Skykeepers (28 page)

“Sasha.” Michael tugged his hand from her too-tight grip and nudged her arm. “Earth to Sasha.”

Torn from her whirling thoughts, she stared blankly at him. “What? Oh.” She flushed at the heat in his eyes, and felt an answering kick of desire within her. But then he looked past her, his expression going strange and rueful as he nodded to the others. “I think those two want to talk to you.”

“What? Why?”

“Check your wrist.”

Adrenaline shot through her system when she realized she’d all but forgotten about the point of the bloodline ceremony in the chaos of what had followed. The
nahwal
, she remembered. That had been Scarred-Jaguar; hadn’t it? The royal
nahwal
was the only one to retain personal characteristics. But why had the royal
nahwal
come for her?

She became acutely aware of the slight tingle that spread across her inner forearm, seeming too large for a single mark.
Oh, shit
, she thought, afraid to look, afraid not to. Before she could make the move, Jox crossed to her, leaned down, and offered his hand. His sleeve slid back to reveal the marks on his forearm.

Where before there had been two jaguar glyphs above the
aj-winikin
, now there were three.

Something inside Sasha went still. Shaking, caught in her oldest and strongest fantasy, the one where she had an actual family, she pushed back the sleeve of her soiled, dragging robe. Shock slammed through her at the sight of not just one mark . . . but four. The jaguar. The royal
ju
. The warrior. And something she didn’t recognize—a talent she hadn’t yet tapped.

She hadn’t just gotten her bloodline mark; she’d also gotten her talent marks, along with an unexpected, terrifying glyph that couldn’t be true. The
ju
. The mark of the jaguar kings. “I’m not . . .” she began, then trailed off. She looked up at Strike. “Ambrose was my father.” She paused. Swallowed. Said in a smaller voice, “Wasn’t he?”

Strike’s face was crowded with emotion, but his voice was matter-of-fact when he said, “The
winikin
stepped in as our guardians. Apparently, Ambrose stepped in as yours.”

Jox had tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, child. I didn’t know. I would’ve looked for you if I did. I would’ve done whatever it took to find you.”

A hot, messy ball of emotion gathered in Sasha’s throat and clogged her chest as she realized that if this was true, if she was really a child of the jaguar bloodline, then Jox should have been her
winikin
. She should have been raised as Strike and Anna had been, with love and a fair-minded understanding of who and what they were. Not blood and madness.

“Who am I?” she asked Strike.

The king looked simultaneously shell-shocked and hopeful. “The
nahwal
said you’re his second daughter. That would make you Anna’s and my baby sister . . . the one who was supposedly stillborn two years before the Solstice Massacre.”

Sasha opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

It was Michael, solid beside her, his eyes dark with an indefinable emotion, who said, “Looks like it was more than a nickname . . . Princess.”

As it got on toward midnight on the night of the full moon, Rabbit killed the music, set his book aside, and started pulling himself together for his late date. Myrinne had told him to come to her room at ten of twelve, not before, and she’d been serious about the timing. So he was following orders, despite the buzz of anticipation that’d played hell with his concentration in the hours leading up to the rendezvous.

He didn’t know what sort of surprise she had planned, but he was hoping it involved getting naked. He also hoped it wouldn’t include any of the witchy stuff she’d been increasingly into lately. If Anna or any of the others knew Myrinne had been dabbling with Mistress Truth’s spell books and paraphernalia, they’d shit a brick. Rabbit was skirting deep trouble by not saying anything to them, but what was he supposed to do, rat out his girlfriend? That was so not happening. Besides, it was all harmless stuff, not even real magic, as far as he could tell. It seemed to be mostly about centering personal energy flows and crap like that, which made it little more than a glorified yoga class with some extra candles and crystals. If she got in any deeper, he figured he’d say something. For now, he was just glad the rituals seemed to have smoothed out the edges she’d developed in the first few weeks they’d been on campus, when she hadn’t wanted to spend much time with him, preferring to be on her own, or hanging with friends he never seemed to meet.

