Demonkeepers (18 page)

Unless an unchosen
winikin
was somehow picked by the gods to serve in a role she hadn’t planned for, hadn’t been prepared for.
Oh, Shandi
.

“Denis and little Samxel,” the
winikin
said, pronouncing the “x” with the “sh” sound it took in the old language. “On the night of the attack, Denny went with the king, along with all the other unchosen adults, the fighting-age magi, and their chosen
winikin
. I stayed behind with you. Samxel was there too, dancing with the other children in the middle of the rec room. He was ten, not old enough to fight, thank the gods. Or so I thought. In the end, it didn’t make a difference.” A tear tracked down her cheek. “They were playing a Michael Jackson song and trying to moonwalk when the first
boluntiku
broke through the wards and attacked the great hall. Dozens were dead within the first few seconds. There was blood everywhere, children screaming. It was . . . it was chaos. Hell on earth.”

You don’t have to tell me if it hurts too much
, Jade wanted to say, but what she would’ve really meant was,
I don’t want to hear this
, so she said nothing. She just held on to Shandi’s hands while the other woman broke into harsh, ugly sobs that rattled in her chest. “You were in one direction, Samxel in the other. I started to go after him; gods help me, I did. But then my marks started burning. I looked down and saw them disappearing, one after the other, doing this crazy vanishing act right in front of my eyes. The harvesters were among the last to die, of course, because they were in the rear guard. But they died. All of them, except you.”

Back in the day, each chosen
winikin
had worn, in addition to the
aj-winikin
glyph of service, row upon row of small bloodline marks denoting the individual members of their bound bloodline. The night of the massacre, the loss of those marks had warned the
winikin
that the attack was a disaster, the Nightkeepers dying. That warning had preceded the attack on Skywatch by mere seconds. Now, most of the surviving
winikin
had only the single bloodline glyph of his or her lone charge.

Shandi continued: “When I saw that, I knew Denny was gone too. He would’ve been right near the harvesters in the ranks with the other unbound
winikin
. I looked for Samxel, but I couldn’t see him anymore. The children were screaming, crying. Some of the older boys were trying to get through the doors to fight, and there were
boluntiku
everywhere. I couldn’t see him. . . .” Her face shone now with tears. “I tried to get down there, but my legs wouldn’t work. My arm was burning. I only had one bloodline mark left, but it was flaring, throbbing, not letting me go get my baby. It was the magic, you see. It wouldn’t let me go to Samxel because you were my charge, my first and only priority. It made me go get you first.” There was bitterness now in her voice and her eyes. “So I went. You were in the nursery zone, surrounded by a sound barrier that kept the music from disturbing the youngest ones. I grabbed you and started running for the dance floor, screaming Samxel’s name. Then the next thing I knew, I was outside, headed for the garage. It was the magic again. It made me get you out rather than go back for him.” She stopped and pulled her hands from Jade’s, not in an angry gesture, but so she could mop her face with her sleeves. Her words were muffled behind the cloth as she said, “I would’ve tried to go back in, but I knew. Somehow I knew he was gone.” She lifted a shoulder. “A mother’s instincts, I guess. Or maybe I needed to believe he was dead so I could do my duty by you.”

And that was what she had always been to her
winikin
, Jade realized. Duty, pure and simple. More than even she’d realized, raising her had been Shandi’s job. The knowledge bit with sharp, greedy teeth, but she said only, “I’m sorry, Shandi. I’m so sorry.”

“We might have gotten away,” the
winikin
said softly. “Only the chosen were marked with the
aj-winikin
; the unchosen weren’t marked at all. If I hadn’t been chosen, the
boluntiku
wouldn’t have been able to track us through the magic. Maybe Denny and I would’ve even taken Samxel and slipped away before the attack; who knows?”

“Did other unchosen do that?” Were there others out there, unmarked and anonymous?

