Dawnkeepers (2 page)

ajawlel
—The slave-master’s glyph, worn by a Nightkeeper who has formed a reciprocal blood link with a human servant.

barrier
—A force field of psi energy that separates the earth, sky, and underworld, and powers the Nightkeepers’ magic. The strength of the barrier fluctuates with the positions of the stars and planets; the power of the magi increases as the barrier weakens.

chac-mool
—An iconographic idol dedicated to the rain god, Chaac, the
chac-mool
is formed in the shape of a seated human figure, and may be used as an altar, a throne, and/or a place of blood sacrifice.

copan
—The sacred incense of the Nightkeepers. This is a variation of the Mayan incense,
copal
, and is associated with the great ruined city of Copán, located in modern-day Honduras.

demon prophecies
—A cycle of seven prophecies that will be triggered in the final four years before the end date. If a prophecy is fulfilled, the barrier thins slightly. If it is thwarted, the barrier strengthens to the same degree. These prophecies, revolving around the seven death-bat sons of Camazotz, are inscribed on a series of Nightkeeper artifacts that were sold off to fund the Nightkeepers’ activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now those relics must be recovered if the Nightkeepers hope to thwart Camazotz and his sons.

hunab ku
—A pseudoglyph associated with the 2012 end date, in modern times the
hunab ku
is not a glyph within the Mayan writing system, but rather is the mark that the Nightkeeper king wears on his biceps, denoting his proximity to the gods.

intersection
—Located in the sacred tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá, this is the one point on earth where the earth, sky, and underworld come very near one another, and where the barrier is its weakest. This is where the gods can come through to create Godkeepers, and where the underworld denizens focus their attacks during each solstice and equinox.

jun tan
—The “beloved” glyph that signifies a Nightkeeper’s mated status.

k’alaj
—The slave mark worn by a human who is blood-bound to a Nightkeeper master or mistress.

pasaj och
—Roughly translating to “open door open,” this, coupled with a blood sacrifice, is the basic command a Nightkeeper uses to form an uplink to the barrier’s power.

starscript
—Ancient writings carved into temples or artifacts in such a way that the glyphs do not reflect normal sun- or moonlight. They are visible only by starlight when the moon is dark.

thirteen prophecies
—A long-term prophetic cycle describing milestone events leading up to the apocalypse. The last of these mentions the Nightkeepers’ king making the ultimate sacrifice in the final four years before 2012.

tzomplanti
—A ceremonial pile formed of stacked human skulls, used as a beacon or a warning sign.

writs
—Written by the First Father, these delineate the duties and codes of the Nightkeepers. Not all of them translate well into modern times.

The jade would be overkill if he met up with bad news of the human variety, but the sacred stone was one of the few things that made a dent in the underworld nasties he’d gotten to know up close and personal over the past seven months, ever since his life had swerved off Reality Road and plunged into something that bore more than a passing resemblance to the quest fantasies he wrote for a living. Or what’d used to be his living.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” he called into the cottage. “It’s Nate Blackhawk; we spoke on the phone yesterday. Are you okay?”

He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t get one.

There was a dead Christmas wreath hanging on the door, and jingle bells tinkled as he let the door swing shut at his back. The decoration was six weeks past its prime, suggesting that the old lady hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she was having trouble keeping up with her house, living alone.

The Cape Cod beachfront cottage was one level, maybe four or five rooms, tops, decorated right out of the Yankee Candle catalog, with an added dose of doilies. The place made Nate—at six-three, two hundred pounds, amber eyed, dark haired and sharp featured, wearing a black-on-black combination of Nightkeeper combat gear and
don’t scare the old lady
casual wear—feel seriously out of his element.

It wasn’t exactly the first place he’d look for an ancient Mayan artifact that’d been out of circulation for nearly eight decades, either, but this was where the trail had led.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” He moved across the main room to a short hallway, where the air was thicker. “Edna?”

There was a bathroom on one side, followed by a closet and a neat-as-a-pin guest room done in Early Ruffle. On the opposite side was a single door, open just enough to show a slice of pale blue carpet and the edge of a lace-topped mahogany dresser. He used his toe to nudge open the door and then stepped inside, grimacing at the sight of a sunken-cheeked woman tucked into a queen-size adjustable bed, with a lace-trimmed quilt pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were closed, her skin gray, her face oddly peaceful. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, but next to her sat a polished keepsake box Nate recognized from her description as the one that had held the small figurine she’d inherited from her grandmother, who’d gotten it from hers.

The box was open and empty, the statuette gone.

“Shit.” He felt a beat of grief for the seventy-something widow, along with a serious case of the
oh, hells
at the realization that the
Banol Kax
had known what the Nightkeepers were looking for, and had somehow gotten there first.

