Demonkeepers

“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t reach for it, instead nodding to Jade.

He passed it over. “Watch out. It’s heavier than it looks.” When she took it solemnly, he looked back over at Anna, catching on that the effigy was why they had been summoned. “You think the skull might help Jade channel the scribe’s talent more reliably?” He tried to remember whether there had been itza’at s mentioned in the history he’d read on the star bloodline. He didn’t think so.

“No, the effigies are bloodline specific. It’d only work for a jaguar.” Anna paused, carefully folding her hands atop her desk blotter. “I need you to take the skull back to Skywatch and give it to Strike.”

Jade’s soft, “Are you sure?” was quickly drowned out when Lucius held up his hands in protest.

“You—” Oh, no. Hell, no. “You’re kidding.”

“Not about this.” There was deep regret in her eyes, but behind that was a strange sort of peace.

“Never about this.”

“But you’re our—their only seer!”

“I should have been,” she corrected. “Maybe I would have been, if I’d gone through my talent ceremony when I should have. But she said we should wait until after the attack on the intersection, so we could focus on my training.”

She was the queen, Lucius knew. Anna’s mother. She had been a powerful seer, but loyal to her husband and king. Nobody knew what she had seen, exactly, but her visions had led her to fake a stillbirth and send baby Sasha to be raised in seclusion. More, she had leaned on Anna to pretend she hadn’t yet reached menarche, thus ruling her out of her talent ceremony prior to the king’s attack on the intersection. Then, the night before the queen marched to battle at her husband’s side, she’d given the effigy to fourteen- year-old Anna, even though the teen hadn’t known how to use the pendant properly. Lucius had long suspected that some of the itza’at’s powers had reached out to young Anna that night, through the effigy’s connection to the queen. He had a feeling Anna had seen the massacre firsthand through that uplink . . . and that she’d been running from those memories ever since.

Jade set the pendant carefully on her desk; it made a hollow, echoing noise that seemed to reverberate on more planes than just the audible level. “Don’t give up on us. Please.”

Anna avoided her eyes. “I’m not. I’m making a choice. I respect what Strike, you, and the others are doing, but I don’t believe in it anymore.”

“You don’t believe there’s going to be a war?” Lucius demanded. The question echoed back to their many debates on the subject of the Nightkeepers and the 2012 doomsday, which Anna had pretended to mock in an effort to keep him from looking too closely at the legends. Had she become convinced by her own arguments? Impossible.

She shook her head. “There’s going to be a war, no question about it. But I don’t believe that we can stop it. If we had the numbers and the skills . . . maybe. But a dozen magi? No. I’m sorry, but no. So I’ve decided that if I’ve only got another two and a half years to live, and there’s nothing I can do to change that fact, then I’d far rather spend the next thirty months living my life rather than chasing futile hope.”

Dull shock pounded through Lucius, alongside disillusionment. How could you? he wanted to demand. Anna had been his superior for the past decade-plus. She’d been his teacher, his mentor, his thesis adviser, his boss, and finally his slave- master. He had looked up to her. He’d harmlessly lusted after her, worried about her, and once he’d learned that she was one of the magi he’d spent a third of his life searching for, he’d practically worshiped her. But now . . . gods, now. How could he respect, never mind revere, someone who would willingly jettison the chance to make a difference?

But he knew her well enough to realize her emotions were already locked into her decision. So he went with logic. “According to the Dresden Codex, the Nightkeepers will need a seer during the final battle.”

“According to the codex, they’ll need Godkeepers and the Triad too. I don’t see either of those things happening.”

“They might.”

“They won’t.” Her eyes had gone hollow. “I wouldn’t do this if I had the faintest hope that we could change what’s going to happen. But do the math. There are too few of us. We’re cut off from the gods.

We don’t have the prophecies or the spells we would need to defend the barrier, if we could even muster enough strength in numbers or magic.” She shook her head. “No. We can’t do it, and we’re making ourselves miserable trying.”

Low anger kindled in his gut. “You’re giving up on yourself.”

Her eyes flashed. “I’m making a choice.”

“A selfish one. You’d rather be playing house with the Dick than working your ass off like the rest of us.” She opened her mouth to fire something back, probably a reaction to his old nickname for her unlikable husband, or an accusation that he was just jealous. But that wasn’t why he was pissed. It was that she had the opportunity to be the sort of savior he’d always wanted to be, the mage he was trying to be . . . and she was just walking away from it. So he steamrolled over her response, saying, “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened to you the night of the massacre, what you saw in your visions. But think about it. . . . That night, the Banol Kax and their boluntiku killed—what—a thousand people?

Try multiplying it by a million. Ten million. A hundred million. What do you think that’s going to look like?”

They didn’t know exactly what form the end-time would take. The Dresden Codex suggested a flood, while Aztec mythology called for fire. And what about the aftermath? Would there be one? The sixth-century Prophet Chilam Balam had talked about mankind turning away from machines, which suggested a massive technology loss. But would humanity survive or be destroyed entirely? Would the earth itself exist in the aftermath? The Xibalbans seemed to be banking on a shift in world order, with Iago intending to be at the top of the proverbial shitheap when everything settled out. The Banol Kax, on the other hand . . . who the hell knew what they were thinking? For all the Nightkeepers could guess, the end-time war would be akin to the Solstice Massacre, only on a global scale.

Anna blanched, but her eyes stayed steady on his. “Screw you.”

“Lucius,” Jade said in warning.

He ignored her, pressing, “How are you going to feel on that last day, when everything starts to go to shit, and you realize that maybe, just maybe, you could’ve helped stop it?”

“Then you believe the Nightkeepers are going to fail too.”

He bared his teeth. “Don’t put words in my mouth. And no, I don’t believe we’re going to fail.” He deliberately included himself in that “we.” “I do, however, believe that we’ve got a far better chance of success with you than without you.”

“Bullshit,” she said scornfully, choking on a derisive laugh. “How have I helped so far? I’ve had a couple of visions that have confused things more than they’ve clarified them, and at that, I haven’t had a vision in months.”

“Because you’re blocking them,” he pointed out, taking a guess and seeing the confirmation in her eyes.

She glared. “I forced Strike to let you live, even after you violated my space, stole my property, and generally acted like an asshole. Remember that the next time you want to poke me about my duty to the Nightkeepers and the end-time war. If I’d been adhering to the writs, I would’ve let them sacrifice you two years ago when you conjured a godsdamned makol!”

“Maybe you should have,” he said bluntly. “So far I’ve done more harm than good. But you know what? That just makes me more determined to get it right from here on out.”

Anna shook her head. “You’ve always wanted to be more; both of you have. Can’t you understand that I’ve always wanted to be less?” She addressed the question to Jade, seeking an ally.

Lucius started to answer, but Jade held up a hand. To Anna, she said, “Is that what you’re going to tell the gods? How about your ancestors?” When Anna sucked in a breath, Jade pushed harder. “What will you tell your father when you meet him in the spirit world?”

Anna’s expression darkened. “Given that I’m the only one of the three royal kids who hasn’t had a conversation with the old man’s nahwal, I’m not sure we’ll have much to talk about.”

“Your old man,” Lucius repeated softly. “Where have I heard that before?”