The third time the zombies moonwalked across the big TV screen and the children in the center of the auditorium cheered, Jox leaned over to Hannah, and whispered, “Please tell me it’s almost over.”
The pretty brunette snickered. “Not a chance. This is the extended version- we’ve got a good ten minutes left.”
The androgynous singer on-screen howled, “Thriller, Thriller, yeah!” over an idiot throb of bass, and Jox groaned. “The gods couldn’t possibly be that cruel.”
“Ah.” She waggled a finger at him. “At the risk of quoting our fearless leader, if it’s easy, it’s not much of a sacrifice.”
That drew a few chuckles from a handful of other winikin standing nearby, but the laughter died quickly.
Jox and fifty more of the winikin, ranging in age from twenty to thirty-five and wearing at-home casuals of jeans and tees, stood on a platform that ran around the football field-sized Great Hall, keeping watch over the children. Uniformly dark-haired and small in stature, the winikin served the Nightkeepers, acting as both support staff and moral compass to the warrior-priests, who themselves served and protected mankind, though mankind had no frigging clue it needed protecting.
Not yet, anyway. And if everything went according to plan tonight, humanity would never know just how close it’d come to total annihilation. If the planned attack failed, however, it would be up to the winikin to get the children to safety.
I’m trusting you with the future, the king had said to Jox. Don’t let me down.
“I do it like this you mean?” a high voice called over the din.
Recognizing the piping tones of one of his two young charges, Jox looked up in time to see a whip-thin boy force his Nike hightops into a passable reverse glide that looked almost- but not quite- like a moonwalk.
With his dark hair growing out from its early summer wiffle, wearing baggy cargo pants and a too-large t-shirt on his bony frame, nine year-old Striking Jaguar- Strike to his pals- would’ve looked like any other kid in the rec room if it weren’t for the double mark on his inner forearm: the snarling jaguar glyph that denoted his Nightkeeper bloodline, and the ju symbol, shaped like the head of the Jester God, that proclaimed him as royalty.
That, and the fact that everyone in the room was subtly aware of him.
The younger kids, both the big Nightkeepers and their smaller winikin counterparts, gave way to Strike as he tried to emulate the dancers on the big rec room television, where that gods-awful video howled on.
The older kids, the ones who’d been forced to stay behind at the training center because they hadn’t yet hit puberty and gotten their talent marks, were less subtle in their attempts to suck up to the heir. A tall girl with pale hair and skin, wearing the mark of the owl bloodline on her forearm, clapped her hands and cheered Strike’s dancing. “That’s exactly right. Then you can add a spin like this.” She demonstrated a shimmying move worthy of Club MTV and added a Jackson-esque “Woo!” at the end that had the younger kids squealing and more than a few of the older boys eyeing her ass.
“Five bucks says she’s jacked in at the next solstice,” Jox said, referring to the ancient ceremony- part sexual, part sacrificial- that each Nightkeeper underwent at maturity in order to gain full access to their magic. He kept his voice low so only Hannah could hear. As winikin to the king’s children, he tried to maintain a certain level of class, but Hannah was his oldest and best friend- and might’ve been more if it hadn’t been for his responsibilities- so he didn’t feel the need to guard his tongue.
“She could’ve jacked in at the spring equinox, but her mother didn’t want-“ Hannah broke off. “Never mind.”
“Shit. Don’t tell me stuff like that.” Sedition- and withholding a magic user from battle certainly counted as that- was a punishable offense. Unfortunately, the owl girl’s mother wasn’t the only one who hadn’t wanted her offspring involved in the king’s plan to permanently seal the barrier.
Scarred-Jaguar had dreamed thirteen nights in a row that the Nightkeepers were supposed to destroy the intersection of the earth, sky and underworld nearly three decades before the prophecies said the end-time battles were supposed to occur. More importantly, those dreams had included the spell that would bring the intersection to life. . . a spell that had been lost since the mid-1500s, when the Conquistador’s had burned the Nightkeepers’ spellbooks and killed most of the warrior-priests in their zeal to Christianize the New World.
