Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

It was the best he could do. And she was going to despise him for it.

‘‘I’m sorry, Blondie.’’ He arranged her on the bed and pulled a blanket over her against the cool of the lower level. ‘‘It’s better this way.’’ He would present himself at the altar beneath Chichén Itzá and offer himself up to take the whole of Kulkulkan, severing the god’s connection to her and bringing all its magic into him. He would be both Godkeeper and Nightkeeper, sacrificing any hope of a future with her for the sake of her safety.

At least, that was the plan. Jade had better hurry up with the spell, though.

Bending, Strike touched his lips to Leah’s cheek, telling himself there’d be time later for them to work things out, for her to learn to trust him. But as he straightened and turned away, it sure as hell felt like he was saying good-bye.

Which was bad enough. Worse was stepping out into the hallway to find Jox standing there, arms crossed, expression thunderous.

‘‘Don’t start.’’ Strike locked the storeroom door with an old-fashioned padlock and stuck the key in his back pocket. Then he fixed his winikin with a look. ‘‘I want your word that she stays put.’’

Jox’s face creased. ‘‘Think about what you’re doing. Please.’’

‘‘I know exactly what I’m doing. Your word.’’ Strike’s chest went tight at the knowledge that this could be the breaking point of his relationship with his winikin , too. Dropping his voice, he said, ‘‘I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t believe. Please.’’

‘‘Your father believed in his course, too.’’

‘‘Your word. Or I lock you in there with her.’’

Jox tipped his head in the barest of nods. ‘‘You have my word. And my disappointment.’’

‘‘Noted.’’ Strike turned on his heel and headed for the stairs, feeling as if the whole world were against him, and not entirely sure he gave a shit.

When Leah awoke, for a moment she thought it was a new day, that she’d somehow made it through the equinox. Then she got a good look around and remembered what had happened in the bedroom. From there, she could easily guess where she’d wound up. Locked in the freaking cellar.

‘‘Goddamn it!’’ She launched herself off the folding cot and hurled herself at the door. ‘‘Strike! Don’t do this!’’

She grabbed the knob, twisted it, and gave the heavy panel a serious hip check.

And went flying out into the hall.

She stopped, stunned, standing in a dimly lit hallway, chest heaving while her brain scrambled to catch up. The door wasn’t locked. Yet Strike had clearly set the room up as her cell . . . which meant someone else had let her out. And she could guess who’d done it.

‘‘Thank you, Jox,’’ she said under her breath, though there was a bite of sarcasm to the words, because they both knew he’d done it so she could kill herself.

Fine, she said as she headed up the stairs as quietly as she could, keeping a sharp ear for any movement up ahead. But I’m not going out alone. If she had to die, she was damn well taking Zipacna with her.

He was going to be at the sacred chamber that evening—it was a given. Strike and the others planned to arrive two hours before the equinox, when the secret door leading down to the hidden tunnels opened up.

Well, she was betting on Zipacna being earlier than that. And she was going to be waiting when he did. Carter had it all set for her—her plane tickets were waiting at the airport, and the weapons and jade-tips she’d paid too much to have smuggled across the border were waiting in a storage facility near Chichén Itzá. She just needed a change of clothes and her passport and she was good to go.

That is, until she, snagged her cell phone, and found a text message waiting for her, sent from an unfamiliar number.

Do you understand yet that the Nightkeepers must kill you to set their god free? Meet me in Pueblo Bonito if you want to live . And the bastard had the balls to sign it, Love, Vince, though he hadn’t used Vince’s phone.

Anger flared alongside adrenaline, and Leah bared her teeth in a triumphant smile. Apparently Zipacna was looking for her, too. Good. That’d save her the trip to Mexico.

Now all she had to do was make sure they both got dead before the zero hour.

Strike knelt on the footprint mat in the sacred chamber that’d been his parents’, pressed his knife-scored hands to the chac-mool where he’d loved Leah the night before, and bowed his head in prayer.

A dull ache thumped at the back of his skull, drumming with his heartbeat. The barrier was thinning—he could feel it in the anger that curled inside him, dark and tempting, and in the heat that flowed in his blood.

‘‘Gods help me make the right choice,’’ he said, hoping like hell they were listening. ‘‘Help me to know the difference between what I want to do and what I ought to do.’’ Those were the right words, the proper ones. But they weren’t at all what was in his heart, and knowing it, knowing he was in serious trouble, he said, ‘‘Kulkulkan. Creator god. There’s got to be a way to save you both. Tell me how. I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.’’

For a moment there was nothing. Then there was a flicker in his peripheral vision. Another. His attention snapped to the obsidian mirror above the altar, where torchlight reflected in strange patterns. Stranger patterns, he realized, than they’d been making before.

‘‘Please,’’ he whispered, and felt the anger stir within him. The power.

The reflected flames stirred. Intertwined. Formed a shape, then a scene, and all of a sudden he was looking at the grad student’s apartment, only not as he’d seen it, but a scene from before his arrival, when the idiot was reading from the codex fragment, his lips moving with the ancient words.

Then the fire picture was gone, and the flames were only flames.

Strike blinked. Blinked again.

And got it. It was the damn transition spell.

‘‘It’s the same spell,’’ he said aloud. ‘‘The makol , the gods. Same transition spell.’’ That was why Leah had wound up hooked to Kulkulkan at the solstice—Zipacna had enacted the transition spell to make himself an ajaw-makol , and in doing so had opened not only the passage to Xibalba, but the skyroad as well.

It was the same. Fucking. Spell. What mattered was the orientation of the user, good versus evil. Only they didn’t have the spell, he realized. Lucius had burned it.

‘‘Damn it!’’ He slammed his palms on the altar and pushed away. Then he froze.

Maybe they did have the spell. Red-Boar had wiped the guy’s memories, which meant he’d experienced them. He’d heard the spell. Odds were, he’d filed it—the brain of a mind-bender was a strange, convoluted place.

Question was, would he give it up?

‘‘Only one way to find out.’’ Strike strode from the royal suite, combat boots thudding as the thick bedroom carpet gave way to the tiled hallway. He hesitated near the stairs going down to the basement, but knew he should stay the hell away from Leah just now. The Nightkeepers were leaving in an hour; they’d be back after the equinox. That’d be soon enough to let her out and try to make amends.

Gods willing.

His heart ached with what he’d been forced to do to her, and with the fear that there wouldn’t be an ‘‘after’’ for them. But he set all that aside—or tried to—burying it deep as he strode out the back to Red-Boar’s cottage and slammed through the door without knocking. ‘‘I need you to—’’

He broke off because Red-Boar wasn’t in his usual spot at the kitchen table. Rabbit sat there instead, his hoodie pulled way down, his shoulders hunched.