Demonkeepers

winikin. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Don’t be. Those were his fists, not yours. I consider it damned lucky he didn’t use his knife on me.

If he had, we’d all be living very different lives right now.”

“Whoa.” Rabbit’s brain tripped over the sequence of what-ifs. If Jox had died back then, Strike and Anna would’ve gone into the foster system. Anna had blocked out most of her memories from before the massacre, and Strike’s had been those of an average, if doted-on, nine-year-old boy. What would they have done when the barrier reactivated? Where would they have gone? They wouldn’t have known about Skywatch, wouldn’t have known there were other survivors. More, Rabbit didn’t even want to think what his own childhood would have been like without Jox in it, and Strike and Anna as his unofficial siblings. Granted, Jox had been able to buffer his old man only to a point, but without that leveling influence . . . Hell, he probably would’ve ended up in the system too. If he’d been lucky.

“Your father came back three years later. I had taken Strike and Anna down to Chichen Itza for the cardinal day—with Red-Boar gone, it was up to them to try the magic. We were just coming out of the tunnel when he stepped out of the rain forest. I pulled a gun on him,” Jox said matter-of-factly. “I’d been carrying a piece the whole time he was gone, afraid that he’d show up and go after one of the kids instead of just me. But he didn’t try to hurt us. He put his hands in the air. A few seconds later, you came out of the underbrush and stood beside him. I looked at you for a moment and you looked back, and I put the gun away.” The winikin paused. “He never apologized, and I never asked him to, just like I never asked him where he’d been or what he’d been doing.”

Rabbit’s throat had gone dry. “You let him come back because of me?”

“Because of you . . . and because it was bad enough living through what happened at Skywatch. He was the only one who survived being ambushed by the Banol Kax at the intersection. I had to believe the gods kept him alive for a reason.”

“Do you still believe that?”

Jox sent Rabbit a long look. “I do. I hope you’ll do your best to prove me right.”

“I . . . Shit.” When his chest got tight and funny at the idea that his old man might have lived solely so he could be born, and the pressure that idea put on him, Rabbit grabbed his box. “Weren’t we supposed to be schlepping this crap somewhere?”

“That was the general theory.” Jox seemed willing to let the topic drop. But as they were heading along what Rabbit had started to think of as the Hall of Ghosts, the winikin said, “The only time he ever mentioned those missing years, he said something about a village called Ox Ajal, up in the highlands.” Jox looked sidelong at Rabbit. “But keep in mind that sometimes when you go looking for answers, you don’t get the ones you’re expecting, or particularly want.”

Rabbit lifted a shoulder. “Nah. I appreciate your telling me about the old man. It . . . it helps to know it wasn’t just me, you know?” It wasn’t an evasion, precisely. But he still felt like shit, given how cool Jox had been to him just now, and what he’d revealed about the past.

“After what’s been going on with Jade’s mother and the nahwal, I think most of us are thinking about our families, particularly our mothers. But do me a favor and keep it in perspective, okay?

You’re doing a good job building your own life. Don’t fuck it up trying to prove something to a dead man.”

Rabbit didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Part of him knew Jox was right, that he should let it go and concentrate on his role within the magi. He was making headway finally, and it felt good. But he already knew what Myrinne was going to say, because he was thinking it: The name of the village—his mother’s village?—couldn’t be a coincidence.

In the old tongue, ox ajal meant “thrice manifested,” and its strange, double-skull glyph was used to represent the Triad.

June 21 Summer solstice Two years and six months to the zero date After the grueling winikin-led practice finally ended at midafternoon the day before the solstice, Jade had dragged herself to her suite, curled up in her bed, and pulled the covers over her head to shut out the rest of the world. She had slept a solid ten hours and awoke well past midnight; the sky was dark and lovely beyond the balcony, with a sliver of moon providing pale blue light. She felt good; heck, she felt better than good, riding on the early buzz of barrier magic that would build exponentially in the hours leading up to the solstice. Driven by the magic-wrought urgency, she showered and dressed in jeans, a tight black tee, and her boots. It wasn’t until she was pulling on a long-sleeved shirt against the cool night air that she acknowledged she was headed outside. To Lucius. They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other in the past three days, but although the whirlwind of game practice, rescue plans, and magical preparations had left her with little in the way of time or energy, she’d never stopped being aware of him on an intimate, visceral level.

Don’t be an Edda , she told herself, but the warning fell flat because she might be a mage, but on another level she was only human. And having spent the past two days watching Lucius practice the gracefully violent moves of the ancient ball game . . . wow. Just wow.

After the first few times one of the winikin had demonstrated a move to have Lucius not only pick it up immediately, but sometimes even improve upon it with his greater mass and strength, his ability to instinctively shift his center of gravity lower to get a knee or a hip under the heavy ball to keep it aloft or in play, Jox had called him on it, and he’d admitted to having played some pickup games while out in the field, albeit with the smaller, lighter balls used in the modern era. It had startled Jade—and, she suspected, some of the others—to realize that the game was still played as pure entertainment among the Mayan villages, and not just as the tourist-focused reenactments they had found on YouTube.

Indeed, it seemed to Jade like an unfortunate statement on humanity that the ball game, which had religion at its center, had survived the conquistadors while the Mayan writing system and codices were systematically destroyed as heathen tools. The game itself had evolved over time, but its core was largely unchanged, and Lucius’s experience with the moves put him at a substantial advantage.

Watching him move lightly over the ground, completely at home in his body, entirely in control of his movements and reflexes, Jade had found herself brutally aroused despite her fatigue. Now, with the fatigue gone, the arousal remained, a sharp ache that drove her out of the mansion in search of Lucius.

She found him sitting atop one of the ball court walls, staring into the night.

She climbed up the steep stone staircase and sat beside him, so their arms brushed lightly as their legs dangled over the sheer twenty- foot drop of one of two parallel stone walls. To her right, she could just make out the moon shadow of the high-set stone ring that was the game’s ultimate goal.

From down below, it had looked impossibly small in relation to the size of the game ball. From up atop the wall, it still looked damn tiny. No wonder there was also a point system of body hits and out-

of-bounds penalties; the hoop seemed an impossible target.

Without preamble, he held out his right hand and flipped his palm up to reveal the quatrefoil hellmark, which looked black in the moonlight, though she knew it was the bloodred of dark magic.

“Do you think it’s possible that I’m part Xibalban?”

“You—Oh.” She rocked back in startlement and fumbled for a few seconds, trying to redirect her brain from the sex buzz in the air to his question.

“Is that an ‘oh’ as in, ‘I’m thinking,’ or as in, ‘Where the fuck are my jade-tips’ ? ”

“That was ‘oh’ as in, ‘I’d like to say you’re crazy, but it would explain a few things.’ More than a few.” She paused, thinking that, unfortunately, it wasn’t the dumbest thing she’d heard lately. “One of the questions we’ve had about you from the beginning is: Why you? Why did the makol reach through the barrier to you, when you’re a fundamentally decent guy? Impulsive, maybe. Stubborn, definitely.

Occasionally self-serving, check. But on balance, there never seemed a compelling reason why a demon would go after you, and more, why you’d be susceptible to it. What if the connection and susceptibility come from a few drops of Xibalban blood, but your makeup, your essential you ness, runs counter to the darkness? That could explain why the makol was able to come through the barrier into you, but couldn’t integrate your soul with its own . . . thus making it possible for you to survive the Prophet’s spell.”