Demonkeepers (35 page)

Leaning in close, she whispered in his ear, “I love you, so stay the hell alive.” Then, nearly blinded by unshed tears, she scrambled up and lunged toward the field of play, where the magi were jockeying for position as the pharaoh’s guards and animal-headed minions passed the ball among them, heading for the sun god’s goal. For a moment, she didn’t understand what was going on; Akhenaton was gone, so who were they playing for? Then she saw that beast-shadows lined the high walls of the ball court. The
Banol Kax
had come to watch, lending their weight to the play.

If the Nightkeepers’ team won, they would be free and Kinich Ahau would return to Earth. If not, they would all remain trapped in Xibalba. Forever.

Habit and instinct told Jade to hide on the sidelines. Instead, she bolted straight for the action. Her breath whistled in her throat as she dodged a spiked club, spun past a snake-head that snapped and hissed at her, and lunged for Sasha. Tapping her on the shoulder, which had been their signal for a player to rotate out of the game, Jade shouted over the game noise, “Go help Lucius. He’s hurt.” She pointed toward where he lay, steeling herself against the sight of his motionless form.

Sasha nodded and took off, leaving Jade to play her position. When she was just barely clear of the field, the sun god screeched an avian war cry. Holding the head-ball under one arm, it raced across the canyon floor, headed for the opposite team’s goal. The slack whipped out of the sinew ropes, which snapped tight and yanked the god to a roaring, thrashing standstill. The animal-heads boiled in pursuit, regenerating as quickly as the Nightkeepers cut them down. Kinich Ahau fought the bonds, which stretched but didn’t give.

They’re too pliable!
Jade thought suddenly. Heart pounding, she summoned the last dregs of her magic and shaped it into the now-familiar iceball spell. Cold touched the air and raced through her veins as she let the ice magic fly. It hit the ropes, which froze with a hissing, crackling noise. And turned brittle.

With an exultant howl, Kinich Ahau snapped free, tossed the head-ball into the air, and leaped after it. As if the bonds themselves had contained the god’s magic, the man-form became the firebird, morphing midair to the fierce flame- clad creature. It flapped its wings once, twice, and on the third sweep, it caught the head-ball in its beak. Banking, the god swept past the hell-team’s goal, and flung the head through the hoop with a shriek of triumph. As the ball passed through, white light lit the sky and a soundless detonation rocked the firmament. The animal-heads and the last of the pharaoh’s guards dropped where they stood and lay, unmoving. Atop the high walls on either side of the ball court, shadows rippled and the
Banol Kax
disappeared, beaten by a game that was part of the fabric of the planes themselves.

Drained of the last of her magic, Jade collapsed to the canyon floor and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t weep, not yet. Not until Sasha told her Lucius was gone. But somehow she knew, she
knew
that had been his soul leaving his body and heading for the sky, where warriors went after they died in battle.

“Gods, please, no,” she whispered behind her hands. The pain was incredible, overwhelming, impossible to bear. But she didn’t wish it gone. She embraced it, wallowed in it, held it to her. And if that put her on the level of the most heartbroken patient she’d ever counseled, then it was a good level to be on, because she had finally taken the risk. She had loved. She had
lived
.

“Jade.” It was Strike’s voice, oddly hushed. “Look up.”

“I know,” she said, sighing as she let her hands fall. “He’s—” She broke off on a gasp.

The firebird stood in front of her, flanked on either side by the big black dogs that guarded it. The flames that had wreathed it before had turned to soft red-gold feathers. It looked like a giant eagle with the plumage of a parrot, and it towered over her, dwarfed her as it stretched out one wing, unfurled its long flight feathers, and brushed them across her face and down her right arm. The touch tingled; it burned, but not unpleasantly . . . and in a familiar way.

Pulse suddenly hammering, she looked down at her forearm. There she wore a new glyph, a third mark. It wasn’t static, though; as she watched, it morphed from one glyph to another and back again, oscillating between the two.

The god was offering her a choice, she realized: the sun or the
jun tan
? Godkeeper or mate?

She looked up at the firebird, her eyes blurring with tears. Even knowing that her choice might cost them a Godkeeper, she said without hesitation, “I choose to be his mate. Magic isn’t the answer. Love is.” And although he might already be gone, the sudden warmth that curled around her heart told her that it was the right answer for her.

“Ho-ly shit,” someone said from behind her. She didn’t know who.

The firebird dipped its head—in acknowledgment, she thought. It touched her again with its wing, and the
jun tan
firmed in place, stark and black on her forearm. Then the god swept its opposite wing toward Lucius’s motionless body. Sasha knelt beside him, trying to keep his body going in the absence of its soul.

