Demonkeepers (8 page)

They had captured the true sun god, Kinich Ahau, along with his canine companions. When the barrier’s activity peaked during the summer solstice of the first triad year—aka in nine fucking days—the dark lords were going to sacrifice the true sun god and elevate Akhenaton in his place.

And oh, holy fuck, that couldn’t be allowed to happen.

Snarling, Akhenaton turned on the firebird, lifted shadowy arms, and chanted a spell. In an instant, a chill wind blew, the air cooled, and the molten stone bars turned solid; they were slightly deformed, but not by enough to free the god. But that hadn’t been the firebird’s aim, Lucius realized seconds later, when two dark blurs hurtled through the widened openings between two pairs of archways: pony-size black dogs with sharp white teeth and red eyes.

The companions!

One of the dogs went for Jade’s captors, the other for Lucius’s. Dark blood sprayed as the ravening canine ripped out Snake-head’s throat; the man-beast went down and stayed down. When it did, the shield magic surrounding Lucius disappeared.

The old Lucius wanted to stand and gape at legends come to life. The better man he was becoming landed running. He lunged for Jade; three of the pharaoh’s guards were using their elongated pikes to keep the big black dogs at bay while the fourth force-marched her toward the fortress, following the demon shadow as it disappeared into the darkness within. Inside the pyramid, the sun god shrieked in rage and pain.

“No!” Lucius bolted after them, catching up with the rearmost guard just outside the temple. The guard spun and leveled his pike, his eyes lighting with battle glee as dark magic rattled. Seconds later, though, they flattened to terror, and a dark blur flashed past Lucius and hit the guard in the chest, sending the bastard down and away from Jade. Blood sprayed and vertebrae crunched. Lucius charged forward and grabbed Jade, who stood where the guard had left her, blank eyed and shocky-looking. The magic that had been holding her fast was gone.

“Lucius!” She sagged into him, grabbed onto him. She might’ve said something else, but he couldn’t hear her over the tidal roar that was rising within him. His body heated to flash point and beyond; he was burning without flames, writhing in agony without screams. The world closed in on him from all sides until he could feel only hot agony and the press of Jade’s body. A howling scream slammed through him, out of him.

He felt that same slipping, sliding sensation from before, only this time it was sucking him
up
, not down. There was a jolt of movement; he heard the
makol
’s screech of anger, Kinich Ahau’s roar of satisfaction, the companions’ howls . . . and then it was all gone. The world whipped past him; he caught a glimpse of the hellmouth, the cloud forest, and what he thought might be the barrier, followed by the outlines of his cottage at Skywatch. Then there was a dizzying jolt and he was back in his body, sprawled inelegantly on the living room floor.

Home.

He lay still for a moment, blinking as his body came back online. When a few of his larger muscle groups checked in, he used them to roll over and stretch out a hand to where Jade lay, an arm’s length away. Her eyes were open, though blurred with disorientation. She was there, though. She was okay.
Thank you, gods
, he thought, but then jolted as the rest of it returned. “The firebird! We have to”—
go back and rescue the sun god
, he started to say, but couldn’t get the words past a sudden rushing noise in his head. His vision blurred. He heard her call his name, felt her grab his hand, but those inputs seemed very far away, and so much less important than the powerful surge that caught him up, feeling very different from the magic that had yanked the two of them to Xibalba. He saw her worried eyes through the whirling tunnel of power as he was yanked back into the magic . . . this time alone.

Pushing to her feet, she reached for her pocket, intending to call Strike, both to report in and to get help with Lucius. She didn’t know where he’d gone, hadn’t even felt the magic that had taken him, and that worried her. If their shared magic had dumped them in Xibalba, where would he wind up now that he was flying solo? If they were lucky, he’d make it to the library . . . but it wasn’t as if luck had been with them so far.

She had the earpiece partway to her ear when a whispery word echoed through the room: “
Jade
.”

It was a woman’s voice. The same one she’d heard just before being yanked into Xibalba.

Freezing, she looked around. “Who is that? Where are you?”