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care at this point—they’re gone, just like everyone else.” Shandi shook her head, blinking tear- drenched eyes. In their depths, though, Jade saw the
winikin
’s habitual hardness coming back into focus. The starch—bitterness? resentment?—was back in her voice when she said, “That’s why I’m not like the other
winikin
, why I couldn’t ever love you the way you wanted me to. Loving you would’ve been giving in to the magic that bound me to you and forced me to save you rather than Denny and Samxel. So there you have it, the truth. Are you happy now?”

It was one thing, Jade found, to think that the woman who raised her had never loved her. It was another to have it confirmed flat-out. Breathing shallowly past the hurt, she said, “It explains some things. But does it make me happy? Hell, no. There’s nothing good about that, nothing fair.”

Shandi sniffed. “Life’s not fair.”

Jade found the ghost of a smile. “That was the first thing the Vennie
nahwal
said to me. ‘Life’s not fair, child,’ she said.” And then everything had started to change for her. Or had things been shifting around her for weeks before that? Months even? Where did the old Jade end and the new one begin? Or, hell, was she even changing at all? What had happened to the whole “people don’t change” thing? What if she was just deluding herself into thinking she’d begun to evolve?
Gods
. This was at once too much for her to bear, and not enough for her to believe in.

Wrenching her mind back to the conversation, she said, “If life were fair, you wouldn’t have been tagged with the
aj-winikin
glyph, and both our lives would’ve been different.” This time, hers was the voice carrying a slash of bitterness. Who would she have been, she wondered, if she’d grown up with a loving, supportive
winikin
like Jox or Izzy?

Shandi made a sour face. “Don’t be so sure about that. I deliberately tanked the psych profile.”

“You . . .” Jade trailed off, gaping. “During the
winikin
testing? But why? What about the three ‘D’s?” Being chosen had been the ultimate honor in
winikin
society. She couldn’t picture Shandi turning that down. She just couldn’t.

The
winikin
smiled with faint wistfulness, and her voice was soft with memory when she said, “I’d only known Denny for a couple of months when I went for testing, but I already knew he was the one. I tanked my chance to become a
winikin
because I wanted to be with him instead. In the end, though, the gods and destiny got their way.” She sniffed again, and blotted at her now-dry face with jerky motions. “That was far more than I meant to tell you, but maybe it’s good that you know why I’ve pushed you to be the best harvester you can be. That’s . . . It’s the only way I can justify what happened, the only way I can see to make their deaths mean something on a personal level. For you to be what you were meant to be, what you were born to be.”

Jade sank back against the conference table, staring at the walls of books. Her thoughts coiled around another of those truisms she’d learned over the years: Love could make a woman defy her own nature. More, the loss of love was a terrible thing. But she said, “You can’t put that on me.”

“I already did. I’ve been putting it on you your entire life.”

“Okay, then let me rephrase: I won’t let you put that on me, not anymore. I want to be a good harvester, but I also want to be the best mage I can be, the mage the Nightkeepers need me to be right now. If that means going beyond the restrictions of a harvester, then so be it.”

“But you
are
a harvester.”

Thinking of the Vennie
nahwal
, Jade lifted her chin. “I’m half star.”

“That’s not the way it works.”

“Maybe not before. But what if it’s time to change the rules?” Strike had said something similar to her the night of the new moon, she remembered. He’d said that the modern magi sometimes had to make their own choices, their own rules.

So then why did it suddenly seem like a revelation?

Shandi pushed away from the table, her face setting once again in the fallback expression of peaceful calm that hid so much. “The rules are the rules. If you try to defy or avoid them, you’ll pay for it one way or the other, just like I did.” She headed for the door stiff-shouldered, turning back at the threshold to pin Jade with a look. “I lost my entire world because I tried to have a love outside my gods-determined destiny. Your mother lost her life doing the same thing, and your father died thinking she’d abandoned him. Who are you to think you can do better?”

“I don’t know who I am,” Jade snapped. “All I know is that the person you want me to be isn’t all there is.”

Shandi bared her teeth. “That sounds like something
she
would have said.”

“I—”
Shit
. Jade’s stomach roiled. Pressing her lips together, she shook her head. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“But you don’t want to follow my advice either.”