Jade’s heart shuddered as a white shimmer coalesced from the sky and drifted down toward him. She told herself not to hope, but she couldn’t stop the hot, hard anticipation from forming as the vapor settled over him, sank into him.

For a moment, nothing happened. Her world contracted, started to crumble around her.

And then he began to breathe.

The firebird was bowing down in front of Sasha. Michael stood at her side.

Another hot wave flashed through Jade, this time one of relief. She hadn’t cost the magi a Godkeeper, after all. “She was meant to be Godkeeper to Kinich Ahau all along,” she said softly, although she suspected that when she and Sasha had jointly fulfilled the triad prophecy, they had both become equal candidates for the honor.

Lucius seemed to follow her thoughts, because he lined up his forearm next to hers. On his inner wrist he wore a
jun tan
to match hers . . . and the quatrefoil hellmark had turned black. “Thank you,” he rasped, in a voice that had started out that of a stranger and become that of her mate.

She looked at their marks. Despite the hot, hard joy that raced through her at the sight of the
jun tan
, she shook her head in pretend rue. “Shandi is going to kick my ass.”

“First she’ll thank the gods that you made it home safely. Then, yeah, she might kick your ass.” They grinned at each other. He stood, his strength returning quickly, and helped her up. As they headed toward the others, hand in hand, power flashed red-gold, there was a thunder-loud clap, and the firebird sprang aloft as Sasha and Michael embraced, leaning into each other.

Kinich Ahau gained altitude, winging into the sky. As the god rose higher and higher, flames limned the red feathers and trailed from the beat of its wings. Then, suddenly, white-hot light flashed. And the god was gone.

“We did it,” Jade said, not quite ready to believe, though Lucius’s fingers were tightly threaded through hers. But then she stared up at the sky in dismay. “I thought winning the game would send us home. Why are we still here?”

“Because it’s my job to get us home,” Lucius said. “The magic inside me originally belonged to Cizin. When its soul was torn away from mine, I somehow kept hold of that one piece of the demon’s power. You know how we’ve theorized that different
makol
have different skill sets? Well, I think Cizin was capable of forming temporary roads through the barrier. But you were right that I couldn’t touch the power until I got to the point where nothing else mattered . . . which happened when Akhenaton tried to possess you.” He caressed her cheek. “I’d rather live forever in the in-between than have you go through that.”

She wanted to close her eyes and lean into his touch. Instead, she poked him in the stomach. He let out a surprised “oof” as she got in his face. “You’d better consider yourself lucky you fought off Akhenaton. If you hadn’t, I would’ve had to find a way to get to the in-between myself, because, starting now, I don’t intend to live without you.”

His lips tipped up. “Yeah. I got that.” He turned to Strike. “I think this is going to take both of us. That first night, I think I called the road magic without really specifying a destination; at first Kinich Ahau’s need drew us to Xibalba. Then I called the magic a second time to get us out of there, but I still didn’t have a real destination in mind. In the absence of Cizin’s magic, I suspect the library magic would have drawn me straight to the library. As it is”—he turned his palms up—“if we can combine your ’port targeting with my ability to form a conduit through the barrier, we may have gained more than just a new Godkeeper and two new mated pairs just now.”

Startled, Jade looked at Sasha’s wrist, where she too wore a new
jun tan
. Curious, Jade craned to pick out Rabbit in the crowd. Face set and angry, he deliberately looked away, but turned his forearm toward her. He wore no
jun tan
, and his hellmark remained bloodred. Her heart ached for him.

“When I used the road magic previously,” Lucius said, “Jade’s and my bodies stayed safely back at Skywatch. This time we all came down here body and soul, via the hellroad. Problem is, the solstice is past and the hellroad is sealed, or close to it.”

Sven glanced at his heavy-duty diver’s watch. “Shit. He’s right.”

Lucius held out his still-bleeding palm to Strike. “You can move bodies on earth. I can move spirits between planes. You want to see if between the two of us we can get our collective asses home?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

The men linked hands as the others nicked their palms and joined up in a circle, linked by blood and magic. Jade kept hold of Lucius’s hand, with Michael on her other side, which seemed fitting somehow.

“Everyone think about Skywatch,” Lucius said. “The magic needs a destination.”

