Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Just prior to the equinox battle, Anna and Red-Boar had tracked Ambrose Ledbetter to a sacred clearing, where they’d found him buried in a shallow grave. He’d been killed and ritually beheaded. At first they’d thought the makol had killed the Mayan researcher for the blood-power of the sacrifice, and to keep the Nightkeepers from asking him about the Godkeeper ritual. However, once Anna and Red-Boar had dug up the older man’s remains to move him to a more appropriate burial site, they’d seen that his right forearm had been a knotted mass of scar tissue, as though the skin had been burned or cut away . . . exactly where a Nightkeeper’s marks would’ve been.

Originally, they’d surmised that he might have been a Nightkeeper who’d been disgraced and cast out before the Solstice Massacre, somehow without Jox or Red-Boar knowing about it. With Iago’s arrival on-scene, however, it seemed more likely that Ledbetter had been a Xibalban, perhaps one who’d seen the light and defected as the end-time drew near.

Maybe.

The PI, Carter, had been unable to learn much about Ledbetter beyond the common-knowledge stuff available through his university, and the fact that he had a daughter—or maybe a goddaughter, depending on the source of the info—named Sasha. Anna had tried to contact the young woman right after the fall equinox, got one missed return phone call, and then the girl had effectively dropped out of sight. Strike hadn’t even been able to lock onto her for a ’port. The Nightkeepers had assumed she’d been killed too, and had turned their focus to other matters.

Now Anna wondered if they’d been too hasty on that one.

Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw the temple.” His eyes changed. “Those were your bootprints just inside the door, weren’t they? The ones that disappeared into the pitfall?” His eyes sharpened, went feral.

“What was down there?”

“Nothing good,” she said faintly. After reburying Ledbetter’s headless corpse at the edge of the forest, she and Red-Boar had split up to look for the Nightkeeper temple they suspected Ledbetter had discovered. In finding it, Anna had been . . . she still didn’t know how to describe it, though “partially possessed” was probably close enough . . . by a nahwal , which never should’ve been able to exist on the earth outside of its normal barrier milieu. Under its influence, she’d cut her wrists in sacrifice, nearly bleeding out before Red-Boar had managed to carry her into satellite phone range and call for help. Since then, none of the Nightkeepers had been back to the ruin, which they’d taken to calling the haunted temple because of the nahwal ’s odd behavior. Without access to Red-Boar’s mind-bending skills, which he’d used to pull her back when the nahwal tried to drag her into the barrier for good, Strike had decided there was too much of a risk. Anna had been scared enough of the place not to argue, but if Lucius had been there, if he’d seen something she and Red-Boar had missed . . .

“I found Ledbetter’s head,” Lucius answered, his voice going ragged. “And the address of this place, written in starscript. There were signs of a struggle, footprints that didn’t add up.” He swallowed hard. “I hoped Sasha read the ’script and came here. Since she didn’t, and since nobody’s seen her since she went south . . .”

When he trailed off, Anna finished, “Either the Xibalbans grabbed her from the haunted temple, or she’s dead. Or both.”

“Xibalbans?”

“I’ll tell you later.” Maybe. “What else did you see in the temple?”

He glanced along the basement hallway. “You going to lock me up?”

“I have no choice.”

“Then I didn’t see anything.”

“Bullshit.”

He raised an eyebrow, and something faintly malevolent glittered in the depths of his eyes, which were greener than she remembered. “Prove it.”

Frustration slapped at her. “Damn it, Lucius.” She was too tired to deal with this now, too drained.

Without being told, he headed for the first of the doors on the right, then paused and looked back.

“This one?”

“Two down,” Anna answered, knowing there really wasn’t much more to say. She followed him to the storeroom, which Strike had outfitted as a holding cell back when he’d planned to imprison Leah rather than letting her sacrifice herself. Her incarceration had lasted approximately five minutes, until Rabbit had let her out and Red-Boar had lured her to the Chaco Canyon ruins, where he’d tried to gun her down in cold blood, thinking to save Strike from repeating his father’s mistake by choosing love over duty and dooming them all. In the end, though, Red-Boar had died for loyalty and love of his king. That sacrifice had washed away all the other sins.

And why do you keep thinking of Red-Boar? Anna asked herself with a stab of guilt. She’d called her husband from the road and made some excuse about her meeting being moved up a couple of days, and hadn’t talked to him since. In the meantime, her heartache had eased some and logic had returned.

They’d dealt with the affair already, and were working to move past it. And there was nothing concrete to suggest he’d encouraged Desiree. There was no reason for her to be thinking of another man. Especially one who was not only dead, but had been an asshole when he was alive. He’d had his reasons, but still. . . . She made a mental note to call Dick when she woke up the next morning. Maybe they could plan to take some time away when she got back.

“It’s not as bad as I expected.” Lucius shrugged at the accommodations. “No worse than fieldwork.”

Tearing her thoughts from Dick and Red-Boar, Anna looked at Lucius and saw a stranger. Feeling fatigue drag, she said, “I’ll come for you in the morning.”

“Yeah.” He turned away, and didn’t look back as she shut and padlocked the door and set the key on a shelf nearby. Then, just to be on the safe side, she set a magical ward that a human could pass through, but which would stop a magical creature in its tracks.

In theory.

Lucius heard the key turn in the lock and knew he should feel trapped, knew he should be freaking right the hell out. Hello, mental overload. The Nightkeepers not only had existed, they still did, and Anna was one of them. He had his proof, had his doctorate, if he still wanted to play Desiree’s game.

But there was more here than just that, wasn’t there? The convo out in the entryway suggested that the other Nightkeepers already knew about him somehow, that Anna had bargained for his life. How, exactly, had he missed that?

At the same time, though, that part of his mental process seemed dull and foggy, less important than the building burn of anger that rode low in his gut, telling him that she’d lied to him, that she’d made a fool of him. That she needed to be punished.

At the thought, the single light in the small room flickered.

Great. Lucius scowled up at the fluorescent tube. Just what I need, wonky wiring. Or maybe that was the idea. Maybe there’d be an “accidental” electrical fire in his cell, taking care of him while retaining some sort of plausible deniability if Anna complained to her brother about his death.

Not that she’d be likely to, he thought. The anger built, sparking heat into his veins as he paced the small room, past a narrow cot and a bucket that served as the so-called amenities. Anna had enjoyed being around him back when he’d been a student, a newbie. The more he’d learned, though, the more he’d questioned her conviction that the Nightkeepers were a myth, the less she’d wanted to be around him and the more she’d tried to narrow his research focus, directing it away from the Nightkeepers.