Normally, Michael let things like that roll off, on the theory that he and Jade had worked things out the best they could, and it wasn’t anybody else’s business. Now, though, he figured he owed the royal council an answer—on this, at any rate. Choosing his words judiciously, he said, “None of what happened yesterday changes the fact that Jade and I were lovers, but we weren’t a destined-mates match. Nor does it mean that Sasha and I are destined, either. Yes, I was drawn to her, and yes, kissing her amplified my shield magic, and yes, she seemed to recognize me. . . .” When he said it like that, it seemed like a no-brainer. And maybe under other circumstances it would have been. But he wasn’t the man he was supposed to have been. Just ask Tomas. “However, Sasha has just been through a terrible ordeal, and, mental filters or not, she’s going to need some room. So I’m asking, as a personal favor, if you’ll pass the word to lay off the destined-mates rhetoric with her.”
Leah, Jox, Nate and Alexis nodded as though that seemed reasonable. Strike, on the other hand, fixed him with a look. “Your winikin thinks you’ve got a commitment problem.”
“My winikin thinks I’ve got lots of problems.” Michael met the king’s eyes squarely, letting him see the determination and control, but not the things that churned beneath. “I swear to you that I’ll do my best by Sasha.” And that was the man talking. The one who was in control, and was going to stay in control, damn it.
After a moment, Strike nodded. “Okay. We’ll give you two some room.” He turned to Anna. “We need to figure out who Iago was looking for, and why. In addition, we need to know what happened with the red-robe. If that’s something new in the Xibalbans’ arsenal, we’ll have to figure out how to counteract it.”
Michael shifted uncomfortably at the list of questions, suspecting that the answers all circled back to him. “I don’t think it’s a new Xibalban weapon,” he said, sticking to his lies. “It seemed more like a misfire of the ’port magic.”
“Which is even more reason to figure it out,” Strike countered. “I’d hate like hell to do something like that to another human being.”
You won’t , Michael thought. It was me. All me. With the Other locked safely away, he felt the kill weigh sickly on his soul. “What about the word ‘mick,’ and the mountains the gray-robes mentioned?”
he asked, his voice rasping on the question.
Anna sent him a long, slow look before answering. “The prefix ‘mic’ was used for many things relating to the realm of the damned, which was called Mictlan.”
“I thought Xibalba was the Mayan equivalent of hell?” Nate asked.
“Yes and no,” Anna replied. “Although Xibalba is the underworld, it’s not necessarily a negative place, not hell as the Christians think of it. It’s more a realm of challenges that the dead must win through in order to reach their end reward in the barrier or the sky—or reincarnation, depending on which set of beliefs you go with.”
Michael frowned. “So there’s no punishment for bad behavior?” That didn’t fit with what the nahwal had told him.
“Wrongdoers get caught up in the challenges, looping endlessly until they learn the lessons they failed to learn on earth,” Anna clarified. “Some never learn, just loop eternally. That’s the punishment, the hell, if you will. Not Xibalba itself. That’s in the formal sense, though. From what’s been happening around us over the past eighteen months, I have a feeling the coming of the end-time has shifted the hierarchy in Xibalba, that the Banol Kax, who used to be the overseers of the challenges and the dead, have started marshaling them as armies instead.”
“Assuming the Banol Kax are still a factor,” Nate put in, referring to the complete lack of action from that front ever since the destruction of the intersection.
“They are,” Strike said flatly. “Just because they’ve gone quiet doesn’t mean they’re not a threat.
They’re doing something, or planning something. We just don’t know what.”
The current theory was that with the intersection gone and Iago folding the hellmouth into the barrier except as needed, the demons of Xibalba had lost their direct access to the earth, forcing them to work through the Xibalbans and makol. But although they might be cut off temporarily, Michael was inclined to agree with Strike’s assessment. Given the tenacity of the Banol Kax throughout history, it would be dangerous to assume they would be out of action for long.
“Anyway,” Anna said, picking up her thread, “four classes of dead go straight to the sky: suicides, sacrificial victims, women who die in childbirth, and warriors who die in battle. They skip the challenges, having earned their ‘get out of jail free’ cards by the manner of their death.”
“Where does Mictlan fit in?” Nate asked.
Anna hummed a flat note. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a construct of the Spanish missionaries, a sort of culturally relevant hell that they used to threaten the natives—the old ‘repent and accept the one true God, or you’ll suffer eternally in Mictlan’ routine . . . or it’s the lowest level of Xibalba, where the true sinners go. Just like there’s a group of souls who go straight to the sky, do not pass go, do not collect, there’s a group of souls, albeit smaller, who bypass the challenges in the other direction: the traitors and the murderers. Some say these are the souls that become the makol.”
A chill skimmed down Michael’s spine. “What about the mountain?”
“Depends on whether we’re talking about the Mayan or Aztec perspective. The Maya believed the entrance of Xibalba was located at the top of a mountain, with tunnels leading to Scorpion River, which formed the boundary of the underworld.” She paused. “The Aztec preferred volcanoes.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Strike said dryly. “They sound like a bunch of bloodthirsty psychopaths. Perfect fodder for the Xibalbans.”
“Or they were no more warlike than their neighbors before the Xibalbans moved in on them,” Anna countered. “Chicken and egg, you know?”
“Were there any volcanoes the Aztec were particularly fond of?” Michael asked. “Maybe one that’s extinct now, that the Xibalbans might have taken over as a stronghold?”
“They worshiped Smoking Mountain and White Woman, near Tenochtitlán. East of there is Mount Tlaloc, where the thunder god was supposed to live.” She paused, frowning. “There are others, but I’ll have to hit the books to be sure.”
“It’s a start,” Strike said. “We’ll check it out, but I hate splitting our forces. It’s hard enough trying to track the hints handed down to us in the Mayan legends, never mind figuring out the Aztec stuff.
Add that to searching for both the library and a new intersection, and we’re spread very, very thin.”
After a brief hesitation, Anna said, “How about Myrinne?”
“No way.” The answer was an immediate knee-jerk from Strike, his expression darkening. Then, catching himself—due at least in part to Leah digging an elbow into his ribs—he toned it down to say, “She and Rabbit just got to school. Let them focus on that for now.” It was no secret Strike had sent them to UT partly in the hopes that the two would drift apart in the wider world. So far, though, that didn’t seem to be happening.
“She would want to help,” Anna pressed. She’d been the one to claim responsibility for Myrinne, based on a debt she owed to Red-Boar, and therefore posthumously to his heir, Rabbit.