Dawnkeepers (25 page)

He didn’t know what time it was, though he’d slept until he wasn’t exhausted anymore, which suggested it was well into the day after his arrival. Maybe already too late.

He rattled the door against its padlock. “Anna!”

A sick feeling locked his gut. He remembered how he’d gotten there, remembered the shock of traveling in search of Sasha Ledbetter and finding Anna and the Nightkeepers instead, but his memories of the prior night were hazy and unreal, like they’d happened to somebody else. An angry, resentful version of himself. In the light of day—okay, in the light of a single fluorescent tube, but after a good night’s sleep—he felt more like himself. And in getting his brain back online, he’d realized he’d left out a crucial detail when he’d been talking to Anna.

Drawing a breath, he thumped on the door again. “Hello! Can anyone hear me?”

The lock rattled on the other side, and an irritated male voice said, “Hold on to your ass. I’m coming.”

The man Lucius had been the night before would’ve looked for a weapon and taken a swing at whoever was on the other side of that door. The guy who’d woken up feeling more at home inside his own skin than he had in a long time backed away and dropped down to sit on the edge of the cot, trying to look as unthreatening as possible.

Which was a good thing, he realized the second the door swung inward, because the guy who stood in the opening was below average in height and weight, in his late fifties, with peppered hair and a quick, economical way of moving . . . and he held a machine pistol with easy familiarity.

Lucius raised both hands in an
I’m unarmed; please don’t mess me up
gesture, and said, “I come in peace.”
Hope you do too.

He was no gun expert, but the thing pointed at him looked like something out of a war movie, or maybe a cops-and-gangs flick, automatic and nasty-looking. The guy, on the other hand, didn’t look nasty. He looked wary and drawn, as if he had a ton on his plate. Then again, that’d make sense. If Lucius had truly found the Nightkeepers, they had to be gearing up for the end of the world, the battle they’d spent generations preparing for. And if that wasn’t a mind-fuck, he didn’t know what was.

“You said you had a message for Anna?” the guy said.

“Yeah. I, uh . . . I’d rather give it to her personally.” He had a feeling it wasn’t going to go down big regardless, but didn’t feel so comfortable telling it to Mr. Armed-and-dangerous.

“I’m Jox, her
winikin
. I’ll give her the message.”

Which might’ve been useful info if Lucius had any idea what the hell a
winikin
was. Whatever the guy’s job description, though, he didn’t seem inclined to go get Anna. Knowing that Anna and her brother—the king, and how screwed up was that?—needed to know what he’d done, and figuring their response was going to suck regardless of how the deets were delivered, Lucius said, “Fine. Tell her that Desiree bet me my degree that I couldn’t find proof the Nightkeepers existed, and gave me the money to do it. I called her last night from the road and told her where I was headed.”

Jox looked disturbed but not panicked, suggesting that the location of the compound wasn’t entirely sacrosanct to the outside world. He said, “Who is Desiree to Anna?”

“Her boss at UT. Beyond that, you’ll have to ask her yourself.” He was so not going there.

Jox considered that for a long moment, then nodded. “I’ll give her the message.”

When he started to pull the door shut, Lucius said, “Wait!”

Jox paused. “Yeah?”

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Knowing Anna, that’d work better coming directly from you,” the guy said, not unkindly. Then he shut and locked the door.

He was right, too, Lucius knew. Thing was, at this point he wasn’t sure he believed Anna would accept his apology . . . or the help he planned on offering.

It wasn’t like she’d had much in the way of downtime to recharge after the eclipse ceremony. Between her fight with Nate and the dream-vision, she hadn’t gotten to bed until close to three a.m., and she’d slept poorly, her dreams chasing her with sensory images of Nate and Michael, and heartache. They’d been real dreams, not visions—she was sure of that much—but they’d put her seriously low on REM sleep.

She’d planned on chilling in her sitting room for another hour at least. The knock came again, though, suggesting that whoever it was knew she was in there, and wasn’t planning on being ignored. Sighing, Alexis crossed the sitting area and opened the door to find her
winikin
on the other side.

Izzy’s expression lightened, though it stayed worried around the edges. “Why didn’t you wake me last night? I can’t believe I didn’t hear the commotion.” The
winikin
’s voice became reproachful. “You should’ve had someone come get me. I would’ve stayed with you.”

“I know.” Which was why Alexis hadn’t woken her. Trying to avoid having to say that, she took the
winikin
’s hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “I’m fine, honest.”

Izzy looked at her long and hard before nodding. “If you say so.” She stepped into the suite and pushed Alexis toward her bedroom. “Get dressed. Jade wants you in the archive as soon as you’ve had some coffee.”