According to the king’s visions, the moment the intersection opened, the Nightkeepers were to join their powers and destroy the link between the earth and underworld forever, blocking the denizens of the underworld, the Banol Kax, from ever again coming to earth to wreak their havoc. The king believed in the plan with every fiber of his increasingly fanatical being.
Please gods, let him be right, Jox prayed. Let them succeed. But Jox was just a winikin. The gods didn’t talk to the likes of him.
Trying not to be annoyed with Hannah because she’d known about the owl girl’s maturity and hadn’t said anything sooner, Jox scanned the room, looking for the sort of trouble that brewed when fifty-plus kids between the ages of two months and fifteen years were stuffed into a single room and told to behave themselves, or else.
He wasn’t in charge of all of them, thank the gods. Around the age of twenty, each winikin became directly responsible for one or two children, when a forearm mark- the aj-winikin glyph of an adult’s hand cupping a sleeping child’s face- appeared on the winikin’s forearm at the moment of the child’s birth. At the same time, the servant became indirectly responsible for every member of the child’s bloodline, as shown by the smaller bloodline glyphs that appeared on the winikin’s right arm and chest, each one representing a living member of the bloodline.
In addition to those marks, Jox also wore four smaller replicas of the royal ju glyph on his forearm, representing the king, the queen and their two children. That give him the dubious honor of being the highest-ranking winikin in the room. . . which meant if the king and queen came home safe tomorrow- gods willing- and found the training center a post-party disaster area- or worse- it’d be his ass.
At the moment, though, everything seemed to be under control.
The Great Hall was a giant rectangle, with white plastered walls and exposed beams carved with glyphs representing the four cardinal directions, where the Ancestors believed the world jaguars held up the corners of the sky. Jox and most of the other winikin stood on an elevated shelf that ran the perimeter of the room, giving them a clear view of danger- and mischief.
Down below, the older kids were either on the dance floor or clustered around the various entertainment stations that lined the long walls of the room. The billiard, foosball and ping-pong tables were in all in heavy use, as were the Pac Man and pinball machines, which acted as staging areas for the teens to get their flirt on. Once the magic users hit sexual maturity and went through the full jack-in ceremony, their hormones would settle down some. In the last few weeks and months before the ceremony, though, the prepubescent mages started to give off psi-vibes that everyone in the vicinity- Nightkeeper and winikin alike- perceived as a shout of, Do me!
And quite often and despite intense chaperoning, they did.
Jox counted heads and breathed a sigh of relief when he came up with the right number of older kids. The younger ones were far easier to keep track of. Beneath a permanent soundproof barrier spell, the children under the age of three were segregated off in one corner of the large room, sleeping in rows of cribs under the watch of the youngest winikin. The four-to-eight year-olds were gathered inside a low corral of bookcases near the babies, also soundproofed against slow death by Michael Jackson. Most of them were sacked out on foam mattresses, clutching Cabbage Patch dolls or Transformers, but a handful of stubborn sleep-fighters were grouped in a loose circle around Jox’s other charge, thirteen year-old princess Anna-Paw.
From the looks of her fierce expressions and claw-fingered gestures, along with the pop-eyed stares of her audience, she was telling them one of the Hero Twin stories that’d been handed down from generation to generation since the time of the First Father. Though fairly gruesome- and thus guaranteed to hold the attention of overtired kids- each of the legends ended with exactly the right message: the Nightkeepers always kicked some serious Banol Kax ass.
Good girl, Jox thought, smiling at Anna.
She was the image of her queen mother, all long limbs and glossy mid-brown hair, but her eyes were the dark, cobalt blue of her father’s jaguar bloodline, and she had the king’s ingrained sense of duty and honor. She also had his power, Jox thought when the girl glanced at him, as though she’d felt his gaze. She hadn’t yet matured into her full talent, but she already showed the signs of being a formidable seer.
She hadn’t seen dreamed the same visions as the king, though. Nobody had.