“Which is what, exactly? What would it take to make you happy?”

The
winikin
took a long, hard look at her. Then she just shook her head and walked away, pushing through the door without another word. The message was clear, though:
Nothing you could do would make me love you, because you’ll always be second-best
.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Jade whispered, finding a kernel of frustration amidst the sickening dismay. “I didn’t pick her as my
winikin
, and I didn’t force her to choose me over them. The magic might have, but I’m not the magic. I shouldn’t be blamed for it.” Unfortunately, knowing that she had a valid point didn’t do anything to smooth over the raw, ragged edges.

The counselor’s cool was long gone. Jade took brief satisfaction in imagining a cartoon version of herself, red faced, with steam coming out of her ears, but that was still a woefully inadequate outlet for the churned-up feelings inside her. For the first time since completing the rudimentary firearms training course all the magi had gone through when they had first come to Skywatch, she was tempted to head down to the firing range and shoot the crap out of some targets. She hadn’t been all that great a shot, but a pump-action shotgun loaded with jadeshot required approximately the finesse of spray paint. Point and shoot she could do, she thought, as long as she didn’t try one of Michael’s advanced training runs, which featured moving targets and good guys standing next to bad. Bull’s-eyes she could handle. She would go shoot some stationary targets. That’d make her feel better, she thought, or at least allow her to burn off some steam.

Pleased to have a plan of sorts, even one that was uncharacteristically violent, she made a quick circuit of the archive to put away the few things that were out of place. She was suddenly buzzed to get going; she wanted the thud of recoil, the tearing of paper targets. Hurrying now, her skull throbbing with a headache that was rapidly turning to a rattling, humming whine, she reached to grab the
Idiot’s Guide
, which lay on the conference table where she had dropped it.

It was still open to the fireball spell. Her eyes skimmed over the glyphs as she moved to shut the book. And she froze.

On the page, the glyphs began to glow, radiating off the page and drifting toward her, outlined not in ink, but in bright red-gold fluorescence against a sudden backdrop of blurred images. She gaped as two of the glyphs shimmered and morphed, becoming entirely different syllables in the phonetic system. The humming whine became a song, and the buzz of anger in her blood suddenly felt like . . .
magic
.

Abruptly, the red-gold, almost holographic writing flared brightly, then disappeared, but the afterimage stayed imprinted in her brain. The air had gone strangely cold.

She mouthed the syllables and felt something wrench inside her. A tingling sensation flared from her center to her extremities and then reversed course, fleeing back up her arms and into her body, leaving her chilled. Breathing hard, unable to get enough oxygen, she looked around wildly, but nothing had changed in the shelf-lined room. Nothing but the syllables that danced in her mind’s eye. Cool heat spun inside her; the spell hovered at the edges of her mind, tempting her. Daring her. Mad euphoria gripped her as something deep inside whispered,
Try it. What have you got to lose
?

Leaving the book where it lay, she held her lightly scarred palms out in front of her, making it look as if she were cupping an imaginary basketball, as she’d seen the warriors do when she’d watched them practice their fighting magic and pretended she didn’t mind being on the sidelines. Then, halfway convinced that nothing at all was going to happen, she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and recited the spell aloud.

Magic detonated within her, ripping a scream from her throat, more from surprise than pain. The air shimmered between her outstretched hands, and then blinding blue-white flashed simultaneously with a crackling roar that was like being inside a clap of thunder. On the heels of the flash-boom, a shock wave hammered away from her, sending her staggering back as the archive door
exploded
. Cold seared across her skin, a frigidity so intense that she couldn’t tell if it was fire or ice; she knew only that it burned. She heard crashes and shouts in the hallway and main mansion, then a second huge detonation that rocked the whole damn building, even the reinforced security of the archive.

As quickly as it had come, the magic drained from her in a rush. The noise quieted. Or rather, the noise of the immediate destruction died down, to be replaced with shouts of alarm and tersely snapped orders as the warriors prepared to man a defense.