Or had they? he wondered, frowning at the neatly smoothed quilt, the carefully positioned body. The
Banol Kax
and their blood-bound human emissaries, the
makol
, weren’t big on subtlety; he would’ve expected her to be hacked up pretty good if they’d been the ones to steal the statuette. But if not the demons, then who had offed the old lady and taken the artifact?

Not your problem,
Nate told himself.
You’re just the courier.
But still, he stared down at the dead woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. Less than twenty-four hours ago they’d spoken by phone about the statuette, and the things she could do with the money he’d offered for it. She’d wanted to move south, where it was warmer in winter, and go into assisted living, because her daughters had no time for her and even less inclination to get involved. Nate had figured he’d offer to help her with the move; he knew what it felt like to have nobody give a crap where you were or what you were doing. That wouldn’t be necessary now, though, because whoever had taken the statuette had taken her life with it. Like that had been necessary. A low burn tightened his gut.
Bastards,
he thought. What harm would it’ve done to leave her alive?

He wanted to tell her that he’d get the shitheels who’d taken away the promise of a better life, but he wasn’t sure the sweet-seeming lady would care for the idea of revenge on her behalf, so in the end he said nothing. He just nodded to her, touched the hawk medallion he wore around his neck, and made a private promise to see justice done. Then he headed back the way he’d come, mentally tracking what he’d touched, wiping as needed, because there was no sense in being stupid when the cops had his prints on file.

He’d done his time and straightened out in the years since, but still.

Once he was outside and the jingle bells were quiet in their brown-needled wreath, he reholstered the nine-millimeter and headed for his rental. A few miles out of town he stopped at a pay phone that actually worked—the things were few and far between these days—and called in an anonymous 911. As soon as he was back on the road, headed for the airport, he palmed his cell and speed-dialed the Nightkeeper’s training compound, Skywatch.

“Yes, sir,” answered his
winikin
, Carlos, proper as always.

Nate didn’t bother reminding his sort-of servant to do the first-name thing, because he knew it wouldn’t work. Most of the other Nightkeeper-
winikin
pairs were pretty informal with each other, having been together for decades. Nate, on the other hand, had lost his original
winikin
early on, winding up in human-style foster care instead. He’d grown up human, not having a clue about the magic in his blood until seven months earlier, when the Nightkeepers’ hereditary king, Striking-Jaguar, had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, teleported him onto the roof, and dangled him over the side in order to get his attention, then promised to tell him about his parents. That’d been shock number one. Shock number two had come when Nate showed up at Skywatch and met fellow Nightkeeper trainee Alexis Gray . . . who was a pixel-perfect image of Hera, the sex-goddess Valkyrie Nate had written into five installments of his
Viking Warrior
vid games over the past four years. His friends had a running joke that Nate couldn’t keep a girlfriend because he was always comparing them to Hera, and maybe there’d been some truth to that. Meeting her in the flesh, so to speak, had blown him away. Even better, Alexis had proven to be a woman of worth; he might give her grief about being a pampered princess and a goody-goody overachiever—both of which were true—but she was also tough and resourceful, and had a core of loyalty and integrity he had to admire, even if that sort of shit had never worked for him. But just because she was sexy as sin and a hell of a woman, and they’d hooked up for a few months during the worst of the hormone storms that’d come with getting their powers, didn’t mean they were foreordained to be mates. Nate didn’t believe in predestiny and crap like that . . . which was tantamount to blasphemy in his new life.

The Nightkeepers’ entire culture was based on fate and prophecy, but as far as Nate was concerned, destiny was just what lazy game developers pulled out of their asses when they couldn’t think of a better way to connect the dots. It was bullshit, right up there with magic swords and the ever-popular “amulet to be named at a later date” that most epic fantasy writers used at one point or another to get themselves out of a jam.

Nate was willing to believe in the Nightkeepers’ magic because he’d experienced it firsthand, and he was willing to buy into the December 21, 2012, end date because it was based in scientific fact: The Great Conjunction was coming, and in the absence of an ozone layer, the Earth would be vulnerable to the sun flares and magnetic fluxes the eggheads were predicting. He was even willing to accept that there was a powerful barrier of psi energy separating the earth and the underworld, and that it thinned during major stellar events. Based on his recent experiences, he’d even stretch credulity and buy into the threat that the barrier would come crashing down on the 2012 end date, and that it was the Nightkeepers’ job to keep the demons on their side of the barrier when that happened.

He’d seen and done enough magic of his own to buy into those things. But there was no way in hell he was going to believe that the future was already written, that he’d known what his gods-intended mate would look like years before he’d met her in the flesh, that they were destined to fall in love because fate said they should.
No frigging thanks.
Having spent his first twenty years locked up, first in the foster system, then in juvie and the Greenville penitentiary, he was all about freedom and free will.