Jox turned his gaze to the two big clocks that hung on the wall above the television. One was a digital display that ran in reverse, measuring out the years and days to the end-time. Twenty-eight years and six months left, and counting. The other was a normal forward-moving clock. Just then, it was creepy-crawling to the moment of the summer solstice, the moment the king’s vision said the Nightkeepers were supposed to open the intersection and do their thing.
Three minutes and counting.
“Nothing yet,” Hannah said, glancing down at the marks on her wrist.
The winikin weren’t magic users, but the marks themselves were magic, imbued with the power of the First Father when he bound a group of Egyptian slaves to the Nightkeeper children they had saved from Akhenaten’s monotheistic purge, and charged the winikin with a single task: keep the bloodlines alive until the end-time, no matter what. Ever since then, each time a member of the bloodline died, one of the glyphs disappeared in a flash of pain from the arms of every winikin bound to that line.
So far, so good. Two minutes to go, and none of the glyphs had disappeared.
“You should be with the baby,” Jox murmured. “Just in case.”
“I know.” Hannah glanced down at the infants’ area, where she’d gotten her best friend, Izzy, to watch her tiny charge for a few minutes. Instead of hurrying away as the countdown continued, though, Hannah took Jox’s hand, raised it to her face and pressed his palm to her cheek. “Be safe.”
His heart tightened in his chest, heavy with the knowledge that he couldn’t put her first, not with his responsibilities to the jaguar bloodline. But when she released his hand, instead of letting it fall away from her soft, warm skin like he knew he should, he slid his grip to the back of her neck and drew her closer.
“Maybe after,” he whispered, and touched his lips to hers.
She hesitated for a fraction of a second as if wondering whether he actually meant it, and then hissed out a breath and returned the kiss, crowding close. His head spun and heat detonated as her flavor- that of a friend and so much more- seeped into him, bringing a surge of lust long denied.
Maybe after. It was what they were all saying- Nightkeeper and winikin alike- if not aloud, then in their hearts. Maybe after the intersection was sealed, they could break away from lives ruled by ancient roles and fragmented prophecies. If the end-time could be prevented from ever beginning, then the Nightkeepers wouldn’t need to protect mankind anymore. The winikin wouldn’t need to serve anymore. They could all disband, disperse, go off to live as they chose. Jox thought he’d like to own his own business, maybe a garden center he could run with his wife while their children played tag in the balled-and-burlapped section.
And he was so getting ahead of himself.
As the final minute began to tick down, he broke the kiss and gave her a little push. “Go on. Get back to work.”
He didn’t watch her go. He watched the clock. Forty-five seconds. Twenty-five. Fifteen. Five. Three. Two. One. There was a collective indrawn breath when half the wristwatches in the room went off in a chaos of digital bleats as the solstice came. . .
And absolutely nothing happened.
Michael Jackson warbled on as the second hand swept past the critical moment by thirty seconds. Thriller. . . Thriller, yeah. . . One minute. Two. Three.
After five minutes, there was a collective exhale, and a few cheers, and the kids in the middle of the room, who’d frozen in place when the moment came, started to dance again, only a few at first, then more and more, their bodies twisting in increasingly frenzied movements as the tension released and excitement began to build.
The winiken to Jox’s immediate left, a sturdy guy named Kneeland who was bound to the axe bloodline, said out of nowhere, “Hannah, huh?” He elbowed Jox in the ribs. “Rock on, Jox-ster. We didn’t think you had it in you. Ever since Strike was born, you’ve been so caught up in- Fuck!” Kneeland went dead pale and clawed at his arm. “Oh, no. No! Please gods, no!”
Gasps and screams ripped through the winikin, echoing at the perimeter of the hall. A terrible pain sliced up Jox’s arm and sick dread spurted through his bloodstream as he flipped his arm and stared at the black tattoo-like marks.
There was a ripple of motion as the jaguar glyphs disappeared one by one.
Blood red washed across his vision. Agony climbed his arm, bringing sick fear and disbelief. Heart hammering, he wanted to scream for his people, for himself, but clamped his teeth on the shout as tears ran down his cheeks. Then, like a switch had been thrown, the pain was gone.
So were almost all of the glyphs on his forearm. Including two of the four royal marks.
