Jessica Andersen - Demonkeepers

The whistle-blower wasn’t on the ramparts anymore, and the dogs—and whatever else was inside—

had gone ominously quiet as the procession stopped short of the temple structure. Lucius’s captors unceremoniously dumped him facedown in the scuffed dirt. He landed cursing, and rolled onto his side as Jade thumped down on her butt next to him. She cried out when she hit, but then snapped her mouth shut and glared instead.

Good girl , Lucius thought. He didn’t get a chance to do more than lock eyes with her before Snake-

head and Pig-head moved in and dragged him to his feet. Still bound in the relentless yet invisible shield magic, he had zero choice in the matter. He hung between his captors, glaring when two of the others hauled Jade to her feet, so the captives and their animal- headed guards stood facing one of the low- linteled doorways that led into the pyramid’s lower tier.

Brain racing in search of a clue, explanation, or escape route, Lucius scanned the intricate Mayan glyphwork carved into the surrounding stones, automatically starting to arrange the phonemes into words and meanings. But before he’d gotten beyond, “On this cardinal day of . . .” there was movement within the temple and four newcomers emerged. They looked like men—in that they had all their flesh and normal human faces—and they wore elaborate cloaks over jewel-encrusted armor plates and armbands. But, incongruously, the armor wasn’t made of wood, leather, and stone, as were the traditional trappings worn by the animal-heads. Instead, it was made of burnished metal: copper, or maybe gold. Which didn’t make sense, because the Maya hadn’t been metalworkers, and the Mayan paradigm prevailed in Xibalba.

At least, he thought it did. But the more he looked at the metal-armored men, the more he became convinced that they were outfitted like pharaohs’ guards, pure Egyptian from their kohl- lined eyes to the rayed-sun symbols on their cloaks. Before he could do the necessary brain shift to figure out what the hell it meant, there was another stir of movement from within the temple, followed by a glint of luminous green that obliterated every other thought inside Lucius’s skull. Rage and revulsion surged to tunnel his vision as a smoky shadow emerged, becoming a dark, man-shaped ghost with glowing green eyes. Makol!

The demon soul drifted across the ground, moving toward him. The air went cold and Lucius’s bones ached with death and damnation, and the things he’d sworn he would never be, ever again.

Clamping his teeth against a stream of foul curses, he strained against the unyielding shield magic. As the makol drew nearer, the shifting shadow morphed and solidified, becoming almost a man, one that wore a tall diadem marked with the sun symbol that had been in use for only a single Egyptian dynasty, that of the pharaoh who had converted the empire to monotheistic sun worship, largely by killing off anyone who preferred the polytheistic religion that had been entrenched for thousands of years.

Gut tightening further with the ID, Lucius bared his teeth. “I thought you’d had yourself declared a god. Is this your idea of a deity’s fitting reward . . . Akhenaton?” Although the pharaoh’s animal-

headed minions—which he belatedly recognized as perverted versions of the Egyptian pantheon Akhenaton had outlawed—might still speak their native tongue, he had no doubt the makol understood him. The damn things could see straight inside a man.

“Akhenaton . ” Jade spat the name of one of the Nightkeepers’ most ancient enemies: the pharaoh who had been responsible for the first of the three massacres that had driven the Nightkeepers nearly to extinction.

At her gasp, the demon spirit turned. Started drifting toward her.

“Stay the hell away from her,” Lucius snarled. The demon’s dark presence scraped along his nerve endings; worse, he could feel its interest in Jade, its dismissal of him. What makol would want a human when a Nightkeeper was available? The thought of Jade going through the transition sickened him beyond reason, past caution. “I said, hands off !” Deep within, the rage spun higher, becoming a strange, edgy energy that buzzed through him, coalescing at the places where the shield magic held him fast.

From within the temple, the dogs suddenly started barking again, their cries sharp and frenzied.

Excited.

Akhenaton hesitated at the sound, and Lucius thought he caught a thread of satisfaction coming from the damned soul. Some message must have passed, because the four pharaoh’s guards broke from their positions and closed on Jade.

“Lucius!” She craned her head, looking back at him as the guards started dragging her into the fortress. The dogs went nuts, barking and howling, sounding almost human in their cries.

“Jade!” Anguish hammered through Lucius, catching him up and taking him someplace within himself, someplace he hadn’t been before. Pain ripped through him, his vision washed red-gold, and pressure detonated inside his head. Liquid flame poured through his veins, bringing a burning agony that he latched onto, instinctively sending it toward the places where the shield magic held him immobile.

A terrible roar of rage split the air; for a second he thought it had come from him. Then the air went instantaneously from cool to blistering hot, huge feathered wings boomed in the air, and a red-orange specter rose into sight, lifting from behind the step-sided wall, flapping hard to stay aloft on ragged, bleeding wings. The sky lit supernova bright in an instant, driving back those standing below on the sand.

Squinting into the flare, Lucius couldn’t pinpoint the thing’s image: One second it seemed a terrible winged and feathered demon with curling horns and fangs, its outline wreathed in fire; then in the next it shifted, seeming to flash the image of a huge figure, that of a masked man, his face obscured behind the symbols of a god. More important, Lucius knew the symbols . Was he really seeing what he thought he was seeing, or was this another of Akhenaton’s creations?

He didn’t know, but he had to chance it. Throwing back his head, he shouted, “Kinich Ahau!”

The horned Mayan firebird, one aspect of the great sun god itself, roared in answer, beating its wings against the stone bars that held it contained. Flames poured from its beak and eyes, licking along the bars and turning them gradually molten. And, as Lucius squinted against the blazing light, he remembered having seen this before.

Or rather, he hadn’t seen it . . . but Cizin had. His demon possessor had been a double agent, planted within the Order of Xibalba to keep Iago in check when the dark lords began to worry that their earthly namesakes were getting above themselves. The Banol Kax didn’t want Iago to ally with Moctezuma’s demon soul, not just because the bloodthirsty Aztec king had once led powerful armies and plotted his own version of the end-time, but also because he’d elevated himself to the status of a god, one affiliated with the sun itself . . . and the Banol Kax didn’t want that to happen because they already had plans to put in place a sun god of their own choosing: the sun king Akhenaton.

They had captured the true sun god, Kinich Ahau, along with his canine companions. When the barrier’s activity peaked during the summer solstice of the first triad year—aka in nine fucking days —the dark lords were going to sacrifice the true sun god and elevate Akhenaton in his place.

And oh, holy fuck, that couldn’t be allowed to happen.

Snarling, Akhenaton turned on the firebird, lifted shadowy arms, and chanted a spell. In an instant, a chill wind blew, the air cooled, and the molten stone bars turned solid; they were slightly deformed, but not by enough to free the god. But that hadn’t been the firebird’s aim, Lucius realized seconds later, when two dark blurs hurtled through the widened openings between two pairs of archways: pony-size black dogs with sharp white teeth and red eyes.