Nightkeepers (10 page)

No way in hell was he leaving Leah unprotected. Not with a
makol
on the loose. So he headed back into the main room and scrounged the tinned meat he’d pulled out for their interrupted snack. By his fourth can of by-products, the world had stopped spinning. By his sixth— when the SPAM started tasting like SPAM, which wasn’t saying much—he was feeling almost normal, except for the part about needing to sleep for a week. Since that wasn’t an option, he went for caffeine instead, raiding the coffee supply and drinking the stuff black, because powdered creamer was just wrong.

Fortified with a mug of sludgelike caffeine, he snagged a package of stale cookies from a cabinet, then headed back to Leah. He tucked the serape more tightly around her, set a chair near her head, facing the door, and sat himself down with the cookies and coffee within reach, along with the MAC-10 autopistol he’d pulled out of the gun locker hidden behind a secret panel in the bathroom closet. With the gun on his lap and a spare clip of jade-tipped bullets nearby, he watched the door. And waited.

And waited.

He was still waiting and watching, and was on his third pot of coffee when the dawn broke with quiet ferocity.

In the aftermath of the solstice, the sun rose almost directly behind the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá, a black step-sided silhouette against the fiery red of dawn. The pyramid—dedicated to the creator god Kulkulkan— was a monumental calendar, with ninety-one steps on each of the four sides, plus the top platform, equaling the 365 days of a solar year. Built atop an earlier temple dedicated to the jaguars gods believed to hold up the four corners of the world, the pyramid of Kulkulkan was designed so a serpent shadow descended the stairs at the exact moment of each equinox, in spring and fall. It overlooked the city of Chichén Itzá, which had been the center of religious and military power in the Yucatán from 800-1100 or so, A.D., housing upward of fifty thousand Maya and Nightkeepers at its peak.

Now, as the sun rose over the ancient city, Strike could just see the parking area that would fill with buses and rental cars in the next few hours, as tourists thronged the ruins, oohing and aahing over the ball court, where teams had competed to toss a heavy ball through stone rings set high on the parallel walls of the court. Little would the tourists know that the ball had represented the sun and the ring had symbolized the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which the Maya had believed was the entrance to Xibalba. In that way, they had reenacted the Great Conjunction over and over again, with the game’s winners offering blood sacrifices— and sometimes their lives—to the gods in the hopes of preventing the end-time.

The tourists also wouldn’t know that the Sacred Cenote, a giant sinkhole opening onto the underground waterways that were the only source of freshwater in the Yucatán, was not only a sacrifical well into which the Maya had thrown thousands of offerings, it was also one of the two entrances to the sacred underground tunnels of the Nightkeepers. Because, hello, nobody even knew the Nightkeepers existed anymore. Thanks to the conquistadors and their missionaries, knowledge of the Great Conjunction had faded to an astronomical oddity, and the Nightkeeper-inspired Mayan pantheon had been lost to monotheism.

Which meant what in practical terms? Nothing, really, Strike admitted to himself as the sun continued to climb the sky above the step-sided pyramid belonging to a god who might’ve been forgotten, but was far from gone. The Nightkeepers’ duties had been set long ago, codified into the thirteen prophecies. The Great Conjunction was coming whether mankind cared or not. The
Banol Kax
would seek to breach the barrier.

And the Nightkeepers—what was left of them, anyway— would stand and fight.

Exhaustion drummed through him. Or maybe that was depression. Grief. It was impossible not to think about the massacre, about what it’d meant. If the barrier was fully back online and the
Banol Kax
had sent their
ajaw-makol
to prepare the stage for a dark lord’s arrival, then everything was happening right on schedule despite the ultimate sacrifice represented by the massacre. Which meant his father’s dreams had been lies. Or maybe he’d failed to follow the visions to their conclusion? Nobody knew at this point, which was a real bugger, because it didn’t give Strike a damn bit of insight into how to deal with his own dreams. Or Leah’s.

‘‘We’ve known each other only a few hours, Blondie, and we’re already up against it,’’ he said to the sleeping woman. He ached over the necessity of wiping her memories and sending her back where she belonged, but the alternative was impossible.

Nightkeepers were born, not recruited.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the apartment, jolting Strike from his reverie. He rose to his feet, autopistol at the ready, and relaxed only marginally when he heard the tapping rhythm on the door that signaled friend.

