Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

In all the time she’d been held prisoner by Iago and his freak-show disciples, this was the first time she’d looked forward to hearing the measured tread of boots in the hallway outside her cell. Before, it’d always meant interrogation. Terror. Endless questions without answers. Pain without end. This time, though, she wasn’t the same dazed creature the masked, red-robed interrogators would be expecting. A little while ago she’d awakened with both her palms sore from shallow cuts that had already scabbed over, her thoughts clouded with a dream of a brown-haired man bending over her, his eyes flickering from hazel to luminous green and back again. But though that was weird enough, far stranger was the clarity of her mind and the strength that flowed through her body, which had been weak and wasted, and was now whole once more.

A small, panicked part of her thought that this was a dream, that her soul had once again retreated deep inside her as the red-robes dragged her to the small stone room that smelled of incense and blood. But no, she had to believe this was real. She could feel the pinch of her boots and smell her own fear as the footsteps came closer.

She didn’t know why or how she was awake, whether they’d forgotten the drugs or withdrawn them for some purpose. She also didn’t know how it could be possible that her bedsores had healed overnight, and her muscles had grown strong once again, her arms and legs lean and toned. She knew only that she’d somehow been given a slim chance, and she didn’t intend to waste it.

Her heart hammered as she curled her fingers around the plastic spork she’d taken from her meal tray, leaving the oversalted microwave dinner uneaten. Letting the jagged round end poke between her fingers, she imagined shoving it into one of Iago’s gloating green eyes. She hated him, hated what he’d done to her, and to her father, Ambrose. Hell, for all she knew, the bastard had killed her Aunt Pim, too, setting Ambrose on the downward spiral to his death.

It fit. It played. And it rankled deep inside Sasha, taking her from the rebellious but naive young chef she’d been prior to her capture and making her into something else, someone else. Someone who could—and would—do whatever it took to get away from Iago and his so-called Xibalbans, who were nothing more than a group of delusional psychopaths who worshipped gods nobody sane believed in anymore, preparing for an apocalyptic threat that existed only in their minds. In that, they were very like her father.

Damn him.

A ball of hot fury kindled in her chest, as the lock to her cell door rattled. Moments later the panel swung inward, sending the meal tray scraping aside with a screech of plastic across the floor.

Sasha didn’t stop to think or look. She attacked in silence, springing from behind the door and slamming her makeshift weapon into the face of the big man who stood in the doorway. She nailed him in the left eye, the spork sinking in with a moment of resistance followed by liquid give.

Blood and fluid spurted and the man shouted, spun, and staggered, clapping both hands to his ruined face and dropping to his knees just inside the door.

Sasha caught an impression of shaggy brown hair and massive shoulders, but it was the gray robes of a Xibalban acolyte that caught her attention, and the incongruous flash of black at his wrist. He wasn’t a red-robe, wasn’t tattooed with the blood-colored quatrefoil glyph that the others wore on their right inner forearms. Instead, he wore a small black glyph shaped like a jaguar’s head, one that she recognized from her childhood.

Telling herself it didn’t matter, that she didn’t have time to stop, look, or think—or regret for even an instant—Sasha dodged around him and through the door, then spun to shut and lock the panel behind her.

She bolted down the corridor with her blood humming in her ears, then stopped at an intersecting corner and took a quick look around, trying to get her bearings. To try was the best she could do, though, because the hallway looked much like her cell—bare and functional, only with drywall painted plain gray rather than the impervious plastic-lined metal that lined the walls of her cell. But beyond that? Nada. No character, no windows, no nothing. Just blah and more blah. She might be in a repurposed guerrilla compound in Central America near the Maya ruin where Iago had captured her, baiting her with her own father’s skull. Or she might be on the thirtieth floor of a high-rise somewhere in the States. There was no way to tell.

For the first time since she’d come out of her drugged fugue, Sasha faltered. Even if she got free, what would she find outside? How would she get home? For that matter, where the hell was home?

Ambrose and Pim were dead, her apartment had undoubtedly been cleared and re-rented, and there were precious few who would’ve missed her, or even noticed she was gone. Tears threatened at the unbe- freaking -lievable suckfest of her situation, and she wondered whether, if she closed her eyes very tight and wished hard enough, she’d wake up in her bed back in Boston and find that the last eleven months had been a terrible dream.

But this wasn’t a nightmare, she knew. This was reality, or at least a version of it created by some very disturbed minds.

Remembering that the red-robes had always dragged her to the left, she went right, running, her breath whistling in her lungs as she braced herself each second for a shout of discovery, the crack of one of the rifles the red-robed guards carried across their backs. She passed a row of solid metal doors, then turned another corner and faltered to a stop when the hall dead-ended at an ancient-looking wall, one with interlocking stone blocks that ran up and over in an arch pattern, making it look like a doorway, though there was no doorknob. There was a circular depression off to one side, carved in the shape of a stylized house symbol. Thanks to Ambrose, she recognized the Mayan way glyph, which could mean both “home” and “doorway.”

The question was, did she want to pass through this particular doorway? The stones were too much like the ones in the interrogation chamber. What if she’d run in a circle?

There’s no time to second-guess , she told herself, her pulse drumming so loud in her ears that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hear the sound of pursuit coming up behind her. Whispering a prayer to the gods, though she’d left Ambrose’s religion behind a long time ago, she pressed the flat of her palm against the glyph, hoping against hope that it was a pressure pad.

For several agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then a groaning noise came from the stone panel and it began to move, sliding sideways into the wall, rumbling on some hidden mechanism. Exhaling with relief and wiping away a spurt of tears, Sasha pushed through into the stone-lined corridor beyond, moving as quietly as she could, keeping her senses on high alert.

The air in the stone tunnel was cool, with the peculiar dampness she associated with stone churches and temple ruins; ambient light came from bare bulbs hanging off an electric line that was bolted to the low ceiling, a jarring anachronism. There was another doorway at the far end, this one wooden and cobbled together with what looked like iron straps and rosehead nails. What the hell was this place?

She didn’t know, didn’t really care except to wonder what was on the other side of the wooden door, and where she was going to find herself when she came out into the open air. If she came out into the open air.

No, don’t think that way , she told herself. Keep it positive . She was going to get out, she was going to find some cops—or mercenaries, depending on where she was—and she was going to come back and kick . . . Iago’s . . . ass.