“
I’m here. Come to me
.” The world wavered. Red-gold magic flared, surrounding Jade unbidden.

This time, the power jolted her in the familiar sidelong direction of the barrier, but she hadn’t performed any transition spell, hadn’t called the magic. Lifting the earpiece, she screamed, “
Help me!
”

But as Lucius’s cottage shimmered and disappeared, she realized she’d forgotten to turn the damned earpiece on. The others wouldn’t know there was a problem for hours, maybe longer. And by then it might be too late.

Then gravity caught up with him and he fell a good three feet to land face-first on the chamber floor. His chin cracked against granite and the breath left him with a hiss of pain as he pancaked it hard. He was also unexpectedly naked, which made the pancake thing suck more than it would have otherwise. Stone slapped his belly and mashed his ’nads, and he let out a grunt as he hit. But the pain didn’t last long in the face of the crazy-making wonder that surrounded him.

He rolled onto his back, laughing and gasping for air. “I did it. I fucking
did it
!” Granted, the Prophet wasn’t supposed to physically—or metaphysically, for that matter—travel to the library, but maybe that was the sacrifice required for his having kept his soul intact.
If so, that’s not going to be much of a sacrifice at all
, he thought. Aloud, he crowed, “What glyph geek
wouldn’t
want access to a place like this?”

The walls were carved in the Classical Mayan style, with figures turned in profile as they bent over codices, holding quill pens and feather-and-fur paintbrushes, or hammering away at chisels, carving stories into stone. And if those walls pressed too close, sparking a hint of the suffocating claustrophobia that had plagued him for the past half year, he’d learned to shove the weakness aside and focus on the things that mattered. Like the library.

He’d finally gained access to the knowledge the Nightkeepers needed.
Deaf gods be praised
. More, there was a new and oh-holy-fuck problem facing them: namely that the
Banol Kax
had stolen the sun god and were planning on making a switcheroo in nine days. And although the information surrounding him dated only up to the fifteen hundreds, when the conquistadors’ pillaging of the so-called New World had prompted the surviving magi to hide the library and create the Prophet’s spell, the Nightkeepers were hoping—praying—that the cache would contain additional prophecies dealing with the end-time . . . including the role the sun god was supposed to play.

“So all I’ve got to do is find those prophecies . . . or better yet, a spellbook entitled,
How to Put the Sun Back into the Sky
.” But, standing naked in the room he’d spent the past six months trying to find, and a decade prior to that dreaming of, even when he hadn’t known precisely what he’d dreamed, he looked around the narrow, jam-packed arcade . . . and realized that he didn’t have the faintest clue where to start. It wasn’t like there was a computerized, searchable cross-ref system already in place.

The memory of putting together just such a system for the Nightkeepers’ archive caught him hard, bringing a blast of the mingled desire and frustration that had ridden him as he and Jade had worked together day after day. Back then he’d done his damnedest to get her to notice him as more than just a friend, only to find that, when he thought he’d gotten past the friends zone, it was only to friends with benefits. At the time, that wasn’t what he’d wanted or needed. And now . . .

“It’s not important,” he said aloud, though that wasn’t entirely true. Jade was very, very important to him, whether as a friend or as . . . whatever they were now. But at the same time, he couldn’t focus on her, or on trying to figure out what sort of relationship they were going to have going forward. He was in the
library
.

Reminding himself to breathe, he took a long look around.

He was standing in a relatively open space at one end of the narrow room. There was a study area nearby with a low stone table and a couple of fixed benches. Three intricately carved stones were set into the floor beside the table, and several wall hooks held lush-looking woven green robes worked with brilliant yellow at their edges. In one corner, a deep wooden rack contained an assortment of quills, tools, fig-bark strips, limestone wash, and all the other necessities for making the ancient, accordion-folded codices of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers. There was a jaguar statue in the opposite corner; he thought it might have been a fountain at one point. It looked as though water would have emerged from a tiny spout halfway up the wall, then dropped into the open mouth of the snarling stone jaguar. The animal’s lower jaw formed a bowl that would have drained down the back of the creature’s throat, presumably to recirculate.

