Now.”
“The king’s ability to teleport isn’t a convenience.”
“Fuck convenience. Consider this a rescue.”
In the ornate ballroom of a recently foreclosed estate on the Monterey coast, the auctioneer introduced lot two twelve, a thirteen-hundred-year-old Mayan statuette of the goddess Ixchel. Bidding started at two grand and jumped almost immediately to five. At fifty-five hundred, Alexis caught the spotter’s eye and nodded to bump the bid. Then she leaned back in her folding chair, projecting the calm of a collector.
It was a lie, of course. The only things she’d ever collected were parking tickets at the Newport Marina. She looked the part, though, in a stylish navy pin-striped pantsuit that nipped in at the waist and pulled a little across the shoulders, thanks to all the hand-to-hand training she’d gotten in recent months. Her streaky blond hair was caught back in a severe ponytail, tasteful makeup accented her blue eyes and wide mouth, and she wore secondhand designer shoes that put her well over six feet. A top-end bag sat at her feet beside a matching folio, both slightly scuffed around the edges.
Understated upscale, courtesy of eBay. Her godmother, Izzy, might’ve pushed her into finance rather than fashion, but Alexis had put her love of fabric to good use regardless, calling on it to build an image.
In her previous life as a private investment consultant, her look had been calculated to reassure her wealthy friends and clients that she belonged among them but wouldn’t compete, wouldn’t upstage.
She’d played the part for so long prior to the oh, by the way, you’re a Nightkeeper revelation that it’d been second nature to dress for this gig. But as bidding on the statuette topped sixtyfive hundred and Alexis nodded to bump it to a cool seven grand, she felt a hum of power that had been missing from her old life.
I have money now, the buzz in her blood said. I deserve to be here.
It wasn’t her money, not really. But she had carte blanche with the Nightkeeper Fund, and orders not to come home empty-handed.
“Ma’am?” said a cultured, amplified voice. It was the auctioneer now, not the spotter, which meant the dabblers had dropped out and he had his two or three serious bidders on the hook. “It’s seventy-
five hundred dollars to you.”
She glanced up at the projection screen at the front of the room. It showed a magnification of the statuette, which rested near the auctioneer’s elbow, top-lit on a nest of black cloth. Described in the auction catalog as “a statuette of Ixchel, Mayan goddess of rainbows and fertility, carved from chert, circa A.D. 1100; love poem inscribed in hieroglyphs on base,” the statuette was lovely. The waxy, pale green stone had been carved with deceptive simplicity into the shape of a woman with a large nose and flattened forehead, her conical skull crowned with a rainbow of hair that fell forward as she tipped her head into her hands in repose, or perhaps tears. She sat upon a stone, or maybe an overturned bowl or basket, and that was where the glyphs were carved, curved and fluid and gorgeous like all Mayan writing, which was as much art as a form of communication.
Love poem, Alexis thought with an inner snort. Not. Or rather, it was eau-de-Hallmark read one way, but according to Jade, the Nightkeepers’ archivist, if they held the statuette at the proper angle under starlight, a second layer of glyphwork would spell out the first of the seven demon prophecies they needed to combat the Banol Kax. Starscript, which was less about magic and more about the refractive angles and wavelengths of starlight, was apparently one of the tricks the ancestral Nightkeepers had used to bury their spells and prophecies within the carved writings of the ancient Maya, again according to Jade. And since Jade was the one who’d gotten the message from her nahwal ancestor during the winter solstice ritual, warning that the demon prophecies must be found, Alexis was inclined to believe her. The nahwal had said that the first prophecy would be triggered during the upcoming spring equinox, just over six weeks away . . . which meant it was pretty godsdamned critical that Alexis didn’t let some collector type outbid her on the Ixchel statuette.
Aware that the auctioneer was waiting for her answer, she said, “Ten thousand dollars.” As she’d hoped, the advance jumped the bid past fair market value by enough to make her remaining opponent shake his head and drop out. The auctioneer pronounced it a done deal, and she felt a flare of success as she flashed her bidder number, knowing there would be no problem with the money.
The Nightkeeper Fund, which had—ironically—been seeded in the late eighteen hundreds with the proceeds from her five-times-great-grandparents’ generation unwisely selling off the very Mayan artifacts the modern Nightkeepers were scrambling to recover now, had been intended to fund an army of hundreds as the 2012 end date approached. That, however, was before the current king’s father had led his warrior-priests in an ill-fated battle against the demons. Only a few of the youngest Nightkeepers had survived, hidden and raised in secret by their winikin until seven months earlier, when the intersection connecting the earth, sky, and underworld had reactivated from its two-decade dormancy, and the old king’s son, Strike, had recalled his warriors.
Yeah, that had been a shocker. Alexis, dear, you’re a magic user, Izzy had pretty much said. I’m not your godmother; I’m your winikin , and we need to leave tonight for your bloodline ceremony and training. And, oh, by the way, you and the other Nightkeepers have a little over four years to save the world.
According to the thirteenth prophecy, Strike’s refusal to sacrifice Leah, the human who had become his mate and queen, meant that the countdown to the end—time had now begun in earnest. Jade’s research indicated that they’d passed into the four-year cycle ruled by the demon prophecies, which predicted that seven minions of the demon Camazotz would come through the intersection one at a time, each on a cardinal day, and attack. If they succeeded, the barrier would tear and the Banol Kax would be freed onto the earth . . . which had the Nightkeepers hustling to find the seven artifacts inscribed with starscript clues on how to avoid the fulfillment of the prophecies.
Make that six artifacts, Alexis thought, grinning. Because I just bagged Ixchel.
“Excuse me, please,” she murmured, and rose, snagging her folio and bag off the floor. She stepped out into the aisle while the auction house employees whisked her statuette off the podium and set up the next lot, and the auctioneer launched into his spiel. When she reached the temporary office that’d been set up in the hallway outside the big estate’s ballroom, she unzipped her folio and enjoyed how the staffer’s eyes got big at the sight of the neatly stacked and banded cash. She handed over her bidder’s number. “What’s the total damage?”
“One moment please,” he said, but his eyes were still glued to the cash.
The two items she’d bought with the Nightkeepers’ money—the statuette and a death mask that had been an earlier impulse buy—wouldn’t be the biggest deals of the day by far, but she’d bet they’d be among only a few handled in paper money. Granted, she could’ve done the remote transfer thing, too, but she quite simply loved the feel of the green stuff. And no, it wasn’t because she’d been deprived or picked on as a child, as someone back at Skywatch had unkindly suggested. Nor was it a reaction to the idea that the world was four years away from a serious crisis of being, as that same someone had offered, or a rejection of destiny or some such garbage.