Demonkeepers (12 page)

Strike’s face tightened, though he didn’t look all that surprised. “Go on.”

“When I zapped in, the air was dry, it was pitch-dark, and I was naked. . . .” Lucius told them everything, exactly the way it had happened. He described the library itself, how he figured out the Ouija board deal, and how he used it to find the notebook. He recited as much of the text as he could from memory, including the massive buzz-kill about how he could enter the library only once more safely, and then only if he found his own magic. Which he didn’t have. He left out the last little bit, though, the part about love. He figured that had been a message just for him.

As he spoke, he watched the faces around him fall from hope to confusion, and from there to dismay. In Jade’s expression, he saw a soft, sad emotion alongside the others, this one directed at him. But where before he would have labeled it pity and resented the hell out of it, now he recognized it as sympathy from someone who knew what it felt like to want to be more than her ancestry suggested she should be, more than the people around her assumed she was capable of being. She knew, or at least could come pretty close to guessing, what it had meant to him to be chosen, albeit accidentally, to be the Prophet. He’d dreamed of the library, of the adventure, of finally being a part of things. And now . . . nothing. He’d glimpsed the library’s glory, only to have it taken away from him again, in a cosmic backhanded slap of
you’re not good enough
. Apparently, despite his new and improved physique, he was still Runt Hunt at his core. And boy, didn’t that just suck?

Continuing, he told them about his strength fading, and his inadvertent discovery of his predecessor entombed at the far corner of the library. “She wore the marks of the star bloodline, a warrior, and a mated woman . . . and based on her use of language and the way she spiral-bound the book like a modern notebook, I’d say she lived in the past few decades.” He turned up his palms. “Beyond that, we’ll need to do some digging to try to figure out who she was . . . and what happened to her.”

He fell silent, aware that he’d been talking for a long time with no interruptions. The faces that had been hopeful, confused, and dismayed were now slightly glazed, most wearing expressions he recognized from his lectures as the fugue the human brain tended to slide into when given too much information at one time, or being asked to change too many preconceptions all at once. He thought it was a combination of the two in this case. Gods knew he was feeling almost numb from everything that had happened in the past day. Two days. Whatever. He’d been to hell and back, been to the library and back. And he’d been with Jade.

“There’s a book about the star bloodline in the archive,” Jade said after a moment. “It was in one of the boxes of books Jox had salvaged from the private suites before the big renovation. I just scanned and cataloged it without really reading it because . . . well”—she lifted a shoulder—“it didn’t seem all that relevant, since none of us are of the bloodline. I’ll go back through and read it, see if there’s anything pertinent.”

Strike nodded. “While you’re at it, run some searches on the star bloodline, the keepers of the library, that sort of thing.” He looked from her to Lucius and back. “Tomorrow. Right now, you two both look like you need some major downtime.”

Until Strike mentioned it, Lucius hadn’t been fully aware of the exhaustion hovering at the edges of his consciousness. The second he noticed the fatigue, though, it was all over: The world grayed out and he suddenly could’ve napped quite comfortably in the straight-backed chair.
Postmagic crash
, he thought.
Huh
. He was too tired even to worry about looking weak, or to fend off Michael and Brandt when they each took a side of him, got him on his feet, and headed him toward the sliders leading out. It was all he could do to crane his head around, catch Jade’s eye, and see that she looked tired and sad, but otherwise okay. He flashed back on what she’d said to him earlier, in his cottage, and the way she’d kissed him. And in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help hearing the journalist’s words, spoken now in a woman’s voice:
Find someone to love . . . and tell them so.
It was tempting . . . and a proven recipe for disaster.

“No, thanks,” he muttered under his breath. “Been there, done that, doesn’t work for me.” For now, and maybe for the long haul, he was far better off alone.

She’d been away at the university for nearly six months, but the suite was spotless and fresh-smelling, and her few plants were bright green and tended to. That was all Shandi’s doing, she knew, and was grateful for the
winikin
’s efforts, even if done only out of duty.

All of it looked like she remembered it, but nothing there seemed to explain the restless, edgy energy that ran through her, making her prowl from room to room, looking for something, though she didn’t have a clue what.

Finally, unable to stay inside, she unlatched the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. The air surprised her anew with its heavy moisture, and it carried a snap of ozone that hinted at one of the quick summer storms that sometimes swept through the canyon, fierce and loud. Though such storms were normally rare, Sasha had said they were getting more frequent as the microclimate changed. Jade had a feeling things were going to get worse before they got better, too, since their improvement hinged on the Nightkeepers returning Kinich Ahau to the sky. Prophecy or no prophecy, it was one thing to find the lost sun, another to storm the underworld itself. She shivered at the thought of the fearsome firebird and its companions, and at the idea of going back down there. She didn’t want to. She couldn’t.

