And it’s probably on the other side of the damn cave-in, he realized, his stomach dropping in acid disappointment. Unless . . . he thought, jumping into the myth with both feet, not sure when he would hit bottom, what if it’s starscript? The Maya had sometimes used moonlight to hide secret text within public carvings. The Nightkeepers had used the stars.
Holding his breath, he turned off his flashlight.
It was damned eerie standing there, alone in the darkness waiting for his eyes to adjust, knowing that Ambrose Ledbetter’s skull was only a few feet away. He found himself saying quietly, “I promise that I’ll find her. I’ll protect her. I swear it on my life.”
The words came out of nowhere, as did the urge to close his hand on the machete blade so it scored his palm across the thick ridge of scar tissue. Realizing he’d done exactly that without meaning to, he closed his eyes, balled his bleeding hand into a fist, and repeated the vow.
His blood dripped to join the other stains, and the hum in the air went silent.
When he opened his eyes once again he was surrounded in silver light, starlight that had reflected in from the distant entrance. And right in front of him were words picked out in starlight that hadn’t been there for his flashlight.
It’s starscript, he thought, floored. It’s real.
Sweat broke out all over Lucius’s body at the magic of it. This was confirmation, if he’d needed it, that he was in a Nightkeeper temple. But that wasn’t the most shocking part. No, the thing that blew him away and set him back on his ass was the words the starscript spelled out. Not glyphs, not ancient Mayan. It was freaking written in English.
“Ledbetter,” he breathed. “Fuck me.” The old goat had left a message. In starscript.
It was an address.
Had Sasha read the message? Was that where she’d gone? Or had the owners of the other footprints taken her before she got the message? He refused to consider the alternative: that she’d been killed and her head was rotting on a skull pile somewhere else in the ruin. She had to be alive, had to be, though he didn’t know why the hell it was so important for him to believe that.
Breathing shallowly through his nose, he fought the shock, fought the buzz, and ignored the questions. Riding the excitement of the starscript and the thrill of the hunt, he pulled a notebook and pen out of his knapsack and scribbled down the addy. He didn’t know who or what was there, but he sure as hell intended to find out.
Anna might’ve told Strike that she’d catch an earlier plane and work on translating the starscript at the base of the Ixchel statuette, but after the cluster-freak of a thesis defense, along with Lucius letting drop that Desiree had been Dick’s mistress, Anna had needed the drive time from Austin to New Mex.
She’d driven until she’d cried herself dry and moved on to exhausted, and then she’d flopped at some motel in the middle of nowhere and slept until she woke up. Which meant that by the time she got to Skywatch, it was just about the same time she would’ve been arriving if she’d kept her original flight.
She’d needed the time alone, though. It wasn’t as if she would’ve done the Nightkeepers any good arriving early and all stuck inside her own head. While she couldn’t say she’d come to any earth-
shattering decisions along the way, at least she was vaguely centered, which she needed to be, given that the lunar eclipse was less than twenty-four hours away. Her mental shields might be slammed and locked, preventing her from seeing good, ill or anywhere in between, but she could still feel the magic growing stronger as the time passed, as the miles passed. Finally, as she pulled into the circular driveway in front of the mansion that Leah had named Skywatch, Anna had a feeling she could break through the barrier if she chose, and see the future if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. Not ever again.
“Which means the only thing I’m really contributing here is glyph geekage,” she said aloud. “So I should shift my ass and get to it.”
Still, it took her a long moment to get out of her Lexus. She’d parked out front instead of in the big garage, figuring she should make it clear from the get-go that she wasn’t staying. She was just passing through again, fulfilling her promise. But parking out front had the downside that it aimed her toward the front door, and the plaque that Leah had given Strike as a kick in the ass the previous fall when he’d refused to step up as either king or leader, trying to deny the inevitable.
That was the thing about destiny, though. Somehow the bitch always caught up with you.
Sighing, Anna stopped with her hand on the doorbell and glanced at the plaque. The name Skywatch was engraved above an etched line drawing of a ceiba tree, very like the one that grew behind the mansion, rising from the ashes of the hundreds of winikin and Nightkeeper children who had been killed during the Solstice Massacre. There was no reason the rain forest-dwelling ceiba tree should’ve been able to survive in the desert canyon; nor had it been planted by any human hand. It had sprung from the ashes of the dead as a symbol. A reminder.
It played the same role on Leah’s plaque, along with the words below it, which spelled out the motto the ex-cop had given them. Written in modern Mayan, it spelled out the three cardinal tenets the modern Nightkeepers had vowed to live: TO FIGHT. TO PROTECT. TO FORGIVE.
Except that Anna wanted to do none of those things. She just wanted to be left alone.
Sighing at the thought, and at the self-pity that had turned into too familiar a friend of late, she stopped herself from ringing the doorbell and pushed open the front door instead. She drew breath to shout a hello, knowing that Strike and Jox were expecting her, because she’d called from the road.
The greeting died in her throat when a ghost stepped into the front hallway, one that had traveled in time.
She knew his fierce eyes from her childhood, the slashing blade of his nose, and the high cheekbones. She knew the shape of his skull where he’d shaved his hair close, leaving faint bristles behind. He was slightly taller than she, and lean-hipped with youth beneath worn jeans, broad through the shoulders like all Nightkeeper males, with muscles to match the warrior’s mark he wore on his inner forearm, along with his bloodline and talent glyphs.
“Red-Boar,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure the words actually came out aloud. But did it really matter? Fantasy, figment, or spirit—surely it could read her mind?
“Hey, Anna,” the apparition said, only the voice was wrong. And then the ghost shifted from one foot to the other and slipped something into his pocket, and the air around him changed and she saw that it wasn’t the father at all. It was the son.
“Rabbit.” This time her voice had sound and shape, leaving her lungs in a rush. “You’ve grown.” It wasn’t just the size of him, either. His face was different than it’d been in the fall, which was the last time she’d seen him, because she’d made an excuse to skip the winter solstice ritual.
He half turned, and jerked his head in the direction of the great room. “Strike’s in there.”
“Thanks.” She was seriously unnerved by how much he looked like the young man his father had been, back when she was a girl and the Nightkeepers had numbered into the hundreds. She moved to pass the teen, then stopped when she saw the rough patch of a partly healed burn that twisted its way across the side of his neck, then down beneath the undershirt. She sucked in a breath. “What happened to your neck?”