Dawnkeepers (17 page)

The king’s face was streaked with soot and burn marks, the latter of which were already most of the way healed. But the strain and worry didn’t ease; they wouldn’t, Alexis knew, until the teen awoke.

“We left him behind so he’d be safe,” she said softly, feeling guilt dig deep. “We didn’t know the witch would come back to the tea shop.” Which didn’t explain why Rabbit had been three blocks away when he’d called the fire magic. But it also didn’t own the full responsibility she carried. “I should’ve listened to Nate,” she said, her shoulders sagging beneath the failure. “When the witch refused to sell us the knife outright, he wanted to steal it and get back home. I convinced him to wait. It’s my fault.”

But the king shook his head. “You didn’t do this. The redhead did.”

Rabbit stirred and whispered something from between cracked lips.

Strike leaned in. “Come again?”

“Iago,” Rabbit said, his voice a dry rasp. “His name is Iago. And you were right; he’s Order of Xibalba.”

Leah stiffened. “How do you know?”

“Myrinne told me. Iago offered the witch a deal.” The teen exhaled and faded again.

“Who the hell is Myrinne?” Strike demanded, voice rough with worry.

Alexis said, “If I’m guessing right, a dark-haired girl with a shiner; I think she may be the witch’s apprentice or servant, maybe her daughter.”

“Which means she probably knows what she’s talking about. Shit. Order of Xibalba.” He shared a complicated look with Leah, one that excluded Alexis and the rest of the world.

Leah nodded. “Yeah. Problem.”

“I’m sorry I lost the knife,” Rabbit said, his cracked voice painful to hear.

“Not your fault either,” Strike said with a look at Alexis. He reached out to touch the boy, then hesitated and let his hand fall. “Heal up. We’ll talk later.”

At the king’s word, Jox came in to tend the boy. Strike rose with a soft curse and headed out of the room, with Leah following. The cop-turned-queen paused at the archway leading to the louvered hall and raised an eyebrow at Alexis. “You coming?”

Alexis stalled, confused. “I don’t . . . I didn’t . . . what?” Treacherous hope unfurled. “You want me in on your meeting? Even though I screwed up?”

“At least you tried something,” Leah said, her blue eyes cool and assessing, not giving away a thing. “You interested in maybe trying something else, or at least talking strategy?”

Alexis was filthy and sore, and a weak, feminine part of her really wanted to check in on Nate, but all of those things could wait. The toehold to an advisory position, the one thing she’d wanted ever since this all began, was being offered to her. She took a tentative step in Leah’s direction, aware that the king was standing behind his mate, waiting for Alexis’s decision.

She paused a moment longer, then lifted her chin and nodded, accepting her mother’s place—her rightful place—among the king’s council. “Count me in.”

According to Abe, those portents indicated that the spirits of the rain forest were restless, and wanted Lucius out of their ’hood.

Normally Lucius would’ve given in. Anna had taught him early on that a Mayanist worked within the local community, even when studying the ancient glyph system that was no longer practiced in the modern day. If she’d been there, she would’ve turned back on warning number two or three. She wouldn’t’ve kept going until Abe broke out in a light sweat and his eyes went wild around the edges. But Anna wasn’t there, and Lucius had no intention of turning back. Something was pulling him onward, drawing him along the faint pathway one of Ledbetter’s grad students had mentioned seeing in his notes. The old coot had been secretive about the site, the girl had said; he’d nearly bitten her head off when he realized she’d seen the journal entry.

That was what she’d told Sasha Ledbetter when she’d come looking for a clue as to where her father had gone. And Lucius, thanks to Desiree and her magic AmEx, had followed, more than four months after Sasha had flown south, and fallen off the map, just like her old man.

Logic said that Ambrose Ledbetter and his daughter had perished, probably taking with them whatever Ambrose had known about the Nightkeepers. But Lucius needed to know for sure.

As though in answer to his thought, the wind picked up, moaning through the top level of the leafy canopy in an eerie descant.
Okay, that’s creepy,
Lucius admitted inwardly.
Doesn’t mean I’m quitting, though.

Abe planted himself in the middle of the nonpath and jammed his machete into the loam. “We’re going back now.”

“It was just the wind,” Lucius said, because really, there was nothing to suggest otherwise. The birds and critters were still doing their thing, and the sun still dappled through the canopy, though slanting a little lower in the sky than it’d been when they left the Jeep at the place where the narrow footpath intersected the muddy track that passed for a road. The air hadn’t changed. Nothing was different.

Yet at the same time, something
was
different, he realized suddenly. There was a hum in the air that hadn’t been there before, subsonic, almost a buzz running beneath his skin.

“I’m not going back,” he said before he was even aware of having made the decision.

