Nightkeepers (29 page)

THE VENUS CONJUNCTION

Deep in the bowels of the art history building at UT Austin, Lucius Hunt was hunched over his desk, hard at work. Okay, technically he was in his first-floor office, but it was nearly three a.m. and pitch dark outside, so it was feeling bowelish. Or maybe that was his total, utter lack of success at deciphering the line of Mayan text that sat on his computer screen, mocking him.

‘‘I can’t tell if the damn skull is grinning or screaming. ’’ He hunkered down in his desk chair until he was eye level with his laptop screen, but all that did was give him a crick in his neck. Sometimes being tall sucked.

Thanks to fifteen hundred years’ worth of tropical weather at the ruins of Chichén Itzá, the Mayan glyphwork was badly eroded. If he adjusted the contrast, he could distinguish what looked like a skull carved inside the outline of a jellyfish, but that could make it any one of twenty-plus glyphs he’d accumulated for his thesis on the end-time prophecy, depending on what the damned skull was doing. Digital comparison to other symbols in the text had allowed him to narrow his options down to grinning or screaming. If the skull was grinning, he’d found himself an ode to Jaguar-Paw Skull, the fourteenth ruler of the ancient Mayan city.
Boo-ring
.

But if it was screaming . . . if it was screaming, he was looking at something seriously important, a discovery that could blow the lid off the prevailing theories on the end-time. If the skull was screaming, then the zero date on the Mayan Long Count calendar wasn’t a metaphor for social change at all. It was a prophecy, just like the doomsday nuts kept saying. A warning.

Game over.

His boss, top Mayanist Anna Catori, didn’t believe the world would end on the day the backward-counting calendar zeroed out. She and the rest of the naysayers chose to ignore the modern astronomers who’d discovered that the zero date on the Long Count calendar was the same exact day the earth would pass through the precise center of the Milky Way galaxy while in conjunction with the sun and moon.

Half the astrophysicists Lucius had interviewed said there was a good chance that the earth’s magnetic poles would flip abruptly on that day, making north become south and south, north. The other half said that was bullshit. There seemed to be a general consensus, though, that the sun-moon-earth conjunction in the galactic center was likely to spark the sort of sunspot activity that hadn’t been seen in twenty-six thousand or so years, since the last time there was a meta-conjunction like this one.

Oh, and by the way, twenty-six thousand years ago, the magnetic poles
had
flipped, and the earth had actually owned an ozone layer capable of protecting it from the sunspots.

The question was, how much of this had the ancient Maya known, and—and here was where Anna kept accusing Lucius of straying over into the tinfoil-hat zone— what was with the handful of inscriptions he’d found that mentioned the Nightkeepers, a secret sect of warrior-priests supposedly sworn to protect the earth when the zero date came?

Ergo, the screaming skulls.

Excitement buzzed through his veins, alongside the caffeine from the six-pack of Mountain Dew he’d downed since midnight. With T minus six weeks and counting to his thesis defense, he needed one more find, one last bit of oomph to put him over the top and counteract his less than stellar disciplinary record at UT. This could be it.

‘‘Come on, baby. Scream for me.’’ He clicked a few keys on his laptop and swapped the colors over to a deep, vibrant purple, which he’d found sometimes popped details the other views washed out.

The result was a purple jellyfish containing a lavender skull that looked like it was snickering at him.

‘‘Son of a bitch.’’ He pushed away from the desk and scrubbed his hands over his eyes, which burned with fatigue and too many hours at the computer. When he blinked against the sting, he saw his favorite skeptic standing in the doorway to his tiny office.

Anna was a dark-haired beauty in her late thirties, lovely and sad-looking, with the most gorgeous blue eyes he’d ever seen in his life. She was wearing jeans and a clingy blue shirt a shade darker than her eyes, with the sleeves rolled up over the forearm tattoos she didn’t like to talk about. One was a perfect representation of the Mayan
balam
glyph, representing the sacred jaguar, the other the
ju
glyph of royalty. Together, they were dead sexy, at least as far as Lucius was concerned.