The king is dead, he thought as the world shattered around him. Long live the king.
Down below, the dancing became a dirge as the girls- most of whom had the sight to one degree or another- screamed at the things they saw in their minds, or wept for their parents. The boys were shouting and running around, banging on the gun cabinet and the locked and warded exterior doors, ready to fight.
Strike was right in the thick of the war cry, his pale skin nearly bloodless, his eyes dark with grief. In the crèche area, Anna was crouched down with her arms encircling as many sobbing children as she could reach, soothing them even as her shoulders shook with her own tears.
Kneeland grabbed Jox’s arm, his fingers digging down to the bone. “We’ve got to do something! They’re dying! What do we do? What do we-”
“Get a grip.” Jox shook off the other man. “The kids are the priority. We’re safe here. The hall is warded, and if we batten down-“
Yellow light flared all around them as the wards fell. Jox’s heart froze in his chest. Impossible, he thought. The wards had been set by blood-sacrifice from the strongest of the Nightkeepers. The only creature capable of breaching them was a-
“Boluntiku!” shouted a winikin named Olivar as a dark shadow rose from the floor, radiating terrible magma-borne heat that set the parquet aflame. The lava-creature coalesced out of a nightmare, rising up from the bowels of the earth itself, a swirling image of red-brown scales that remained translucent as it formed a six-fingered hand tipped with razor-sharp claws, and swung.
In the moment before it touched Olivar, the thing turned solid.
Blood geysered and Olivar’s body arched like crossbow strung too tight, suspended from the boluntiku’s six-clawed grip.
A chatter of gunfire rang out, sounding loud even through the screams, and Olivar’s body jerked with the impact of bullets fired by a terrified-looking winikin who’d had the presence of mind to unlock the gun cabinet and grab a MAC-10 auto-pistol loaded with jade-tipped bullets.
The bullets had to hit to work, though, and these didn’t. The boluntiku- an underworld creature of legend so old even the ancestors had doubted their existence- puffed to vapor so the bullets passed harmlessly through and Olivar’s limp body dropped to the floor. Then the thing turned on the shooter, turning solid in the moment before it attacked.
Seconds later, the winikin was dead and the weapons cabinet was a mass of shattered wood and twisted metal.
Jox was moving before he’d even processed what was happening, running toward the children he was bound to protect. There was only one explanation for what was happening: the attack had failed, and the intersection was wide open. Worse, the training center was breached. There was a boluntiku in the rec room. Shit, there were five boluntiku, with more of them vaporing through the floor every second.
According to the old stories, which was the only place the boluntiku had existed for generations, the things could smell magic.
They could also smell royalty.
As one, the creatures zeroed in on Anna, who was fighting her way toward Strike through the crush piled up near the main exit. The kids were struggling to open the locked doors. There were winikin in the mix, too, scrambling to get their charges out of the melee, screaming as more boluntiku erupted from the floor and set upon them, mowing down Nightkeepers and winikin with scythe-like claws and gnashing teeth as they closed in on Anna and Strike, two from each side.
“No!” Jox screamed, his voice breaking on the word as he fought his way toward them. Terrified cries rose up around him and the floor was slick with blood, but the First Father’s directive gave him tunnel vision, focusing him entirely on the children he was sworn to protect.
A huge boluntiku rose up from the middle of the crush, rearing up and flaring its claws to swing at Anna, who was trying to shield Strike with her body. Too late, Jox thought, desperation pounding in his veins as he struggled through a sea of panic and gore. He was going to be too late.
The creature went solid, killing everyone who’d been inside the confines of its vapor body, and attacked. In the second before the six-fingered claws raked the children, gunfire chattered and jade-tipped bullets struck home.
The boluntiku jerked back with a shriek that sounded like a thousand fingernails scratching across a giant blackboard, and spun toward its attacker. Jox turned, too, and saw Kneeland standing in front of the big TV, holding a dented MAC-10 while tears rolled down his cheeks. When the winikin caught Jox’s eye, he flashed his forearm.
It was bare. His children- and their bloodline- were gone.