A second bowl rested between the recumbent jaguar’s paws; it was marked with a looping glyph that resembled a thumbs-up gesture made by a stubby-fingered hand. The glyph, which translated to “
sa
,” represented corn or corn gruel, but was more generally taken to mean “food.”

Okay. Food and water. He got that. If he was lucky—or as smart as he liked to think he was—he’d be able to figure out how the rest of the place worked.

He prowled the study area, trying to get a mental picture of the magi who had set it up. If he could understand how they ordered their workspace, maybe he could guess at how they had organized the contents of the shelves. He badly wanted to dive right into the stacks, but held himself back, knowing his own ability to hyperfocus and lose track of things. Odds were that unless he went in there with a plan, he’d get sucked in by the first codex he laid hands on, regardless of its contents. So he behaved, staying in what passed for his analytical brain.

Everything was bright and new, dust free and fresh seeming.
Magic
, he thought, knowing that also accounted for the torches that burned steadily without emitting smoke or noticeably impacting the oxygen level in the room. Almost as an afterthought, he snagged one of the robes and shrugged it on; it proved to be a loose-fitting ceremonial garment worked with quills and feathers down the back, in the geometric pattern of repeating “G” characters that was often associated with the gods, or places of sacred thought. The realization humbled him with the reminder that he wasn’t just a guy on a mission; he was the latest in a long line of scholars who had served the library. He might not be a mage, but he’d kick the shit out of anyone who tried to take the title of “scholar” away from him. He’d damn well earned it.

“And now it’s time to earn it all over again,” he said, staring at row upon row of racked artifacts and codices and noting the total lack of distinguishing marks on any of the shelves. “But I’ve gotta ask: Is there any way to find what I’m looking for without cataloging every bloody artifact myself?”

With a sudden lurch, his body seesawed into motion without his volition, walking him stiff- legged to an open space near the stone table. Shocked, Lucius cursed under his breath and tried to stop moving but couldn’t, tried to change direction, but couldn’t do that, either. He flashed back hard on the memory of his body doing things his mind couldn’t control.
Godsdamn it!
But before either panic or rage could fully form, the compulsion drained away and he found himself standing beside the study table, near where the three carved stones were set into the floor.

Magic
, he thought, wonder shimmering through the loathing that came with being controlled, compelled. “Don’t do that again,” he warned, though he wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his own body or whatever force had briefly animated it, divorcing his flesh from his soul. Gods, what was it about him? Was he so loosely connected to himself that it was
easy
to pull that shit? One of these days, would his consciousness take a walk without his corpse, and that’d be the end of things?

Okay, now he was freaking himself out.
Focus, moron
. Forcing himself back on task, he studied the carved stones. There were three of them arranged in a triangle, all engraved with familiar glyphs. His bare toes were touching the left- bottom stone of the two-dimensional pyramid. The stone at the apex was carved with the so-called “snaggle-toothed dragon” glyph, that of gaping jaws framing an open space. It was one of several glyphs for
way
.

“Now we’re getting somewhere. That could be how I get out of here.” It might be as simple as standing on the stone and saying the word, or it might involve a blood sacrifice. He wasn’t ready to leave yet, but it was good to have a starting point when the time came.

He stared down at the two other carved insets. The one on the left, the one he’d first stood on, was an intricate glyph: a large, rounded square flanked with two rounded rectangles, one ending in a fanlike shape. Each of the main shapes had shapes within shapes, curling and looping back on one another in the Mayan tradition, which was as much about beauty as writing. “
Yilaj
,” he said softly, translating the three phonetic symbols spelling out
yi-la-ji
. It meant “was seen.” The other stone bore a stylistic reptile’s face in profile, with a closed eye and an appended symbol for a second syllable, written phonetically.
Ma ilaj
. “Was not seen.”

Ohhh-kay
, he thought, trying to parse it out. He had
was seen
and
was not seen
. Positive and negative. Or . . . yes and no.

