Only one Triad had been called previously, back at the end of the first millennium A.D., when a rogue group of Nightkeepers had splintered off, allied themselves with the king of a Mayan city-state that controlled a potent ceremonial site, and called six
Banol Kax
through the barrier to the Earth. The dark magi, who later took to calling themselves the Order of Xibalba, had wanted to control the empire; instead, unable to rein in the creatures they had summoned, they changed civilization forever. Modern archaeologists still puzzled over why the population of the Mayan empire had crashed abruptly in the late ninth century, with entire cities abandoned seemingly overnight. The theories usually touched on plague, drought, and warfare, with the artifactual evidence to back them up. But that told only a small part of the story; in the larger realm, each of those catastrophic breakdowns of civilization had been wrought by the six
Banol Kax
, which had run amok in Mesoamerica while the Nightkeepers fought to force them back to the underworld, where they belonged.
In the end, in the most extreme of exigencies, the gods had sent the Triad spell to King One-Boar, who had searched his soul . . . and enacted it. One-Boar was chosen, along with his brother, Boar Tusk, and One-Boar’s only child, a girl barely out of her teens. Boar Tusk died almost instantly; One-Boar went mad from the voices inside his head . . . and the girl survived. Wielding the talents and knowledge of her forebears, she rallied the Nightkeepers and used dire magic to drive the
Banol Kax
back to Xibalba. In the aftermath, with the males of the royal branch of the peccary bloodline gone, One-Boar’s daughter married into the jaguars, who became the Nightkeepers’ new ruling bloodline. She ruled well, died an old woman, and time passed without a Triad . . . but a single fragmentary codex reference decreed that the Nightkeepers were supposed to call a Triad during the third year prior to the zero date. If they didn’t, the end-time was screwed.
They were almost halfway through the year in question. And they didn’t have the spell needed to call the Triad.
“Which means,” Lucius said, making it sound like he was answering a question, though nobody had spoken, “that we need the Triad spell.” He turned to Jade. “But there’s a problem.”
Only one?
she thought, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter lodging in her throat. But she knew what he meant. “If I can reach my
nahwal
and Vennie can take over again, she could tell us how to get you back into the library, or at least where to look for information here on earth. But in order for me to reach my
nahwal
, you need to invoke the library magic so I can follow you into the barrier.” Maybe. There were a lot of
ifs
there.
“We sure as hell can’t wait for the solstice,” Strike said bluntly. He wasn’t looking at Jade or Lucius, but the message was clear. What wasn’t nearly so clear was what Jade’s response should be.
Before, she’d volunteered for booty duty because it had seemed like her best chance of contributing, and because, well, it was Lucius they were talking about. But the sex magic had come with an unnerving level of intensity. Then there was the
nahwal
’s words, which too closely paralleled her own experiences. Vennie had urged her not to let emotion weaken her. Should she listen to the
nahwal
and focus on her own magic instead? She didn’t know. And because she didn’t know, she found herself far too aware of Lucius as the meeting continued. She was acutely sensitive to each of his breaths, to every shift of his body. Her peripheral vision showed the bunch and flow of muscles beneath his jeans and tee, and her mind replayed the sight of him naked against her, atop her, lit by the art of her ancestors. Although she told herself to concentrate on what was being said, she was far more aware of what was going on inside her as desire heated and built, and her body readied itself for something her mind told her she should walk away from.
But which part of her should she listen to? Did she even have a right to make a choice when so much was riding on her and Lucius’s getting back into the barrier before the solstice?
The meeting lasted well past afternoon, as the magi and
winikin
brainstormed various plans to get into Xibalba and rescue Kinich Ahau, all of which hinged on the magi finding a way to get into—and, more important, back out of—the underworld. The
winikin
—including Shandi, who reappeared quietly and shook off both questions and concern—dished out pasta and drinks, and the group worked through dinner and up to the late-summer dusk, which turned the sky bloodred. Finally, Strike called it a day and dismissed the meeting, which had covered a great deal and resolved almost nothing.
