Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Which was when she realized she didn’t need an excuse. She was late for a meeting. Her breath hissed between her teeth. “I’ve got to go. I’m due in my evil boss’s office five minutes ago for Lucius’s thesis defense.”

“How’s he doing?” The question was far from casual.

Knowing that Strike didn’t really give a crap about Lucius’s defense as long as her senior grad student didn’t mention where he’d gotten the scar on his palm, she said, “He doesn’t remember going through the transition ritual, or almost becoming a makol . Red-Boar’s mind block did the trick.”

Lucius had almost been dead meat the prior fall, and he didn’t even know it, didn’t know he was living on probation as far as the Nightkeepers were concerned. Hell, he didn’t have a clue that the Nightkeepers really existed. He liked to think they did, liked to believe in the end-time myths most Mayanists dismissed as sensationalism, but she’d deliberately steered him away from the truth, leaving him mired in fiction.

“Good to hear he doesn’t remember,” Strike said, but he didn’t sound convinced. Back before the equinox battle, when Lucius had unwittingly offered himself up on a platter for demon possession, Red-Boar would’ve sacrificed him, but Strike had made a deal with her: He’d have Red-Boar reverse the makol spell if Anna agreed to rejoin the Nightkeepers, at least during the ceremonial days.

Now, she knew, he regretted having made the deal, and considered Lucius a liability. The younger man had undergone the transition spell once already, and his natural inclinations had called upon the Banol Kax rather than the gods—which perplexed the hell out of Anna, because Lucius didn’t have much in the way of a dark side, but still, it’d happened. And because it had happened once, she knew Strike was worried that it would happen again.

Basically, Lucius was living on her good graces, and the knowledge weighed, especially given the political crap going on in the art history department these days. The department head, Desiree Soo, had never been warm or fuzzy, but she’d grown increasingly critical over the past half year, particularly when it came to the Mayan studies department. Anna couldn’t prove it, but she was pretty sure Desiree had chased off her last intern, Neenee, who’d taken off around Christmas, leaving only a terse e-mail of nonexplanation. Since then, Anna’s lab had had reimbursement requests kicked back from admin over tiny quibbles, room assignments were constantly getting screwed up, and Anna had found herself loaded down with intro-level lectures that were usually handed straight to the TAs. And then there was Lucius’s thesis defense.

Desiree had been acting professionally enough back when Lucius had asked her to chair his thesis committee. Given the way she’d been behaving lately, though, Anna could pretty much guarantee there was going to be a problem.

Sighing, feeling a hundred years old rather than her own thirty-nine, Anna said, “Seriously. I’ve gotta go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Call Jox with your flight info and he’ll meet you at the airport.”

“Will do.” She hung up and headed for the dragon’s lair.

Okay, so it wasn’t literally Desiree’s lair—they were meeting in the conference room across the hall from the department head’s office—but Anna had the distinct feeling she was headed into enemy territory as she stepped through the doors. She was the last one in, which meant the entire committee was arranged on one side of the conference table, all facing a slump-shouldered Lucius.

Desiree was seated in the center of the long side of the conference table, flanked on either side by the lower-ranking committee members. She almost always wore long-sleeved, high-collared shirts in jewel tones that enhanced the red highlights in her hair, accessorizing the outfits with a heavy silver cuff on her right wrist. The cuff was embossed with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Anna didn’t remember ever seeing her without it. Desiree was long and lean and gorgeous, with high cheekbones, almond-

shaped eyes, and shoulder-length hair that fell pin-straight from an off-center widow’s peak. Her eyes were an unusually pale hazel that might’ve looked dreamy on another woman, but somehow managed to look vaguely reptilian in her face.

Or maybe Anna was projecting on that one. As far as she was concerned, the woman was a bitch, pure and simple.

The other committee members included a stout, bearded Greek mythology expert named—

ironically—Thor; a cheerful, round-cheeked classics professor named Holly; and a gaunt, aged relic of an art historian whom everyone called Dr. Young. Anna was pretty sure that wasn’t his name, more of a joke that’d stuck. The committee members acknowledged Anna when she came through the door, with nods from the two men, a little wave from Holly. Desiree made a mean little moue.

Lucius, on the other hand, whipped around in his chair and gave her a where the hell have you been? look liberally dosed with nerves.

He was tall and skinny, and typically moved with an awkward sort of grace. Now, though, sitting folded into the conference room chair, he looked pointy and angular, like a praying mantis that someone had bent the wrong way. Or maybe that was the strangeness of seeing him in a shirt and tie rather than his usual grad student uniform of bar-logo tee and ratty jeans. He’d traded his sandals for hiking boots that made a stab at formality, and somewhere over the past twelve hours had subjected his normally shaggy brown hair to an unfortunate trim that screamed “eight-dollar walk-in.”

The overall effect was one of quiet desperation.

Lucius had grown up in middle America, a dreamer misfit in a large extended family of jocks. He’d escaped to the university on a scholarship and had discovered Mayan studies when he’d taken an undergrad intro course on pre-Columbian civilization as a frosh, in a bid to avoid the foreign language requirement. In the nearly ten years since—four years as an undergrad and almost six as Anna’s grad student—he’d proven to be both the best and most frustrating student she’d ever dealt with. He was an intuitive epigrapher, able to tease out the most worn inscriptions and decipher them into translations that stood up remarkably well to scrutiny from even the toughest of critics, including her.

Unfortunately, that same level of intuition caused him to see patterns where there weren’t any—or, as in the case with the Nightkeeper myths, in places where she’d rather he not see them. When he saw such patterns, his scientific method sometimes went out the window while he focused on the answer he’d convinced himself was right, searching for evidence that proved his theory and ignoring anything that suggested otherwise.

That was not a good trait in a scientist, regardless of the field. Add to it his penchant for playing fast and loose with personal-property laws—like the time he’d broken into her office and stolen the codex fragment bearing the transition spell that’d nearly turned him into a makol —and he was something of a loose cannon.

The thing was, he was her loose cannon. He was sweet and funny, and when things had been at their worst with Dick, Lucius had been there for her to lean on. And if there had been a spark or two, neither of them had acted on the temptation. Instead they had let it deepen their working friendship until it was a strong, steady piece of her life. That, along with knowing he wouldn’t have come into contact with the codex fragment if she’d been more careful about keeping it hidden, meant there had been no real choice to be made when she’d faced Strike and Red-Boar over Lucius’s rigor-contorted body, while his eyes flickered from luminous green to hazel and back. She’d traded her normal life for his, and though she regretted the choice, she wouldn’t undo it. Nor would she admit to Strike just how much Lucius had changed in the months since his partial possession, becoming withdrawn and secretive. Hell, she was doing her best not to admit it to herself. What she hadn’t been able to ignore, however, was how Lucius had started focusing his research more on the things she’d managed to steer him away from in the past . . . like the zero date, and the few sketchy rumors of a superhuman race of warrior-magi sworn to protect mankind.