He’d bled all over the thing.
Anna was going to kill him.
He didn’t remember deciphering any of it, but there were words rocketing around inside his brain, syllables he couldn’t quite catch but knew he should understand. The translation eluded him, dancing just beyond the reaches of his spinning mind.
Letting go of the knife, hearing it clatter to the floor, Lucius pressed the fingers of his good hand to his eyes in an effort to stop the pounding pulse behind them.
He sort of remembered deciphering the first couple of glyphs, but then something had happened and things had gone fuzzy for a while until he’d snapped back in and found himself sitting at the kitchen table with a steak knife stuck in his palm and half a pint of A-positive splattered on the stolen text.
Thinking to clean it off or something, he rose from the kitchen table and shambled across the room to the sink. He wadded up a couple of paper towels and pressed them against his cut palm, then wet a couple more of the towels and turned back to the table.
By the time he got there, he wasn’t carrying paper towels. Instead, he held one of his roommate’s froufrou scented candles and a box of matches.
Don’t do it . . . just don’t! he shouted inside his own skull as he watched his hands strike a match and light the candle. Don’t, please, no!
Without volition—his own, at least—Lucius touched the candle to the edge of the blood-soaked codex fragment. The flame licked at the dried bark, turning the edges brown and then black. A chant rose in his mind, overwhelming him, overpowering him until he said the words aloud, giving them shape and substance as the codex burned. He leaned forward and breathed in the smoke of burned blood and paper.
A ripping, tearing noise blotted out everything else, and a void appeared inside him, a sudden emptiness inside his soul, his being.
‘‘Crap!’’ He reeled and fell to his hands and knees, retching as glowing green foulness oozed from the tear inside him and began to fill the empty spot. Pain sliced through him, crippling him and driving him to the kitchen floor, where he curled himself into a ball of agony, with his knees pulled up tight beneath his chin. He threw back his head and howled, but he couldn’t tell if any noise actually came out, because it was lost amid the screams that seemed to come from his soul, from all around him.
There was a loud boom, a thundering noise he felt as a vibration rather than hearing as a sound, and suddenly he knew he wasn’t alone anymore. Something else lived inside him. He turned blind eyes upward, squinting in an effort to see through the darkness.
A dark-haired man stood over him, heavily muscled, barefoot and bare chested, wearing loose black pants fastened at the ankles with intricate twists of red twine. His eyes were a bright, luminous green, one darker than the other, and he had a flying crocodile inked across his right pec. The air around him was shadowed a dark purple-black and radiated with hatred. Malice.
Lucius opened his mouth to beg for help, for mercy, but he wasn’t sure he even formed words through the taste of evil and the stink of despair. He was suddenly very afraid he was going to die.
Worse, he was afraid he might not.
Strike dropped back into his earthly body with a flash of pain that he welcomed because it meant he was still alive. He blinked and felt his eyelids grate, shifted and felt his joints pop, and didn’t care because the first thing he saw was Leah on the other side of the chac-mool, blinking her cornflower blue eyes in confusion, and then, when the memories caught up, making a little, ‘‘Oh,’’ of despair.
‘‘We’ll figure something out,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘I promise.’’
But they both knew he hadn’t promised to keep her safe, or even alive. Things had gotten seriously complicated way fast. The Nightkeepers couldn’t lose the skyroad or Kulkulkan. But at the same time, he couldn’t lose Leah.
Her expression went wistful. ‘‘Yeah,’’ she said, responding to what he hadn’t said, rather than what he had. ‘‘I know.’’
He wanted to say something but didn’t know what or how, so he stayed silent, and in the next moment Red-Boar exhaled and stirred, and the blue-robed trainees did the same as they all jacked out simultaneously. Strike felt the power surge, felt the echoed satisfaction of a job well-done, and knew that the talent ceremony had gone well.
Thank the gods for small favors.
Letting go of Leah’s hands, Strike pushed away from the altar and headed for the door, intending to warn Jox that he was about five minutes away from a kitchen stampede. He was halfway there when a woman’s scream echoed in his head. ‘‘Help him!’’
The cry was followed by a mental picture that flashed along the link of a shared bloodline, powered by the magic of an itza’at seer. Anna! Strike thought on a spike of adrenaline and bloodline power.
The image she sent was that of a young man curled up and clutching his bleeding hand to his chest as his eyes started to glow green. A dark figure stood over him. Zipacna.
Rage flared, and Strike didn’t stop to think or ask questions, didn’t care that his legs were numb and his head pounding with a postmagic hangover, that he might not have the power to ’port accurately. He grabbed Leah with one hand and Red-Boar with the other. ‘‘Hang on!’’
He leaned on the older Nightkeeper for a boost, fixing the transmitted image in his mind.
And zapped.
One minute Leah was getting her bearings in the sacred chamber at Skywatch, trying to deal with the nahwal ’s morbid information dump. Then Strike grabbed her, the world lurched, and the next thing she knew she was in some sort of student apartment, standing in a combined kitchen/living room full of yard-sale furniture and clutter.
And Zipacna was there.
He stood near where the kitchen tile began, his mismatched eyes glowing pure emerald green as he crouched over a young man who lay in a fetal ball, unmoving. The ajaw-makol was wearing loose black pants and held a bloody steak knife in one hand. The creature snapped his head up when the Nightkeepers appeared, and he bared his teeth in a hiss. Then his eyes fixed on Leah and the hiss became a smile.
Rage flared through her, hard and hot and pure, and she lunged at him, screaming an incoherent battle cry. She was dimly aware that Strike shouted for her to stop and Red-Boar cursed and made a grab for her, but neither of them mattered just then. What mattered was the bastard who’d killed her brother, her friends.
Surprise was on her side. She slammed into Zipacna, burying her shoulder in his gut and using the momentum to drive them both away from the young man. They went stumbling into the kitchen and slammed into the stove, which clattered a metallic protest. The ajaw-makol roared and pushed away, reversing their momentum and sending Leah flying across the small space to smash into the opposite cabinets.
Without the benefit of jade-tips to slow him down, she went for the kitchen sink, which was full of nasty-ass dirty dishes. Grabbing a knife, she lunged under his swing and stabbed up, going for his heart. The weapon bit through flesh and grated on bone, and blood flowed over her hand, looking darker than it should have.
Zipacna stiffened and roared with pain. ‘‘Bitch!’’
Quicker than human reactions, he grabbed her and spun her, whipping her arm up behind her back and getting his own knife across her throat, pressing hard enough to have her freezing in place.
‘‘I thought we were friends,’’ he said softly in her ear. Only it wasn’t Zipacna’s voice anymore.
It was Vince’s.
Shock hammered through Leah. Betrayal. ‘‘Vince, no!’’