“I am.” Abe stepped away and spit on the ground. “Good luck.”

The loogie wasn’t a sign of disrespect, Lucius knew, but rather the exact opposite. Moisture was precious in the Yucatán, where water ran entirely underground, coming to the surface only at circular openings, fallen-through sinkholes called cenotes. The spittle was a sacrifice. A blessing.

Or, more likely, a gesture of,
Gods be with you, dumb-ass.

The Daykeeper left the machete and his canteen and took off, humping it back down the trail at more than twice the speed they’d made forging forward.

“Thanks for your help,” Lucius called, figuring there was no need for hurt feelings. He had plenty of supplies, a GPS unit, and a satellite phone for emergencies. He could see the path—more or less, anyway—and figured there was a good bet that the temple site he was looking for was somewhere up ahead. He was good to go.

Yet his feet wouldn’t move.

He stood there as the sound of Abe’s retreat faded into the background jungle chatter, and he was completely frozen as the two halves of him pulled in diametrically opposite directions. The logical part of him, the part that’d absorbed Anna’s training and already couldn’t believe he’d gone behind her back like this, wanted to go with Abe. The Daykeeper knew his shit. If he said the signs were wrong, then the signs were wrong and it was time to leave.

The other part of him, though, the part that brought him strange, twisted dreams in the night, dreams that curled with fire and tasted of blood—that part of him wanted to grab the machete and keep going. The temple was up ahead; he could feel it, practically see it. There was no reason to turn back now and every reason to keep going. And then he
was
moving, though he couldn’t have said why or how; he just knew he had the machete in his hand and was using it to widen the narrow trail, pushing through the densely packed vegetation, wading through an ocean of green.

Five minutes later he saw the first sign of civilization he’d seen in hours, and it wasn’t modern. The carved stone pillar lay on its side, broken into three pieces along the seams where the stacked sections had been sealed together.

Called stelae, such pillars had been the Maya’s billboards. In the ruined city of Chichén Itzá, they were grouped together by the hundreds in the Hall of Pillars, and had offered up everything from local proclamations and records of political changes to histories and legends. Elsewhere—including the burbs of Chichén—stelae were scattered farther out, standing alone, sometimes in the seeming middle of nowhere, a testament to a culture that might be long gone, but remained alive in its writings. Those scattered stelae had typically been more along the lines of road markers . . . or sometimes warnings.

Feeling a creepy-crawl heading down the back of his neck, Lucius knelt beside the stela and swiped at the encroaching vegetation, which had grown only partway up to cover the carved limestone.
Can’t have fallen that long ago,
he thought as the heady excitement of fieldwork cleared his brain a little.
Would’ve been covered otherwise.

If it’d been any more overgrown he might not’ve seen it. As it was, the only reason he’d noticed the whitehued stone was because he’d had to hack around a section of denser brush. It was a happy coincidence that he’d stumbled on the thing. Or maybe it’d been fate. The Nightkeepers hadn’t believed in coincidence, after all.

Using the flat of the machete to scrape away some thorny, clinging vines, he uncovered a swath of carved stone. It took a second for the sight of the main glyph to register. When it did, he stopped breathing.

He’d found the screaming skull.

It was the one glyph he’d needed to prove his thesis. The one glyph he’d been unable to conclusively identify from actual writing samples.

“Holy shit.” He’d been so sure it existed, had been pretty sure he’d found it at least twice before, but Anna had torpedoed his translation the first time, and the second time . . . well, back then they’d still been friends and he’d taken her at her word that it was really Jaguar-Paw’s laughing-skull glyph. In retrospect, he had a feeling she’d Photoshopped his digitals to make sure of it. And wasn’t that a nasty suspicion?

A faint warning bell chimed at the back of his head, a brain worm that said the thoughts weren’t his own, and neither was the anger. But as he knelt there and the damp worked through the fabric of his breathable nylon cargo pants, the rage took root and started to grow.

He’d trusted her, and she’d blocked him at every turn.

I’ll show her,
he thought, pulling his camera out of his pack and taking a dozen snaps of the stela, and the tell-tale glyph that symbolized the Nightkeepers’ involvement in the zero date, and their vow to protect mankind. In theory, anyway.

“No theory about it,” he said, rising to his feet and shouldering his pack, the weight feeling far lighter than it had only moments earlier as the certainty flowed through him. He was almost there, almost at the end of years of searching for something the experts said didn’t exist. The stela had been a marker; he was sure of it. And maybe a warning, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, just as he hadn’t been scared off by Abe’s talk of bad omens.

The thrill of excitement drew him onward, the promise of discovery, the mystery of what the hell’d happened to Ambrose Ledbetter, and the burning certainty that he had to find Ambrose’s daughter, Sasha.

