“Ngh,” he said, wincing when the word—the grunt?—echoed too loudly, setting off cymbal clashes in his skull. He hadn’t felt hangover- crappy like this since the day after Cizin had first entered his soul. The thought brought a spurt of panic, but he beat it back. It feels like this because you’re a human trying to do magic, he told himself, forcing the logic through the pain. The library is not a makol ; it’s not trying to possess you. Though the ask-and-walk thing was borderline.
“Lucius!” Jade said, her voice seeming to come from far above him. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Jesus Christ, don’t shout , he wanted to say, but he caught the worry in her voice and felt the grip of her hand on his. He hated that she was seeing him weak and helpless yet again, but that was his hang-
up, not hers, so he made an effort to be polite, even through the hammering inside his skull. “M’fine.
Food?”
Okay, so maybe that was still lacking in the polite-ness department. But he heard paper and then clothing rustle and sensed motion nearby. What was more, he didn’t sense a crowd nearby, which was a relief.
“Jox left a carb- and-fat bomb in case . . . for when you came around.” Her voice trembled on the words. She took a deep breath, and she sounded steadier when she said, “I’ll call the others. We’ve been watching you in shifts ever since Sasha said you were as stable as she could get you. We’ve been waiting for . . . well. I’ll call them.”
“ ’N a minute.” Lucius slitted his eyes, saw the familiar details of his cottage, and relaxed fractionally at finding that he was on his couch, not locked up in the basement in the main mansion, or worse. Craning his neck, he looked for Jade, and found her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter with her arms braced and her head hanging. She was wearing trim jeans and a soft button-down that clung to her skin as her body curved in a private moment of what might have been relief, but he found himself interpreting more as grief. Regret.
What the hell had he missed? He wanted to go to her, to hold her. Wanted to lean into her and let her lean on him. But that was the weakness talking, he knew. More, he knew that it was a private moment, and one she wouldn’t thank him for watching. So he forced himself to look away.
Focusing on the changes that had occurred in his main room while he’d been out of it, he saw that the TV was off, no longer showing the scene that had been so strangely mimicked by what they had seen in Xibalba. The coffee table held a notebook and a couple of volumes he recognized from the archive, primary texts on the legends of the sun god, clueing him in that Jade had caught the Kinich Ahau connection. Good girl. There was an IV stand beside the couch, a needle taped at the crook of his arm, and a clear line feeding him the nutrient mix the winikin had come up with to offset the postmagic crash experience by a mage—or in this case, a human wannabe—in the aftermath of big magic. Which made him wonder how long he’d been unconscious.
A look out the window showed him that sky was blue-black, but with dusk, not dawn. Had he lost an entire day? More? He cursed under his breath.
As he did, Jade came back into the main room carrying a bowl of pasta mixed with the heavy meat sauce he liked, liberally dosed with cheese. At his colorful language, she raised an eyebrow. “That sounded coherent, if physically impossible. I take it your head is clearing?”
“How many days did I lose?” He took the bowl and held out a hand for the fork she was still holding, just in case she had any idea of trying to feed him.
She passed it over. “About twenty hours. From your perspective, it’s tomorrow night.” She was wearing what he thought of as her counselor’s face, serene to the point of blandness. But he knew her well enough to see strain and nerves beneath, along with an unfamiliar edginess.
“I made it to the library,” he said before she asked.
“And?”
There was no simple answer to that, he realized as he tried to come up with something concise and vaguely coherent. He dug into the pasta, buying himself a moment. Finally, he went with: “It’s amazing. I wish you could’ve been there with me.”
And it was true, he realized. Of all of the magi, she was the one who would’ve appreciated the artifacts, the Ouija game, all of it. And he would’ve liked to have seen it all for the first time with her.
Whatever else was—or wasn’t—between them, they meshed on that level. Always had.
“I tried to find you,” she blurted, locking her fingers together until her knuckles whitened. “Last night we uplinked—Strike, me, everyone. I tried to find your ch’ul song for Sasha, tried to follow where you’d gone . . . but I couldn’t. Our connection, the sex magic, just wasn’t strong enough.I wasn’t strong enough.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, her sitting next to his bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness—or die, though neither of them had said it outright—seemed less like the vigil of a friend or lover, and more like self-
flagellation.
She continued, though he wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “I couldn’t find the sex link and pull you home. We thought . . . We weren’t sure you were going to make it out.”
“But I did,” he pointed out in between big bites of cheese-laden pasta, not mentioning that it had been a close call. “And for the record, I don’t think the library works the same way the rest of the barrier does. It’s possible—even likely—that you wouldn’t have been able to follow me even if I were a mage and we were jun tan mates.” He thought of the corpse’s mated mark, wondered if someone had gone looking for her. And if so, what had happened to them. He hated like hell that Jade felt like a failure because of him, but knew she wouldn’t thank him for saying it aloud. So instead, he said, “I’m guessing you gave the others a full report on Kinich Ahau and the companions?” She had twenty hours’ head start on him—it sure as hell hadn’t felt that long when he’d been inside the library, but the barrier was known to fold time oddly in some cases.
She nodded. “I gave them what I could yesterday, and am just about finished filling in the gaps from the archive.” She paused before saying softly, “The Banol Kax are trying to put Akhenaton in the sun god’s place.”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to stop them?”
At first he thought it was a rhetorical question. But when she looked at him too expectantly, he realized she was hoping for him to play Prophet. Exhaling, he shook his head. “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. I’m not going to be able to channel info on command.”
Worse, now that he had some food in him, he was seeing just how big an oh, holy shit of a problem that was going to be. If he needed to use his own talent to get back into the library, as the journalist had said . . . then the magi were going to be waiting a long time, because humans didn’t have talents, and he was pure human, do not pass “Go,” do not collect two hundred.