Nightkeepers (2 page)

SUMMER SOLSTICE

Two big clocks hung high at one end of the great hall, counting time. One ran in reverse, measuring out how long was left until the end-time: almost exactly twenty-eight years and six months. The other was a normal clock, and it was creepy-crawling to nine fifty-three p.m., the moment of the summer solstice. The moment King Scarred-Jaguar and two hundred other Nightkeeper warrior-priests would take their places in the sacred tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá and cast the king’s spell, sealing the intersection of the earth, sky, and underworld.

Three minutes and change to go.

Scarred-Jaguar’s loyal servant, Jox, stood guard, along with fifty other
winikin
, all spaced around the edge of the huge hall, watching the seconds tick down. The Nightkeeper children who were too young to fight were gathered in the center of the room. Some of them were watching a Michael Jackson video on the big screen.

The rest were watching the clock.

‘‘Nothing yet,’’ Hannah said from beside Jox. The pretty brunette glanced down at the marks on her right inner forearm, rows of tiny lizard glyphs, each representing a member of the bloodline she was sworn to protect.

The
winikin
weren’t magic users, but the marks themselves were magic. Every time a member of the bloodline died, one of the glyphs disappeared.

So far, so good. Two minutes to go, and nobody had lost a glyph.

‘‘You should be with the baby,’’ Jox murmured. ‘‘Just in case.’’

‘‘I know.’’ Hannah glanced down at the infants’ area, where she’d gotten her best friend, Izzy, to watch her tiny charge for a few minutes. Instead of hurrying away as the countdown continued, though, she took Jox’s hand and pressed his palm to her cheek. ‘‘Be safe.’’

His heart tightened in his chest, heavy with the knowledge that he couldn’t put her first, not when he was blood-bound to the king’s son and daughter. But when she released his hand, instead of letting it fall away from her soft, warm skin like he knew he should, he slid his grip to the back of her neck and drew her closer.

‘‘Maybe after,’’ he whispered, and touched his lips to hers.

She hesitated for a fraction of a second, as if wondering whether he actually meant it after all this time. Then she returned the kiss with a sharp edge of fear. Of hope.

Maybe after
. It was what they were all saying— Nightkeeper and
winikin
alike—if not aloud, then in their hearts. Maybe after the intersection was sealed, they’d be able to break away from lives ruled by ancient roles and prophecies. If the end-time could be prevented from ever beginning, then the Nightkeepers wouldn’t need to protect mankind anymore. The
winikin
wouldn’t need to serve anymore. They could all disband, disperse, go off to live as they chose. Jox figured he’d start his own business, maybe a garden center. He could run the front with Hannah while their rug rats played tag in the shrubbery.

And he was so getting ahead of himself.

As the final minute began to tick down, he broke the kiss and gave her a little push. ‘‘Go on. Get back to work.’’

He didn’t watch her go. He watched the clock. Forty-five seconds. Twenty-five. Fifteen. Five. Three. Two. One. There was a collective indrawn breath when half the wristwatches in the room went off in a chaos of digital bleats as the solstice came. . . .

And absolutely nothing happened.

The second hand on the big clock swept past the critical moment and kept going. Thirty seconds. One minute. Two. Three.

After five minutes there was a collective exhale and a few cheers, and the kids in the middle of the room started talking, only a few at first, then more and more, the volume building as the tension released and excitement took hold.

The
winiken
to Jox’s immediate left, a sturdy guy named Kneeland who was bound to the ax bloodline, said, ‘‘Hannah, huh?’’ He elbowed Jox in the ribs. ‘‘Rock on. We didn’t think you had it in you. Ever since the prince was born, you’ve been so caught up in—
Shit!
’’ Kneeland went dead pale and clawed at his arm, pushing up his sleeve. ‘‘Oh, no. No! Please, gods,
no!
’’

Screams ripped through the
winikin
, echoing at the perimeter of the hall, then in the middle as the kids reacted to their protectors’ alarm.

A second later, pain seared along Jox’s arm. Cursing, praying, he shoved up his sleeve and stared at the black tattoolike marks on his right forearm.