With nothing left to live for, Kneeland lifted the auto-pistol in salute, then ran across the raised platform and leapt straight for the huge boluntiku. The thing stayed solid and caught him mid-air, clasping him around the middle with its claws and hoisting him to its gaping, hundred-toothed mouth.
The moment before it bit down, Kneeland let loose with the auto-pistol, emptying the clip. The back of the creature’s head blew out in a spray of blackish blood and rust-colored scales as its jaws closed with an audible crunch.
Kneeland’s body went limp, then fell to the ground in a bloody heap when the boluntiku vaporized in death, opening up a corpse-filled hole in the panicked mob. Retching, Jox hurdled the limp obstacles and tried not to think of them as people who’d been alive only seconds earlier. Nightkeepers. Winikin. Children. Gods help us!
Around him, the screams and blackboard-chalk howls continued, some choked off mid-cry, and the air smelled of blood and death. Then he was there, at the doors, and Anna grabbed for him and she was hanging on to Strike, and all Jox could think about was getting them the fuck out of there.
Someone must’ve hit the panic release- shit, he should’ve thought of that sooner- because the doors weren’t locked anymore, they were wide open and survivors were running out into the starlit canyon where the training center was hidden, deep within the badlands.
The winikin dragged their children away from the carnage, running for their lives, but the boluntiku pursued with single-minded ferocity, their vapor bulks partially submerged beneath the ground as they gained strength from the magma flow at the earth’s mantle.
“Jox, come on!” Anna pulled him toward the door. “Jox!”
Three boluntiku were closing in on them, drawn by the smell of royalty.
“No. Wait.” He checked the exits and saw that most of the escapees were headed toward the forty-car garage, or for the barns and the high canyon trails beyond. His heart bled with the knowledge that they’d never make it to the cars or horses. More importantly, it wouldn’t matter if they did, because distance was nothing to the boluntiku. Only the smell mattered.
He had to get the children somewhere shielded, someplace safe.
“This way,” he said, making the only call he possibly could, though it nearly killed him to turn his back on the others.
He made sure Anna was right behind him, grabbed a dazed-looking Strike by his waist and arm, half-carrying, half-dragging the boy across the great hall to the covered walkway leading to the main house. It’d been locked off all night, but now the doors stood open, one hanging halfway off its hinge. “Don’t look,” he ordered as their feet slid in the bloody wetness that seemed to be everywhere, and they passed body after body. He lifted Strike higher and the boy trembled and clung to him like a limpet, pressing his face into the winikin’s chest.
Jox heard fingernails-on-blackboard behind them, heard an infant’s shrill howl and a familiar voice screaming a battle cry. He didn’t turn back, but something deep inside him wept, Hannah.
Then he was inside the hallway connecting to the mansion, running like hell. Windows and framed paintings flashed past them as they ran, and their feet slapped on marble parquet. “Get the door!” he snapped. Anna ran ahead and got the heavy, carved wood panel open, then slammed it shut after Jox lunged through, carrying Strike. “To the archive. Go!”
She bolted ahead and Jox followed, feeling the pressure of pursuit even though he knew the boluntiku could just as easily morph up through the floor in front of him than behind. That they hadn’t yet suggested some of the wards had survived the systems crash, enough to slow the creatures down, at any rate.
Which might give them enough time. Barely.
Heart hammering in his chest, lungs aching, Jox staggered up two flights of stairs and down a short hallway to where Anna was waiting. There, he set Strike on his feet. The boy clung to Jox’s leg as the winikin keyed in the code to open the mechanized door that protected the single repository of all the Nightkeeper’s known magic.
Anna watched him, eyes dark with grief, with anger. “Can we fight them with a spell? Is that why we’re here?”
The door hissed open and Jox all but shoved her through. “No. No spell. No way to fight.” Not that he knew of, anyway, and not that would be any good to a winikin and two kids who weren’t even fully jacked in yet.
He slammed the door, spun and slapped his palm against the panel, and said, “K’al.” Close and lock, and gods help us.
Strike’s eyes widened. “You can use!”
