out areas, and one or two spots where narrow places had been widened by hand. In the absence of the close-fitted stonework and stylized carvings she’d grown used to in ritual settings, the tunnel almost didn’t feel Nightkeeper in origin. It rounded a gentle curve, cutting out the daylight and leaving them to rely entirely on the foxfire, but the magic stayed true, with little strain on her reserves.
“I wonder how far—” She broke off when the tunnel widened to a cavern and she had an answer to how far it went.
More, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or think as her entire consciousness logjammed on a rapid- fire kaleidoscope of images that she couldn’t process all at once.
“Oh,” she said. That was all she could manage, really, because the breath backed up in her lungs and her throat closed until only a stingy trickle of oxygen got through.
The budding symbologist in her locked on the spiral designs on the floor and ceiling, recognizing the multirayed galactic symbol of the Chacoans, who had appeared suddenly in the first few centuries A.D., flourished in the canyons of New Mexico, and then disappeared just as suddenly, leaving behind intricate stone cities built entirely for the dead. The scribe in her noted a small carved box of the sort the ancient Maya and Nightkeepers had used to store their most precious possessions.
The daughter in her, though, focused on the dry, desiccated corpse slumped up against the far wall.
Vennie’s corpse was much as Lucius had described its spiritual representation in the library, with a hooked nose and protruding teeth that bore little resemblance to the bright, laughing girl from the photos. Oddly, Jade found she could look at her mother’s death-ravaged face and hands without any real queasiness; on some level she’d been prepared for that. What she hadn’t been entirely prepared for, though, was for the body to be wearing the remains of high-top Reeboks, acid-washed jeans, a faded hot-pink sweatshirt, and a denim jacket that was two shades darker than the pants, and carefully decorated with iron-on patches for bands that now played on classic-rock radio.
The clothes didn’t just date the corpse; they drove home the child her mother had been, somehow uniting the two inside Jade. Yes, Vennie had been a wife and a mother, and had been torn between the responsibilities of the bloodline she’d been born into and the strictures of the one she’d chosen. But at the same time, her life had just been beginning. If it hadn’t been for the massacre, she would have been in her early forties now. She would’ve been at her prime as a mage, whatever form that magic might have taken.
“She barely even got a chance to know herself,” Jade murmured.
Lucius gave her a one-armed hug and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Then he stepped away, giving her some space she wasn’t sure she needed. “Are you okay with me checking out the box?”
“Go for it.” She stayed with the body, though. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Sooner than she’d expected, he made a satisfied noise and held out something to her. “I think you should open this one.”
It was a hot-pink spiral-bound notebook with glitter stars stuck to the cover. To Jade’s surprise, she felt her lips curve in a smile as she took the small volume. “She wasn’t subtle, was she?”
“She was seventeen,” he said, which more or less said it all.
She met Lucius’s eyes. “Thank you. Not just for the notebook, but for all of it. For being here with me, for letting me see her first . . . For all of it.”
He tipped his head, but didn’t quite meet her eyes. “That’s what friends are for.”
Telling herself not to read too much into that—or too little—she nodded and cracked open the notebook. The lined pages were brittle and yellow; the first half of the book appeared to be class notes, full of cryptic scribbles about the hero twins and the end-time interspersed with doodles of the spiral pattern that was echoed on the floor and ceiling of the cavern, along with two repeated symbols: the star and the warrior’s glyph. “A little full of ourselves, were we?” Jade commented, though more fondly than anything. She thought she was getting a handle on her feelings where it came to Vennie, slotting her—for the moment, anyway—in a mental position she thought was someplace between sister and mother.
“Again, she was seventeen.” Lucius grinned, but lines of tension bracketed his eyes and mouth as he read over her shoulder. “Is there anything in there besides class notes?”
She flipped a few more pages, then stopped. Everything stopped—her voice, her breath, even her heart—as she stared down at the single page filled with looping writing.
It began: Dear Jade.
“Oh,” she said, a single syllable of pained longing.
Lucius read the top line over her shoulder, then simply touched his temple to hers in support. “Read it to me,” he suggested, his voice barely more than a whisper of breath in her ear. “More, read it to her. Let her know you got it, that she’s been found after all these years.” Then he moved away, giving her the room to make her own decision.
She nodded, swallowing to clear the huge lump in her throat. “ ‘Dear Jade,’ ” she began, and had to start over when her voice cracked. “ ‘Dear Jade, please forgive me for what I’m about to do. And please ask the stars to forgive me too. I know I don’t belong here anymore. But I don’t really belong anywhere, do I? I’m an outsider, soon to become a Prophet. Please ask them to use my voice to help the king with his decisions. If it’s to be an attack, use me to win. If not, use me to plan the 2012 war, though that’s still so far away. Either way, please know that I am satisfied so long as the magi don’t march to their deaths the day after tomorrow, which is what I’m scared will happen if I don’t do this.
And finally, please tell your father, tell Josh, that it wasn’t always easy loving him, but I never stopped. I love you both. Your mother, Venus.’ ” When Jade fell silent, the cave seemed to hum with the echoes of her voice, the sound becoming, for a moment, multitonal.
“Vennie must’ve been a nickname for Venus,” Lucius observed. “Venus is one of the most visible stars in the sky, and its patterns form a cornerstone of the entire calendric system.”
Jade found a ghost of a smile. “Venus. Yeah. That fits.” She sighed. “She must’ve written this part before she tried the soul spell. She was assuming that the Prophet’s magic would take her soul and she wouldn’t get another chance to say good-bye.” Something nudged at the edge of her brain—a question she hadn’t asked, a connection she was missing.
“ ‘This part’?” Lucius said. “There’s more?”
She nodded, skimming ahead, not sure what she was feeling, what she was supposed to feel. “The next one is another ‘Dear Jade’ letter. I think she was expecting the members of the star bloodline to find her once she became the Prophet—maybe there was some sort of magic signal to announce its arrival?—and wanted them to have this info, but couldn’t bring herself to write it directly to the family members who had turned away from her. So she wrote them to a six-month-old baby instead.”
“Or else she wanted you to know she was, in her own way, a hero.”
Nodding, Jade began reading again: “ ‘Dear Jade . . . Gods . . . oh, gods, how do I say this? How can it be true? I said the spell right, made the sacrifice, but the magic didn’t take me. Instead, it took her, took someone I didn’t even know about, but loved with all my heart—’ ” She broke off, her blood chilling as she made the connection that had been bothering her. “That’s why she ended up like you.