Now, eyeing the window, which seemed to have shrunk over the past two years, he admitted inwardly that there was no way he’d fit through there now, as he had when he broke in to steal the transition ritual that Cizin had needed to come through the barrier. Lucius’s body, like his world, had gotten a whole hell of a lot bigger since he’d left campus.
Anna’s voice interrupted his prowl. “Stop pacing and sit, Lucius.”
Jade had taken a folding chair off to one side, so he dropped into the visitor’s chair, which was an old friend. He’d spent many, many hours working with Anna, their heads bent together as they argued over interpretations. The good old days, he thought with a trace of nostalgia and a hint of bitterness.
He focused on Anna, realized she was fiddling with her chain, a sure sign of nerves. “Why are we here?” he asked without preamble.
In answer, she lifted the chain from around her neck, pulling the skull effigy from beneath her shirt in the process. In the stark white light coming from the overhead fluorescents, the sacred yellow quartz glittered dully, and the shadowed eye sockets seemed to stare at him. Lucius wasn’t sure whether the jolt he felt was magic or awe at the sight of the ancient carving, which had been passed down, mother to daughter, through untold generations of itza’at seers.
The legendary crystal skulls were inextricably intertwined with the mythos of the 2012 doomsday, and had hit the mainstream with the last Indiana Jones movie—unfortunately so, in his opinion, but it wasn’t like Spielberg had asked him. And yeah, there were plenty of von Dänikenites who thought the delicately carved skulls that had been found at various Mesoamerican sites were proof of a higher—
aka alien—intelligence. But they weren’t. They were pure Nightkeeper; always had been . . . going back to the last Great Conjunction, when cataclysmic upheavals had loosed the demons from the underworld and destroyed the crystal cities of the magi, sinking them into the sea. Only a few hundred survivors had been left to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba and erect the barrier that would contain them for the next twenty-six thousand years. Turning nomadic, the magi had brought with them the few remaining artifacts they had retained from their once-great civilization . . . including thirteen life-
size crystal skulls.
The humans had found four of the skulls, all in clear quartz; three were in various museums, the fourth in a private collection. Rigorous science had concluded all four to be nineteenth-century fakes, based on their stone compositions and marks from tools that hadn’t been available to the Maya or Aztec to whom they were supposedly ascribed. Which wasn’t entirely wrong . . . The timing was just off by two dozen millennia or so. Of the remaining nine skulls, some of yellow quartz, some of pink, six were safely locked in the middle archive at Skywatch, two were missing in action . . . and one had been broken up into thirteen smaller skull effigies that had been given to the itza’at seers of the Nightkeepers. Twelve had disappeared the night of the massacre. Only Anna’s remained.
Lucius didn’t remember reaching out to touch it, but he was suddenly holding it in his hand, feeling the echoed warmth of Anna’s body and the unexpected weight of the skull, which looked far lighter than it actually was. Startled, he held it back out to her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab. I just . . .” He shrugged. “This is what it’s all about, you know? It’s one of the skulls. I mean, holy shit!”
“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t reach for it, instead nodding to Jade.
He passed it over. “Watch out. It’s heavier than it looks.” When she took it solemnly, he looked back over at Anna, catching on that the effigy was why they had been summoned. “You think the skull might help Jade channel the scribe’s talent more reliably?” He tried to remember whether there had been itza’at s mentioned in the history he’d read on the star bloodline. He didn’t think so.
“No, the effigies are bloodline specific. It’d only work for a jaguar.” Anna paused, carefully folding her hands atop her desk blotter. “I need you to take the skull back to Skywatch and give it to Strike.”
Jade’s soft, “Are you sure?” was quickly drowned out when Lucius held up his hands in protest.
“You—” Oh, no. Hell, no. “You’re kidding.”
“Not about this.” There was deep regret in her eyes, but behind that was a strange sort of peace.
“Never about this.”
“But you’re our—their only seer!”
“I should have been,” she corrected. “Maybe I would have been, if I’d gone through my talent ceremony when I should have. But she said we should wait until after the attack on the intersection, so we could focus on my training.”
She was the queen, Lucius knew. Anna’s mother. She had been a powerful seer, but loyal to her husband and king. Nobody knew what she had seen, exactly, but her visions had led her to fake a stillbirth and send baby Sasha to be raised in seclusion. More, she had leaned on Anna to pretend she hadn’t yet reached menarche, thus ruling her out of her talent ceremony prior to the king’s attack on the intersection. Then, the night before the queen marched to battle at her husband’s side, she’d given the effigy to fourteen- year-old Anna, even though the teen hadn’t known how to use the pendant properly. Lucius had long suspected that some of the itza’at’s powers had reached out to young Anna that night, through the effigy’s connection to the queen. He had a feeling Anna had seen the massacre firsthand through that uplink . . . and that she’d been running from those memories ever since.
Jade set the pendant carefully on her desk; it made a hollow, echoing noise that seemed to reverberate on more planes than just the audible level. “Don’t give up on us. Please.”
Anna avoided her eyes. “I’m not. I’m making a choice. I respect what Strike, you, and the others are doing, but I don’t believe in it anymore.”
“You don’t believe there’s going to be a war?” Lucius demanded. The question echoed back to their many debates on the subject of the Nightkeepers and the 2012 doomsday, which Anna had pretended to mock in an effort to keep him from looking too closely at the legends. Had she become convinced by her own arguments? Impossible.
She shook her head. “There’s going to be a war, no question about it. But I don’t believe that we can stop it. If we had the numbers and the skills . . . maybe. But a dozen magi? No. I’m sorry, but no. So I’ve decided that if I’ve only got another two and a half years to live, and there’s nothing I can do to change that fact, then I’d far rather spend the next thirty months living my life rather than chasing futile hope.”
Dull shock pounded through Lucius, alongside disillusionment. How could you? he wanted to demand. Anna had been his superior for the past decade-plus. She’d been his teacher, his mentor, his thesis adviser, his boss, and finally his slave- master. He had looked up to her. He’d harmlessly lusted after her, worried about her, and once he’d learned that she was one of the magi he’d spent a third of his life searching for, he’d practically worshiped her. But now . . . gods, now. How could he respect, never mind revere, someone who would willingly jettison the chance to make a difference?