Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

If that was the case, he decided, he was okay with dying.

The moment he thought that, a shadow appeared in the distance, growing closer as he continued walking. Pretty soon he could make out a high stone arch stretching over the road, with huge, openmouthed serpents carved on either side.

Beyond it was a wide, sluggish river.

On instinct, Lucius reached into his pants pocket and found two hard, round objects in there. Pulling them out, he stared at the jade beads. That’s it, then, he thought, sadness breaking through the fog.

Game over.

“Turn around,” a multitonal voice said, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. “She needs you.”

Lucius stopped dead, and the fog blinked out of existence. He could see details all of a sudden, could see that the rocky plains on either side of him were painted curtains writhing with reptilian movement from the other side, and the archway was cracked and broken and black, the water brackish and stinking.

A pit opened up in the center of his stomach, yawning, dark, and terrifying.

“Who said that?” he called, his voice falling flat in the echoless space.

There was no answer, but suddenly he had control over his limbs again and could turn around on the path. He took a step back in the direction he’d come. The moment his foot landed, a terrible scream arose from the waterway, then another.

Lucius didn’t think, didn’t look back. He just started running toward the light that appeared in front of him, at the other end of the road of the damned.

Back to the land of the living.

It took most of the day for the members of the royal council to debrief Rabbit and Myrinne, alternating between them when Jox announced it was time for one of the exhausted, malnourished kids to eat or sleep, or both. By the end of the day, as Alexis headed to her rooms to change, shower, and generally take a big breath, she wasn’t convinced they knew much more than they had going in. Or rather, they knew more, but what they’d learned probably wouldn’t go very far toward helping them the next day, when they would ’port to the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá and defend the barrier against Iago and Camazotz.

The plan was for the Nightkeepers to ’port to the safe house early in the morning and stake out the tunnel entrance. Problem was, they weren’t even sure Iago would be working his magic through the intersection. Rabbit didn’t know if the mage had found the actual hellmouth, the place where the Xibalbans had called the Banol Kax through to earth in A.D. 951. If Iago knew where the hellmouth was, then he had direct access to Xibalba, do not pass go, do not collect, no need for the Nightkeepers’ intersection and its tortuous connections to the sky and underworld.

If Iago didn’t show at the intersection—which Alexis strongly suspected would be the case—the Nightkeepers would do as they had done during the winter solstice and eclipse, uplinking and banding together to hold the barrier that separated Xibalba from the earth. Strike and Leah would call on the power of Kulkulkan, and Alexis would add Ixchel’s strength to the mix. The barrier was a psi-entity that stretched everywhere and nowhere at once, which meant that if they managed to fortify it with enough power at Chichén Itzá, it should prove impenetrable at the hellmouth. In theory. In reality, they had no frigging clue. And that was the worry that had Alexis unable to settle in her rooms, and had her pacing from one to the next, touching a light fixture here, a book there, somehow needing the tactile reminders, the solidity of the earth plane.

She and Ixchel were supposed to counteract the first of the demon prophecies, but Alexis had no idea how. The others were acting as though the first prophecy were a moot point, given that Iago planned to bring through all seven of Camazotz’s sons simultaneously. But she wasn’t so sure. If there was no such thing as true coincidence, if everything that was happening was truly influenced by fate, or destiny, or the gods, then shouldn’t the gods have foreseen Iago’s threat? Assuming they had, then that meant Ixchel was supposed to serve a larger purpose, or else she and Alexis wouldn’t have formed the Godkeeper bond.

Right?

“I don’t know!” Alexis practically shouted. “I don’t know why she picked me, or how I’m supposed to use her powers.” Her stomach twisted on a gut-deep fear of failure, fear of death. Fear of losing the people she loved.

Frustrated and heartsore, she threw herself on the sofa, then bounced back up almost immediately when she couldn’t stand not to be moving. It wasn’t just the fears and worries that kept her going, either; the magic of the coming equinox rode her hard. She could close her eyes and tell where the stars were overhead just by feeling their pull and seeing the faint color shimmers they gave off in her soul. The barrier was thinning, and with it her self-control. She wanted to scream and throw things, wanted to drive off into the desert in one of the four-wheelers Jox kept in the garage, wanted to spin the tires and kick up sand and jump the vehicle from hill to hill, though she’d never actually driven one of the damn things.

Then she heard a knock on the door. She knew who it was without question, and in that instant all the crazy, jumbled needs inside her coalesced into a single emotion.

Desire.

She opened the door and saw Nate standing there, exactly as she’d expected, wearing jeans and a soft black pullover that did nothing to gentle the angles of his face and the edgy tension surrounding him. She arched a brow, but before she could work up a witty opener, he said simply, “I know you don’t owe me a damned thing, and you might not want to be around me right now, but I had to come. I need you to know that if I could’ve figured out how to love anyone, I would’ve loved you.”

The simplicity of that, the finality of it, drove the breath from her lungs and sent a spear of pain through her heart. It took her a second, but once her throat unlocked, she said, “Then why can’t you?”

“Nature, maybe, or nurture. Maybe both. Probably both.” He lifted a shoulder. “It took me a while to see it, but if you look at the pictures of my parents, my mother’s always the one surrounded by other people, while my father is always apart just a bit. And the paintings . . . they’re all of places seen from a distance. No people, no close-ups. If that’s not detachment, I don’t know what is. Add his DNA to my growing up in the system, and you’ve got a guy who likes people okay but does best alone.” He exhaled long and hard. “Look, I’ve tried to feel the things other people feel, and it . . . it just doesn’t work. It’s just not in me to love someone.” His eyes went very sad. “Not even you. I’m so sorry.”

Alexis bowed her head as all the restless energy drained into a moment of pure, profound emotion.

It wasn’t heartache; that would come later, she knew. It wasn’t failure, either, though she was due for a heaping pile of that too. No, this was a piercing regret that the things they’d already had together were the end of it, even if they survived the equinox. There would be no moving into Nate’s cottage and waking up next to him each morning, no trying to cook for each other and sneaking food from the main mansion when the stuff didn’t turn out, no hardwood floors and little smoke-motif knickknacks.

“Alexis, please say something,” he pressed when she’d been silent for too long. His lips twitched in a small, sad smile. “Either that or rack me a good one and slam the door. Whichever works for you.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said slowly. “Maybe it’s better to go into tomorrow without this between us.” Better to go into battle with nothing she was looking forward to except more fighting, more training. More war.