Demonkeepers (30 page)

He and Myrinne had done some digging on their own, but hadn’t come up with much info on the Order of Xibalba that wasn’t already common knowledge. Rabbit had negged the idea of hiring a PI, first because he’d thrown money in that direction once before with minimal results, and second because he might not agree with all of Strike’s tenets, but he had to believe it was better for the magi to stay well under the human radar. With his luck, he’d hire a PI, the guy would find something on the Xibalbans, and the next thing he knew, the
Enquirer
would have a headline like:
Mayan Doomsday Cult Implicated in Black Magic Slaying!
or some such shit. No freaking way. He was trying to be smart these days.

It seemed to be paying off too. Despite the knee-jerk piss-off of having Jade and Lucius break into his place and sniff around—
hello, personal space
—when he’d called Strike to bitch, the king had actually been pretty conciliatory about it. He’d even gone back on his
keep Rabbit and Myrinne at UT through the solstice
decree, and zapped out to get them. Then, when Jade’s panic button went off, Rabbit hadn’t just gotten to come along for the ride; he’d been front and center of the rescue when he’d said he thought he could crisp the
makol
without doing the head-and-heart thing. Strike hadn’t been too keen on his doing so much killing, but it wasn’t like they were people anymore. Once a
makol
was fully bound, the human host was dead one way or the other. Rabbit had just sped things up.

In the aftermath of the op he’d been pumped, even after the drag of twelve hours in the Jeep with Michael and Lucius, who weren’t bad guys, but had both been in pissy moods and had argued about every stop. Didn’t matter, though, because when he’d gotten back to Skywatch, Myrinne had been there, waiting for him with a smile and the bright idea to ask Jox about his mother. Not in so many words, of course, but that was the basic plan. If anyone living knew anything, it would be the
winikin
.

Subtle
, Rabbit reminded himself as he lengthened his strides to catch up.
You’re going for subtle
.

Doing the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head thing he’d perfected over more than four decades of in loco parenthood, Jox stopped at the edge of the narrow, rectangular playing field, right on the out-of-bounds line. He raised an eyebrow. “Did you need something, or are we just headed in the same direction?” There was no asperity in the question; it was just a question. Jox was like that—a straight shooter who tried to do his best by everyone and, as far as Rabbit was concerned, didn’t take nearly enough for himself.

“I thought you might want some help digging the stuff out of storage for tomorrow.” Rabbit didn’t quite stick his hands in his pockets and whistle innocently, but he sure imagined it.

A year ago, Jox probably would’ve busted out laughing. Now he nodded, looking pleased. “Sure. Come on. These days, a
winikin
can’t afford to turn down free labor under the age of fifty.”

They headed for the mansion, bypassed the construction crews by going in through the garage, and turned down a seldom-used hallway that had doorways marching down it on either side, numbered in sequence starting with one hundred. “These are more residences, right?”

“They used to be,” Jox answered grimly. “Three floors of one-room studios for the unchosen
winikin
, single nonranking magi, out-of-town visitors, that sort of thing. Now it’s fucking storage space.”

Rabbit held his hands up. “Sor-ry.”

“Damn it.” Jox shook his head. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I really, really hate this part.” Stopping in front of door 121, he checked the number against a spreadsheet on his iPhone screen, muttering, “And I really don’t want to have to paw through any more boxes than absolutely necessary.” Pushing open the door, he flipped on the lights and waved Rabbit through.

Jox had been in charge of the massive renovation and updating of Skywatch almost exactly two years earlier, when the barrier reactivated and the magi returned to their abandoned home. At the time, Rabbit had been sulking up in the pueblo, listening to tunes and hating the world. When his old man had bothered to hunt him down and nag about him pitching in and helping Jox with the cleanup, he’d sneered and done a fast fade.

Now, looking at row upon row of moving boxes, stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks set with minimal aisles between, like something out of the closing credits of
Cold Case
, for the first time, Rabbit thought, really
thought
about what the
winikin
had been facing. Some boxes were marked with content lists, some with bloodlines, others with names. They were all carefully stored, cataloged, and cross-reffed in Jox’s database. And he’d done most of the work himself. He’d sorted through the residences of dead men, women, and children—family members, teammates, friends—and although he’d had a hired cleanup crew come in and strip the place of nearly a thousand people’s worth of daily living crap, he’d had to pull out the Nightkeeper-specific stuff first so it wouldn’t hit the mainstream via Goodwill. He’d done it mostly alone too, wanting the rooms pristine, with no sign of their former inhabitants or their slaughter, before the other Nightkeepers and
winikin
arrived.

Diverted from his stealth mission, Rabbit swallowed. “Shit. I’m sorry. I should’ve helped with this.”

“You were too busy planting your head up your own ass at the time.”