Lately, she’d been spending more and more time with him, and seemed happier overall. He figured he could overlook the yoga stuff if this was the end result. Gods knew she’d had some major life upheavals over the past year. If this was how she needed to deal, then so be it. It wasn’t like he could judge—he’d spent most of the months following his old man’s death hanging out in the pueblo ruins behind Skywatch, smashed on the drug-laced, highly alcoholic
pulque
he’d snagged from Jox’s not-so-hidden stash. In fact, when he thought about it that way, she was probably dealing with things better than he had.

At exactly ten to midnight, his blood buzzing pleasantly with anticipation, Rabbit crossed the hallway and knocked on her door.

Her husky voice called, “Come on in.”

He opened the door and his pulse kicked to find the lights off and fat red candles flickering, and Myrinne wearing the long black silk bathrobe he’d bought her a few weeks ago after she’d bookmarked it on his Web browser as a hint. Her hair was loose and lustrous, and she wore the jade bracelet he’d given her over the summer.

Rabbit grinned.
Hello. Guess I’m getting lucky tonight!

It wasn’t until he stepped into the room and locked the door at his back that he saw that the candles weren’t ambience, after all. At least not entirely. They sat at the points of a six-pointed star that was drawn on the linoleum floor in red electrician’s tape, with a double line through the middle of the star.

Myrinne’s expression went wary at his double take. “Problem?” she said, her voice faintly challenging.

Rabbit squelched his first few responses, which were all variations of,
Oh, fucking shit, baby, are you
trying
to get me in trouble?
She deserved better than that. Of anyone at Skywatch—or anyone in his life, ever—she’d been the first to be entirely on his side, no matter what. The others kept trying to make him fit into their prophecies, their rules, not seeming to understand that a half-blood, by definition, didn’t conform to the Nightkeepers’ rules. Hell, in the past, no half-blood would’ve even been put through the bloodline ceremony and allowed to perform magic. It was a case of luck, lack of manpower, his own strong magic, and eventually Strike’s royal
this is how it’s gonna be
that had gained him acceptance as a Nightkeeper, over his old man’s strenuous objections and dire predictions.

And whether because of those predictions or because he was truly a screwup at heart, he’d blown up one opportunity after another, most of the time literally . . . until he met Myrinne. She’d been the first one to appreciate him—and maybe even love him?—for who and what he was, for what he could do. She wasn’t afraid of him, hadn’t been from the first. In fact, she was always encouraging him to practice more, work harder, develop the multi-pronged talent that set him apart from the others.

Could he do any less for her?

So he took a deep breath and forced himself not to freak out at the sign of the star on the floor and the suspicion that this wasn’t exactly the kind of date he’d had in mind. Unable to think of a better response off the cuff, he said, “Nice candles.”

Some of the fight drained out of her, and she smiled at him, candlelight catching her eyes. “The star represents the two of us. You’re the fire sign—no-brainer—which is the upward triangle, and I’m earth, which is the downward triangle with the line through the middle. Put the two together, and you get the transected star.”

He liked the symbolism just fine, with it joining the two of them together and all. But he wasn’t sure he liked where he thought she was going with the rest of it. “Myr . . . you know we can’t do magic, right? We swore blood oaths to Strike and Anna.”

She crossed to him, moving through the star with a smooth sweep of her robe, somehow avoiding all the candles in the process. On one level, Rabbit thought sourly that if he ever tried that while wearing, say, his ceremonial robes back at Skywatch, he would’ve lit his shit right up. On another, more primal level, his skin tightened at her approach, and his jeans, baggy though they were, grew uncomfortably tight in the crotch.

Stopping very close to him, close enough to kiss, to touch, she did neither, instead raising an eyebrow in challenge. “We swore a blood oath not to do Nightkeeper magic. This isn’t.”

Rabbit’s breath left him in a whoosh, and his brain clicked back into
oh, shit
mode. Technically, she was right, but he knew damn well that the technicality wouldn’t save him from getting his ass handed to him if Strike or Anna found out. Or Jox. Or, hell, any of the gang back at Skywatch.

