Demonkeepers

an art form as a language. A given word could be represented by a pictograph or a string of syllables making up the word, or sometimes both. Then the syllables themselves could be represented by many different glyphs, or the same glyphs could look entirely different, depending on the artist who’d rendered them. That very fact had slowed his shit down when he’d gotten to the translation. He still wasn’t sure if the third glyph was a hook-

nosed god’s face with suns where its eyes should be, or a really whacked version of a jaguar’s head, but he’d gotten up against deadline day and had to go with what he had.

Walking the halls now, with Jade at his side, Lucius remembered how badly he’d worked himself up by the time he’d headed over to turn in the application, how he’d been practically puking with nerves.

Back then, Anna had been less senior, so she’d had an upper- floor office. These days she had a primo ground-floor spot. But despite the difference in location, the clutter stuck to the corkboard hung on her door was much the same. Clippings of journal articles, some hers, some written by colleagues, offered the current state of the art in Mayan epigraphy. They bumped up against a scattering of cartoons and silly slogans, some hung by Anna, others by her coworkers and students. Slapped atop it all was a laminated page printed with her office hours and phone numbers, with a boldfaced note at the bottom: Knock. What have you got to lose?

The laminate looked new; the sentiment was an old, familiar friend. One that had been a mantra during certain parts of his life.

That first day, it had taken him nearly two full minutes to work up the courage. Now he just knocked, knowing that wasn’t the hard part.

“Come on in,” Anna’s voice called from within.

He pushed the door open, stuck his head through, and grinned past a sudden spike of nerves. “Damn.

And here I was looking forward to climbing in the window again.”

Anna looked up, her face reflecting pretty much what he was feeling: a new awkwardness to an old friendship. Sitting behind her big, messy desk, she was dressed informally even for her, in a navy blue UT sweatshirt and collared shirt. He couldn’t see her lower half, but was betting on jeans, based on the fact that she had her red- highlighted hair up in a ponytail and was wearing little, if any, makeup. The lack of makeup wasn’t why she looked tired, though; the fatigue was real. He knew that because he knew her, and knew she dressed down at the university only when she was feeling crappy. Summer session or no summer session, she liked being put together.

Then again, things changed. People changed. Just look at him.

As if paralleling his thoughts, she glanced at the window he had B and E’d under Cizin’s influence.

“Ten bucks says you couldn’t even fit through it anymore.” She waved him all the way in. “Come on.

Hey, Jade. Glad you could both make it. Any problems getting here?”

Jade shook her head. “None.”

“How are you?” Anna asked her, the question clearly a woman to woman, we’ve got our secrets deal.

Lucius turned away, giving them a moment to catch up, and to remind himself it was largely his fault that his and Anna’s relationship had suffered. He’d stolen from her; he’d betrayed her—albeit inadvertently—with a Xibalban. Because of him, she’d been forced back into her brother’s sphere.

Because of him, she wore a fourth mark, that of the slave- master, in addition to the jaguar, the royal ju, and the seer’s mark. He couldn’t blame her for not being excited to see him, after all they’d been through together and apart. Nor could he blame her for turning to Jade as a friend. Jade was warm and honest, analytical and near genius-smart. She was, he realized, a little bit like Anna in those ways. But where Anna tended to get caught up in her own emotions and had some drama-queen tendencies, Jade’s waters ran still and deep.

As the women did a brief what’s-up-how’s-it-going, he stuck his hands in his pockets and took a tour of Anna’s office, looking for new additions to her rogues’ gallery of fakes. She used the hobby as a teaching tool, showing her students—Lucius included—not just how to spot the fakes and haggle in fine old open-market style, but also how to get the so-called antiquities dealers to show them the real stuff they tended to keep under wraps. Her goals were twofold: first, to cooperate with local authorities in blocking the export of national treasures when possible, and second, to potentially track exciting finds back to their sources. Each year, particularly in the less developed areas of the former Mayan empire, new caches of antiquities were discovered and sold off, to the great loss of the archaeologists and the still-scattered knowledge of the two-millennium history of the Maya. At times during his graduate career, Lucius had pictured himself eventually working against the black-market trade in the low country, acting as sort of a reverse treasure hunter, trying to keep the finds in place rather than in museums —or at least making sure that the sites were rigorously documented before the artifacts were split up. He’d cast himself as sort of a geeky Indiana Jones without the fedora, working with some heavily armed locals, maybe even armed himself. In those dreams, he’d been doing his part to save the small corner of the world that he’d claimed as his own.

Now, eyeing the window, which seemed to have shrunk over the past two years, he admitted inwardly that there was no way he’d fit through there now, as he had when he broke in to steal the transition ritual that Cizin had needed to come through the barrier. Lucius’s body, like his world, had gotten a whole hell of a lot bigger since he’d left campus.

Anna’s voice interrupted his prowl. “Stop pacing and sit, Lucius.”

Jade had taken a folding chair off to one side, so he dropped into the visitor’s chair, which was an old friend. He’d spent many, many hours working with Anna, their heads bent together as they argued over interpretations. The good old days, he thought with a trace of nostalgia and a hint of bitterness.

He focused on Anna, realized she was fiddling with her chain, a sure sign of nerves. “Why are we here?” he asked without preamble.

In answer, she lifted the chain from around her neck, pulling the skull effigy from beneath her shirt in the process. In the stark white light coming from the overhead fluorescents, the sacred yellow quartz glittered dully, and the shadowed eye sockets seemed to stare at him. Lucius wasn’t sure whether the jolt he felt was magic or awe at the sight of the ancient carving, which had been passed down, mother to daughter, through untold generations of itza’at seers.

The legendary crystal skulls were inextricably intertwined with the mythos of the 2012 doomsday, and had hit the mainstream with the last Indiana Jones movie—unfortunately so, in his opinion, but it wasn’t like Spielberg had asked him. And yeah, there were plenty of von Danikenites who thought the delicately carved skulls that had been found at various Mesoamerican sites were proof of a higher—

aka alien—intelligence. But they weren’t. They were pure Nightkeeper; always had been . . . going back to the last Great Conjunction, when cataclysmic upheavals had loosed the demons from the underworld and destroyed the crystal cities of the magi, sinking them into the sea. Only a few hundred survivors had been left to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba and erect the barrier that would contain them for the next twenty-six thousand years. Turning nomadic, the magi had brought with them the few remaining artifacts they had retained from their once-great civilization . . . including thirteen life-

size crystal skulls.

The humans had found four of the skulls, all in clear quartz; three were in various museums, the fourth in a private collection. Rigorous science had concluded all four to be nineteenth-century fakes, based on their stone compositions and marks from tools that hadn’t been available to the Maya or Aztec to whom they were supposedly ascribed. Which wasn’t entirely wrong . . . The timing was just off by two dozen millennia or so. Of the remaining nine skulls, some of yellow quartz, some of pink, six were safely locked in the middle archive at Skywatch, two were missing in action . . . and one had been broken up into thirteen smaller skull effigies that had been given to the itza’at seers of the Nightkeepers. Twelve had disappeared the night of the massacre. Only Anna’s remained.

Lucius didn’t remember reaching out to touch it, but he was suddenly holding it in his hand, feeling the echoed warmth of Anna’s body and the unexpected weight of the skull, which looked far lighter than it actually was. Startled, he held it back out to her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab. I just . . .” He shrugged. “This is what it’s all about, you know? It’s one of the skulls. I mean, holy shit!”