“No kidding.”

The mild response earned him a longer look from the
winikin
, and a faint, approving nod. “So the rumors are true. You’re growing up.”

“Doing my best.”

“Glad to have you.” The
winikin
turned away before shit could get mushy, consulting his phone once again. “Back corner, six boxes here, another ten a couple of rooms down. We won’t need everything, but we’ll pull them all out and pick and choose.” He paused with a sidelong grin. “You get to carry the ones with all the five-pound hand stones.”

“Screw you,” Rabbit agreed good-naturedly.

They found the boxes. Jox tensed up when Rabbit popped the first one, then relaxed when it proved to be full of the promised shin guards and a couple of crazy-looking headpieces adorned with brittle parrot feathers. At Rabbit’s look, the
winikin
lifted a shoulder. “Let’s just say I was working fast back then, and was more than a little stressed. When I came looking for Gray-Smoke’s battle gear, to give to Alexis, I opened up what I thought was the right box and saw—” He broke off, jerked his shoulders irritably. “Ghosts. Not important now; let’s get these boxes back out into the light of day.”

After that, Rabbit almost didn’t ask him about Red-Boar. The
winikin
was already dealing with massacre flashbacks. Didn’t seem fair to pile on another set of memories. But as they schlepped the boxes out of the first room and moved on to the next, and the boxes didn’t yield any surprises, the
winikin
unwound by degrees. What was more, Rabbit started hearing Myrinne’s voice in his head, telling him he had to look out for himself and not worry so much about other people’s opinions. Eventually, he said, “I’ve been thinking about my old man lately.”

The
winikin
didn’t look up from his iPhone. “What sort of thinking?” He seemed okay with the question.

Rabbit shrugged. “Trying to figure him out, I guess. The more distance I get, the more I realize that not everything he did or said was bullshit. It’s just tough deciding which is which.” And that was the gods’ honest truth. The more he and Myrinne had tried to figure out where Red-Boar had been during the years after the massacre, when he’d disappeared into the jungle and eventually came back out with a tagalong half-blood toddler he’d refused to give a proper name, the more Rabbit had started remembering his old man without the anger those memories usually brought. Granted, the useful shit Red-Boar had taught him had been pretty sparse when weighed against the me-me-me shit, but still.

“Good luck,” Jox said dryly. “I couldn’t always tell the difference, and I knew him his entire life.” But after a minute of silent schlepping, he said, “Anything you want to know in particular?”

“Well . . . Anna’s told me a bit about what he was like, you know, before.” He almost hadn’t bothered asking her, but had figured,
What the hell?
To his surprise, she’d talked for nearly an hour, making Red- Boar sound like the local big man on campus, his first wife the homecoming queen. Rabbit hadn’t known what to make of the picture she painted, couldn’t reconcile it with the stubborn, zonked- out asshole he’d grown up with. When Jade turned up with the skull effigy a few days later, though, he’d thought he understood. Anna had been saying good- bye to the memories. No wonder she’d made them sound better than they probably were. He continued. “And Strike’s filled in most of what I was too young to remember about growing up. So I was hoping maybe you could tell me about when the old man went missing . . . and what happened when he came back.” Even as he said it he felt like a total shit. Nothing like putting the guy right back where he didn’t want to go.

At first he thought Jox was going to give him a well-deserved,
Ask me that some other time . . . like never.
But after a moment, the
winikin
said, “It happened a few years after the massacre. Every cardinal day, your father and I would hop a plane down to the Yucatán and sneak into Chichén Itzá, and he would try to jack in, to see if the barrier was still blocked. This one time, as we came out of the tunnel, he just . . . I don’t know. Snapped. I knew he was having trouble dealing—we all were. But this . . . It came out of nowhere. One minute he was treating me like furniture, like usual, and the next he was coming after me.” The
winikin
’s voice dropped. “Three times in my life now, I’ve thought I was going to die. Once was during the massacre. Once was when the
makol
took over Lucius and got loose inside the compound. And once was when Red-Boar came after me that day.”

A shiver crawled down the back of Rabbit’s neck. “I thought he just up and disappeared.”

“He did. But he beat the shit out of me first.” Jox clenched and unclenched one fist, staring at it as if remembering pain, or perhaps broken bones. “I don’t know what was going on inside his head, or what specifically triggered it. All I know is that I was surprised as hell when I woke up and found myself alive—more or less—and him long gone. I dragged myself to our bolt-hole in the village—remember that place?—doctored myself up, and managed to make my flight home, barely. I remember sitting there with his spot empty beside me, hoping to hell he wouldn’t show up.”

“He . . . Fuck.” Rabbit gave up any pretense of hauling the next-to-last box and just stared at the
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 Chichén Itzá 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.”