There was a ripple of motion as the jaguar glyphs disappeared one by one.

Blood red washed across his vision and his pulse stuttered. Agony vised his body. Fear. Disbelief. Crushing, awful grief.

No!
He wanted to scream for his people, for himself, but instead clamped his teeth on the cry as tears ran down his cheeks. Then, like a switch had been thrown, the pain was gone. So were almost all of the glyphs, including two of the four royal marks.

The absence of the pain echoed like silence. Like sorrow.

The king is dead
, he thought.
Long live the king
.

The hall was in chaos. The girls—most of whom had the sight to one degree or another—screamed at the things they saw in their minds, or wept for their parents, or both. Most of the boys were shouting, running around, banging on the gun cabinet and hammering at the locked and warded exterior doors, ready to fight the enemy, the demons called
Banol Kax
.

Kneeland grabbed Jox’s arm, his fingers digging down to the bone. ‘‘We’ve got to do something! They’re dying! What do we do? What do we—’’

‘‘Focus!’’ Jox grabbed the other man and shook him hard. ‘‘The kids are the priority. We’re safe here. The hall is protected, and if we batten down—’’

Yellow light flared all around them as the protective wards fell. Jox’s heart froze in his chest.
Impossible
, he thought. The wards had been set by blood sacrifice from the strongest of the Nightkeepers. The only creature capable of breaching them was one of the
Banol Kax
, or their lava creatures, the—

‘‘Boluntiku!’’
shouted a
winikin
named Olivar as a dark shadow rose from the floor, radiating terrible magma-borne heat that set the parquet aflame. The creature coalesced out of a nightmare, rising up from the bowels of the earth, a swirling image of red-brown scales that remained translucent as it formed a six-fingered hand tipped with razor-sharp claws, and swung.

In the moment before it touched Olivar, the thing flared bright orange and turned solid. Blood geysered and Olivar’s body arched like a crossbow strung too tightly, suspended from the
boluntiku
’s six-clawed grip.

A chatter of gunfire rang out, sounding loud even through the screams. Olivar’s body jerked with the impact of bullets fired by a terrified-looking
winikin
, who’d unlocked the gun cabinet and grabbed an autopistol loaded with jade-tipped bullets.

Jade was to the
Banol Kax
as garlic was to the mythical vampires, or silver to the werewolves of legend. While the demons and their ilk were impervious to most other nonmagical weapons, jade could pierce their psi armor and do some damage.

The bullets had to hit to work, though, and these didn’t. The
boluntiku
puffed to vapor so the jade-tips passed harmlessly through, and Olivar’s limp body dropped to the floor. Then the lava creature turned on the shooter, going solid in the moment before it attacked.

Seconds later, the
winikin
was dead and the weapons cabinet was a mass of shattered wood and twisted metal. And the floor nearby was aflame.

Jox was moving before he’d even processed what was happening, running toward his charges, nine-year-old Striking-Jaguar and his fourteen-year-old sister, Anna-Paw.

Scarred-Jaguar’s attack must have failed. The Nightkeepers were all dead and the intersection was wide-open. The
Banol Kax
had sent their creatures to kill the children, to wipe out any chance of resistance when the Great Conjunction arrived. And it wouldn’t matter if the
winikin
got the kids out of the training center and hid—the
boluntiku
could smell magic.

They could also smell royalty.

Acting in concert, the
boluntiku
zeroed in on Anna, who was fighting her way toward Strike through the crush piled up near the exit, where children struggled to unlock the doors and
winikin
scrambled to get to their charges, everyone screaming as more
boluntiku
erupted from the floor.

‘‘No!’’ Jox shouted, his voice breaking as he fought his way toward the king’s children. Terrified cries rose up around him, and the floor was slick with blood, but he was entirely focused on the prince and princess he was blood-bound to protect.

Then a huge
boluntiku
rose up from the middle of the crush, rearing up and flaring its claws to swing at Anna, who was trying to shield her little brother.

Too late
, Jox thought, desperation pounding in his veins as he struggled through a sea of panic and gore. He was going to be too late.

