Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Normally Lucius would’ve given in. Anna had taught him early on that a Mayanist worked within the local community, even when studying the ancient glyph system that was no longer practiced in the modern day. If she’d been there, she would’ve turned back on warning number two or three. She wouldn’t’ve kept going until Abe broke out in a light sweat and his eyes went wild around the edges.

But Anna wasn’t there, and Lucius had no intention of turning back. Something was pulling him onward, drawing him along the faint pathway one of Ledbetter’s grad students had mentioned seeing in his notes. The old coot had been secretive about the site, the girl had said; he’d nearly bitten her head off when he realized she’d seen the journal entry.

That was what she’d told Sasha Ledbetter when she’d come looking for a clue as to where her father had gone. And Lucius, thanks to Desiree and her magic AmEx, had followed, more than four months after Sasha had flown south, and fallen off the map, just like her old man.

Logic said that Ambrose Ledbetter and his daughter had perished, probably taking with them whatever Ambrose had known about the Nightkeepers. But Lucius needed to know for sure.

As though in answer to his thought, the wind picked up, moaning through the top level of the leafy canopy in an eerie descant. Okay, that’s creepy, Lucius admitted inwardly. Doesn’t mean I’m quitting, though.

Abe planted himself in the middle of the nonpath and jammed his machete into the loam. “We’re going back now.”

“It was just the wind,” Lucius said, because really, there was nothing to suggest otherwise. The birds and critters were still doing their thing, and the sun still dappled through the canopy, though slanting a little lower in the sky than it’d been when they left the Jeep at the place where the narrow footpath intersected the muddy track that passed for a road. The air hadn’t changed. Nothing was different.

Yet at the same time, something was different, he realized suddenly. There was a hum in the air that hadn’t been there before, subsonic, almost a buzz running beneath his skin.

“I’m not going back,” he said before he was even aware of having made the decision.

“I am.” Abe stepped away and spit on the ground. “Good luck.”

The loogie wasn’t a sign of disrespect, Lucius knew, but rather the exact opposite. Moisture was precious in the Yucatán, where water ran entirely underground, coming to the surface only at circular openings, fallen-through sinkholes called cenotes. The spittle was a sacrifice. A blessing.

Or, more likely, a gesture of, Gods be with you, dumb-ass.

The Daykeeper left the machete and his canteen and took off, humping it back down the trail at more than twice the speed they’d made forging forward.

“Thanks for your help,” Lucius called, figuring there was no need for hurt feelings. He had plenty of supplies, a GPS unit, and a satellite phone for emergencies. He could see the path—more or less, anyway—and figured there was a good bet that the temple site he was looking for was somewhere up ahead. He was good to go.

Yet his feet wouldn’t move.

He stood there as the sound of Abe’s retreat faded into the background jungle chatter, and he was completely frozen as the two halves of him pulled in diametrically opposite directions. The logical part of him, the part that’d absorbed Anna’s training and already couldn’t believe he’d gone behind her back like this, wanted to go with Abe. The Daykeeper knew his shit. If he said the signs were wrong, then the signs were wrong and it was time to leave.

The other part of him, though, the part that brought him strange, twisted dreams in the night, dreams that curled with fire and tasted of blood—that part of him wanted to grab the machete and keep going. The temple was up ahead; he could feel it, practically see it. There was no reason to turn back now and every reason to keep going. And then he was moving, though he couldn’t have said why or how; he just knew he had the machete in his hand and was using it to widen the narrow trail, pushing through the densely packed vegetation, wading through an ocean of green.

Five minutes later he saw the first sign of civilization he’d seen in hours, and it wasn’t modern. The carved stone pillar lay on its side, broken into three pieces along the seams where the stacked sections had been sealed together.

Called stelae, such pillars had been the Maya’s billboards. In the ruined city of Chichén Itzá, they were grouped together by the hundreds in the Hall of Pillars, and had offered up everything from local proclamations and records of political changes to histories and legends. Elsewhere—including the burbs of Chichén—stelae were scattered farther out, standing alone, sometimes in the seeming middle of nowhere, a testament to a culture that might be long gone, but remained alive in its writings. Those scattered stelae had typically been more along the lines of road markers . . . or sometimes warnings.

Feeling a creepy-crawl heading down the back of his neck, Lucius knelt beside the stela and swiped at the encroaching vegetation, which had grown only partway up to cover the carved limestone. Can’t have fallen that long ago, he thought as the heady excitement of fieldwork cleared his brain a little.

Would’ve been covered otherwise.

If it’d been any more overgrown he might not’ve seen it. As it was, the only reason he’d noticed the whitehued stone was because he’d had to hack around a section of denser brush. It was a happy coincidence that he’d stumbled on the thing. Or maybe it’d been fate. The Nightkeepers hadn’t believed in coincidence, after all.

Using the flat of the machete to scrape away some thorny, clinging vines, he uncovered a swath of carved stone. It took a second for the sight of the main glyph to register. When it did, he stopped breathing.

He’d found the screaming skull.

It was the one glyph he’d needed to prove his thesis. The one glyph he’d been unable to conclusively identify from actual writing samples.

“Holy shit.” He’d been so sure it existed, had been pretty sure he’d found it at least twice before, but Anna had torpedoed his translation the first time, and the second time . . . well, back then they’d still been friends and he’d taken her at her word that it was really Jaguar-Paw’s laughing-skull glyph.

In retrospect, he had a feeling she’d Photoshopped his digitals to make sure of it. And wasn’t that a nasty suspicion?

A faint warning bell chimed at the back of his head, a brain worm that said the thoughts weren’t his own, and neither was the anger. But as he knelt there and the damp worked through the fabric of his breathable nylon cargo pants, the rage took root and started to grow.

He’d trusted her, and she’d blocked him at every turn.

I’ll show her, he thought, pulling his camera out of his pack and taking a dozen snaps of the stela, and the tell-tale glyph that symbolized the Nightkeepers’ involvement in the zero date, and their vow to protect mankind. In theory, anyway.

“No theory about it,” he said, rising to his feet and shouldering his pack, the weight feeling far lighter than it had only moments earlier as the certainty flowed through him. He was almost there, almost at the end of years of searching for something the experts said didn’t exist. The stela had been a marker; he was sure of it. And maybe a warning, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, just as he hadn’t been scared off by Abe’s talk of bad omens.

The thrill of excitement drew him onward, the promise of discovery, the mystery of what the hell’d happened to Ambrose Ledbetter, and the burning certainty that he had to find Ambrose’s daughter, Sasha.