Oh, shit
, Jade thought on a spurt of horrified adrenaline.
They think we’re under attack!
She had to get out there and explain, but she couldn’t move. She was frozen in place, not by the magic or shock now, but by the sight of the crazy, misplaced winter wonderland that surrounded her.

She hadn’t created a fireball. She had summoned ice.

The walls, floor, ceiling, bookcases, and every other damn thing that had been to the sides or behind her when she’d recited the spell were covered in a thick layer of furry white frost, as though the whole room had been stuck in a giant freezer that had missed out on the past fifty years of frost- free technology. In front of her, where her inadvertent and out-of-control . . . iceball, she supposed, had exploded away from her, the door was gone, along with most of the wall. In their place were sheets of ice and drifts of frosty snow that extended far out into the hallway. The opposite wall was frost-crazed, the windows cracked from the quick war between the heat outside and the insta- freeze within. And, as far as she could tell, the snow and ice kept going on down the hallway. She was pretty sure that last big detonation had come from the great room.

“Oh, gods,” she moaned. What if she had hurt someone? Yanking herself from her paralysis, she bolted out of the archive, slipped on a wide patch of ice just outside the door, and went down on her knees. Water soaked through her jeans almost immediately; the frost layer was already melting, saturating the walls and floor and dripping from the ceiling.

“Jade!” It was Sasha’s voice, relieved. Armed with a submachine gun she held with easy familiarity, she was partway up the hall, slipping and slithering as she followed the ice trail to its source. “What happened? Was it Iago?”

Jade’s legs gave out on her at that, and she found herself sitting in a puddle of meltwater, gaping as the Nightkeepers charged up the hallway toward her, most of them armed, all of them coming to defend Skywatch against . . . her. She started to laugh, tried to swallow it, and ended up emitting a ridiculous hiccup that had Sasha’s expression going to one of pure worry.

Before her friend could go into healer mode, Jade waved to fend her off. “No, I’m fine, really. Better than fine. I’m sorry about the door, though. And the walls. And the windows.” She looked around her at the growing melt, cringing at the destruction, then, when she remembered what the archive had looked like, wailed, “And the books!” They were all scanned into the digital system, but still.

“Jade!”
Michael gripped her shoulder and gave her a none-too-gentle shake. “Was Iago here? Did something happen with one of the artifacts?”

“No.” The hysterical laughter threatened to burble up again. “Something happened with
me
. I did it, all of it. I finally wrote a spell. Or manipulated it, at least.” As she watched, a huge blob of slush let go of the ceiling and fell down the back of Michael’s neck.

“Gah!” He straightened abruptly, pawing at his nape, then scowled when the others laughed at him. He glared around. “Can we get out of here and continue this someplace
dry
?”

“I’d suggest the great room,” a new voice broke in, “but the furniture’s gone . . . along with most of the floor, and what looks like part of the gym downstairs.” Strike made his way through the crowd. Dressed in full black-on-black combat gear and wearing a loaded weapons belt, he was even more intimidating than usual. He glared around, not immediately locking on Jade. “What in the
hell
is going on here? We have rules about experimenting, you know. As in
fucking don’t
unless you’re in the training hall, where you can’t destroy too much expensive stuff.”

Jade closed her eyes as her brief amusement fled. She was starting to shake now, with a combination of reaction and what she suspected was going to be a hell of a postmagic crash. “I did it. It was all my fault. I was looking at the fireball spell in the
Idiot’s Guide
, and it morphed into something else in front of my eyes. I recited what I saw and . . .” She trailed off, opened her eyes, and looked around, seeing a few faces missing. Including Lucius’s and Shandi’s. Fresh worry clutched at her. “Did I hurt anyone?”

The king shook his head. “We got lucky.” From the sudden satisfied glint in his eyes, she got the feeling he wasn’t entirely unhappy with what had just happened. He reached down and, before she knew what was happening, he had hauled her vertical and was leading her along the hallway, where their feet squished on the meltwater-soaked runner. “The great room was empty. Jox was in the kitchen, but he ducked behind the breakfast bar when the leading edge hit. The power was dissipating as it came, so by the time it reached the kitchen it was down to a spring frost and a couple inches of snow.”