When she didn’t move from the doorway, didn’t say anything, he started to think he was having a waking fantasy, the kind where she’d glide across the room, haul him down to the desk, and make love to him amidst his thesis notes.

Then she scowled. ‘‘Don’t you ever sleep?’’

Not a dream, then.
Bummer.

Lucius glanced at his watch. Three fifteen. Over the past few months he’d been sleeping less and less, kept awake by dark dreams and a strange, growing restlessness. ‘‘What makes you think I’m not just getting a really early start on tomorrow?’’

She pointed to the line of empties on his desk. ‘‘I count six dead soldiers, and you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.’’ She paused, her expression softening. ‘‘Go home and sleep, Lucius. I don’t want to see you back here before noon. You’re no good to me if you burn out before the ink dries on your doctorate.’’

"But I found—"

‘‘Go.’’ She crossed the room, pulled him out of his chair, and shoved him toward the door. ‘‘It’ll still be here in a few hours. One nice thing about the study of an ancient civilization is that life-threatening emergencies are rare.’’

The sentiment was so un-Anna-like that he paused. ‘‘Is everything okay?’’

She avoided his eyes. ‘‘Everything’s fine. I want to get a jump on things before the grant vultures descend this afternoon.’’

‘‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Anna.’’
Talk to me,
he wanted to say.
Tell me what’s wrong. I’ll listen; I want to help
. But he didn’t go there, because she’d already let him know in so many little ways that she was flattered, but not interested in a student nearly ten years her junior. Rumor said her marriage to Dick Catori of the economics department was on shaky ground, but she left that at the door. At least, she usually did. Tonight, she seemed to waver, seemed to lean toward him for half a second.

Then she straightened and shook her head. ‘‘It’s nothing you can help me with.’’

‘‘Try me.’’

Her eyes softened to the
you’re so cute
look he hated like poison, and she nudged him toward the door. ‘‘It’s not your fight. Go home.’’

Lucius didn’t like the thought of her sleeping at the lab because things had gotten bad with the Dick, but he’d just look like an idiot if he invited her to his place, a shared apartment furnished in Early Roach, so he said, ‘‘Call me if you change your mind.’’

‘‘I will,’’ she said, but they both knew she wouldn’t.

‘‘See you in a few hours.’’

‘‘Not before noon, or I’m docking your stipend.’’ He shot her a grin. ‘‘Can’t threaten me. Half of nothing’s still nothing.’’ But the moment the door swung shut at his back, his smile faded.

What was going on? She’d been distracted lately, worried by more than just the grant committee. A bubble of anger worked its way through his normal calm. If the Dick was giving her grief, he’d . . .

You’ll do what,
he thought bitterly,
tell on him?

Lucius was two inches taller and a good fifty pounds lighter than his younger brothers and his father, who were all cut in the Hunt mold of dark, handsome, and built. Lucius looked more like his mother and sister, and while light and willowy was gorgeous on them, he looked more wussy than willowy, and doubted Anna’s ex-linebacker husband would be impressed.

He’d have to try another angle, then.
So, think
, he told himself as he crossed the narrow bridge at the front of the art history building.
What does Anna need?

The question bumped against the twitchiness deep inside him, and he glanced up at the waning moon overhead. He could swear he felt the night in his bones, a subsonic itch that added to the restlessness.

His mother used to say he should’ve been born in another time, when he could’ve lived the quests he read about and played on VR games. But neither books nor games were enough, had never been enough. He wanted to do something,
be
something more than a scrawny glyph geek who was constantly getting himself in trouble more through accident than design.

Going on instinct, he doubled back, circling the outer edge of the dark, seventies-style building until he reached the window of Anna’s first-floor office. The window was closed but the room was fully lit. Trusting that the darkness at his back would shield him from view, he squelched the guilt and peeked in.

He saw his laptop open on the desk, with the monitor switched to a deep crimson that really popped the line of glyphwork he’d been working on. The red showed the skull screaming, clear as day. But that wasn’t what had Lucius freezing in place.

It was the sight of Anna, slumped in her desk chair with her eyes closed and blood trickling from the corner of her mouth.