“We should”—
all think of the same spot
, Jade started to say, but she was cut off midword when the magic triggered unexpectedly, the power leaping from zero to ninety in no time flat. She heard Lucius yell something but missed what he said; his magic roared in her head, masculine and commanding, blending now with Strike’s red-gold teleporter’s talent. The power grabbed them, snatching them out of the canyon in an instant. She saw a flash of dark, ominous shadows moving toward the “I”-shaped ball court; then it was gone. Xibalba was gone. And still they moved up, accelerating, the universe moving past them in a blur that wasn’t gray-green, wasn’t black, wasn’t any real color at all. Then, in the blur, she saw an image: a teenager’s face, smiling at her.
“You’re so much smarter than I was,”
the
nahwal
’s voice said.
“So much braver than I. You fought for him.”

Jade gaped even as truth and joy sang through her. “You died trying to save us. That’s as brave as it gets.”

“If I had truly been brave, I wouldn’t have gone into the library that last time. I would have stayed. I would have found you . . . somehow.”

Jade’s heart took a long, slow roll in her chest. What would it have been like to have her mother with her growing up? To have another senior mage alive when they returned to Skywatch? But she shook her head. “I don’t blame you.”

“Maybe you should
.
”

“I don’t,” Jade said firmly. “I forgive you. I hope you’ll forgive yourself.” She paused. “I’m okay now . . . Mom.”

As if that had been what the
nahwal
—ghost?—had been waiting for, despite whether she knew it herself, Vennie’s lips turned up in a smile that Jade knew from seeing her own face in the mirror. Then the vision wavered and went thin. In the instant before it disappeared, though, Jade saw another shadow: that of a tall, broad-shouldered young man waiting for Vennie in the mist.

Tears blinded Jade alongside a thought of,
Thank you, gods
. Then the air detonated around her and the magi materialized, their feet firmly planted on the floor for a change. Only they weren’t at Skywatch.

They were in the library.

Lucius’s hand tightened on hers and his face drained of color. “Oh, gods. Oh,
shit
!”

Jade’s heart stuttered in her chest. They stood in the study area Lucius had described: There were the racks and robes, the tables, the yes/no stones, and the
way
glyph. Beyond, shelves stretched into the distance. The fountain was just as he had described it, with one difference: It was working now. Water spilled from the wall spigot, filled the bowl, and trickled down the back of the stone jaguar’s gaping throat. Between its paws, the bowl was filled with flat, irregular rounds of corn bread.

A disbelieving laugh caught in her throat and emerged sounding like a moan. “At least we won’t starve right away.” But could they get out again? Had she found love, inner strength, and a new sort of peace, only to lose it too quickly? More, had they just doomed the earth to—

“
That’s
new.” Lucius’s eyes were locked on a plain wooden door that was inset beside the jaguar. Tugging on their joined hands to bring her with him, he crossed to the door. Seeing no latch, he pushed on it.

The panel opened easily. Sunlight spilled in, blinding Jade. She squinted into the light, which was too bright, too white, too hot. . . . Her eyes were slow to adjust. When they did, she found herself blinking at canyon walls and a worn pathway leading to a small cluster of buildings in the middle distance.

Skywatch. Oh, holy shit.

“We’re home,” Lucius said. “And I think we brought the whole fucking library with us.” He let out a long, shuddering breath as the others clustered behind them, and they poured through the door as a team. The sky was very blue, the sun very white. The air felt drier than it had the day before, and the encroaching algae slime was already turning black and dying beneath the might of Kinich Ahau.

Turning back to look at where they had come from, Jade let out a long breath of her own. “No,” she said softly. “
We
didn’t bring the library home.
You
did.”

The plain wooden doorway had appeared in the spot where the hidden tunnel mouth had been, flanked by the flame-shaped stones on one side, the staring eyes on the other. She imagined that when they went back inside, all the way to the rear of the chamber, they would find that the place where Vennie’s skeleton had sat in the star bloodline’s secret room would match up precisely with the metaphysical version of her corpse Lucius had seen within the barrier. Or maybe they would both be gone, vanished now that her soul was where it belonged. Either one would be fine, Jade thought. She knew her parents now.

Above the door, blazoned into the canyon wall in glyph writing, was the prophecy Lucius had translated from the carved wooden box.

“Fuck me,” he said on a sharp bark of disbelief. “It was a true prophecy after all, but Sasha guessed right. It was a damned fragment.” He read aloud, translating: “ ‘In the triad years, a mage-born Prophet can wield the library’s might, but it will take a human’s love to bring it back to Earth
.
’ ” He turned to Jade, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her deeply. When they came up for air, he finished the translation: “ ‘Magic isn’t the answer. Love is.’ ”