The story of our lives
, Jade thought as the magi and
winikin
dispersed to their rooms and tasks, very carefully not making a big deal of leaving her and Lucius alone.
When they were gone, she braced herself for Lucius’s anger; she hadn’t missed his tension upon learning that she’d gone into the barrier alone, without sufficient magic to get back out on her own, and hadn’t told anyone. But that was her prerogative; it had been her
nahwal
, her message. And she’d revealed it the moment it became clear that it related to Vennie and the library.
Bracing herself, she turned to him. “I didn’t—” She didn’t get any further; her words were muffled by his hard, solid shoulder as he hauled her into his arms. For half a second she stiffened, thinking he was presuming far too much, far too publicly. But then she realized it wasn’t a sexual overture, not really.
He was, quite simply, holding her.
“I wish you’d woken me up last night and told me what was going on,” he said into her hair. “I don’t like thinking of you dealing with all that shit alone.”
“I—” She had to swallow against an unexpected and inexplicable sob. “I had Shandi.”
“Like I said. Dealing with it alone.”
Finding too much comfort in the embrace, she tried to push away. “I can handle myself.”
He wouldn’t let her push. “I know you can. But you shouldn’t always have to.” He paused. “If you don’t want to lean on me as your lover, lean on me as your friend. I’ve always been that, even when we weren’t really talking to each other.”
She sagged against him, defeated. “Shit. You played the friend card.”
“My mama never called me stupid.” He hugged her hard and eased away, so he was looking down at her when he said, “Granted, she babied me, told me I was fragile, and made me carry an inhaler I’m not sure I ever needed. Then, when my dad couldn’t figure out what to do with me, sitting inside with my nose in a book, she told him I was lucky I got her brains, because my body wasn’t ever going to amount to much.”
Jade frowned at him, trying not to notice how right it felt to be in his loose embrace, with her half on his lap as they cuddled together on the couch, the mansion gone conveniently empty and quiet around them. “Your point?”
“Family is the luck of the draw. It might not seem fair that your
winikin
is less than warm and fuzzy, or that after all this time you find out that your parents were younger than you thought, and your mother made some decisions that don’t seem compatible with the responsibilities of a mother, though that might depend on your interpretation of the writs. But fair or not, that’s the family—or at least the family history—that you’ve got. Question is, what are you going to do about it?”
She broke eye contact. “I don’t know. Do I have to do anything? I am who I am, you know? Learning all that stuff about my mother doesn’t change the fact that I’m a harvester who wears the scribe’s mark but doesn’t have the talent to go with it. Except . . .” She brought her eyes back up to his. “As I came out of the barrier, it was like I could see the magic, the layers of it, and the inner structure of the spell. But I haven’t been able to access the power since then. I’m sure the
nahwal
did something to help me find a piece of my talent . . . but what if the sex magic was part of it too?”
His eyes darkened. “I hate knowing that you got pulled into the barrier like that.”
“If we can make it happen again, I can ask her about the library.” Though the prospect was more than a little unnerving. Like meeting her mother again for the first time. What should she say? What would the
nahwal
do? Could she even find her way back there? Would it be worth it?
For the ability to do magic like the glimpse she’d been shown . . . yes.
“I don’t want any of it to happen again,” Lucius rasped, but they both knew that wasn’t the right and proper answer. “Damn it,” he muttered. “This should be easier.”
“We can make it be,” she said firmly, though she wasn’t quite so sure about that anymore.
His expression flattened for a moment, but then he nodded and rose to his feet, drawing her up with him and then stepping away. When they were standing facing each other, he held out his hand, turning it so his palm was painted bloodred by the dusk, slashed through with a shadow-scar. “Come home with me tonight?” he asked softly.
On one level, she wanted him to say something about wanting her outside of the magic and the greater good, that what was between them was real and not a by-product of the situation and the need. On another level, she was relieved that he didn’t, because she wanted it too much.
She took his hand and said simply, “Yes.”