Lucius had e-mailed Ambrose once or twice about his end-time theories, but the old coot had stonewalled him, and their one in-person meeting had been more of a midconference snarl in passing from Ledbetter than an actual meeting. Lucius hadn’t even known Ledbetter had a daughter until Sasha had phoned the glyph lab looking for Anna. Yet it was Sasha’s voice he heard at the back of his head as he hacked his way along the thin trail, and her picture, which he’d downloaded from the Web page of the high-end restaurant where she worked, that he held in the forefront of his mind. She was pretty enough—okay, gorgeous—but it wasn’t her looks that he’d focused most on. There had been something about her eyes, something about their shape and intensity. That something had sent a chill down his spine and kicked some serious heat into his bloodstream, driving him onward.

He wasn’t expecting that she’d be at the temple, was actually hoping he didn’t find her there, because if he did, odds were he’d be looking at her remains. But if luck—or fate—was with him, then he’d find a clue to where she and Ambrose had disappeared to.

The background hum of the rain forest—bugs or something, he didn’t know what—rose as the sunlight went from afternoon slant to predusk dimness. He knew he should make camp, but something pushed him to keep going—a lighter patch up ahead, maybe, or perhaps simply the certainty that he was close, so close to his destination.

And then he was there. One second he was hacking at clinging green fronds, and the next his machete broke clear. Expecting his rote-mechanical swing to meet resistance, he stumbled forward when it hit only air, and wound up in a small clearing that was barely the size of his apartment kitchen.

A gap in the canopy let through a shaft of light from the setting sun, and the beam shone bloodred on a carved stone doorway leading into the side of a hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, he realized after a second. It was an unrestored ruin, a pyramid that had succumbed to a thousand years of zero maintenance and been reclaimed by the land. Vegetation had covered all the stone with leaves and clinging vines, with the exception of the doorway, which gleamed almost new-looking in the fading light. It was a stone arch, with the cornice and lintelwork that the Maya stoneworkers had put into regular use by the height of the empire. They might not’ve had the wheel or known how to work metal, but they’d been pretty damn untouchable when it came to rock.

This wasn’t just Mayan, though. There was an elongated elegance to it, one that reminded him of another pyramid-building culture on the other side of the world, one that had faltered into despotism after the Nightkeepers left and the sun god Aten held sway.

A faint shimmy started in Lucius’s gut and worked its way out from there. High above him parrots called to one another and loose-limbed monkeys played tag in the gathering dusk. Down at ground level, though, there was strange stillness, and a hum that touched the air. Rubbing his scarred palm, which ached from all the machete work, he took a step toward the doorway, almost expecting it to disappear, for him to wake up and find himself in his crummy apartment, in the middle of his lame-ass, going-backward life.

But it didn’t. He was really there, and so was the doorway.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, scrabbling in his knapsack for his flashlight. Clicking it on, he took a couple more steps, passed beneath the lintel—

And nearly fell straight into nothing when the floor dropped out beneath him.

He saw the pitfall in time—barely—and stopped at the edge, where interlocking stones formed a tunnel that descended at an acute slant, ending somewhere deep in the earth, beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Adrenaline spiked and he stepped back a pace, but the stone didn’t give way beneath him. The trap had already been sprung.

From the scrapes in the dirt, it hadn’t been triggered all that long ago, either. Rain had wiped the tracks within the first ten feet or so of the entrance, but beneath his own footprints he could see another set. Damned if they didn’t look like the same kind of boot treads too, only smaller, as though the person who’d been there before him was a woman, or maybe a teen. Wearing trekking boots of the sort favored by fieldworkers.

His stomach did a nosedive as he shone his light downward once again. “Sasha? Are you down there?”

There was no answer. Not that he should’ve expected there to be. She was a chef, not a field archaeologist, which suggested the boot prints weren’t hers. Besides, like it or not, whoever had gone down, they’d done it before the rains, which meant a couple of months at least.

Lucius felt a beat of grief for whoever it’d been, along with relief that he had a good reason not to go down there. Clamping the flashlight in his teeth, he edged around the pitfall, not letting out his breath until he was safe on the other side and there was no sign of a second booby trap.
Not yet, anyway,
he thought. But the presence of the first trap was oddly encouraging: It suggested there was—or had been—something in the ruin worth guarding.

“So onward we go,” he said, talking to himself because it was too damn quiet inside the low tunnel that narrowed beyond the pit trap. Using the flashlight to check his footing, he worked his way deeper into what he suspected wasn’t the ruins of a temple that’d been built up from the ground, but rather one that’d been dug into the earth itself. The tunnel sloped slightly downward as he walked, and the air was damp and chill.