Moments later, a key turned in the lock and the door opened, and he saw the relief in Jox’s face, the condemnation in Red-Boar’s.

The sight of the two men loosened something inside Strike, making him feel a little less alone in the world. The second the door shut at their backs, the exhaustion he’d been fighting back all night rose up to claim him. ‘‘Don’t hurt her,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s an order.’’

And he pitched to the floor, out cold.

The party at the garden center was in full swing by two a.m. Music pumped from the surround-sound speakers in the apartment, and someone had rigged the intercom to blast the tunes out in the warehouse. It was so loud, nobody cared that it sounded like shit.

The apartment above the store was jammed, and there were probably fifty or so kids packed into the warehouse. They were dancing in the main aisle and climbing on the stacked pallets of seeds and fertilizer, jumping from one leaning tower to the next and making bets on who’d fall first. A stack of 5-10-10 had already bitten the dust, and it looked like the leaning tower of diatomaceous earth was next. The dancers ground the fertilizer granules to dust beneath their feet, making the air sparkle faintly in the red-tinged emergency lights.

Rabbit stood above it all, watching from behind the wide picture window that opened from Jox’s office onto the warehouse. He’d declared the room off-limits by slapping a crisscross of yellow-and-black caution tape over the door and locking it behind him, and so far the barricade had held.

The office lights were off, leaving him watching in the darkness as somebody started lobbing five-pounders of birdseed from the top racks of the thirty-foot-high warehouse. The bags exploded when they hit, sending up millet and sunflower shrapnel and making the dancers scream with laughter.

Rabbit knew he should be out there. This was his frigging party, and he was going to catch hell for it when the others got back. But he didn’t move, just sat and watched instead, wishing he’d had the guts to go toe-to-toe with the old man when it’d counted. But he hadn’t, so here he was, stuck in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing important. As usual.

‘‘Rabbit?’’ There was a knock on the door. ‘‘You in there?’’

The voice was female, which pretty much guaranteed he was going to answer. He cracked the door and saw Tracy Lindh, a dark-haired junior cheerleader he knew in passing, who scored about a seven of ten on the do-ability scale, mostly because her breasts balanced out her chunky legs. ‘‘Yeah?’’

‘‘I, uh, don’t want to interrupt or anything.’’

‘‘I’m alone. Just taking a time-out. You want in?’’ He let the door swing wide enough that she could get through, but kept it tight so she’d have to slide up past him.

But she stayed put. ‘‘No, I, uh . . . You know that room in the apartment? The one with the padlock? Well, Ben Stanley and a couple of his buddies—’’

Rabbit was out the door before she finished.

He should’ve been cursing whatever asshole’d invited the terrible trio, when pretty much everyone who was anyone knew they’d made Rabbit’s life a living hell since junior high. It’d gotten so bad he’d actually studied so he could graduate early and get away from them.

But all he could think as he bolted up the hallway and skidded through the front door of the apartment, heart pounding in his ears, was,
Oh, shit. Oh, no. No, shit, please, no—

He broke off when he saw that the door to the ritual room was splintered wide-open, with the padlock still attached to its hasp. Raucous male laughter sounded from within.

Lunging for the door, hoping like hell he wasn’t too late, he shouted, ‘‘Hey, get out of—’’

He stopped dead, heart slamming in his chest at the sight of three guys standing over the
chac-mool
altar, drinking beer from the ritual bowls.

Ben Stanley—a big, arrogant blond jerk who was a second-stringer on the football team and acted like he was captain—stood in the middle. Rabbit didn’t recognize the guys on either side of him, because they were wearing the Nightkeepers’ sacred robes, one red, one black, with the hoods pulled forward to shadow their faces. The hems and sleeve points dragged on the floor, which was littered with broken nachos and what looked like a big spooge of string cheese.

‘‘Get. Out.’’ Rabbit tried to keep his voice even, but it shook with rage.

They shouldn’t be in the ritual chamber. Hell,
he
shouldn’t even be in there. Not if the barrier had reactivated.

He’d never doubted the magic, even when it failed to work year after year. Somehow he’d always known it’d work someday; he just hadn’t counted on being left behind. And in response, he was just now realizing, he’d made a big fucking mistake.

Probably the biggest of his life.