Her blood burned as he led her out into the night, went to flame as they undressed each other in his cottage, staying out in the main room because bedrooms were too intimate. They left the lights off and came together in the red darkness, in a clash of lips and tongues, inciting caresses and hard, hot bodies slicked with sweat.
The sex was fast and greedy, almost animalistic. It left her limp and wrung-out, and filled with inner fire as she clung to him and tried not to need. It was amazing, staggering, mind-blowing . . . but it wasn’t magic.
“I need to see Harry and Braden,” she said without preamble. “I’ll take whatever blood vows you demand. I’ll make myself invisible; they won’t even know I’m there. I just . . . I have to see them.”
The king didn’t answer for a moment, just stared into her eyes, and she fleetingly wondered whether he’d somehow gained the powers of a mind-bender, because it was almost as if he were trying to see inside her, and find . . . what? She would’ve given it to him if she knew what he was looking for. She’d give anything to see her babies.
“Why?” he finally asked, then clarified, “I mean, I know why you want to see them: You’re their mom, and it’s been more than a year, and the situation sucks royal donkey dick. I get that. I mean why now, specifically? Has something happened?”
For a half second, she wondered whether he was asking her to give him an excuse to ignore his better judgment and the council’s recommendation. He’d gone against the thirteenth prophecy by taking Leah as his queen rather than sacrificing her to the gods, based on having seen her in his dreams. He believed in the power of visions, even when the mage having them wasn’t a seer. If she told him she’d dreamed of the boys, and sold it hard enough, he’d give her what she wanted.
It would be a lie, though. She’d dreamed of them—of course she had; she was their
mother
, damn it. But the dreams were always normal, garden- variety agglomerations of daily experiences, vague fears, and the grind of a life that had seemed so exciting when she’d first arrived at Skywatch, but over time had become rote, routine, and so very lonely. She missed her boys, missed her
winikin
, Hannah. And she missed the man Brandt had been when his
winikin
, Woody, had been around to keep him from taking himself too seriously. Without the boys and
winikin
, she and Brandt had drifted, badly. But none of that, she knew, would be enough to sway the king.
“I’m miserable,” she said simply. “I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating, and I feel like crap. Worse, my magic is for shit. I can hardly boost Brandt past a trickle anymore, and vice versa.” She paused hopefully, but Strike’s face had gone neutral. She continued. “I tried antidepressants, but they killed what was left of my powers, which is no good. I’ve talked to Jade in therapist mode; I changed my diet, worked out, used the shooting range, practiced a shit-ton of hand-to-hand, had sex with my husband . . . all the tricks she suggested to break out of depression. And maybe they helped for a little bit, but not long. I want, I
need
, to see my boys. Please. I’m begging you. Just tell me where they are, or have Hannah and Woody bring them someplace random, where nobody would think to look. I just want to see them. Then I’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.”
The king didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he said simply, “Is your own happiness worth their lives?”
The oxygen vacated Patience’s lungs, leaving her trying to breathe around an empty space in her chest. She’d thought she’d braced herself for the question. She’d been wrong. Somehow, hearing it in Brandt’s too-reasonable, too-serious tones had just put her back up and made her think,
You’re wrong; it’s not like that. It’s not an either/or question
. But somehow, facing her king, she couldn’t be so sure.
Still, she pushed onward. “There’s been no sign of Iago in months; he’s either dead or he’s trying to assimilate Moctezuma’s spirit. With him out of commission, the Xibalbans haven’t done a damn thing. For all we know, all of the red-robes died in Paxil Mountain when Michael unleashed his death magic. If that’s the case, then it’s a good bet the gray-robes have disbanded, or at the very least that they’re disorganized and blind without their magic users. Given that, don’t you think we could come up with a safe way for me to see the twins?”
Or, even better, bring them home
? She didn’t say that last part, though. One important lesson she’d learned over the past two years was that in some wars it was possible to fight only one battle at a time. Looking at the whole thing at once was too damned daunting.
