Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

He was fully clothed and resting on top of the comforter while she’d slept beneath in a T-shirt and underwear, as though he’d kept watch over her, not wanting her to wake up scared. His eyes were very blue, his face haggard with emotion and exhaustion as he pressed her head back to his shoulder. ‘‘Just one more minute. Then we’ll talk.’’

She resisted for a heartbeat, then gave in and clung, because the fact that they were alone together—in her bed, no less—meant she hadn’t imagined any of it, that it’d all really happened.

Stifling a sob, she pressed against him full-length and looped an arm around his waist, holding him close, anchoring herself. Heat rose, and she was tempted to kiss him, tempted to lose herself in the madness. But that would’ve been an evasion, and she knew it. So she shifted to look at the scar she’d gotten as a child, high on her inner right wrist. He’d asked about it twice before, and each time she’d avoided the question. Now she had to wonder—if she’d told him from the very beginning, would anything have happened differently?

‘‘We were on vacation,’’ she began. ‘‘In Mexico. The Yucatán.’’

The time-share had been billed as a ‘‘rain forest retreat on the beautiful Yucatán peninsula only minutes away from the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá.’’ The house itself had been okay, but it had been the small, unrestored stone ruins tucked into the rain forest nearby that’d grabbed Leah’s attention. She’d been eight years old, Matty six, and she’d had no business sneaking out that night, even less business making her younger brother go with her. But even knowing she’d catch hell if her parents found out, she’d snagged a flashlight and headed out into the warm, humid night, far too brave for her own good, but not brave enough to go alone.

‘‘Don’t be a baby,’’ she’d said to Matty with all the lofty scorn of a two-year age gap. ‘‘I dare you.’’ And he’d gone along with her, not because of the dare, but because even back then he’d been too willing to follow the leader.

‘‘We went inside,’’ she said, remembering the damp chill of the stones, even though so much time had passed. ‘‘It wasn’t big, just a stone rectangle the size of a school bus or something. We’d checked it out that afternoon, the whole family, so I knew there wasn’t anything scary. Except when we got inside, there was a door that hadn’t been there before.’’ She paused. ‘‘School had just gotten out when we left. I don’t remember the date, but it could’ve been the summer solstice.’’

Strike nodded, and didn’t seem all that surprised. Which she supposed made sense. The phrase ‘‘twenty-four years ago at the summer solstice’’ was burned into the Nightkeepers’ collective consciousness as the night their lives had changed irrevocably.

Hers too, apparently. And her brother’s.

‘‘Go on.’’

‘‘The door led to a long tunnel that sloped down. Matty didn’t want to go in. I didn’t either, really, but there was something calling me. Like a child’s voice, only in my head, telling me it was okay, that I needed to go in there. So I did, and I made Matty come with me.’’ He’d been crying, she remembered. And she’d dragged him along anyway.

She continued, ‘‘I don’t know how far down we were, but there was this explosion, first orange, then yellow. I remember screaming and turning to run, but something hit me on the back of the head. I fell and lost hold of Matty, and then . . .’’ She trailed off. ‘‘My parents found us the next morning outside the little ruin, unconscious, and rushed us to the nearest hospital. When I woke up, my mother was crying. She stopped when Matty woke up, too. We both had burns on our arms, and . . . that was it.’’ She stared at the scar. ‘‘We went home the next day, and I spent the entire summer grounded.’’

‘‘Did you and he ever talk about what happened?’’ Strike asked, his words rumbling beneath her cheek.

‘‘Not then. But we got into a fight a few months before he died, when I found out how much time he was spending with the 2012ers. He said there was something about Zipacna that called to him, that I ought to understand what he was going through.’’ She broke off, swallowing hard. ‘‘He was so angry . . .’’ She closed her eyes, making a connection she hadn’t seen before because she hadn’t wanted to look too closely. ‘‘He’d always been a little borderline.’’

It was starting to make an awful sort of sense. The temple must’ve been some ancient place of power, maybe even one of the hidden entrances to the underground river system beneath Chichén Itzá. She’d wandered in there—or been called?—at the same time that Strike’s father and the other Nightkeepers were fighting to seal the intersection. After the Nightkeepers died the barrier started to close off, and Kulkulkan must’ve reached out to the two nearest—and possibly, because of their ages, most open-minded—humans: her and Matty. The dual god had touched them somehow, making them his. Matty had gotten the darker aspects, leading to his later troubles—or maybe he’d been predisposed to trouble, and that had attracted the darker aspects of the god; who knew? She’d gotten the lighter aspects, which included justice. Police work. It fit.

Unfortunately, it also fit that the Banol Kax had somehow known about the two of them, or sensed their connection to the god and had sent Zipacna after them.

Matty’s blood had held enough power to reactivate the barrier, Zipacna had said. Hers held enough to bring the Banol Kax through.

All because she’d gone exploring as a child.

That was why she hadn’t wanted to talk about the scar before, for fear that it would be something like this. Even before she’d learned of the Nightkeepers and the things going on beneath the surface of everyday life, she’d known Matty’s—and her—connection to the 2012ers and their Maya-based mythology wasn’t a coincidence.

‘‘He was crying,’’ she said softly, her voice cracking on guilt and despair. ‘‘He didn’t want to go into the tunnel, but I made him.’’ And in doing so, she’d started the chain of events that would eventually kill him.

‘‘You were eight.’’

‘‘I knew better.’’

‘‘You made a mistake.’’

‘‘Yes.’’ There was silence between them for a moment. She could hear sounds coming from other parts of the mansion, and the steady thump of Strike’s heart beneath her cheek. ‘‘He kept a journal,’’ she said eventually, feeling as though the words were being pushed out of her by an outside force, a compulsion to purge all the ugly truths she’d been keeping. ‘‘I guess he started seeing a therapist after his fiancée left him. I didn’t even know. . . .’’ She trailed off, feeling the weight of guilt. ‘‘The Calendar Killer task force kept it as evidence, but Connie had them make me a copy.’’

‘‘Did he write about that night in Mexico?’’ Strike asked, seeming to know she needed the prodding or she’d lose her ability to keep going. ‘‘Did he say that was why he was attracted to Zipacna and the group?’’

‘‘Not in so many words, but now that I look back, yeah.’’ She nodded. ‘‘It was in there. He talked about how he felt like he and Zipacna were connected somehow, like they’d known each other in another life.’’ She glanced at Strike. ‘‘Past lives weren’t Matty’s style. He wasn’t real artsy or spiritual. He liked things—possessions, money, pleasures—and he liked to get them the easy way. At first I thought that was the attraction of Survivor2012— the nice mansion, the fat bankroll. When I read that diary, though, it freaked me out. It sounded like he was really buying into the religion, which didn’t make any sense.’’ Now, though, maybe it was starting to. ‘‘Do you think—’’ She broke off. ‘‘Do you think he became who he was because of Kulkulkan’s darkness, or did he get the darkness because his personality already skewed that way?’’