Before she could even begin to answer that, Strike booted the cottage door open and strode through the kitchen with the others in his wake. Instinctively—she couldn’t have said why, or where the urge came from—Jade punched the remote to kill the image on the big
TV, and clicked on the light beside the sofa instead. The others didn’t notice her actions or question them; they were intent on Lucius as, in a flash, the cottage went from being too empty to being too full, jammed with overlarge bodies, gleaming good looks, and expansive personalities.
Michael and Sasha were on the king’s heels: He was dark and green-eyed, with jaw-length black hair, wide features, and a big fighter’s body that all but oozed pheromones; she was lean and lithe, with flyaway brunette curls and eyes the color of rich milk chocolate. They balanced each other perfectly. More, they were Jade’s closest friends at Skywatch. Under other circumstances, in another life, that might have been odd, given that Michael had been her lover for a time. But Jade was a pragmatist. Michael, though a death wielder and their resident mage-assassin, was a good man; and Sasha was a friend. They made it work. More, Sasha was a
ch’ulel
, a master of living energy, and Lucius badly needed an energy infusion. Jade was glad Strike had brought them both.
Behind them came the two other mated mage- pairs in residence, bringing the exponential power boosts of their
jun tan
mated marks. Alexis led the way, a blond Amazon of a warrior whose ambition had gained her the position of king’s adviser, as her mother had been for Strike’s father. Nate was right behind her, not because he was secondary in their mated power structure, but because he didn’t feel any need to jockey for position, with her or with the others. He was the Volatile, a shape-shifter who could turn into a man-size hawk that featured prominently in some of the more obscure end-time prophecies. He was also a loner, brought into the Nightkeepers’ tightly knit group—and the royal council—by his and Alexis’s rock-solid love match.
The couple following them, in contrast, was far from rock-solid, in Jade’s opinion, both professional and personal. Brown-haired, intense Brandt and blond karate instructor Patience had found each other, and the magic of love, more than three years before the barrier reactivated and they all learned they were the last of the Nightkeepers. But for all that they’d been married human-style for nearly five years now, and had twin sons together, they walked apart, not touching. Barely even looking at each other. The problems in their relationship had been going on for some time, but Jade was struck anew by the distance that gaped between two people who, on paper, at least, seemed as though they should be the perfect couple.
Ghosting in behind them came Sven, the lone remaining Nightkeeper bachelor within the training compound. Loose limbed and all-American handsome, with a stubby blond ponytail and a seemingly endless supply of ass-hanging shorts and surf-shop T-shirts, he wore his I-don’t-take-anything-seriously attitude like a shield. Jade, though, saw beneath to a man who was deeply bothered that he’d failed the Nightkeepers several times when they’d needed him.
Although simple math and the value added by matings between Nightkeepers would suggest she and Sven should try the couple thing, the suggestion had never been broached in her hearing. While she suspected that was largely because she lacked the warrior’s mark, she was grateful it had never come down to that for either of them. Duty would’ve demanded she at least try to make it work, and that would have been . . . uncomfortable. She liked Sven, but wasn’t attracted to him. She liked a man who made her laugh, one who made her think. One who challenged her, teased her, made her a little crazy.
At the thought, she looked down at Lucius’s motionless form and heard a multitonal whisper in her mind:
Don’t let yourself get distracted by the human
. That wasn’t exactly what the
nahwal
had said; she wasn’t sure if it was her own reservations talking now, or something else. Still, though, she was acutely aware that Strike’s human mate, Leah, wasn’t there. For all that they loved each other fiercely, and he’d gone against the gods to claim her as his own, ever since the destruction of the skyroad had severed her Godkeeper connection, Leah had offered little in terms of magic.
Leah wasn’t the only one missing, either, Jade realized with a kick of unease. Rabbit wasn’t there. Granted, Strike would’ve had to ’port out to UT for him, but still. Who better than a mind-bender to find a lost soul?
“Let’s get him up on the couch,” Strike said, not really acknowledging Jade. He glanced at Sasha. “Unless you think we should haul him to the sacred chamber, or even down south to the tomb?”
She shook her head. “Let’s see what we’re up against before we change too many things at once. Couch first, then triage, then we’ll make decisions about moving him.” Given that she was their resident healer it was logical for her to take command of the situation. But that didn’t stop resentment from kicking through Jade as the others crowded around Lucius’s motionless form, putting her on the outside of a solid wall of wide shoulders and too-perfect bodies.
