Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

“Shit!” He checked the time stamp on the message and saw that he was already an hour late. It didn’t matter whether she’d called to kick him out or give him another chance; being late wasn’t going to help. When the boss called a meeting, you showed. Or at least made a good effort to show. Stomach clenching on too many awful possibilities to name, he headed for her corner office. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or bummed when he saw that her lights were still on, the door open.

He knocked on the doorframe, and the Dragon Lady— Dr. Soo , he corrected himself—looked up from her seat behind a wide desk. He couldn’t read her expression when she saw who it was. “Come on in.”

Her office was professionally done up in rich-looking blues and golds, accented with accessories that reflected her specialty of ancient Egyptian art. He wasn’t sure, but the delicate faience bowl set in a case just inside the door looked real. Not willing to chance knocking it over, he gave the thing a wide berth as he stepped over the threshold.

“Shut the door,” she ordered, returning her attention to her laptop computer screen. Her tone didn’t make it sound like she’d reconsidered her decision on his thesis—more like she was getting ready to kick him out. He was pretty sure she couldn’t do that without Anna’s okay . . . but then again, it was entirely possible that Anna had okayed it and hadn’t had the guts to tell him herself, he thought on a low burn of anger that was both foreign and tempting.

“Sit.” Again with the orders, but he wasn’t about to argue. At least not until she said she was kicking him out.

He took one of two chairs set opposite her desk, both of which were made of dark, carved wood and somehow managed to be big and imposing at the same time that they were delicate and feminine. The chair creaked under his weight; that was the only sound in the room for close to five minutes, as she kept reading and he sat in silence, partly because he wanted to wait her out, partly because flapping his trap had already gotten him in enough trouble that day.

Finally the Dragon Lady hit a couple of keys and pushed the laptop away, then looked him up and down and up again, until he started twitching under her scrutiny. Just when he was getting ready to break the silence, she said, “You know something, Lucius?” She tapped one high-gloss nail against her lower lip. “I like you.”

On a one-to-ten scale of what he’d expected to hear, that ranked about a minus fifty. “Excuse me?”

“I like you,” she repeated, “which is why I’m going to do something I almost never do. I’m going to give you another chance.”

If anyone else on the faculty had said that, he would’ve thanked the hell out of them, and then asked when they should reschedule his thesis defense. Given who he was talking to and what she’d been up to lately, his first and potentially suicidal response was, “What’s the catch?”

Something flashed in her eyes—irritation or amusement, or maybe a bit of both. “It’s not a catch; it’s an opportunity to expand on the work you’re already doing. If you pull it off, you’ll be making a hell of a name for yourself, and you’ll get your degree.” When he said nothing, simply waited, she leaned forward, giving him a glimpse of the steel in her eyes and the edge of a lacy bra beneath her camisole. “I want you to prove that the Nightkeepers are real.”

“You—” he started in surprise, then broke off as he got it. She hadn’t tanked his defense to embarrass Anna. She’d done it because she’d wanted his research. Embarrassing Anna had been a side benefit.

Son of a bitch, he thought, not sure if he was disgusted or impressed, or a bit of both.

Legend had it that the Nightkeepers had lived with the Egyptians up until Akhenaton had gone monotheistic. If that particular legend were real, proving the existence of the Nightkeepers wouldn’t just blow the doors off the field of Mayan studies, it could rewrite a big chunk of Egyptology. And even better—as far as the Dragon Lady was concerned, no doubt—proving the Nightkeepers were real would invalidate a big chunk of Anna’s anti-end-time publications, putting a serious cramp in her forward momentum at the university, maybe even providing enough ammo to get her tenure pulled.

Bitch, Lucius thought, his anger cranking hard and hot. But beneath the anger was a stealthy slide of, Hmmm . . .

Anna had never supported his research on the Nightkeepers. Was she his priority, or was the research?

The Dragon Lady continued, “Tell Anna you need some time off to figure things out. I’ll fund your travel as necessary, and you’ll report directly to me.”

“I won’t do it,” he said, but it sounded weak even to him.

“There have to be things you’ve wanted to try, but couldn’t because she wouldn’t sign off on them, things you figured you’d do once you had your own grant money.” She paused. “What if you could do them now?”

I can’t, he repeated, only what came out of his mouth sounded an awful lot like, “I shouldn’t.”

“Come on; name it. If you had to pick one line of evidence to follow, and you had decent travel money, where would you go first . . . Belize?” That was where the Nightkeepers who’d survived Akhenaton’s religious “purification” had supposedly wound up, where they had—again supposedly—

hooked up with the Olmec, who had just begun to develop a cultural identity that would become, with the Nightkeepers’ help, the Mayan Empire.

In theory.

But Lucius shook his head. “No, actually. I’d start in Boston. There’s this girl—” He broke off, afraid that he’d come off sounding like an idiot, like he was crushing on someone he’d talked to on the phone for, like, twenty seconds, just long enough to take a message. A girl who hadn’t returned any of his calls in the months since.

But Desiree—she’d gone from Dragon Lady to first name in his head all of a sudden—said only, “What about her?”

He let out the breath he hadn’t consciously known he’d been holding. Which made him he realize something else, too. He was actually considering taking her up on the offer.

It was disloyal as hell, yes, and he owed Anna better. But really, that low, mean voice inside him said, how much do you owe her? She’d shut him out, withdrawn, left him behind. It’d been her fault they’d had to reschedule his defense; if he’d turned in his thesis last fall, on schedule, he would’ve sailed through. But he’d been forced to reschedule because she’d done her little disappearing act, leaving for a few weeks at the start of the fall semester and returning a pale, strange version of herself.

If she’d stayed put and soldiered on, he’d have his Ph.D. and probably some new funding by now, enough to follow the clues that Anna pooh-poohed at best, derided at worst. She’d never wanted to even entertain the possibility that the Nightkeepers had existed, never mind discussing whether they still did, and what it might mean on the zero date. And it wasn’t just a closed discussion in her book; it’d never been a discussion at all. To her, the Nightkeepers were nothing more than a bedtime story.

But that doesn’t make it okay to go behind her back, he told himself, feeling as though there were two sets of feelings at war within his head: one that said he should trust that Anna would appeal Desiree’s ruling on his thesis, and another that said he hadn’t been able to trust Anna to do anything for him ever since she’d turned away from him, cut him adrift.

Rubbing a thumb across the raised knot of flesh on his opposite palm in a gesture that’d become habitual since he’d acquired the scar in a night of drunken stupidity, he told himself that friendships waxed and waned, that it was only natural for Anna to pull away from a relationship that’d perhaps gotten closer than she was comfortable with once she and the Dick had reconciled. The only relationship she really owed him was one of thesis adviser to student, and she’d never shirked that duty. Or had she? She’d steered him safely through his project, true, but had she kept him too safe?