But you’re not at Skywatch, are you?
said a small, sly voice inside him.
They sent you away to grow up. Who’s to say this isn’t part of the process? It’s called making your own decisions, asshole. You might want to give it a try sometime.

“Besides,” Myrinne continued, lifting his right hand to press a small kiss at his wrist, over the bloodred Xibalban mark he’d accepted from Iago in order to save her life, “don’t you have questions?”

He went still. “You’ve got an answer spell?”

“It’s called scrying,” she corrected, “and yeah. Especially since tonight is the esbat—the full moon—I think we should be able to figure out where you can find the spell to call a new three-question
nahwal
. Or heck, maybe we’ll even call up the spell itself.” She paused tellingly. “That’s assuming that you get behind this a hundred percent. It won’t work if you’re not into it, or if you don’t trust me.”

“I trust you,” he said immediately, realizing that he’d begun to sweat lightly, which sucked, because he was wearing the last of his clean shirts. “It’s just . . . if it’s not Nightkeeper magic—”

“It’s not,” she broke in. “No blood sacrifice, no barrier. It’s all about flames and mirrors.”

“Then are you sure it’ll answer questions about Nightkeeper magic? Does it . . . I don’t know . . . acknowledge other magic systems?”

It was the right thing to say, he saw immediately from the gleam in her eyes. “It’s more along the lines of self-hypnosis, allowing you to access your own natural visions and your connection to other levels of sight and knowledge,” she said. “It’s all very low-impact, very natural. Honest.”

He shouldn’t do it, he knew. He should back out as gracefully as possible, hoping she didn’t take it the wrong way. But even as he told himself that, he couldn’t help thinking about everything that’d gotten fucked up because he’d killed the three-question
nahwal
. If the Nightkeepers still had access to its answers, they might’ve rescued Sasha sooner, found the library, found a new intersection . . . hell, they might’ve even dealt with Iago by now. Who knew?

“What . . .” Rabbit faltered. “If these visions come from my magic, or my ancestors, or, shit, the barrier or something, then it’s Nightkeeper magic.” But the protest didn’t sound convincing even to his own ears. He kept picturing what Strike’s face would look like if he showed up at Skywatch and announced that he knew how to summon a new three-question
nahwal
. Or better yet, that he’d already summoned it. That’d have to make up for some of his more spectacular disasters, right? And, tangentially, it’d prove to them that Myrinne belonged with the magi, and with him, because she would’ve been his catalyst for recovering the
nahwal
.

Right?

She slid her hand down his forearm, across his bloodline mark—the peccary—and his main talent mark, that of pyrokinesis. When their fingers linked, she squeezed, conveying her sympathy and support. Her affection. “Trust me,” she said again.

How could he not? He might’ve saved her from Iago, but she’d saved him right back. He was alive because of her. He didn’t just trust her; he loved her.

“Okay, let’s do it,” he said finally, and was rewarded by her brilliant smile.

She leaned in and kissed him hard, slightly off center, but was gone before he could correct the angle and follow up with more. She skipped back across the star, making the candlelight dance. “Sit here,” she ordered, pointing to one spire of the star. “That’s the top of your triangle. I’ll sit at the top of mine.”

They linked hands over the flickering candles, making a small, intimate circle of two. Myrinne said some sort of incantation about the mother and the earth, and being young and seeing all that was to be seen. Rabbit didn’t totally follow all of the words, not for lack of trying, but because she was so damned beautiful in the candlelight that he couldn’t stop looking at her, couldn’t take his eyes off the play of light and shadow across her face.

The bloodred candles were faintly scented—how had he not noticed that before?—and whatever was in them made his head spin, made his body feel light.

“Look into the mirror,” she said now. A faint smile touched her lips. “You can look at me later. Promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said, feeling an added layer of heat kick into his bloodstream. He looked into the mirror, where she had placed a slender candle made of clear wax, or maybe some sort of crystal. Whatever the components, it made the candlelight refract at all sorts of crazy angles. The flickers merged and separated, always moving, never the same. The patterns fixed his attention, drew him in. “Cool,” he breathed, and heard his own voice as if from far away.