Lucius’s breath shuddered out of him as he remembered the last thing he’d said before his body walked him over to the “yes” glyph. He tried it again. “Is there a trick to help me find what I’m looking for in here?”

His body jerked and he took a step forward.
Yilaj
. Yes.

Oh, holy flying fuck.
He was in the middle of a Nightkeeper Ouija board, and he was the damned planchette.

Pulse racing, he stepped off the carved stone and tried another question. “Is Jade safe?” He hadn’t meant to ask that, really. But he needed to know. His body jerked and he found himself standing on
ma ilaj
. No, she wasn’t okay.
Shit.
“Is she in danger?” he demanded quickly. Nothing happened. Realizing he hadn’t stepped off the indicator stone, he jumped to neutral ground and repeated the question. He found himself standing back on the “no” stone, which didn’t make any sense. How could she be unsafe, but not in danger?

She couldn’t be. Which meant he’d screwed up the translation, or its intent.

He looked back down at the glyphs for a moment, then got it. Stepping to neutral ground, he said, “Does
ma ilaj
mean you can’t answer the question?”
Yilaj
. Okay, at least he’d cleared that up. The library’s magic—or was this the Prophet’s magic itself?—not only had its limitations, it knew what they were.
Cool
, he thought, pulse starting to skim faster now, not from his dislike of his body being used this way, with or without his permission—though there was some of that—but with the sort of academic anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Back at UT, when the most important thing in his life had been finishing up his thesis, he’d felt the buzz every time he made even infinitesimal progress in finding the elusive screaming-skull glyph that was rumored to mark Nightkeepers’ involvement in the end-time. At Skywatch, he’d felt the buzz nearly every damned day at first, when he’d suddenly found himself surrounded by the people of legend and been given access to archived codices and artifacts that were purely unknown in the outside world. Since his return, though, there hadn’t been any buzz. There had been only failure and frustration. He might have grown into himself physically, but in doing so, he’d lost part of that other side of himself without even really realizing it.

Now, standing in the library of the ancients, finally in a position to do something to help the Nightkeepers rather than hurt them, he felt the buzz. And he fucking loved it.

Grinning, he stepped off the stone. He didn’t let himself ask again about Jade. She was safely back at Skywatch. And besides, the library didn’t know her status. Which brought up an interesting point, come to think. “Are you unable to answer because the question relates to current events rather than something contained specifically within this library?”
Yilaj
. He was getting the hang of this, he thought. But when he stepped off the “yes” stone again, he stumbled. As though it had been hovering at the periphery of his consciousness, waiting for him to notice it, dizzying exhaustion suddenly roared through him, graying his vision and making the floor pitch beneath him.

“Knock it off,” he told himself, his words going slurred. “You’re not that guy anymore.” He was finished with being weak, finished with fading and giving up when people needed him most. He was a new man now.
So fucking act like it
. Granted, magic burned an enormous amount of energy—he’d seen the magi refueling like marathoners and then crashing hard after major spell casting—but he didn’t have access to food right now, so he was just going to have to suck it up and deal. It’d probably be a good idea for him to get going on his research, though. Either that, or figure out how to make the stone jaguar in the corner cough up some grub.

Steadying himself through force of will, he stepped to neutral ground and took a moment to formulate his next question, eventually coming up with: “Can you tell me how the Prophet’s magic works?”

Yilaj
.

“How?”

No answer.

He stepped off the stone, forced himself to focus through the whirling dizziness, and realized he hadn’t asked an actual question. He tried again: “How does the Prophet’s magic work?”

This time it wasn’t so much of a surprise when his body did an about- face without his input, but it was still damned unsettling to have the scenery passing by him without knowing where he was going. He could feel his muscles interacting as he walked toward the racks, but couldn’t tell where the neural inputs governing those actions were coming from. Before, the demon had invaded his skull, pushing him into a corner of his own consciousness and eventually severing his connection with the outside world. Now the magic was somehow controlling his body without pressuring his mind. On one level, that was a relief. On another, it squicked him right the hell out, because if he couldn’t sense the invader, he couldn’t defend himself against it, either.