That dry rundown didn’t even come close to prep-ping Jade for the sight that confronted her when she stepped through the arched doorway with the others crowding behind her.

The sitting area was demolished. Jagged, frozen chunks of what might have been the comfy chairs and assorted pillows were scattered across the space, which was draped with sharp-edged splashes of crystalline ice and drifts of snow. The sliders had blown out and snow drifted onto the pool deck, where it melted pretty much the second it hit the sun-baked deck. A large, dark shape lurked in the pool, leviathanesque. She was pretty sure it was the couch.

Holy. Shit
.

Jade knotted her fingers together, her stomach churning as it had right before the magic, only more in an I’m-going-to-vomit way. “I’m so sorry.” She directed the apology at Jox, who had overseen the renovations and always did his level best to keep the mansion clean and comfortable for everyone. “Gods. I’m sorry.”

The
winikin
’s expression bordered on wild. “Ice,” he said faintly. “There’s no such thing as an ice spell.”

“There is now.” She glanced at her scribe’s mark. “I think I just made it up. Or my talent did.”

“Just like that?” Strike snapped his fingers. “No warning?”

At that moment, Lucius appeared from the direction of the cottages, moving fast, his eyes hard and hot. He hesitated at the sight of the melting snowdrifts and the submerged sofa, then strode through into the ruined main room. His eyes swept the crowd and settled on her, then skimmed past. His aggressive stance eased. “I take it we’re not under attack?”

“Not an intentional one,” Leah answered dryly. “Jade was just about to tell us about when and how her powers started coming online. Because I’m guessing this wasn’t the first clue.”

Jade winced. “Yes and no. There was one other time, but I convinced myself it was nothing.”

“This,” Sven said, “is clearly something.” Patience elbowed him into silence.

Flushing, Jade sketched a brief summary of what she’d felt when she’d brought herself out of the barrier, and how she’d glanced at a supposedly gibberish text and seen a blessing instead. “I didn’t mention it before because I was convinced the magic had come from the Vennie
nahwal
, or that maybe she had tried to jump-start my talent and failed because my magic is simply too weak.”

“Apparently that’s not the case.” Despite the fact that he was standing ankle-deep in the melting mess and most of the living room was gone, Strike’s eyes gleamed. “Congratulations, Jade. You’re a scribe.”

“Yeah.” She grinned up at him. “I am.” Her smile felt foolish, though, and his image was a little watery around the edges, filtered as it was through unshed tears. “I also think I’m about to pass out.”

She didn’t, but it was pretty close.

Sasha and Michael propped her up and got her to her suite; she waved off the offer of an IV—she’d far rather pig out, thanks—but nodded floppily when Jox called after them that he’d have Shandi bring food. She would’ve warned him that Shandi was mad at her, but lacked the strength. Besides, given that Jox was the royal
winikin
, he probably already knew what was going on, and why. He’d already shown, though, that he wouldn’t interfere in a
winikin
’s relationship with his or her charge. Each
winikin
was chosen for a reason, even if that reason wasn’t immediately obvious.
The gods move in mysterious ways
, Jade thought woozily.

Once she was in bed, Sasha shooed Michael away and helped Jade undress and drag on an oversize T-shirt. Jade was asleep before Sasha pulled the curtains.

She awoke sometime later to the sight of French toast and OJ on a tray at her bedside table . . . and beyond that, Lucius sitting in the chair where she typically dumped her clean laundry. He was reading.

He didn’t realize right away that she was awake, giving her a few seconds to simply watch him. In her mind’s eye, the moment kaleidoscoped to the many times they’d read together in the archive, working separately but together, each of them in their old guises. Now, as he frowned down at the text—which was newly water-damaged, she saw with an inner wince—she found his single-minded, almost fanatical concentration arousing, in large part because she now knew that he brought that same level of intensity to lovemaking.
Sex
, she reminded herself.
Sex, not lovemaking. Keep your own rules straight
. Still, the sight heated her blood and tightened her skin despite the tug of lingering fatigue.