The men lifted Lucius onto the sofa, jostled him until he was wedged in place, then nearly mummified him with the quilt.
Don’t trap him like that
, Jade wanted to tell them.
He’d hate it
. But she stayed silent, feeling invisible and unimportant. This wasn’t about her; it was about the Nightkeepers doing what they could for Lucius. And even if the
nahwal
actually had unlocked some part of her talent, it wasn’t like she could rattle off a spell capable of bringing him back. For now, Lucius was better off with Strike and Sasha taking the lead, with the others lending power to them, and through them into Lucius.
Feeling extraneous, Jade eased back farther.
“Where are you going?” Strike asked. It took Jade a second to realize he was talking to her.
“Sorry. Did you want me to stay for the uplink?”
The king locked eyes with her, his expression unreadable. “Sex forges a connection within the magic. You’re his lover, which means you’re our best means of finding him.”
“I’m not his—” She broke off the instinctive denial, because this wasn’t about the “L” word. And she couldn’t claim there wasn’t a connection. It didn’t make sense for her to argue on one hand that sex magic was just about the sex, then on the other hand claim that a magic bond between sex partners required an emotional bond that wasn’t relevant to her and Lucius.
“You said you wanted to step up into the fight, even without the warrior’s mark. Well, here’s a chance for you to do exactly that.”
Strike’s challenge hung on the air for a moment, seeming to suck all the oxygen from Jade’s lungs. She was acutely aware of the others watching her, waiting for her response. Part of her wanted to melt into the woodwork. Another wanted to cut and run. Instead, she took a deep breath and nodded. “Of course. I’m in.” She only hoped she was strong enough to make a difference . . . and that the Nightkeepers together could bring Lucius home.
His body jolted, lurched upright, and staggered back toward the stacks. “Whoa! Wait,” he said, “I didn’t mean—” But he broke off at the realization that he was far, far weaker than he’d comprehended. His legs shook and the stone walls blurred around him as he headed across the room, impelled by the magic. It was all he could do to stay on his feet, but he’d be damned if he crawled.
By the time he reached the other end of the narrow stone room, he was breathing hard, nearly doubled over as he fought not to retch. Then he got a good look at what the magic had brought him to, and he froze inside and out.
A woman’s corpse sat in the corner, wrapped in a yellow-edged green robe identical to the one he was wearing.
He had his answer. He’d asked who wrote the journal . . . and the magic showed him. For half a second, the torch flames flickering on the body made it seem to move, even though he knew it wasn’t alive. It couldn’t be. Not looking like that. She wasn’t a mummy in the formal sense of embalming and wraps, but she was mummified all the same, with her skin tight and shiny, stretched over where flesh had wasted from bones. Honey-colored hair hung to her shoulders, and the bone structure of her face seemed oddly elegant despite the hooked-nose, bared-teeth grotesquery of desiccation. The robe had ridden up over her forearm, baring three marks: those of the star bloodline, the warrior, and the
jun tan
.
“Bingo,” Lucius slurred. “Now we know that the stars were the keepers of the library.” Which was only partially useful, given that none of the living Nightkeepers were members of the star bloodline. But it was information, and he’d always been a fan of info. And, dude, he was punchy. The torchlight seared his eyes, and the stones beneath his feet heaved like the deck of a fishing boat, with the same nausea-inducing consequences he’d suffered on his single lamented attempt at deep-sea fishing. “I’ve gotta get out of here.” He didn’t have the answers the Nightkeepers needed about the skyroad or the sun god, but his body was flat-out done. If he collapsed and passed out here, he would probably exhaust the last of his energy reserves while unconscious. And death in the barrier was death nonetheless, which meant it was time to go home.
The journal had talked about the “
way-ya
” spell, not the
way
spell, which was what he’d been assuming he should use. “
Way-ya
” meant “home,” but could also mean “spirit” or “portal.” Similar but different. Chanting the word over and over in his thick-feeling head, he dragged himself back to the study area, with its carved medallions. His feet seemed very far away when he plonked them on the
way
symbol of the snaggle-toothed dragon. Wetting his gone-dry mouth, he croaked, “
Way-ya
.”
Power instantly slammed into him, swept him up. Everything went dark, and the world around him spun hard and fast. He might’ve puked but wasn’t sure; he lost touch with his body, with his neurons—hell, with every part of himself. Terror slashed as he glimpsed a dusty, barren roadway that came from nowhere, led nowhere. The in- between. His own private hell. Adrenaline slashed, sweeping away the cobwebs. Screaming inwardly, he fought not to go there, fought to go anywhere
but
there, but how could he fight without power, without magic, without training?