The creature went solid, killing everyone who’d been inside the confines of its vapor body. But in the second before the six-fingered claws raked the children, gunfire chattered and jade-tipped bullets struck home.

The
boluntiku
jerked back with a shriek that sounded like a thousand fingernails scratching across a giant blackboard, and spun toward its attacker. Jox turned, too, and saw Kneeland standing in front of the big-screen TV, holding a dented autopistol while tears rolled down his cheeks. When the
winikin
caught Jox’s eye, he flashed his forearm.

It was bare. His protectees—and their bloodline— were gone.

With nothing left to live for, Kneeland lifted the weapon in salute, then ran across the raised platform and leaped straight for the huge
boluntiku
. The thing stayed solid and caught him in midair with its claws, hoisting him to its gaping, hundred-toothed mouth.

The moment before it bit down, Kneeland let loose with the autopistol, emptying the clip. The back of the creature’s head blew out in a spray of blackish blood and rust-colored scales. But, still, its jaws closed with an audible crunch.

Kneeland’s body went limp, then fell to the ground in a bloody heap when the
boluntiku
vaporized in death, opening up a corpse-filled hole in the panicked mob. Retching, Jox hurdled the bodies and tried not to think of them as people who’d been alive only seconds earlier.

Around him the screams and fingernails-on-blackboard howls continued and the air smelled of blood and death. Then he was at the doors, and Anna grabbed him, and she was hanging on to Strike, and all Jox could think about was getting the hell out of there.

Someone must’ve hit the panic release—shit, he should’ve thought of that—because the doors weren’t locked anymore; they were wide-open and survivors were running out into the starlit crevasse where the training center was hidden, deep within Chaco Canyon.
Winikin
were dragging their children away from the carnage, running for their lives, but the
boluntiku
pursued with single-minded ferocity, their vapor bulks partially submerged beneath the ground as they gained strength from the magma flow at the earth’s mantle.

‘‘Jox, come on!’’ Anna pulled him toward the door.
‘‘Jox!’’

Three
boluntiku
were closing in on them, drawn by the smell of royalty.

‘‘Not that way.’’ Most of the escapees were headed toward the forty-car garage, or for the barns and the high canyon trails beyond. Jox’s heart hurt with the knowledge that they’d never make it to the vehicles or horses. More important, it wouldn’t matter if they did, because distance was nothing to the
boluntiku
. Only smell mattered.

He had to get the children to the secret blood-warded room beneath the archives, which only the royal
winikin
knew of.

‘‘This way,’’ he said, making the only call he possibly could, though it nearly killed him to turn away from everyone else he’d ever known.

Making sure Anna was right behind him, he grabbed a dazed-looking Strike by the waist and arm, half carrying, half dragging the boy across the great hall to the covered walkway leading to the mansion. It’d been locked all night, but now the doors stood open, one hanging halfway off its hinge. ‘‘Don’t look,’’ he ordered as their feet slid in the bloody wetness that seemed to be everywhere. He lifted Strike higher and the boy trembled and clung to him like a limpet, pressing his face into the
winikin
’s chest.

Jox heard fingernails on blackboard behind them, heard an infant’s wail and a familiar feminine voice screaming a battle cry. Something deep inside him wept—
Hannah
. But he didn’t turn back to help her.

He took the king’s children and ran for his life.

The glowing green numbers of the Crown Vic’s in-dash clock ticked from eleven fifty-nine to midnight, signaling the start of a new day. Detective Leah Ann Daniels let out a slow breath, trying to settle her nerves. ‘‘First day of summer used to be a good thing.’’

‘‘That was before the locals started drinking the Kool-Aid, ’’ her partner, Nick Ramon, said, then winced. ‘‘Sorry.’’

‘‘Don’t be.’’
It’s not your fault my brother joined a cult and drew the short straw.
Battling the churning in her gut, Leah scanned the dark, cluttered alley outside the car, looking for Itchy Pasquale, the scrawny gangbanger— and occasional snitch—who’d called her for a meeting, claiming to know where the Kool-Aid was being served this time around.