“Even if Iago and the Xibalbans are out of the picture for the moment—and I’m not convinced they are—then we still have the
Banol Kax
to consider,” Strike pointed out.
Her pulse sped up a notch. “I
am
considering them. That’s why I need to do this now. The
Banol Kax
haven’t been able to reach the earth plane recently because Iago closed the hellroad and hid it in the barrier, right? That should mean they can’t perceive us up here, that they don’t know what’s going on. If Lucius manages to find the hellroad and we get it open to rescue the sun god, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to close it again. So I need to do this now, before we make any sort of move on the hellmouth.”
“Damn it, Patience.” The angry words came not from the king, but from behind her. In her husband’s voice. “I thought we agreed to wait on this . . . and to put it in front of the royal council, officially, and
together
.”
She closed her eyes on a spasm of the grinding, wrenching, nausea-inducing pain in her stomach that made her want to cross her arms over herself and moan. She didn’t, though, because that would accomplish exactly nothing. Back during the early days of their marriage, Brandt had loved it when she played girl and leaned on him, needed him. These days, though, he took any sign of weakness as an excuse to take over and start making unilateral decisions, pushing her aside.
She didn’t know if his Borg- like assimilation into the Nightkeeper ways was what had caused him to put his responsibilities to his family behind his duties to the magi and the end-time war, as demanded by the writs. Maybe the magic itself had changed him, making him harder and uncompromising, or maybe he’d always been that way and she hadn’t noticed because their needs had coincided rather than clashed. Whatever the cause, the small disagreements had snowballed, then avalanched, until she barely knew him anymore.
“
You
agreed to that. I just didn’t argue,” she said softly, still facing away from him. Then, avoiding Strike’s eyes because she didn’t want to see the sympathy she knew was in his expression, she turned to face her husband. Her heart clutched a little at the frustrated anger in his gorgeous brown eyes and model-perfect face, the lines of tension in his big body.
Despite everything they’d been through lately, she still felt a gut-deep kick of desire, and heard a faint, egotistical whisper of,
The other girls can eat their hearts out. He’s mine.
That was pretty much the first thing she’d said to him six years earlier, when she’d awakened beside him in a Cancún hotel room in the midst of spring break. Her brain had been full of disconnected images of the previous night’s hard partying, her bed had been full of gorgeous guy, and both their forearms had been marked with what they had thought at the time were tattoos of Mayan glyphs, but had later proved to be so much more. It was that
more
that was screwing them up now, she thought. Or maybe they’d been doomed from the start, and it’d taken them this long to figure it out.
She waited for his eyes to soften, waited to see some of the old wonder in them, the look that had made her believe he was just as awed as she was by what they’d found. But he stayed annoyed. More than that, he looked hurt, which was ridiculous. He’d been the first one to suggest sending the twins away, after all. She’d initially believed it had been Strike’s idea, but Brandt had later confessed that it had been his. He might’ve thought knowing that would help her resign herself to the separation. He’d been wrong.
Looking past her, he said to Strike, “Sorry. I thought we’d settled this.”
“Don’t apologize for me,” she snapped, anger rising. “You don’t own me, and you don’t speak for me.”
“Clearly.” He moved up beside her, still looking at Strike. That forced her to turn, as well, so she and Brandt wound up standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing their king. But although the shift created an illusion of their joining forces against a common enemy, she knew that was far from the case. She was on her own in this one, not part of a team anymore.
“I want to hook you up and let you visit,” Strike said. “And gods know I’d love to bring them back here, not just for you guys, but so Hannah and Woody could come back, too, and because we all enjoyed having the kids around. But at the same time, I’m not willing to bet that the Xibalbans are out of the equation, not the way you’re proposing. Similarly, I can’t rule out the
Banol Kax
. They don’t seem to be able to get through the barrier right now . . . but is that a reality, or is that what they want us to think? Not to mention that they may still be able to punch through the barrier to create an
ajaw-makol
, even if they’re unable to pass through themselves.”