Carlos, on the other hand, was all about “the thirteenth Nightkeeper prophecy” this and “the seven demon prophecies” that, and practically worshiped the idea that time was cyclical, that what had happened before would happen again. According to legend, the
winikin
were the descendants of the captured Sumerian warriors who had served the Nightkeepers back in ancient Egypt. When Akhenaton went monotheistic in 1300 or so B.C. and ordered his guard to off the priests of the old religion—including the Nightkeepers—the servants had managed to escape with a handful of the Nightkeepers’ children. The sole surviving adult mage, acting under the influence of the gods, had magically blood-bound the servants to their Nightkeeper lineages, creating the
winikin
. Or so the story went. The upshot was that the
winikin
were fiercely loyal to their blood-bound charges. They acted partly as the Nightkeepers’ protectors, partly as their servants, and almost always as the little nagging voices on their shoulders.

Carlos, who on the king’s request had transferred responsibility for his original Nightkeeper charge to his daughter and taken over as Nate’s
winikin
when the Nightkeepers had been reunited seven months earlier, was an Olympic-level nagger. Worse, he had ambitions. He was jonesing for Nate to follow in the footsteps of his father, Two-Hawk, and become an adviser to the king. The
winikin
just didn’t get why that wasn’t going to happen . . . i.e., because Nate had no intention of getting in any deeper than he absolutely had to. Hell, he’d volunteered to go get the statuette only because he’d needed some distance from all of the destiny shit, and a chance to get away from the stress of trying to be a Nightkeeper while running Hawk Enterprises long-distance. And he’d needed to put some serious miles between him and Alexis after the way things had ended between them.

Besides, he’d figured it’d be an easy deal: Fly out, buy the statuette off the old lady, and fly home.

That’d worked well.
Not.

Nate, who kept score in his head, like any good gamer, figured that if he called the Nightkeepers’ first big fight with the
Banol Kax
level one of the battle, then they had more or less won their way through when they’d banded together during the previous fall’s equinox and driven the demon Zipacna back through the barrier to Xibalba, where he belonged. Which meant they were on to level two now, and the bad guys had scored the first hit when they’d snagged the demon prophecy out from under Nate’s nose.

“Edna Hopkins is dead and the statuette’s gone,” Nate told Carlos, his voice clipped. “Someone—or something—got here ahead of me.”

Which was not good news, because it meant they’d been wrong in thinking that the lack of activity at the intersection during the winter solstice had meant the
Banol Kax
had fallen back to regroup. The demons must’ve sent something through the barrier after all, though gods only knew how they’d done it. The sole transit point between the earth, sky, and underworld was the sacred chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, and sure as shit nothing had come through there. The Nightkeepers had been there, waiting.

Which probably meant the demons had managed to punch through the barrier and convince an evil-souled human host to undergo the
makol
ritual, as they had done at least twice the prior fall. The
makol
, who could be identified by their luminous green eyes, retained their human intelligence and free will in direct relation to their degree of evilness and willingness to be possessed. Maybe the demons had created one or more
makol
during the winter solstice and sent them after the statuette. But why now? And why had they left the body untouched?

“Are you safe?” Carlos asked, though they both knew the question was more protocol than real concern.

“Yeah. Whoever or whatever killed her is long gone.”

“Was she sacrificed?”

“She’s intact.” Which had Nate seriously on edge. The dark magic of Xibalba was largely powered by the blood sacrifice of unwilling victims. If
makol
had taken the statue and killed Edna Hopkins, they would’ve taken her head and heart, too, as those were the seats of power. Yet there hadn’t been a mark on her, and she’d looked peaceful rather than terrified. Which meant . . . Hell, he didn’t know what it meant, and the discrepancy had him rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, where the hairs at his nape were doing a shimmy. “Don’t let anyone else leave the compound until I get back, okay? I have a bad feeling about this.”

Skywatch was protected by a blood ward that had been set in the 1920s by the willing sacrifice of two senior Nightkeepers, and was reinforced by regular ceremonial autolettings by the resident magi. The ward meant the training compound was impenetrable to all but the strongest of the underworld denizens. If the Nightkeepers stayed put they’d be safe from Edna Hopkins’s killer, buying them time to identify the threat and figure out how to neutralize it.

Strike and the others might be willing to follow prophecies carved in stone temples. Nate preferred legwork, strategy, and firepower.

But Carlos was silent for too long. That, combined with the tickle at the back of Nate’s neck, warned him there was a problem even before the
winikin
said, “Miss Alexis left last night for an estate auction in Monterey.”