“Only for this, kid.” Jox’s head pounded and his eyes felt fuzzy and disjointed, because a winikin wasn’t supposed to be able to use, ever. “Special dispensation.”
Fighting to hold it together, Jox turned and staggered across the room, past a row of Macintosh computers to a set of bookshelves. He held out his hands. “I need help.”
He’d intended for the kids to grab on and leak him as much power as they could. Instead, Strike snatched the knife from Jox’s belt, flicked it open and drew it across his palm, then tossed it to his sister, who did the same. Then they reached up and took his hands, one on each side.
At the touch of royal blood, the power boost nearly blew the top of Jox’s head off.
Suddenly, he could hear a thousand voices, screaming just out of reach. He could see images beyond the walls: the points of light that were the fleeing Nightkeepers, the warm outlines of the winikin who accompanied them, and the black silhouettes of the boluntiku closing on them in deadly pursuit. Outside the warded archive door, four giant shadows hung motionless, as though waiting. Or plotting.
Any minute now, they’d come up through the floor, despite the added spells protecting the archive.
The floor tilted beneath Jox’s feet, though he wasn’t sure if it was an earth tremor or the magic. He forced himself to concentrate, forced himself to use the spells given only to the heir’s winikin, the only of his kind allowed any magic at all.
“Pasaj,” he said in the language of the ancient Maya, with whom the Nightkeepers and their servants had lived for nearly three thousand years after the First Massacre drove them out of Egypt. Open sesame.
The bookshelf in front of him shimmered and disappeared, revealing a narrow set of stairs descending into the darkness.
“Come on.” He led the way, aware that the bookcase retook solid form after a ten-count, and equally aware that he couldn’t trust something so simple to hold off the boluntiku for long. The ward on the archive door would fail soon; the lure of magic and royalty would draw the creatures onward, and down into the earth, where they would grow more powerful with proximity to the core.
Father said nothing could get through once we’re inside the safe room, Jox reminded himself. He didn’t say the words aloud because that was when it hit him- really hit him- that his family was gone, too. His parents had accompanied the king and queen, and would’ve given their lives before seeing their charges harmed. That was what it meant to be winikin.
He swallowed hard and tried to damp down the sharp, tearing grief that made him want to curl into a ball and howl. He couldn’t lose it, not now. Through the sticky contact of the children’s blooded hands, he sensed the bright lights snuffing out one by one overhead as the young Nightkeepers died. He clamped his teeth shut, trapping the cry when pain flashed in his arm once, twice and then a third time, marking the murders of the king’s two nieces and nephew. Gods.
His legs threatened to buckle beneath him, but the First Father’s imperative, backed up by the king’s command, drove him onward: Save the children.
He led them down the stairs, into the darkness. For the first forty treads or so there was light, brought by the wan glow of two bulbs just inside the door. Then the stairs doubled back on themselves, and the bend in the tunnel squelched even that faint illumination.
Moving blind, Jox let go of Anna’s hand so he could feel his way by trailing his fingers along the wall to his right. The cool, damp surface was even and faintly rough. Cement, most likely poured when the foundation for the training center had gone in during the late 1920s, under the supervision of the children’s great-grandfather who’d been king back then, and Jox’s twice-great grandfather, who had been the royal winikin.
Then, as now, the tunnel had been intended as a last-gap survival measure, an assurance that if history repeated itself as the writs said it would, and another massacre came, the Nightkeepers would continue on as they had done for thousands of ears, the lineages unbroken.
Gods willing.
They hit the bottom of the staircase. Jox stumbled but caught himself quickly, and felt along the walls on either side. His fingertips found a flat button. When he pressed it, a set of blast doors ground into place behind them, closing them in. The air instantly began to feel close and stale.
Strike whimpered, the sound echoing in the darkness along with Anna’s voice, which trembled as she told him everything was going to be okay.
Jox wondered if she knew she was lying.
Six more paces brought them to a dead end, where he shifted the children off to the side. “Here,” he said to Strike. “Take your sister’s hand.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I need to- ah. Got it.” Jox felt around the small box set into the wall where the tunnel dead-ended, searching for the button his father had described. Finding it, he hit the switch and crossed his fingers that the thing had juice.
