“Feeling nostalgic?” he asked with a little too much edge.
“Bite me.” She sent him a sharp smile and turned her back on him.
Nate snorted, but didn’t regret the jibe, which had been as much a reality check as anything. The others might be buying into the What has happened before will happen again motto of the Nightkeeper legends, but he figured the history should stay where it belonged—in the past. The modern-day Nightkeepers, such as they were, would out of necessity be a new breed of magi. They didn’t need to learn about the past; they needed to forge their own futures. Screw the prophecies; screw destiny. As far as he was concerned, they should gather the artifacts, boost their powers as far as they could manage, and bust ass through the barrier to hit the Banol Kax on their home turf.
Not surprisingly, he was in the minority on that one.
“Et voilà,” Alexis murmured, and lifted the top of the case, revealing not one, but two artifacts.
A murmur of surprise rippled through the assembled Nightkeepers and winikin, and most of them leaned in to see. The first artifact was the statuette she’d been sent after; Nate recognized it from the auction catalog. The second was a flattened clay disk maybe eight inches in diameter, shaped to resemble a man’s face. The formed clay face was slack mouthed, and the man’s eyes were covered with the jade pebbles he would’ve needed on his journey through Xibalba. Holes pierced on either side showed where rope or sinew would have been threaded through, allowing the mask to be tied in place.
Nate recognized it from what little reading he’d done on the Nightkeepers and the customs they’d shared with the ancient Maya. “It’s a death mask.”
It wasn’t just any death mask, either. The dead man had vaguely porcine features, with a flattened nose and the hint of tusks rather than teeth.
“Watch this,” Alexis said, and she rotated the disk one-eighty, so the peccary features were upside down. The action revealed a second set of eyes, nose, and mouth—another face hidden in the frown lines and shapes of the first. In the second incarnation, the pig-man was smiling and looked, if not happy, then at least at peace with himself and what had happened to cause his death.
It wasn’t a Mayan death mask, as the auction catalog had probably stated. It was Nightkeeper made, as proven by the mark of the boar in the lower corner, a match to the bloodline glyph on Rabbit’s arm.
“Nostalgic indeed,” Nate said, but this time he wasn’t teasing. Instead he felt a beat of grief for a lost comrade.
Red-Boar had been a prickly bastard, and he’d sucked as a role model and father, but he’d been one of the team. He’d been killed in the tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá, when one of the lesser makol had turned out to be a mimic, a shape-shifter capable of taking on other forms. The mimic had impersonated Leah and used the guise to slit Red-Boar’s throat.
“It spoke to me,” Alexis said of the mask. Looking at Jox, who was the unofficial arbiter of all purchases and decorating decisions around Skywatch, save for their personal quarters, she said, “I thought maybe we could hang it in here, or in the training hall, as a reminder. Sort of like having him looking down on us.”
Jox looked to Strike. “Cool by you?”
“It’s really Rabbit’s call,” the king answered.
The teen looked startled for a second, then thoughtful. Finally he nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Yeah, the old man’d get a kick out of that. Just . . . just make sure he can see the ceiba tree, okay? It was . . . it mattered to him.”
The tree in question, a big sucker nearly fifty feet high and about as wide, grew where the Nightkeepers’ Great Hall had stood before the massacre. In the aftermath of the attack, before he’d enacted the spell that’d banished the training compound from the face of the earth for more than two decades, Jox had piled the bodies in the Great Hall and set it ablaze as a funeral pyre. When Strike and Red-Boar had reversed the spell twenty-four years later, they’d found the ceiba tree rooted in the ashes of the fallen Nightkeepers. The tree, which the Maya and Nightkeepers had revered as the symbol of community, believing that the roots stretched to the underworld and that the branches held up the sky, was native to the Yucatán and Central America. It shouldn’t have been able to grow in the arid box canyon, and it sure as hell couldn’t have gotten so big in the time it had. But there it was.
And yeah, it mattered. Even to someone like Nate, who didn’t believe in looking back.
“The training hall it is, then,” Alexis said, looking pleased, as though she hadn’t been sure how her impulse buy was going to go over. Then she reached for the statuette. “Well, I guess I should introduce you to Ixchel. I sure hope she was worth—” The moment she touched the statuette, she stiffened, her mouth opening in a round O of surprise.
“Alexis?” Nate’s gut tightened as magic danced across his skin. Before any of the others could react, he shot out a hand, intending to pull hers away from the statuette. But the moment he touched her his muscles locked.
And the world around him disappeared.
CHAPTER THREE
Power burned up Alexis’s arm and gathered in her core, spinning and expanding and taking over until there was only the power. She didn’t know where she was, couldn’t see anything but darkness, couldn’t feel anything but magic. Worse, she couldn’t lock on, couldn’t jack in and use what little magic she possessed to get free. She could only hang suspended in the nothingness.
Panic gripped her. She would’ve fought but she couldn’t move; would’ve screamed, but she couldn’t make a sound.
Help! she screamed in her head. Help me! But there was no answer.
Gulping for air, though it seemed she wasn’t actually breathing, she fought to slow her racing brain, struggled to think it through. She’d given the death mask to Rabbit, turned to lift the statuette from the case, and then—
A flash of vibrant color, a kaleidoscope of vivid hues. Then nothing.
She’d touched the statuette, and the contact had sent her . . . where? She wasn’t in the barrier; she knew that much. There was no gray-green mist, no squishy surface underfoot and gray-green sky above. There was no up or down where she’d been transported, no surface or sky. There was just blackness and power. Then, suddenly, the colors returned in shimmering ribbons of light. They caressed her, curled around her, then dissipated. When they cleared she was in a ceremonial chamber she’d never seen before.
She stood on a slender ledge that ran along one side of the narrow room. A vaulted stone ceiling arched overhead, spanning a rectangular pool of dark water. Stalactites hung down in gorgeous stone droplets, and stalagmites thrust up from the water, causing the sluggish flow to eddy and swirl in overlapping ripple patterns. Light came from torches that were set in stone sconces on either side of the narrow room. In the flickering illumination, she saw that the room was closed at either end, creating a long, narrow arcade with water instead of a floor. There were no doors or windows, but the torch smoke, which smelled faintly of sacred incense, moved along the ceiling to a narrow crack halfway down one of the long walls.
One entire short side was taken up with an elaborate thronelike structure built out of limestone blocks and carved from the living subterranean stone itself. She wasn’t sure if it was a throne or an altar; the flat space in the middle could have served as either. Arching columns rose up on either side, carved with a serpent and feather pattern that made her think of Kulkulkan, along with a sinuous motif she didn’t recognize. The other three walls and the vaulted ceiling were carved with human figures, not the intricate hieroglyphs used for writing, but a single extended scene, a grand mural of Mayan men and women with the flattened, elongated foreheads that had been created early in childhood with binding boards, and the exaggerated cheekbones and noses often made from clay or jade, all of it intended to make the wearer look more like a god. Hundreds of figures were carved on either side of the black pool, some bowing or kneeling, others raising their hands in supplication. All of them faced the throne at the far end.