Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

Even though her eyes were practically crossed with the pain-fatigue of the hangover, she glared up at him. ‘‘Take me home.’’

He knew he should do it, wipe her one more time and take her home. But that just wasn’t possible. ‘‘I can’t,’’ he said. ‘‘You’re not safe in Miami anymore.’’ They had come after her again, and not just because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight until he figured out why.

‘‘And I’m supposed to take your word that I’m safe here?’’

‘‘I’m guessing a promise wouldn’t get me very far,’’ he said drily.

‘‘I’ll take it anyway.’’ She paused. ‘‘Along with the MAC-10 you were packing the other night. With one of those under my pillow I’ll sleep fine.’’

And she’d put some serious holes in anyone who disturbed her, Strike warranted. He wasn’t too keen on having an autopistol loose in the mansion, and knew that Jox would tear a strip out of him if he agreed, but he couldn’t blame her for wanting the protection.

Besides, she’d be unconscious for the next half day or so, whether she liked it or not.

He raised a hand as if he were pledging allegiance. ‘‘I swear that you’ll be safe here tonight.’’ He didn’t dare promise beyond that, and saw her register the qualifier. ‘‘As for the autopistol’’—he nodded to his winikin —

‘‘Jox will take care of that.’’

The winikin glared at him. ‘‘What does she mean, ‘the other night?’’

‘‘Later,’’ Strike grated out. ‘‘Christ.’’ His head was starting to pound, too, and the room had a pretty good spin going on. ‘‘We all need to eat and have some—’’ He broke off. He’d been about to say, ‘‘have some sex.’’

Maybe it was the aphelion, maybe having Leah nearby, all blond hair and edgy attitude, standing up for herself even though she was so far out of her depth she could barely see the surface. But suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to take her somewhere private, where none of the others would matter, where nothing would matter but the two of them and the heat they created together.

Hello, pretalent hornies.

Trying to banish the sex buzz he was getting off the blue robes, Strike grated, ‘‘Jox? Please show Leah where she’ll be staying.’’

‘‘And that would be . . . ?’’ the winikin asked coolly.

The pool house, Strike almost said, because he wanted her in his space, wanted her within reach. But he didn’t dare keep her so close, not with the hormones in the air. ‘‘Put her in the royal quarters.’’

Jox’s jaw was locked tight, though Strike didn’t know if it was solely because he was pissed, or if he was also picking up on the do-me vibes that were flying around the room, thicker with every passing minute.

Sweat popped out on Strike’s brow, and he was careful not to touch Leah when he waved for her to follow the winikin . ‘‘Go ahead. Jox will take care of everything, including the MAC. Get some food in you, get some rest, and I’ll scrounge some clothes for you. When you’re feeling steadier, we’ll talk.’’

‘‘Okay.’’ Leah nodded. Her eyes were starting to glaze a little, though he wasn’t sure if it was the shock and postmagic hangover, or if she was picking up on the vibes. She shouldn’t be able to, because she wasn’t a Nightkeeper. But then again, she shouldn’t have been able to tell that there was anything special about the oilskin packet she clutched in one hand as she followed Jox from the room.

Strike hoped like hell that the packet contained a fragment from one of the old spellbooks. There was no other explanation for why it glowed red—royal red. He’d wanted to ask her for it, wanted to commandeer it, but she needed to keep it for now, needed to trust that he wouldn’t take it by force. Besides, assuming it was one of the lost spells, they couldn’t do anything with it right now. Not without a translator.

For the moment, its greatest strength would be helping him convince Red-Boar and the others that the gods well and truly meant for Leah to be involved with the coming battle. Then it’d be up to him to figure out how to manage that without endangering her further.

Step one, he thought as he watched her leave, keep your hands off her . Which was going to be far easier said than done. He’d already touched her, already tasted her. He’d heard the sexy catch of her breath against his skin, and knew what it felt like to come inside her.

And it couldn’t happen again, or she was dead.

PART III

THE VENUS CONJUNCTION

Alignment of the Sun, Earth, and the planet Venus, which was the morning star used by the Maya to predict the equinoxes and solstices.

CHAPTER TWELVE

July 5

Deep in the bowels of the art history building at UT Austin, Lucius Hunt was hunched over his desk, hard at work. Okay, technically he was in his first-floor office, but it was nearly three a.m. and pitch dark outside, so it was feeling bowelish. Or maybe that was his total, utter lack of success at deciphering the line of Mayan text that sat on his computer screen, mocking him.

‘‘I can’t tell if the damn skull is grinning or screaming. ’’ He hunkered down in his desk chair until he was eye level with his laptop screen, but all that did was give him a crick in his neck. Sometimes being tall sucked.

Thanks to fifteen hundred years’ worth of tropical weather at the ruins of Chichén Itzá, the Mayan glyphwork was badly eroded. If he adjusted the contrast, he could distinguish what looked like a skull carved inside the outline of a jellyfish, but that could make it any one of twenty-plus glyphs he’d accumulated for his thesis on the end-time prophecy, depending on what the damned skull was doing. Digital comparison to other symbols in the text had allowed him to narrow his options down to grinning or screaming. If the skull was grinning, he’d found himself an ode to Jaguar-Paw Skull, the fourteenth ruler of the ancient Mayan city. Boo-ring .

But if it was screaming . . . if it was screaming, he was looking at something seriously important, a discovery that could blow the lid off the prevailing theories on the end-time. If the skull was screaming, then the zero date on the Mayan Long Count calendar wasn’t a metaphor for social change at all. It was a prophecy, just like the doomsday nuts kept saying. A warning.

Game over.

His boss, top Mayanist Anna Catori, didn’t believe the world would end on the day the backward-counting calendar zeroed out. She and the rest of the naysayers chose to ignore the modern astronomers who’d discovered that the zero date on the Long Count calendar was the same exact day the earth would pass through the precise center of the Milky Way galaxy while in conjunction with the sun and moon.

Half the astrophysicists Lucius had interviewed said there was a good chance that the earth’s magnetic poles would flip abruptly on that day, making north become south and south, north. The other half said that was bullshit. There seemed to be a general consensus, though, that the sun-moon-earth conjunction in the galactic center was likely to spark the sort of sunspot activity that hadn’t been seen in twenty-six thousand or so years, since the last time there was a meta-conjunction like this one.

Oh, and by the way, twenty-six thousand years ago, the magnetic poles had flipped, and the earth had actually owned an ozone layer capable of protecting it from the sunspots.

The question was, how much of this had the ancient Maya known, and—and here was where Anna kept accusing Lucius of straying over into the tinfoil-hat zone— what was with the handful of inscriptions he’d found that mentioned the Nightkeepers, a secret sect of warrior-priests supposedly sworn to protect the earth when the zero date came?