Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

‘‘Hello, Neenie?’’ Lucius waved a hand in front of her face. ‘‘Someone else in the room here, remember? Let’s focus. Okay, so Anna showed you a piece of a codex. What did she say, ‘Hey, Neenie, come in here and see what I got my hands on’?’’

‘‘No.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘It was more like, ‘Come in and close the door. Now, promise me this is just between us. Okay . . . what does this look like to you?’ ’’

And all of a sudden, he got it. Anna had called Neenie in because she didn’t know how to translate the glyphs yet, but she’d shown an almost uncanny knack for being able to identify the pictures themselves.

The writing system of the ancient Maya was seriously complex, the symbols often difficult to interpret, meaning that field epigraphers got real good at pattern recognition real fast, or they moved on, and they often asked one another’s opinions and went with the consensus vote, at least until something else in the text proved the interpretation wrong. It also meant that an epigrapher who didn’t want anyone else to know what she was working on might use, say, an untrained pattern recognizer to help with the gnarly stuff. Anna must’ve gotten stumped on something and needed a second set of trained eyes, but hadn’t wanted to use someone—namely him—who could translate the glyphs themselves. So she’d taken a chance on Neenie, not realizing that her vault had some serious leaks when it came to keeping secrets.

‘‘What did you tell her you thought it was?’’ Lucius asked, feeling an itch of excitement. If Anna was working on something huge, it would explain so much of what had gone on lately—from the stress she’d been under, to the weird working hours, to the fact that she’d been kicking him out of the lab as often as possible over the past week.

Yeah, he was cheesed that she hadn’t let him in on it, but he’d forgive her if it was the sort of thing that would land her—and, by extension, the senior member of her lab—on the cover of National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine or something.

Already envisioning the two of them suited up in full kit, posing beside the chac-mool throne inside the step-sided Pyramid of Kulkulkan at Chichén Itzá—because that was the sort of thing the big magazines wanted, even if the codex page had come from someplace else entirely and most of their work was done in a lab in Austin—Lucius almost missed Neenie’s answer.

Then he got it. And froze.

‘‘What did you just say?’’

‘‘I told her I thought it looked like a screaming skull.’’ Neenie gave him a weird look. ‘‘Are you okay?’’

No, I’m not. I just took a big whack upside the head with the every-glyph-groupie-for-herself stick.

He shook his head, hoping those last few words would rattle loose and turn into something else. But they didn’t, leaving him with only one question: Why hadn’t Anna shown it to him? She knew damn well he was looking for text with a screaming skull, so he could compare it to the images on his computer, the ones he thought were screaming and she insisted were nothing but more of good old King Jaguar-Paw Skull’s laughing skeletons.

If she had one and hadn’t showed it to him, it meant . . .

Fuck, he didn’t know what it meant.

‘‘What else did you see?’’ he demanded.

Neenie went a little wild-eyed. ‘‘Do you need to sit down or something? You’re freaking me out.’’

‘‘You had brothers. Deal with it.’’

‘‘Yeah, okay.’’ Still, she edged a little closer to the door before she said, ‘‘She kept most of it under that protective paper, so I didn’t see all of it. There were a few of those jellyfish blobs with the dots in them.’’

Which represented numbers, or sometimes dates. ‘‘How many dots? Do you remember?’’

She shook her head. ‘‘That’s not how my brain works. I can see the patterns, kind of out-of-focus, but if I concentrate too hard the lines get all jumbled up.’’

‘‘Great. Well, how about—’’ Lucius broke off. ‘‘Wait. Could you draw it from memory?’’

She looked offended. ‘‘Of course. I remember this one time my brother Max—’’

‘‘Not now. Don’t care.’’ He rummaged through his horizontal filing system—aka the pile beside his desk— and came up with a piece of sketch paper and a pencil with some lead left. ‘‘Draw.’’

She hesitated and looked at him as though considering another negotiation, but whatever she saw in his face must’ve convinced her otherwise, because she took the pencil and began to sketch.

Lucius watched, his heart actually racing as the images emerged: the curve of a skull with its mouth gaping wide; three blobs stacked one atop the next with dots beside them, spelling out a date; a highly stylized jaguar with its jaws clamped around the neck of a human figure, with spurting blood that formed a waterfall leading to a round circle wreathed in flames.

No, Lucius realized. Not a circle. A planet. Earth. Or, more specifically, the end of planet Earth.

And the transition of a god to the plane of mankind.

‘‘Fuck me,’’ he said, loud enough to make Neenie jump and drop her pencil. ‘‘Don’t stop now,’’ he said, excitement riding his tone. ‘‘Keep going!’’

‘‘I can’t. That’s all I saw.’’ She looked up at him. ‘‘What does it say?’’

He shook his head. ‘‘I don’t know.’’

‘‘You’re lying.’’

‘‘Prove it.’’ He snagged the paper before she could and stuck it in his top desk drawer. ‘‘And before you make a stink about it, don’t forget you’re the one who broke your promise.’’

She lifted her chin. ‘‘I sold out. There’s a difference.’’ Unable to argue that point—and not sure why he’d want to—Lucius crossed the room and opened the door. ‘‘Whatever. Go away.’’

She paused in the doorway and turned back to stare him in the eye, and the semiteasing look fell away from her expression. ‘‘You’re defending soon. Now is not the time to do something stupid.’’

He dipped his chin. ‘‘I know.’’

But once she was gone, heading down the hall in the same direction the Dick had taken maybe ten minutes earlier, Lucius sucked in a deep breath, told himself there was nothing gained from venturing nothing, and headed for Anna’s office.

He knocked and waited for her to call, ‘‘Come on in.’’

Her eyes widened slightly when he entered—not something he would’ve picked up on if he hadn’t been looking, but did because he was. ‘‘Expecting someone else?’’

‘‘Only because you knocked,’’ she teased, but the humor didn’t reach her eyes. She started neatening up her desk, pushing the papers to one side and reshelving a couple of books in the cases to the left of the desk. ‘‘What’s up? And make it quick, because I was just headed home.’’

Which meant either she’d decided to give in to her jerk husband, or she was lying. Lucius wasn’t sure which option pissed him off more, but he throttled it down. ‘‘Never mind, then. I thought you were staying late, so I was checking to see if you wanted anything from Dirty Martin’s,’’ he said, knowing she could occasionally be bribed with a Sissy Burger and a chocolate shake.

Her expression eased. ‘‘No, thanks. I’m good.’’ She shoved a couple of folders into her soft-sided leather briefcase and stood, slinging the strap over her shoulder. ‘‘See you tomorrow, Lucius. And . . . thanks.’’

‘‘For what?’’

She squeezed his hand briefly in passing, then tugged him out into the hallway so she could shut and lock her office door. ‘‘For being you.’’

Which left him completely baffled as she marched off, her heels clicking and her long, red-highlighted dark hair swinging opposite the motion of her walk, which he was pretty sure had an added wiggle in it as she turned the corner.