Leah awoke midafternoon, with a serious crick in her neck from having slept on a MAC-10 autopistol and a profound wish that she’d open her eyes and find that the last few weeks—hell, the last year and a half—had been a really twisted dream.

But when she did the eyes-open thing and found herself in a sumptuous bedroom with tall ceilings, thick carpets and drapes, and a faintly impersonal Native American- themed decor that practically screamed ‘‘high-end hotel,’’ she had a strong feeling the weirdness was just beginning.

As the events of the night before came clearer in her mind, she was sure of only one thing: She was way out of her jurisdiction.

The red-rock canyon walls visible beyond the wide bedroom windows suggested the Southwest, and what she now remembered of the explanation Strike had given her in the Mayan temple—after they’d had total-stranger sex—suggested she’d stumbled into a cosmic-level battle that went well beyond the MDPD.

It should’ve been utterly ridiculous even to consider that any of what she’d seen—or thought she’d seen— was real. But what was the alternative? Hallucination? Insanity? It felt way too real, and her online searches on the Survivor2012 doctrine had made it sound like an awful lot of experts—including real scientists, not just doomsday nuts—agreed that something wonky was going to happen at the end of 2012. And if she believed the Maya had predicted the zero date a few thousand years ago, was it such a stretch to believe that there was a religious component to it all?

‘‘But religion isn’t the same as actual magic,’’ she said aloud. ‘‘An astronomical event isn’t the same as gods and demons battling for control of the earth.’’

In order for her to believe what Strike had told her about the Nightkeepers, she had to accept that the 2012 apocalypse was going to boil down to a battle between good and evil, and while that might make a hell of a movie, it didn’t do much for her in terms of common sense. She was a cop. A realist.

‘‘There’s no such thing as magic,’’ she said. But she didn’t sound convinced, even to her own ears, because if there was no such thing as magic, how did she explain all that she’d seen and done recently?

A tap on the door interrupted her thoughts, which was a relief, because they weren’t getting her anywhere. Scrambling out of the plush, king-size bed, she pulled on her bloodstained clothes and fastened her belt loosely enough that she could jam the MAC beneath it. Exiting the bedroom, she crossed an equally opulent sitting room, taking note of the attached kitchenette and a short hallway beyond, leading to what looked like a solarium and a few other closed doors.

Forget upscale hotel. Apparently she’d rated a small condo.

The main door to the suite was actually a set of double doors, both elaborately carved with the same sort of glyphs Strike wore on his arm. At the thought of the marks—and the man—Leah’s skin warmed, anger at his deception tangling with desire. The churned-up heat had her voice sharpening when she opened one of the doors. ‘‘Yes?’’

Jox stood there, his lived-in face tight with disapproval as he held out a small pile of clothing, with a pair of sneakers on top. ‘‘They’ll be too big for you.’’

She bristled to meet his ’tude. ‘‘Better than bloodstains. ’’ She took the clothes before he could snatch them back. And what the hell was his problem? It wasn’t like she’d asked to get herself dragged into this mess. She’d just been doing her job.

More or less.

He bowed stiffly.
‘‘Aj-winikin.’’
Then he turned on his heel and strode off, somehow making his faded jeans and long-sleeved shirt look like livery.

‘‘Wait,’’ she said quickly. She needed more info, needed to figure out if these people—these Nightkeepers—were the real deal, and if so, whether they were the good guys or the bad. She wanted to believe Strike, wanted to trust him. And that was a serious problem, because her track record really sucked in the picking-trustworthy-men-for-relationships department.

Jox turned back with a scowl. ‘‘What?’’

‘‘What is that?’’ Leah asked. ‘‘
Aj-winikin
. What does it mean?’’

‘‘It means, ‘I am your servant,’’’ Jox replied. ‘‘That’s what I am, a
winikin
. A servant.’’

She shook her head, not buying it. ‘‘That might be the translation, but you’re nobody’s servant. What does it really mean?’’

That got her a considering look. ‘‘The
winikin
look after . . . people like Strike and the others. When they’re children, we help raise them, teach them, guard them. When they’re grown we act as . . . I guess you’d say their conscience. We’re the little voices that sit on their shoulders and give advice when things are going to hell.’’