That had Alexis stopping and turning, her heart kicking on a burst of excitement mingled with dread. “She found the temple? We’re going?”

Izzy nodded. “You leave for Belize in an hour.”

What was more, she wanted to talk to Jade, and make sure things were really over between her and Michael. She couldn’t bring herself to start the convo, though. Not because of Jade, but because thanks to some of what Nate had said the night before, Alexis couldn’t help feeling as though she were pimping herself out for the magic. She kept telling herself it wasn’t really like that, at least not by Nightkeeper standards. But at the same time, she had to admit that by modern standards it was borderline.

Forcing herself to focus, Alexis peered at the Web site Jade had found. Seeing that the nav bar had buttons for tours and hotels, she frowned. “It’s a tourist attraction?” That didn’t play with her visions.

Jade gave a yes/no hand-wiggle. “Not on the level of Yucatán sites like Chichén Itzá and Tulum, that’s for sure. Belize is sparsely populated, and has maybe a half dozen paved airstrips for the entire country. Not exactly a destination for the average tourist.” She tapped the screen, her fingertip hitting a picture of a calcified human skeleton. “The ATM cave system is a stiff three-mile hike in from the nearest road. Unlike the Yucatán, Belize has aboveground waterways; there are three river crossings between the road and the cave system, and when you get there you’ve got to swim in. Because of all that hassle, though, the complex still has most of its original artifacts in place. Access to the cave system is tightly regulated; only a couple of groups have permission to bring tours through, and those cost.”

“So you’ve gotta really want it,” Alexis said. She looked at the pictures, then shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure. This looks similar to the dream-visions, but I’m not seeing an exact match.” She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the picture of the skeleton, though, couldn’t help thinking the feeling she got from the photographs resonated too much to be a coincidence.

“This is your cave; I’m sure of it.” Jade slid a bound book across to Alexis, then clicked on one of the Web site buttons, bringing up a cartoon map of the cave system on the laptop. “Have a look.”

The book was open to an age-yellowed map that bore a strong resemblance to the one on the computer screen, except that the hard-copy map, dated 1873, showed several additional chambers off by themselves, connected to the others only by blue water trails rather than brown-marked pathways or gray-shaded tunnels.

The farthest chamber was a narrow rectangle with a serpent-and-rainbow altar sketched in at the far end, with a strange, looping figure extending away from it. The altar looked like a good enough match that Alexis felt the click she’d needed, followed by a burst of excitement mingled with unease. “Yeah. I think you found it.” She traced the blue waterways leading in. “We’re going to have to swim in through a submerged tunnel?” She shuddered a little, but there was no question that she had to go.

“It doesn’t look too far. Or at least it wasn’t in the late eighteen hundreds. Jade paused. “There are two things you need to know before you decide you’re definitely going, though.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Alexis leaned back in her chair and gave the archivist her full attention.

Jade tapped the date at the top of the page. “Does the map date ring any bells?”

Alexis frowned and shook her head. “Sorry. You’re better at the history stuff than I—” She broke off, realizing why it should’ve connected. “Shit, that was when Painted-Jaguar’s expedition went south. You’re telling me this is the cache site?”

After the Civil War, with “civilization” encroaching westward and the various Native American cultures being squeezed into smaller and smaller settlements, the Nightkeepers had once again been subject to the pressures acting on their hosts—in this case the Hopi. By the 1870s, the Nightkeepers had numbered less than a hundred, and the survivors were starving. Times were grim, prospects dim, until an
itza’at
seer had envisioned a fabulously wealthy cache of Mayan-era artifacts secreted away in a Nightkeeper temple far to the south. A small group of the strongest remaining magi traveled through the hostile Mexican territories, eventually finding the temple and the artifacts within. The journey had been harsh, though, the trip back even worse, and only two of the original twenty Nightkeepers had returned, bearing the recovered riches of their ancestors.

They had sold off some of the artifacts immediately, and the proceeds had allowed the Nightkeepers to integrate into society. Their children were educated in human trades as well as Nightkeeper magic, and judicious investments, funded with artifact sales, kept them going for the next fifty years or so, while their numbers increased. In the twenties and thirties they’d liquidated the remainder of the artifacts—including those bearing the demon prophecies—to fund the construction of Skywatch.

“This was the cache site,” Jade confirmed. “Meaning that just because your dream-vision showed the statuette fragment in that hidden alcove, that doesn’t guarantee it’s still there. For all we know, your vision showed where it was before Painted-Jaguar discovered the cache.”

“True,” Alexis said, drawing out the word. “But I saw my mother and Two-Hawk with the statuette fragment, which would’ve made it sometime in the nineteen seventies or early eighties.”