As he slid toward that dry, dusty purgatory, he lashed out, reaching invisible thought hands to grab something, anything that might halt the slide. He caught a flash at the edge of his consciousness, a hint of power that wasn’t quite familiar, wasn’t entirely strange, but was wholly, utterly compelling. He grabbed for it, touched it for a second, then lost it. But at that brief touch, the in-between winked out and the world went gray-green.
Then that too winked out, and there was nothing but darkness and sick, aching pain.
Panic hammered through him as he sensed boundaries all around him, hemming him into a space that was so much smaller than the vastness he’d just traveled through. He was jailed by the pain, trapped within—
Oh
, he thought as the inner lightbulb went off and he recognized the sensation of being back in his physical self . . . which felt like unholy shit. His head hammered with the rhythm of his stumbling heart, and agony flared in each of his joints, making him feel like he’d been stretched out on a huge cosmic torture rack that had stopped short of actually killing him, but only barely. And who knew the body had so many damned joints? Even his pinkie toes were killing him.
“Ngh,” he said, wincing when the word—the grunt?—echoed too loudly, setting off cymbal clashes in his skull. He hadn’t felt hangover- crappy like this since the day after Cizin had first entered his soul. The thought brought a spurt of panic, but he beat it back.
It feels like this because you’re a human trying to do magic
, he told himself, forcing the logic through the pain.
The library is not a
makol
; it’s not trying to possess you
. Though the ask-and-walk thing was borderline.
“Lucius!” Jade said, her voice seeming to come from far above him. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Jesus Christ, don’t shout
, he wanted to say, but he caught the worry in her voice and felt the grip of her hand on his. He hated that she was seeing him weak and helpless yet again, but that was his hang-up, not hers, so he made an effort to be polite, even through the hammering inside his skull. “M’fine. Food?”
Okay, so maybe that was still lacking in the polite-ness department. But he heard paper and then clothing rustle and sensed motion nearby. What was more, he didn’t sense a crowd nearby, which was a relief.
“Jox left a carb- and-fat bomb in case . . . for when you came around.” Her voice trembled on the words. She took a deep breath, and she sounded steadier when she said, “I’ll call the others. We’ve been watching you in shifts ever since Sasha said you were as stable as she could get you. We’ve been waiting for . . . well. I’ll call them.”
“ ’N a minute.” Lucius slitted his eyes, saw the familiar details of his cottage, and relaxed fractionally at finding that he was on his couch, not locked up in the basement in the main mansion, or worse. Craning his neck, he looked for Jade, and found her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter with her arms braced and her head hanging. She was wearing trim jeans and a soft button-down that clung to her skin as her body curved in a private moment of what might have been relief, but he found himself interpreting more as grief. Regret.
What the hell had he missed? He wanted to go to her, to hold her. Wanted to lean into her and let her lean on him. But that was the weakness talking, he knew. More, he knew that it was a private moment, and one she wouldn’t thank him for watching. So he forced himself to look away.
Focusing on the changes that had occurred in his main room while he’d been out of it, he saw that the TV was off, no longer showing the scene that had been so strangely mimicked by what they had seen in Xibalba. The coffee table held a notebook and a couple of volumes he recognized from the archive, primary texts on the legends of the sun god, clueing him in that Jade had caught the Kinich Ahau connection.
Good girl
. There was an IV stand beside the couch, a needle taped at the crook of his arm, and a clear line feeding him the nutrient mix the
winikin
had come up with to offset the postmagic crash experience by a mage—or in this case, a human wannabe—in the aftermath of big magic. Which made him wonder how long he’d been unconscious.
A look out the window showed him that sky was blue-black, but with dusk, not dawn. Had he lost an entire day? More? He cursed under his breath.
As he did, Jade came back into the main room carrying a bowl of pasta mixed with the heavy meat sauce he liked, liberally dosed with cheese. At his colorful language, she raised an eyebrow. “That sounded coherent, if physically impossible. I take it your head is clearing?”
“How many days did I lose?” He took the bowl and held out a hand for the fork she was still holding, just in case she had any idea of trying to feed him.
She passed it over. “About twenty hours. From your perspective, it’s tomorrow night.” She was wearing what he thought of as her counselor’s face, serene to the point of blandness. But he knew her well enough to see strain and nerves beneath, along with an unfamiliar edginess.