Patience gave him credit for talking to her rather than Brandt. She probably shouldn’t have been mildly surprised—Strike was gender-blind when it came to warrior stuff, assigning duties based on skill rather than sex. And she had a feeling that Leah had likely cured him of any residual chauvinism that might have come from his being raised in the human environment, by a royal
winikin
who was firmly entrenched in the Nightkeepers’ patriarchal, male-dominated society. The queen had managed to maintain her individuality without losing her mate’s regard. Patience envied that.
“I know it’s a risk,” she said now, softly, “but aren’t we all taking calculated risks these days? And let’s be honest—we may not have lost the war yet, but we’re not winning it yet, either.” She took a deep breath, only to find that the air carried a hint of the aftershave she’d bought her husband for the
wayeb
festival—the Nightkeepers’ nod at a Christmas-type holiday. Not letting herself dwell on the scent, or the low churn it brought to her midsection, she said, “I don’t know whether we’re going to win or lose this war, but either way, I know for certain that I don’t want to spend my next—maybe my last—two and a half years separated from my sons. I’ve already lost a year with them. I’m asking you . . . I’m begging you. Let me at least see them. Just a glimpse. That’s all.”
She paused. To her astonishment, Brandt reached over and took her hand, squeezing tightly. She thought his fingers might even have trembled a little, letting her know that he cared far more than she’d realized. Tears stung her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. She was a warrior, after all.
Sighing heavily, Strike shook his head. “I hope you both know how much I wish I could authorize a visit. The council has brainstormed some options, even, but we just can’t see a way to absolutely protect Harry and Braden while giving you access. They don’t have their bloodline marks and they’re not connected to the barrier. Which means that as long as we don’t contact them, and vice versa, there’s no way for the Xibalbans or
Banol Kax
to find them. They’re absolutely safe.” The king paused, looking suddenly far older than his thirtysomething years. “This is one of those times when I have to be the bad guy. As much as I understand how awful this is for you, I have to do what I think is best.”
Patience’s mouth dried to dust, and dull anger kindled in her chest, making it hard to breathe. “You have
no idea
what I’m going through. None of you do. Or have you lost track of the fact that Brandt and I are the only ones here who are actually married, not just
jun tan
mates, and we’re the only ones who are parents?”
“The
winikin
—” Strike began.
“The
winikin
raised us, but they’re not our parents. There’s a difference.”
“Not to some of them, there isn’t.” But Strike didn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to tell you where they are, and I’m not going to arrange a meeting, or even an invisibility-cloaked look-see. I want you to stay away from them. Let Hannah and Woody do their jobs while you do yours.” He fixed her with a stern look and reached for his belt, where he wore his father’s ceremonial knife. “I want you to swear to me, on your—”
The normal-size door inset into the heavily carved ceremonial panels guarding the royal suite swung open and Leah stuck her head through, interrupting with, “There you are! Hurry up, will you?”
Strike broke off and swung around. “Did you get Anna on the line?”
“Yeah, but she’s trying to escape. Better move your fine ass.” Leah’s attention shifted from Strike to the others. “Unless you’re busy?”
“We’re done here,” Strike said, thoroughly distracted now. Brows furrowed, expression suggesting he viewed the upcoming convo with his sister with both anticipation and dread, he turned back, reached out, and gripped Patience’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said for the second—or was it the third?—time. “Be strong and do your best. That’s all any of us can do.” Then, shooting Brandt what she strongly suspected was a mated man’s look of commiseration, the king turned on his heel and beat it for the royal suite. Moments later, the door swung shut at his back, leaving Patience and Brandt out in the hall. Together. Alone.
Before, what seemed like an eternity ago but had been only a couple of years, they might have taken the opportunity to sneak a few kisses, maybe more. Now, although Brandt kept hold of her hand, he scowled down at her. “What the hell was that?”
She bristled. “Excuse me?”
“Please. You know damn well you agreed to hold off on talking to the king.” But his eyes softened and he caught her other hand, holding her still when she would’ve shifted away. “We’re on the same side here, sweetheart. I want what you want.”