Exhaling, she leaned on the railing for a moment and stared out into the night. As she’d sat, watching Lucius breathe and praying he would come back safely, she’d arrived at three important conclusions. Her first was that the gods had gotten it right when they failed to tag her with the warrior’s glyph. She wasn’t cut out to fight—when the moment had come she’d frozen instead of fighting, and could’ve gotten her and Lucius both killed. Which meant she was going to have to find some sort of middle ground between shield bearer and warrior, a way to be involved without actually being on the front lines. The knowledge stung, as did the need to let go of that long-held goal.

But that led to her second conclusion, which was that she needed to focus on the talent the gods
had
given her. Problem was, it seemed to have died on her. Since the strange meeting with her
nahwal
, she’d tried over and over again to call up the magic that had so briefly let her see patterns in the power, but she hadn’t gotten squat. And when she’d stared at the painting on Lucuis’s laptop, she hadn’t been able to pick out the blessing she was sure she’d seen in there before. The glyphs had reverted to their original gibberish. Which meant . . . what? Had the magic come from the
nahwal
, lasting only long enough to get her out of the barrier? Or was something blocking her from using her scribe’s talent, something the
nahwal
had briefly unlocked so she could feel what it ought to feel like, see what it ought to look like? For the moment she was going with the second option, shifting her goal from becoming a warrior to becoming the magic user she was meant to be. Somehow.

The third and last conclusion was one she’d come to deep in the middle of the night, as she sat and stared at Lucius’s face, which had softened with the absence of his now-forceful personality, returning to the younger-looking lines she remembered from before. She didn’t prefer the old Lucius, necessarily, but he was far less intimidating. And in seeing her friend in the face of the man he’d grown into over such a short, tumultuous time, she had realized that just as she needed to find a middle ground between being a bookkeeper and a soldier, perhaps she could find a middle ground with him. Maybe their relationship didn’t have to be a choice between keeping it friends-only and losing herself to him. If she’d learned anything over the past two years—hell, the past few days—it was that things could change in a blink of magic or fate. Maybe it was time to try putting more of herself into her various relationships now, rather than waiting until it was too late and she was stuck sitting at a friend’s bedside, wishing she’d made more of an effort when she’d had the chance.

She’d long attributed her reserve to Shandi, sometimes in gratitude, sometimes in blame. The
winikin
wasn’t warm and fuzzy; she was efficient and effective. That upbringing had served Jade well in her career, allowing her to pick through the darkest parts of her patients’ lives and emerge relatively untouched. But that same defensive shell had kept her insulated from the outside world. Lucius had called her on it, she remembered with a faint smile. Over and over again, when she’d tried to fob him off with something cool and distant, he’d told her to get out of therapist’s mode and
feel
. She’d brushed him off, pretending to laugh, but the comments had stuck. The question was: How did she find
that
middle ground, the one between feeling nothing and feeling too much?

“Watching the stars again?” Shandi said from inside the suite. Jade tensed, but didn’t let the
winikin
see her startlement, or the bite of irritation brought on by the question. As a child, she’d often slipped out of bed and sneaked up onto the balcony or roof of wherever they were living at the time, to lie out and watch the stars. Shandi had invariably found her before too long, bringing her back inside with a few cool words about keeping her eyes on the path in front of her.

“There aren’t any stars tonight. There’s a storm coming.” Jade turned slowly and found her
winikin
framed in the sliders, silhouetted against the light coming from the room beyond. To Jade’s surprise, an uncanny calm descended over her, one that said she would say what needed to be said and deal with the consequences. Maybe that was going to be part of her new middle-ground theory. “I’m not going to apologize for sleeping with Lucius, or for trying to help the others find him. I may not be a warrior, but I’m sick of being in the background.”

Shandi didn’t argue the point. She simply said, “Come inside and sit down. We need to talk.”

Jade was tempted to tell her that she was too tired and bitchy to talk now, that they’d have to deal with whatever it was in the morning, but the shimmer of nerves—and were those tears?—in the
winikin
’s eyes stopped the words in her throat. She nodded instead. “Okay.”

She stepped inside, closed the sliders on the incoming storm, and headed for the couch. Shandi took the chair opposite, so the coffee table formed a wide space between them. Jade didn’t offer her anything and the
winikin
didn’t ask; they just sat there for a few moments, staring at each other. How could it be, Jade wondered, that she didn’t have anything to say to the woman who had saved her from the massacre, raised her, brought her to her birthright, and helped her adjust to being a mage? Why was it that for all they had in common, it sometimes seemed that they didn’t share anything?

Finally, Shandi broke the silence. “I think the woman Lucius saw in the library was your mother.”

On a scale of one to a million, that ranked pretty high on the
things I didn’t expect to hear
scale. Shock hammered through Jade . . . but she didn’t jump or run, or shout an instinctive,
What the fuck?
She just sat there, stunned.

The words spaced themselves out in her head:
I . . . think . . . woman . . . library . . . your mother
. Still, though, the sentence refused to make any sort of cohesive sense within the scope of what she knew. “But I’m a harvester,” she said, because while that wasn’t the most important point, it was the one that defined her. “I’m not a star.”