For a moment nothing happened, and his stomach clutched. Then there was a faint hum and a panel slid aside, revealing a lit keypad and digital display that had obviously been modernized since the twenties, though he didn’t know when, or by whom.
Blowing out a relieved breath, Jox tapped in the code, 12-21-2012, and a green bulb lit overhead, bathing them briefly in an alien glow.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, showing the kids huddled together against the wall, he became aware of the air growing thin, the damp cement walls pressing close, and the utter stillness. Without the blood connection to Anna’s sight, he couldn’t tell what was going on overhead, and with the blast doors sealed, he couldn’t tell whether the wards had given way yet.
Thirty seconds after he’d tapped in the code, the wall in front of them slid aside and fluorescent lights came up, revealing a square cement-walled room beyond. It was maybe ten feet by fifteen, with racks on three sides holding blankets and provisions, along with a row of blood-locked binders representing the major magic and history of the Nightkeepers, all the way forward from their Atlantean roots.
He paused at the threshold, throat closing when he realized this was it. This could very well be all that was left of the Nightkeepers- a handful of books and two kids. When he stepped through that door and sealed them into the safe room, which had been consecrated and warded with the strongest of rituals and the lifeblood of a willing sacrifice, he was admitting defeat.
Face it, we’re already fucked, he thought. We lost. This is damage control. Heart aching, he turned his hand palm-up and looked at his forearm.
Only two Jaguar glyphs remained, one for each of the children. He glanced back at them, seeing their faces deeply shadowed in the green-tinted light. Anna’s eyes had gone wide and vacant, and silent tears tracked down her cheeks. It was as though she’d gone inside herself, somewhere far away he couldn’t follow. Strike, in contrast, had come back to life. He was right in the moment, his sturdy body angled ahead of hers, as though challenging the boluntiku to come and get him.
With his face set in concentration, the nine year-old prince suddenly looked like his father. Like a king.
That realization held Jox paralyzed for a second, until a dull thud reverberated through the tunnel, followed by a high-pitched chalkboard whine that riffled the fine hairs on the back of his neck and brought gooseflesh to his arms.
“Get in.” He tugged the children through the door into the square, utilitarian cell, and tapped the same code into a keypad that was set into the wall on the inside, a mirror image of the one in the tunnel. There was no delay this time; the panel slid shut immediately. When it was closed, Jox placed his palm flat against the surface and repeated the charm he’d used upstairs.
The door seams shimmered and disappeared, leaving him with a hell of a headache and a strong desire to puke up a lung. No wonder winikin don’t use, he thought on a stab of pain. It sucks.
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of their breathing. Then Strike said, “They’re dead, aren’t they?”
Jox didn’t know if he meant the friends he’d been playing with upstairs or his mother and father, and the Nightkeepers they’d led to the sacred temple beneath the Maya ruins at Chichen Itza, but his nod encompassed all those things. “Yes.”
He expected the boy to ask why or how. Instead, Strike looked around the room, at the whitewashed walls that seemed to pulse in the harsh fluorescent lights, at the provisions and the vents in the ceiling, which cycled the air to gods only knew where. “What is this place? Is it safe?”
“We’re inside a blood-ward.” Jox’s head pounded with the beat of his heart, and he could feel the connection to the ward power, which came from the ashes of a sacrificed Nightkeeper mixed into the cement all around them. “I can hold it as long as necessary.” Or he’d die trying, but he didn’t think the kids needed to hear that part. Instead, he moved toward the racks and started pulling down blankets and pillows, along with changes of clothing and wet-naps. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up and comfortable. We’ll sleep down here tonight, then see what’s what in the morning.”
Strike didn’t move. “It’s a pretty big room for just the three of us.”
“I know.” Jox closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool metal shelving, feeling the power throb beneath his skin and hating every pulse. “I couldn’t bring the others.”
“Because Father said not to?”