Jade countered, “Right, but we’re not sure how the visions work, and whether they’re going to prove fully accurate. What if your dream . . . I don’t know . . . folded time or something, showing you parts of two different scenes in the same temple?”

“It’s still worth looking.”

Jade grimaced. “Which brings us to
numero duo
of the things I think you should know before you decide to ’port.” She tapped the paper map, indicating the loop that extended beyond the temple chamber, and the unfamiliar glyph below it. “This seems to indicate that there’s a loop of tunnel extending beyond the temple, under the waterline. The glyph is
och ja-ja
, which according to Anna has two translations: One is ‘enter the water,’ which is pretty benign, but the other translation is ‘death,’ which was often associated with entering a watery tunnel on the way to hell, sort of a reverse of the birth process.”

Alexis fought a little shiver as she looked down at the glyph and the map. “As in ‘you die if you enter the water’?”

“I’m thinking it’s something like that. Booby traps, maybe?”

“Well, that’s just great.” Alexis fought the shimmy in her gut. “Note to self: Don’t go into the tunnels beyond the temple room.” Fortunately, she didn’t see why she’d want or need to.

“You could call it off,” Jade urged.

“And do what?” Alexis asked, faintly irritated. “It’s not like I wouldn’t rather be doing something else, you know.”

“I know, that wasn’t very helpful, was it? I’m sorry.” Jade rolled her shoulders. “I’ve been in a mood lately. I’m just . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Frustrated. Sick of working in here by myself, pretty much functioning as a human Google.” She flicked the side of her laptop. “I can’t wait to finish scanning the last of the books into this thing and get the computerized system going. Then it’ll be up to you guys to query and find your own spells and stuff.” She paused. “Then again, once you can, I’ll be pretty much useless, won’t I?”

“No,” Alexis said quickly. “You’ll have more time to concentrate on developing your magic.”

“What magic?” Jade looked at her forearm, where she had her bloodline and talent marks, but no warrior’s glyph. “The scribe’s glyph is supposed to mean I can create new spells, but it’s not like there’s an instruction manual. I don’t even know where to start!”

Seeing the opening, Alexis said, “What about, um, boosting your power? You know, try some autoletting, or . . . something else.”
Like sex.

Jade’s lips twitched. “Don’t worry, I already heard you all but propositioned Mike last night. It’s fine. Honest.” She even sounded like she meant it.

“Are you positive?” Alexis pressed, feeling like total crap. Theirs was too small a community for her to be making waves. What was she doing?

Getting away from a man who wants a woman who looks like you, but doesn’t act like you,
thought her rational self, the one that’d suggested she switch partners in the first place.

“I’m positive,” Jade said firmly. She took Alexis’s hand and pressed her fingers. “Truly. Mike and I aren’t a good fit—he wants the magic, and I . . . don’t. I really, really don’t.” She looked almost surprised to have said the last part, but added, “I’m not even sure I want to stay here.”

“Wow.” Alexis rocked back, stunned. “What does Shandi think about that?” Shandi, Jade’s
winikin
, was quiet and ultratraditional; Izzy held her in high regard, which pretty much said everything that needed to be said.

Jade blanched. “I haven’t told her, and you can’t either. Promise? I’m just thinking aloud. I don’t really mean it.” But that last part sounded more like rote than reality.

“I won’t say anything,” Alexis promised, but her brain spun while she gathered the references Jade had pulled together on Belize and the ATM caves.

As she headed back to her rooms, concern dogged her footsteps. What was happening to the Nightkeepers? They’d been a team during the equinox battle. Now, only five months later, they were bickering and scattered. How were they supposed to build an effective defense against Iago if they couldn’t manage to get along on a day-to-day basis?

Complete the statuette,
a voice whispered at the back of her brain. Alexis didn’t think it was hers.

Stopping dead, she whispered, “Ixchel?”

There was no answer, save for a flicker of color at the edges of her peripheral vision. That and a renewed determination. She was going into the ATM caves, and she was bringing out the second piece of the demon prophecy. They needed to figure out the meaning of the partial inscription . . . and time was ticking down to the next cardinal day, the spring equinox, which was when Jade’s
nahwal
vision had foretold that the first of the demon prophecies would be enacted. On that night, the magi would have to block the first of Camazotz’s death-bat sons from coming to earth and fulfilling the next step in the end-time countdown. And she was going to help them do it.

Alexis felt a kick of excitement at the prospect of playing a major role, finally. But alongside that was nerves, because she wasn’t her mother, wasn’t a powerful mage or a mated Godkeeper. What if she screwed everything up?