Beside her, Lucius stiffened. “Who? Where?”
She closed her eyes, feeling idiotic as the pieces clicked together. She should have figured it out sooner, probably would have if she hadn’t been so focused on so many other things. “The other night, as you were being transported into the library, I was pulled along too, only I wound up in the barrier itself. I think the library magic must’ve weakened the barrier enough that my nahwal could call me through, and then boot me again when it was done with me.” She held up a hand when Lucius drew breath to interject. “I know, I should’ve said something sooner. And I would have if I thought it had anything to do with Kinich Ahau or the library. But I didn’t. Not until just now, when Brandt mentioned the nahwal . . . and I realized what had been bothering me since last night.” She paused, shaking her head as the impossible began to seem frighteningly possible. “The nahwal was acting very strangely. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, though, I think I do.” She looked over at Strike. “It was acting like my mother.”
Her thoughts raced as she tried to remember the exchange, word for word, gesture for gesture. She described how the nahwal had alternated from a normal form that had transmitted the “duty and diligence” tenets of the harvesters, to a more feminized version that had talked about Jade finding her own path and maximizing her strengths, even if they led her away from the harvesters’ paradigm. “It was just what I would expect Vennie to have said, based on what Shandi told me about her resenting the harvesters’ limitations. If I’d seen that sort of behavior in a patient, I would’ve taken a serious look at schizophrenia. But in a nahwal?” She turned her palms up. “I know that technically she shouldn’t play much of a part in the collective of the harvester nahwal, given that she’s a married-in, and her priorities weren’t aligned with theirs. She should be . . . outvoted, I guess you should say.
Except she wasn’t. She was there.”
The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. And the more confused, not by the logic, but by her own response. She felt . . . numb.
“It’s not out of the realm,” Strike allowed. “The jaguar nahwal wears Scarred-Jaguar’s earring and has some of his traits.” She noticed he didn’t say “my father,” and wondered why.
Lucius said slowly, “What if the bloodline nahwal are morphing as the end-time gets nearer? The dominant personalities could be moving to the forefront and taking over because they’re stronger, have the closest ties to the survivors, or have the most pressing need to speak with their descendants.”
Jade imagined more than a few of the others were thinking, Why her? Why not me? She didn’t have an answer for that one, except that maybe Vennie had urgently needed—wanted—to talk to her.
Why did that feel like too little, too late? She’d never met her mother, didn’t have a relationship with her beyond shared DNA. But then again, if she couldn’t judge Vennie, who could? Shandi? The king?
Suddenly Lucius sat up, his face reflecting a lightbulb moment. “What if the nahwal are gaining personal characteristics in preparation for the Triad spell?”
The room went dead silent.
Legend held that in times of the most acute need, the Nightkeepers would gain the ability to enact a spell that would call on the gods to choose three Nightkeeper magi: the Triad. Once chosen, the three would be given the ability to channel all of their ancestors, not just the wisdom contained within the nahwal, but also their personalities, and, most of all, their magical talents. In the space of a single spell, three of the Nightkeepers would become superbeings. But that was the good news. The bad news was that—historically, anyway—the Triad spell had an attrition rate of two-thirds.
Only one Triad had been called previously, back at the end of the first millennium A.D., when a rogue group of Nightkeepers had splintered off, allied themselves with the king of a Mayan city-state that controlled a potent ceremonial site, and called six Banol Kax through the barrier to the Earth. The dark magi, who later took to calling themselves the Order of Xibalba, had wanted to control the empire; instead, unable to rein in the creatures they had summoned, they changed civilization forever.
Modern archaeologists still puzzled over why the population of the Mayan empire had crashed abruptly in the late ninth century, with entire cities abandoned seemingly overnight. The theories usually touched on plague, drought, and warfare, with the artifactual evidence to back them up. But that told only a small part of the story; in the larger realm, each of those catastrophic breakdowns of civilization had been wrought by the six Banol Kax, which had run amok in Mesoamerica while the Nightkeepers fought to force them back to the underworld, where they belonged.
In the end, in the most extreme of exigencies, the gods had sent the Triad spell to King One-Boar, who had searched his soul . . . and enacted it. One-Boar was chosen, along with his brother, Boar Tusk, and One-Boar’s only child, a girl barely out of her teens. Boar Tusk died almost instantly; One-Boar went mad from the voices inside his head . . . and the girl survived. Wielding the talents and knowledge of her forebears, she rallied the Nightkeepers and used dire magic to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba. In the aftermath, with the males of the royal branch of the peccary bloodline gone, One-Boar’s daughter married into the jaguars, who became the Nightkeepers’ new ruling bloodline.
She ruled well, died an old woman, and time passed without a Triad . . . but a single fragmentary codex reference decreed that the Nightkeepers were supposed to call a Triad during the third year prior to the zero date. If they didn’t, the end-time was screwed.
They were almost halfway through the year in question. And they didn’t have the spell needed to call the Triad.
“Which means,” Lucius said, making it sound like he was answering a question, though nobody had spoken, “that we need the Triad spell.” He turned to Jade. “But there’s a problem.”
Only one? she thought, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter lodging in her throat. But she knew what he meant. “If I can reach my nahwal and Vennie can take over again, she could tell us how to get you back into the library, or at least where to look for information here on earth. But in order for me to reach my nahwal, you need to invoke the library magic so I can follow you into the barrier.” Maybe.
There were a lot of ifs there.
“We sure as hell can’t wait for the solstice,” Strike said bluntly. He wasn’t looking at Jade or Lucius, but the message was clear. What wasn’t nearly so clear was what Jade’s response should be.
Before, she’d volunteered for booty duty because it had seemed like her best chance of contributing, and because, well, it was Lucius they were talking about. But the sex magic had come with an unnerving level of intensity. Then there was the nahwal’s words, which too closely paralleled her own experiences. Vennie had urged her not to let emotion weaken her. Should she listen to the nahwal and focus on her own magic instead? She didn’t know. And because she didn’t know, she found herself far too aware of Lucius as the meeting continued. She was acutely sensitive to each of his breaths, to every shift of his body. Her peripheral vision showed the bunch and flow of muscles beneath his jeans and tee, and her mind replayed the sight of him naked against her, atop her, lit by the art of her ancestors. Although she told herself to concentrate on what was being said, she was far more aware of what was going on inside her as desire heated and built, and her body readied itself for something her mind told her she should walk away from.