“You don’t know that for sure.”
“If I’m an itza’at, then it wasn’t a case of my brain plugging in my latest lover,” Alexis countered, fixing her winikin with a look. “Which probably isn’t what you wanted to hear.”
Izzy looked away, refusing to comment. In the distance a coyote howled, sounding mournful and alone.
“You ready to tell me what you’ve got against Blackhawk?” Alexis pressed, though she’d never gotten far with the question before. “You raised me to want to be the best at everything, right? So why wouldn’t you want me allied with another Nightkeeper? Gods know my magic could use some help.”
“He’s untrustworthy,” Izzy said, though Alexis got the distinct feeling there was more to it than that. “He already tossed you over once. Why would you go back there?”
“Lack of options?” Alexis said wryly, though she didn’t mean it, not really. What was—or rather had been—between her and Nate had always been way more complicated than simple chemistry.
She’d known his medallion before she’d ever met him, and had a feeling he’d recognized her on some level, though she’d never gotten him to admit it. And while their temperaments and priorities were very different, the sex had been easy . . . and phenomenal. Why shouldn’t she wonder whether it was worth another try, especially after her vision?
But Izzy wagged a finger at her. “Don’t settle.”
“But the magic—”
“I taught you better,” the winikin interrupted. “Find your own magic. Don’t put that on a mate, or you’ll only be disappointed.”
For a second Alexis thought she saw something in the other woman’s expression. “You sound like you’re speaking from personal experience. Would that be you or my mother?” When the winikin said nothing, Alexis knew she’d hit a chord. Pressing, she said, “Is this about my father?”
She bore her mother’s bloodline name and glyph, not her father’s, which was highly unusual, and Izzy always avoided mentioning the man who’d sired her, except to say that her parents had loved each other. All Alexis really knew about her father was that he’d been a mage of the star bloodline, and he’d died a few months before the massacre.
“He has nothing to do with this or you,” Izzy said, her expression going grim. “He was a good man who wanted only the best for you and your mother.” But then her face softened and she reached across the picnic table to grip Alexis’s hands in her own. “Just please promise me you won’t act based on any of these visions until you’ve talked to somebody about them.”
“Like who? In case you haven’t noticed, part of the reason we’re having trouble figuring out what the hell happened today is because we don’t have a seer. Which means I can’t exactly ask a seer.”
“The eclipse ceremony is in a couple of days. Anna will be here. Talk to her.”
Anna was an itza’at; it was true. But she couldn’t control her visions, and really, really didn’t like talking about magic. Not exactly a primo source of info. But Alexis nodded, mostly to appease her winikin. “Fine. I’ll talk to her.”
“And you won’t make any decisions until then?”
Alexis snorted. “Nate and I are headed to New Orleans tomorrow to buy a knife from a wannabe witch who calls herself Mistress Truth. We’ll be lucky if we don’t kill each other on the plane ride, never mind finding time for some one-on-one.” Still, she felt a kick of excitement at the prospect of the trip, and the thought of Nate seeing her at her best—negotiating a purchase. Which just went to show that she so wasn’t over him, despite what she kept telling herself.
“Promise me,” Izzy said, her voice low.
“Fine, I promise I won’t do anything about the vision,” Alexis said, tempering it with a mental, for now, anyway.
Since her swimming mojo had been thoroughly disrupted, she exchanged good-nights with Izzy and headed back to her room to read over the references Jade had found to the Order of Xibalba. Sitting on the elegant gray sofa she’d had shipped down from the city, Alexis started reading the summary report Jade had pulled together.
Strike seemed to think the enemy mage might have something to do with the Xibalbans, while Jox kept insisting the order was nothing more than a bogeyman legend the Nightkeepers and winikin had used to scare the crap out of their kids and keep them more or less behaving. But eventually Jox had admitted that the legend, like so many others, was rooted in fact. The Order of Xibalba had existed, and its members had been seriously bad news.
More important, they’d been marked with a quatrefoil glyph that represented the entrance to hell.
Which meant . . . what? Was the guy she’d gone up against a surviving member of the original order, or someone who’d gotten hold of their magic, maybe through a spell book or something? And if it was one of those things, what the hell did it mean for the Nightkeepers?
Unfortunately, the more she read, the worse it sounded.
Some of the references Jade had uncovered said the order had arisen from the Mayan shaman-
priests themselves, who had been astronomers and mystics in their own right, aside from their association with the Nightkeepers. Other references suggested the order arose when a group of rogue Nightkeepers split off and began to teach the Mayan priests some of the Nightkeepers’ spells, which was forbidden. When the Nightkeepers’ king had learned of the betrayal he’d gone after the rogues and their followers, who had fled into the highlands and disappeared into hiding, emerging only on the cardinal days, when they practiced their dark arts.
After that point the stories converged to agree on one major point: Around the year A.D. 950, the Xibalbans—which was how they’d come to be known by that point—had somehow breached the barrier and unleashed several of the Banol Kax onto the earth plane. The demons had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Maya, wiping out entire cities and putting the empire on the brink of collapse. The Nightkeepers had eventually managed to recapture the creatures and restore the barrier, but the damage had been done. The Mayan Empire had never recovered to the heights it’d achieved prior to the Xibalbans’ attack, soon losing ground to the vicious Inca, Aztecs, and Toltecs, who had flourished with the help of the Xibalbans until the fifteen hundreds, when the Xibalbans convinced them to welcome Cortés and his conquistadors. The Nightkeepers warned that the conquistadors should be sent away, but their counsel went unheeded. The two decades following Cortés’s landing had seen the deaths of ninety percent of the Maya, Inca, Aztec, and Toltec; the destruction of the Mayan writing system; and the slaughter of all the polytheistic priests. A few dozen Nightkeepers had escaped, and the Xibalbans had disappeared entirely from the historical record, which was largely why Jox and the others assumed they’d been wiped out.
Had they, like the Nightkeepers, hidden themselves, focusing on training for the end-time wars? Or had the order truly disappeared, meaning that the enemy mage was a new breed of danger?
Damned if I know, Alexis thought, flipping Jade’s report back to the first page and starting to reread it more carefully, in case she’d missed something critical the first time through. As she did so, though, she knew she was just avoiding thinking about her convo with Izzy, and the fact that she and Nate were going to be doing the close-proximity thing the next day when they traveled to Louisiana.
They were flying commercial because Leah had long ago decreed that Strike’s teleport powers were emergency-only. Which only made sense; they didn’t know enough about the magic to predict its limitations. What if he had only so many zaps in him, and they used them up blip-ping off to get beer or something? Bad idea.