‘‘Hey, Bunny-boy,’’ the black-robed guy said. ‘‘What the fuck is this? You part of a cult? You and your fucked-up father worship the devil or something?’’

Rabbit ID’d the voice as belonging to one of Ben’s two usual partners in crime: brown-haired, pockmarked Zits Vicker. That meant Jason Tremblay, skinhead extraordinaire, was wearing the royal red.

‘‘Come on, guys,’’ Tracy said, surprising Rabbit because she’d followed him into the apartment. ‘‘Lay off. You’ve gotta admit this is a pretty cool place. You want to be invited back, right?’’

Rabbit turned to her. ‘‘Go downstairs, okay? I’ve got this.’’

He didn’t want her to see him get his shit knocked loose.

‘‘Aw, let her stay,’’ Zits whined. ‘‘We’re just gonna have a little fun.’’ He shook the black robe, making the stingray spines dance. ‘‘Is this your dress, Bunny? Or does your daddy like you in the red one better?’’

‘‘Go,’’ Rabbit whispered, his heart bumping unevenly in his chest. ‘‘Please.’’

Tracy finally left, and Ben shut the door after her, giving it a shove so it wedged against the busted part and stuck fast. Then he crossed to the altar and dropped the bowl he’d been drinking from, giving it a spin so beer sloshed over the edges.

Rabbit was tempted to tell them that the last thing to hit those bowls had been human blood. He was going to take a pounding anyway. Why not deserve it?

But where before he’d more or less taken what they’d dished out—because resistance was futile and just earned him more of a beating—now he found himself squaring off opposite Ben as Zits and Jason moved up on either side of their leader.

Outside the sacred chamber, somebody swapped out the music, and a heavy throb of drumbeats sounded, seeming to echo up through the floor.

‘‘Wanna tell us what goes on in here?’’ Zits asked. He slurped from his bowl, beer sloshing down the front of the sacred black robe.

Rabbit wanted to kill him. Really and truly kill him— a quick slash across the throat would do it, or even better, he could cut the bastard’s heart out of his chest and watch as Zits’s blood pressure crashed, his brain cut out, and he dropped dead. Better still, he could burn him, robes and all, and listen to him scream.

For a second the image of it was so vivid in his mind, so perfect, Rabbit thought he’d already crisped the son of a bitch. Then the fantasy winked out and he was stuck back in the reality of high school torment, three months after he’d escaped the halls of hell.

This time, though, he wasn’t the skinny kid who’d moved to town halfway through junior high and got caught doodling a black-robed wizard in his algebra notebook. This time he was . . .

Nothing. He was nothing. A half-blood who couldn’t even jack in.

‘‘He’s not gonna tell us,’’ Ben said. ‘‘Guess we’ll have to make him.’’ He slapped the ceremonial bowl off the altar, sending it across the room. The thin jade shattered when it hit the wall, and the air hummed off-key.

‘‘Hey! Knock it off.’’ Heart hammering in his chest, feeling faintly sick, Rabbit crouched down and picked up the largest piece of jade, which had broken off in an elongated triangle with knife-sharp edges.

Ben stuck his chin out. ‘‘Make me.’’

The humming got louder, reverberating in Rabbit’s ears. ‘‘Just go,’’ he whispered, gripping the shard of jade and feeling it cut into his palm. ‘‘Please, just go.’’

Heat surrounded him. Built inside him.

There must’ve been something in his eyes or voice, or maybe the heat and the humming weren’t just his imagination, because Jason started edging toward the door. He pulled off the red robe and dropped it on the floor. ‘‘Come on, guys. We don’t want to get in trouble with the ’rents. This shit looks expensive.’’

‘‘There aren’t any ’rents,’’ Ben scoffed. ‘‘Just his stoner dad. You ever see him wandering around here in his brown bathrobe? What a loser.’’ His eyes flicked to Rabbit’s hand. ‘‘What’re you gonna do, stab me with that?’’ He spread his hands and stuck out the beginnings of a gut. ‘‘Have at it, Bunny. You don’t have the stones.’’

Red washed Rabbit’s vision, narrowing it to a pinprick focused on Ben’s face. All the jeers and indignities, every kick and punch, came back to him in a flare of humiliation.

‘‘Go,’’ he said again, his voice shaking with fear, not of them, but of what was happening inside him.
Say it
, a voice whispered.
Say the word
.