Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

“I’m Jox, her winikin . I’ll give her the message.”

Which might’ve been useful info if Lucius had any idea what the hell a winikin was. Whatever the guy’s job description, though, he didn’t seem inclined to go get Anna. Knowing that Anna and her brother—the king, and how screwed up was that?—needed to know what he’d done, and figuring their response was going to suck regardless of how the deets were delivered, Lucius said, “Fine. Tell her that Desiree bet me my degree that I couldn’t find proof the Nightkeepers existed, and gave me the money to do it. I called her last night from the road and told her where I was headed.”

Jox looked disturbed but not panicked, suggesting that the location of the compound wasn’t entirely sacrosanct to the outside world. He said, “Who is Desiree to Anna?”

“Her boss at UT. Beyond that, you’ll have to ask her yourself.” He was so not going there.

Jox considered that for a long moment, then nodded. “I’ll give her the message.”

When he started to pull the door shut, Lucius said, “Wait!”

Jox paused. “Yeah?”

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Knowing Anna, that’d work better coming directly from you,” the guy said, not unkindly. Then he shut and locked the door.

He was right, too, Lucius knew. Thing was, at this point he wasn’t sure he believed Anna would accept his apology . . . or the help he planned on offering.

Alexis was just getting out of the shower when there was a knock on the door of her suite. As she toweled off and threw on last night’s nighshirt and a pair of yoga pants, she was strongly tempted to ignore it, needing a few more minutes to herself.

It wasn’t like she’d had much in the way of downtime to recharge after the eclipse ceremony.

Between her fight with Nate and the dream-vision, she hadn’t gotten to bed until close to three a.m., and she’d slept poorly, her dreams chasing her with sensory images of Nate and Michael, and heartache. They’d been real dreams, not visions—she was sure of that much—but they’d put her seriously low on REM sleep.

She’d planned on chilling in her sitting room for another hour at least. The knock came again, though, suggesting that whoever it was knew she was in there, and wasn’t planning on being ignored.

Sighing, Alexis crossed the sitting area and opened the door to find her winikin on the other side.

Izzy’s expression lightened, though it stayed worried around the edges. “Why didn’t you wake me last night? I can’t believe I didn’t hear the commotion.” The winikin ’s voice became reproachful.

“You should’ve had someone come get me. I would’ve stayed with you.”

“I know.” Which was why Alexis hadn’t woken her. Trying to avoid having to say that, she took the winikin ’s hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “I’m fine, honest.”

Izzy looked at her long and hard before nodding. “If you say so.” She stepped into the suite and pushed Alexis toward her bedroom. “Get dressed. Jade wants you in the archive as soon as you’ve had some coffee.”

That had Alexis stopping and turning, her heart kicking on a burst of excitement mingled with dread. “She found the temple? We’re going?”

Izzy nodded. “You leave for Belize in an hour.”

“It’s called the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave system; ATM for short,” Jade said, indicating her laptop screen, which showed a series of photographs that were eerily familiar to Alexis.

The two women were in the archive, having a one-on-one about the likely temple site. The three-

room library was quiet, the temperature perfect, the air crisp from the high-tech filter system Jade had requisitioned a few months earlier. The whole effect should’ve been restful, but Alexis couldn’t settle.

She was keyed up by the prospect of seeing the temple for real, and nervous about going with Michael, knowing she would have to proposition him if she wanted access to the goddess’s power.

What was more, she wanted to talk to Jade, and make sure things were really over between her and Michael. She couldn’t bring herself to start the convo, though. Not because of Jade, but because thanks to some of what Nate had said the night before, Alexis couldn’t help feeling as though she were pimping herself out for the magic. She kept telling herself it wasn’t really like that, at least not by Nightkeeper standards. But at the same time, she had to admit that by modern standards it was borderline.

Forcing herself to focus, Alexis peered at the Web site Jade had found. Seeing that the nav bar had buttons for tours and hotels, she frowned. “It’s a tourist attraction?” That didn’t play with her visions.

Jade gave a yes/no hand-wiggle. “Not on the level of Yucatán sites like Chichén Itzá and Tulum, that’s for sure. Belize is sparsely populated, and has maybe a half dozen paved airstrips for the entire country. Not exactly a destination for the average tourist.” She tapped the screen, her fingertip hitting a picture of a calcified human skeleton. “The ATM cave system is a stiff three-mile hike in from the nearest road. Unlike the Yucatán, Belize has aboveground waterways; there are three river crossings between the road and the cave system, and when you get there you’ve got to swim in. Because of all that hassle, though, the complex still has most of its original artifacts in place. Access to the cave system is tightly regulated; only a couple of groups have permission to bring tours through, and those cost.”

“So you’ve gotta really want it,” Alexis said. She looked at the pictures, then shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure. This looks similar to the dream-visions, but I’m not seeing an exact match.”

She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the picture of the skeleton, though, couldn’t help thinking the feeling she got from the photographs resonated too much to be a coincidence.

“This is your cave; I’m sure of it.” Jade slid a bound book across to Alexis, then clicked on one of the Web site buttons, bringing up a cartoon map of the cave system on the laptop. “Have a look.”

The book was open to an age-yellowed map that bore a strong resemblance to the one on the computer screen, except that the hard-copy map, dated 1873, showed several additional chambers off by themselves, connected to the others only by blue water trails rather than brown-marked pathways or gray-shaded tunnels.

The farthest chamber was a narrow rectangle with a serpent-and-rainbow altar sketched in at the far end, with a strange, looping figure extending away from it. The altar looked like a good enough match that Alexis felt the click she’d needed, followed by a burst of excitement mingled with unease. “Yeah.

I think you found it.” She traced the blue waterways leading in. “We’re going to have to swim in through a submerged tunnel?” She shuddered a little, but there was no question that she had to go.

“It doesn’t look too far. Or at least it wasn’t in the late eighteen hundreds. Jade paused. “There are two things you need to know before you decide you’re definitely going, though.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Alexis leaned back in her chair and gave the archivist her full attention.

Jade tapped the date at the top of the page. “Does the map date ring any bells?”

Alexis frowned and shook her head. “Sorry. You’re better at the history stuff than I—” She broke off, realizing why it should’ve connected. “Shit, that was when Painted-Jaguar’s expedition went south. You’re telling me this is the cache site?”

After the Civil War, with “civilization” encroaching westward and the various Native American cultures being squeezed into smaller and smaller settlements, the Nightkeepers had once again been subject to the pressures acting on their hosts—in this case the Hopi. By the 1870s, the Nightkeepers had numbered less than a hundred, and the survivors were starving. Times were grim, prospects dim, until an itza’at seer had envisioned a fabulously wealthy cache of Mayan-era artifacts secreted away in a Nightkeeper temple far to the south. A small group of the strongest remaining magi traveled through the hostile Mexican territories, eventually finding the temple and the artifacts within. The journey had been harsh, though, the trip back even worse, and only two of the original twenty Nightkeepers had returned, bearing the recovered riches of their ancestors.