“Your father, Joshua, was a harvester. But your mother, Vennie, was a member of the star bloodline.”

“But that’s—”
Not how it works
, Jade started to say, then broke off, reeling as the world downshifted around her, took a left-hand turn, and sped off in a new, unexpected direction. One with lots of bumps and potholes.

Among the Nightkeepers, certain bloodlines had tended to interbreed while others hadn’t, forming the basis for talent clusters. The bird bloodlines tended to intermingle, concentrating the genetic traits—assuming that was how the magic was inherited—that conferred the talents of flight and levitation; the four-legged-predator bloodlines carried teleportation and telekinesis, among other things; while the reptilian bloodlines tended toward the fire and weather talents, and invisibility. The omnivorous peccaries could have any of the other talents, along with mind-bending, while the talents of the nonanimal bloodlines fell into two camps: low power and high. On the low end of the spectrum was the harvester bloodline. On the high end was the star bloodline, which was the third most powerful bloodline among all the magi, behind only the royal jaguars and the peccaries.

And Jade was apparently fifty percent star.

How had she not known that? How could she not have asked about her mother’s bloodline before?

“It was a highly unlikely match,” Shandi said. “And, as it turned out, not a good one.” She paused as though weighing a decision, then said, “Your mother abandoned you and your father a few days before the Solstice Massacre. We thought she’d run off . . . and when I couldn’t find any sign of her afterward, I assumed the
boluntiku
had tracked and killed her as they had so many others.”

Shock layered atop shock within Jade. Again, the individual words made sense, but the sum of them seemed to represent a foreign language. “You told me my parents loved each other,” she whispered, suffering a spasm of betrayal that was far stronger than the information probably deserved. But these were her
parents
they were talking about: the tall, sleek- haired woman with the soft voice and her strong, sturdy-armed husband. And even as Shandi’s stories of their having died in a car crash had morphed into the reality of their dying in the Solstice Massacre, Shandi had always said that they had loved each other, that they had died together.

Apparently not so much
, Jade thought as her stomach took a long, sick slide toward her toes.

“They did love each other . . . in the beginning.” Shandi held up a hand. “Let me tell it my way, start to finish. Okay?” After a moment, she continued: “Vennie was a good Nightkeeper. She was loyal to her king and her magic, and she was a strong soldier. She wore the warrior’s mark and excelled at fireball magic. She was . . .” The
winikin
paused, her expression clouding. “Vennie was like a comet. She burned brightly, moved fast, and rarely looked behind herself to see what sort of mess she’d left trailing behind her. She’d been away from the compound for a few years with her parents, and when she showed back up for the solstice ritual of ’eighty-two, she was sixteen, gorgeous, talented, and reckless. It was easy to see why Joshua took one look at her and fell hard. It wasn’t so obvious what she saw in him . . . but before any of us knew what was happening, they were asking formal permission to marry, even though her family objected, saying she was too young to know her own mind.”

While the
winikin
was talking, Jade did her level best to drop herself into therapist mode, drawing the analytic thought process tightly around her when emotion failed to make sense and threatened to swamp her. Now, putting things into their historical perspective, she said, “I thought that back then King Scarred- Jaguar and the royal council were encouraging gods-destined pairings and pregnancies between teenagers, on the theory that it was imperative to create as many fighting-age magi as possible before 2012?”

“That’s true. And even before that, it was more common than not for young magi to pair up early; the magic is hardwired to seek the other half of itself. But this case wasn’t as clear-cut, first because their bloodlines weren’t considered inherently compatible, and second because they married without the
jun tan
.”

Whoa
. “My parents weren’t gods-destined mates?” Even through the counselor’s calm, she felt the world take a long, slow roll around her.

Shandi tipped her hand in a
yes-no
gesture. “They eventually got their
jun tan
s, but not until a few months after they were married. That was around the time you were conceived, so there was some question of whether the ‘mated’ marks appeared because your parents were truly destined mates, or because the pregnancy kicked in a new level of the magic. More than a few people whispered that the gods were affirming your value, not actually sanctifying the marriage.”

Dull unease twisted through Jade. “Surely there were pregnancies between unmated magi?” Love affairs and infidelity were, after all, part of the human condition. And although the Nightkeepers had a few skills normal humans didn’t, there were far more similarities than differences.

“Of course. In those cases, the children were accepted into either their father’s or mother’s bloodlines—usually the more powerful of the two, to give the child the greatest chance of growing into the maximum magic they could command. Even in
jun tan
-sanctified marriages, the mother’s bloodline could accept the child if the father didn’t object. That’s how Alexis came to be a member of her mother’s stronger bloodline. The same thing probably should have been done in your case, giving you the protection and power of the star bloodline . . . but Vennie refused. And, as usual, she got what she wanted, which was a neat little harvester family. For about six months or so.”