Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

He figured the shrine had probably been an effort to mimic the pyramidal piles of skulls, called tzomplanti that the Maya had built at the height of their sacrificial practices. They had piled the heads of their sacrifices one atop the next and left them on platforms or at the city limits as a warning to their enemies. This is what we’ll do to you, the tzomplanti had signaled. Be warned. But who had this warning been intended for?

“What happened to you, old man?” Lucius whispered, his voice echoing oddly. “Where’s Sasha?”

The second set of feminine footprints was there too, smudged and scuffed over the top of the bootprints, but the dust was really messed up at that point, churned up amidst rust-brown splashes he had to assume were blood. Strangely drawn by the stains he crouched down to touch one of the bloodstains with his fingers, and felt a tingle when he made contact. It was almost as though there were two of him inside: One wanted to touch the blood and the skull and see if the tingling grew stronger; the other wanted to keep looking and see if there was any evidence of where Sasha had gone from there.

Forcing his fingers away from the bloodstains, he swept his flashlight in a low arc, stopping when he came across two new sets of footprints in the dust at the edge of the cave-in. They looked like the marks from . . . men’s street shoes and a pair of high heels?

“You’re shitting me.” But even after he’d blinked a few times the marks were still there. He hadn’t seen them anywhere else in the tunnel; nor did they seem to lead beneath the piled rubble. It was as though whoever belonged to the footprints had just appeared out of thin air, then disappeared once they’d done what they’d come to do. Which was just ridiculous. There had to be another explanation.

He didn’t know what, but there had to be. So he kept looking, sending his flashlight beam arcing from one side of the tunnel to the other, hoping to hell the literal dead end wouldn’t turn out to be a metaphorical one too.

Then the flashlight beam glinted off something, there and gone so quickly he almost missed it. But when he repeated the action he got the same gleam again. More important, he got another glow farther down the tunnel, then another. There were mirrors on the walls, he realized. Rather, they were highly polished spots on the stone angled precisely so they caught the light and bounced it from one to the next and then on again.

The Egyptians had used metal mirrors to bring sunlight into their tombs and pyramids, Lucius thought as excitement kicked through his bloodstream. The ancient Maya, on the other hand, had worked by torchlight. The presence of the mirrors in the temple was another confirmation of the crossover, the connection from one continent to the next, one people to the other. But it was so much more, because for them to have bothered polishing the stone mirrors, there had to be something to see.

And it’s probably on the other side of the damn cave-in, he realized, his stomach dropping in acid disappointment. Unless . . . he thought, jumping into the myth with both feet, not sure when he would hit bottom, what if it’s starscript? The Maya had sometimes used moonlight to hide secret text within public carvings. The Nightkeepers had used the stars.

Holding his breath, he turned off his flashlight.

It was damned eerie standing there, alone in the darkness waiting for his eyes to adjust, knowing that Ambrose Ledbetter’s skull was only a few feet away. He found himself saying quietly, “I promise that I’ll find her. I’ll protect her. I swear it on my life.”

The words came out of nowhere, as did the urge to close his hand on the machete blade so it scored his palm across the thick ridge of scar tissue. Realizing he’d done exactly that without meaning to, he closed his eyes, balled his bleeding hand into a fist, and repeated the vow.

His blood dripped to join the other stains, and the hum in the air went silent.

When he opened his eyes once again he was surrounded in silver light, starlight that had reflected in from the distant entrance. And right in front of him were words picked out in starlight that hadn’t been there for his flashlight.

It’s starscript, he thought, floored. It’s real.

Sweat broke out all over Lucius’s body at the magic of it. This was confirmation, if he’d needed it, that he was in a Nightkeeper temple. But that wasn’t the most shocking part. No, the thing that blew him away and set him back on his ass was the words the starscript spelled out. Not glyphs, not ancient Mayan. It was freaking written in English.

“Ledbetter,” he breathed. “Fuck me.” The old goat had left a message. In starscript.

It was an address.

Had Sasha read the message? Was that where she’d gone? Or had the owners of the other footprints taken her before she got the message? He refused to consider the alternative: that she’d been killed and her head was rotting on a skull pile somewhere else in the ruin. She had to be alive, had to be, though he didn’t know why the hell it was so important for him to believe that.

Breathing shallowly through his nose, he fought the shock, fought the buzz, and ignored the questions. Riding the excitement of the starscript and the thrill of the hunt, he pulled a notebook and pen out of his knapsack and scribbled down the addy. He didn’t know who or what was there, but he sure as hell intended to find out.

Anna might’ve told Strike that she’d catch an earlier plane and work on translating the starscript at the base of the Ixchel statuette, but after the cluster-freak of a thesis defense, along with Lucius letting drop that Desiree had been Dick’s mistress, Anna had needed the drive time from Austin to New Mex.

She’d driven until she’d cried herself dry and moved on to exhausted, and then she’d flopped at some motel in the middle of nowhere and slept until she woke up. Which meant that by the time she got to Skywatch, it was just about the same time she would’ve been arriving if she’d kept her original flight.

She’d needed the time alone, though. It wasn’t as if she would’ve done the Nightkeepers any good arriving early and all stuck inside her own head. While she couldn’t say she’d come to any earth-

shattering decisions along the way, at least she was vaguely centered, which she needed to be, given that the lunar eclipse was less than twenty-four hours away. Her mental shields might be slammed and locked, preventing her from seeing good, ill or anywhere in between, but she could still feel the magic growing stronger as the time passed, as the miles passed. Finally, as she pulled into the circular driveway in front of the mansion that Leah had named Skywatch, Anna had a feeling she could break through the barrier if she chose, and see the future if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. Not ever again.

“Which means the only thing I’m really contributing here is glyph geekage,” she said aloud. “So I should shift my ass and get to it.”

Still, it took her a long moment to get out of her Lexus. She’d parked out front instead of in the big garage, figuring she should make it clear from the get-go that she wasn’t staying. She was just passing through again, fulfilling her promise. But parking out front had the downside that it aimed her toward the front door, and the plaque that Leah had given Strike as a kick in the ass the previous fall when he’d refused to step up as either king or leader, trying to deny the inevitable.

That was the thing about destiny, though. Somehow the bitch always caught up with you.

Sighing, Anna stopped with her hand on the doorbell and glanced at the plaque. The name Skywatch was engraved above an etched line drawing of a ceiba tree, very like the one that grew behind the mansion, rising from the ashes of the hundreds of winikin and Nightkeeper children who had been killed during the Solstice Massacre. There was no reason the rain forest-dwelling ceiba tree should’ve been able to survive in the desert canyon; nor had it been planted by any human hand. It had sprung from the ashes of the dead as a symbol. A reminder.