“No.” Jox shook his head, knowing that the king would’ve saved as many as he could’ve packed in there. “Because it’s not my job to save the others. It’s my job to save you. I couldn’t risk bringing anyone else down here.” Not even Hannah and the baby.
The First Father, the only adult survivor of the first massacre back in Akenaten’s Egypt, had cast the spell in 1350 B.C., creating the winikin and burying the imperative deep within each of them: because what has happened before will happen again, the servants are charged thusly: should the fathers and mothers fall, the children must be saved; the chain must remain unbroken until the end-time or all mankind is lost.
Strike stared at him for a minute, expression accusatory, eyes older than they should have been. Then he nodded, the motion jerky. “Thank you.”
The words came out thick but true, and a hard ball of emotion fisted itself beneath Jox’s heart at the realization that this child who should have been king would likely have nobody to lead when they emerged the following day, once the solstice had passed and the barrier between the earth and underworld was once again too thick for the boluntiku to remain on this side. Strike wouldn’t be just another boy, though, and his sister would be far from just another girl.
They would be the last of the Nightkeepers.
A shiver crawled down Jox’s spine, though the room was temperature-controlled by some hidden mechanism that no doubt functioned in tandem with the air recycler. He wanted to kneel down, and pray that this was all a terrible nightmare. He wanted to wake up and hear Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk, the king’s closest advisors, standing in the hallway outside the royal suite, arguing over something stupid. He wanted Hannah to ‘accidentally’ bump into him near the kitchen. He wanted everything to be back to normal.
But nothing would ever be normal again, would it?
Choking back the sob that threatened to rip itself from his throat, Jox changed out of his blood-soaked clothes and wiped the worst of the gore off his skin before pulling on a set of the one-size-fits-most green scrubs that were racked along with the survival gear. Then he helped the kids do the same, all the while straining for some sense of what was going on outside the blood-ward. But there was no sound, no tremor of sight, not even when he leeched power off the kids and tried to see through the walls. The ward was a two-way block: nothing in, nothing out.
Finally, after tossing Strike an MRE and a bottle of water, Jox dumped the pillows and blankets in the corner opposite where the door had been. Then he sat with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him, and patted the blanket. “Come on. This’ll be easier if we hang onto each other.”
Anna, still seriously out of it, didn’t react. After a moment, Strike took her hand and led her across the room, then urged her down onto the blanket. Together, he and Jox tucked another blanket around her, until all that was visible of her was her bloodless face and staring blue eyes. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing anything except breathing long, slow swallows of air.
She’s in shock, thought Jox. We all are.
Knowing there was nothing they could do at this point but wait out the solstice, he helped Strike settle down beside him, and then pulled the last blanket over them both, more because it felt like a shield than because he was cold.
After a long silence, he said, “Pick a story. Any story.”
He couldn’t talk about what had just happened. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Strike held himself stiff and still for a long moment, then finally sighed and nestled closer to his winikin. His voice was thin and tired when he said, “I want the one about the Hero Twins and the house of bats.”
Jox almost said no, thinking they’d be better with a happy story, not one about a beheading. But then he realized that wasn’t the story the boy truly wanted to hear- it was the next one in the mythic creation cycle, the one where the young hero’s severed head was restored through trickery and guile, and the siblings used their magic to bring their father back from the dead.
Come to think of it, he needed to hear that one, too. So he settled back, closed his eyes and thought of his own father teaching him the story when he was a little boy.
Jox’s voice was rough with grief and fear, and the strain of holding the ward though he was only a winikin, but the words took on an ancient music and power when he began: “The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, traveled to the underworld in search of their father and survived the first three trials the Banol Kax had contrived- the house of cold, the house of jaguars and the house of fire. On the fourth night, the Banol Kax put them inside the house of bats, which was full of death bats. These were great beasts with teeth like ceremonial knives, who wanted to kill the young boys. But Hunahpu and Xbalanque had their blowguns with them. . .”
Jox talked long through the night, telling story after story until his voice went ragged and the legends stopped seeming like legends at all, instead seeming like something he was living in his own skin.
Finally, the solstice passed. The sun came up. And a new day dawned.