“I made it to the library,” he said before she asked.
“And?”
There was no simple answer to that, he realized as he tried to come up with something concise and vaguely coherent. He dug into the pasta, buying himself a moment. Finally, he went with: “It’s amazing. I wish you could’ve been there with me.”
And it was true, he realized. Of all of the magi, she was the one who would’ve appreciated the artifacts, the Ouija game, all of it. And he would’ve liked to have seen it all for the first time with her. Whatever else was—or wasn’t—between them, they meshed on that level. Always had.
“I tried to find you,” she blurted, locking her fingers together until her knuckles whitened. “Last night we uplinked—Strike, me, everyone. I tried to find your
ch’ul
song for Sasha, tried to follow where you’d gone . . . but I couldn’t. Our connection, the sex magic, just wasn’t strong enough.
I
wasn’t strong enough.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, her sitting next to his bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness—or die, though neither of them had said it outright—seemed less like the vigil of a friend or lover, and more like self-flagellation.
She continued, though he wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “I couldn’t find the sex link and pull you home. We thought . . . We weren’t sure you were going to make it out.”
“But I did,” he pointed out in between big bites of cheese-laden pasta, not mentioning that it had been a close call. “And for the record, I don’t think the library works the same way the rest of the barrier does. It’s possible—even likely—that you wouldn’t have been able to follow me even if I were a mage and we were
jun tan
mates.” He thought of the corpse’s mated mark, wondered if someone had gone looking for her. And if so, what had happened to them. He hated like hell that Jade felt like a failure because of him, but knew she wouldn’t thank him for saying it aloud. So instead, he said, “I’m guessing you gave the others a full report on Kinich Ahau and the companions?” She had twenty hours’ head start on him—it sure as hell hadn’t felt that long when he’d been inside the library, but the barrier was known to fold time oddly in some cases.
She nodded. “I gave them what I could yesterday, and am just about finished filling in the gaps from the archive.” She paused before saying softly, “The
Banol Kax
are trying to put Akhenaton in the sun god’s place.”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to stop them?”
At first he thought it was a rhetorical question. But when she looked at him too expectantly, he realized she was hoping for him to play Prophet. Exhaling, he shook his head. “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. I’m not going to be able to channel info on command.”
Worse, now that he had some food in him, he was seeing just how big an
oh, holy shit
of a problem that was going to be. If he needed to use his own talent to get back into the library, as the journalist had said . . . then the magi were going to be waiting a long time, because humans didn’t have talents, and he was pure human, do not pass “Go,” do not collect two hundred.
She looked at him for a long moment, and something sparked in the air, making him very aware that they were alone again in his cottage, where the magic had begun. All she said, though, was, “Do you feel up to a general meeting?”
“That’d probably be best.” He might as well break the bad news en masse.
“I’ll go spread the word. But I don’t want to see you up at the mansion until you’ve finished eating, got it?”
“Got it.” A quick yank and he had the IV out, then had to fumble to shut the thing off when it peed on his foot. “Yeah. Smooth,” he muttered under his breath.
She flashed him a grin that looked far more natural than anything she’d managed up to that point. “Glad to have you back.”
Looking up, he met her eyes. “Same goes.” They locked gazes for a three- count of heartbeats, and more passed between them than had been said. At least, it did for him, though he couldn’t have articulated what, exactly, he took away from the moment beyond a hot pressure in his chest and a more than fleeting thought of locking the door and saying,
Fuck the general meeting; they can wait until tomorrow
. But the problem was, he didn’t know if they
could
wait, really. He’d already lost a day, which put them at only eight to go until the summer solstice.
Jade broke the eye lock with a self-conscious head shake, then turned and headed for the door, scooping up the books and papers on her way past the coffee table. She paused at the archway leading to the kitchen, glancing back. “In the pit . . . in Xibalba. You were amazing. I don’t think I would’ve made it out of there if it hadn’t been for you.” Before he could say anything—not that he had a clue how to respond to something like that; it wasn’t like he’d had much practice being amazing—she continued: “I froze. Here I am, trying to tell everyone that I deserve to be in on the action, but when it came down to it, I just stood there. I wouldn’t have run if you hadn’t dragged me, and I wouldn’t have made it out if you hadn’t come after me. When that guard started marching me toward the fortress—” She broke off, shuddering, her eyes going stark and hollow in her face. “I panicked. I didn’t
do
anything.”