Which was essentially a backhanded way of asking, Where is the library? Sasha made a face. “I don’t. I’m sorry.” She paused. “I’m assuming you’ve searched Ambrose’s temple?”
Now it was Strike’s turn to grimace. “To the best of our ability. It’s guarded by an entity of some sort that’s able to both take corporeal form and mind-bend full magi. The thing nearly killed Anna, and it’s gone after us a couple of other times when we were in there, searching. We didn’t find anything.” He paused. “We did recover your father’s skull while we were in there. It seemed wrong to just leave it. The next time we’re out there, we’ll exhume the rest of him, and bring him back for a proper funeral.”
Sasha’s throat closed on a surge of emotion. “Thank you. He’d . . . Thank you.”
The king nodded. Then his expression softened, making him suddenly seem far less imposing, far more human. “You look exhausted—you’re probably ready to turn it off for a little while, huh?”
“Beyond ready,” she said.
Strike nodded. “Jox will show you a couple of suites; choose one and crash. When you’re ready to start moving in for real, tap him for decorating and clothing money out of the Nightkeeper Fund. Get what you want, no limits, though be advised that he starts wincing after a while.”
“I . . .” Sasha trailed off, sort of guppy-gaping at how things had done yet another quick one-eighty on her.
“What?”
“You’re one of us,” he said implacably. “If you’re going to be hit with the responsibilities and dangers, you should get the perks, too.”
Her mouth went dry. “You don’t know for certain that I’m a Nightkeeper.” And for the first time, she felt a tug of longing, a desire to belong to these people, to live the adventures she’d dreamed of as a child.
The king tapped the geometric hunab ku on his upper arm. “I have faith. The gods may not be able to reach us directly anymore, but the plans they helped put in place long ago are still coming to fruition. You’re a child of prophecy, Sasha, just like I was.” His expression reflected an odd mix of regret and satisfaction. “I would wish for you to have an easier time of it than I did, but I have a feeling it’s one of those doctrine-of-balance things, that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.” He looked over at Leah, and his face lit with love.
“Thanks, I think,” Sasha said, carefully not looking over her shoulder, where Michael still stood guard.
He growled, “Don’t thank him yet. He hasn’t gotten to the catch.”
But Sasha shook her head. “I already know. I’m my father’s daughter, after all.” She paused. “You want me to undergo the bloodline ceremony,” she said, and saw the confirmation in their faces. Oddly, she wasn’t as upset as she would’ve thought. “When?”
“The full moon,” Strike answered immediately. “On December second, thirteen days from now.”
She nodded, because what else was there to say, really? She’d woken up a prisoner, and would go to sleep that night a potential mage. So much had changed, yet plenty was still the same. She was still at odds with her father, even though he was more than a year in the grave. And once again, she’d set her sights on a hunter, and imagined he felt more than he really did. At the thought, she glanced over at Michael and saw him deep in convo with the pretty brunette archivist, Jade, their heads bent together with intimate familiarity. When Strike cleared his throat, her gut-check was confirmed. Well, hell, she thought, just what I don’t need . Best-case scenario, she was an ex. Worst-case, she was a current. And Sasha so couldn’t deal with that level of drama right now, so she focused on Strike. Her king. And how weird was that? “You said something about assigning me a real room?” she asked.
Strike watched as Michael and Jade disappeared down a hallway beside the kitchen. “What the—” He caught himself with a glance at Sasha. “Sorry. Right. Check with Jox. He’s . . .” A quick check showed that the winikin was gone. “Try the greenhouse,” Strike suggested. “He goes there when things get hectic.”
“Then I think he and I will get along just fine,” Sasha said, and dredged up a smile that felt only a little thin around the edges. She headed for the sliders leading out. And she damn well didn’t let herself look back, down the hallway where Michael and Jade had gone.
Twenty minutes after the meeting broke up, almost exactly twenty hours after he’d lost himself in Sasha’s body and let the Other escape, Michael stared at the reference Jade had dug up for him, and cursed hollowly.
He’d asked her to search for references to silver magic and rage. Because he’d claimed to have seen it coming from Iago, she hadn’t thought twice about the request—aside from a grimace of disgust at his description of the corpse. Using the computerized database she and Lucius had put together, she’d searched all the scanned, translated pages they had on file, and had come up with a likely reference.
Michael stared at the computer screen, which was split between the scanned page and Lucius’s translation. The reference had come from the journal of a missionary who’d worked in the Mayan highlands in the mid-sixteenth century. Lucius had done a very rough, vernacular translation from old-
style Spanish: The village elders speak of great white-gold magicians who used to live with their ancestors in the sky pyramids. These great magi fought against the devil himself, wielding a silver-
gray magic called muk. But the muk held too much evil, it was too easily corrupted, and the magicians split it in half, taking the red-gold half for themselves and banishing the darkness to Xibalba.
From there, the passage devolved to proselytizing, but in the margin was a red-lined note tagged with Lucius’s user name. Don’t know what the hell this muk is—I’ve never heard of it before, and I can’t cross-ref it anywhere, but I think we can assume Nightkeeper magic was the “good” side of it, hellmagic the bad. Not sure if the ancestral joined magic is even still around, though it’s probably worth looking into, as it’d make a hell of a weapon . . . if we could find a way to control the stuff and keep it from turning to the dark side.
“Weapon, yes,” Michael muttered under his breath. “Control, maybe.” Was that what was going on with him? Were the lies and rationalizations evidence that the silver magic was corrupting him? Or had he come precorrupted, thanks to the Other? And how the hell did a government-created alternate personality relate to the ancestral magic that preceded Nightkeeper power? More, how was Sasha involved with the Other and the magic? Iago had implied that she was important to his transformation, and that his transformed self would be of use to the Xibalbans, and that fit with the way she broke through his defenses without trying. But at the same time, there had been moments when touching her, being with her, had helped level him off, as though she strengthened not only the monster inside him, but the man. And it wasn’t like he could tell her any of what was going on—he’d tried earlier, and had vapor locked on the words. As far as she knew, he was . . . hell, he didn’t know what she thought he was at this point. All he knew was that he couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk her. Not until he knew what he was, and why Iago wanted him.
“Shit,” he muttered. “We need more info, as usual.”
“Was that what you were looking for?” asked Jade from her desk in the corner.
“Yeah, thanks,” he answered, but he doubted she heard him. She hadn’t looked up from what she was doing, and her tone had suggested she was mostly asking to be polite, and to indicate that she could make herself available if he needed help. All of which was quintessential Jade—always supportive, always there. Even after the talent ceremony, when he’d been too screwed up to continue as her lover, she’d tried to help him.