Jox stepped forward, with the other two behind him, looking grim, efficient, and suddenly very coach-like. “Everyone ready for the rules of the game the way your parents played it?”
Almost in synchrony, the magi turned and looked at the tall parallel walls of the ball court. “I guess I always thought of it as another artifact,” Brandt said. “It’s just always there, you know? Like it’s watching over us.”
“And now maybe it’s going to do more.” Jox nodded to the other two winikin; they dug into the box and started handing out thin booklets that were heavy on diagrams, light on text, and laid out the basics. Lucius had snagged one earlier and already had it memorized. He’d even run through some of the moves, which had come back to him with an ease that had surprised him. He’d never been much into sports before. Then again, that was before.
“We’re just going to study pictures?” Rabbit asked from the far end of the table. Lucius glanced over, surprised to see him and Myrinne at the outskirts of the group. He hadn’t noticed the young couple’s arrival, and he wasn’t used to Strike letting the girl sit in on meetings. More, it seemed, had changed than just Rabbit’s level of pyrokinesis.
“Only briefly.” The corners of Jox’s mouth kicked up. “Then we’re going to practice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
June 20 Two years, six months, and one day to the zero date Jox’s idea of practice turned out to be two days of sweaty, hard-hitting, brutal play, without the benefit of helmets or arm and wrist guards, which he claimed were only for ceremonial use anyway. By the time the winikin declared them competent enough not to embarrass themselves in front of the gods, Rabbit’s nose was sore and swollen, and his knees and elbows were skinned to shit. They hurt badly enough to remind him of when he and his old man had lived briefly in a cheap apartment that would’ve been more of the same old, except that there had been a half-pipe down the street, and a couple of kids who’d taught him a few tricks on their boards. That had lasted until his old man had shown up in his penitent’s robes, with his head shaved and his eyes crazy-wild; that had been the end of Rabbit’s half-pipe friends, and they’d moved on soon after.
This isn’t about the old man, Rabbit reminded himself as he trailed after Jox, heading out of the ball court. Not directly, anyway.
He and Myrinne had done some digging on their own, but hadn’t come up with much info on the Order of Xibalba that wasn’t already common knowledge. Rabbit had negged the idea of hiring a PI, first because he’d thrown money in that direction once before with minimal results, and second because he might not agree with all of Strike’s tenets, but he had to believe it was better for the magi to stay well under the human radar. With his luck, he’d hire a PI, the guy would find something on the Xibalbans, and the next thing he knew, the Enquirer would have a headline like: Mayan Doomsday Cult Implicated in Black Magic Slaying! or some such shit. No freaking way. He was trying to be smart these days.
It seemed to be paying off too. Despite the knee-jerk piss-off of having Jade and Lucius break into his place and sniff around— hello, personal space—when he’d called Strike to bitch, the king had actually been pretty conciliatory about it. He’d even gone back on his keep Rabbit and Myrinne at UT through the solstice decree, and zapped out to get them. Then, when Jade’s panic button went off, Rabbit hadn’t just gotten to come along for the ride; he’d been front and center of the rescue when he’d said he thought he could crisp the makol without doing the head-and-heart thing. Strike hadn’t been too keen on his doing so much killing, but it wasn’t like they were people anymore. Once a makol was fully bound, the human host was dead one way or the other. Rabbit had just sped things up.
In the aftermath of the op he’d been pumped, even after the drag of twelve hours in the Jeep with Michael and Lucius, who weren’t bad guys, but had both been in pissy moods and had argued about every stop. Didn’t matter, though, because when he’d gotten back to Skywatch, Myrinne had been there, waiting for him with a smile and the bright idea to ask Jox about his mother. Not in so many words, of course, but that was the basic plan. If anyone living knew anything, it would be the winikin.
Subtle, Rabbit reminded himself as he lengthened his strides to catch up. You’re going for subtle.
Doing the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head thing he’d perfected over more than four decades of in loco parenthood, Jox stopped at the edge of the narrow, rectangular playing field, right on the out-of-
bounds line. He raised an eyebrow. “Did you need something, or are we just headed in the same direction?” There was no asperity in the question; it was just a question. Jox was like that—a straight shooter who tried to do his best by everyone and, as far as Rabbit was concerned, didn’t take nearly enough for himself.
“I thought you might want some help digging the stuff out of storage for tomorrow.” Rabbit didn’t quite stick his hands in his pockets and whistle innocently, but he sure imagined it.
A year ago, Jox probably would’ve busted out laughing. Now he nodded, looking pleased. “Sure.
Come on. These days, a winikin can’t afford to turn down free labor under the age of fifty.”
They headed for the mansion, bypassed the construction crews by going in through the garage, and turned down a seldom-used hallway that had doorways marching down it on either side, numbered in sequence starting with one hundred. “These are more residences, right?”
“They used to be,” Jox answered grimly. “Three floors of one-room studios for the unchosen winikin, single nonranking magi, out-of-town visitors, that sort of thing. Now it’s fucking storage space.”
Rabbit held his hands up. “Sor-ry.”
“Damn it.” Jox shook his head. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I really, really hate this part.” Stopping in front of door 121, he checked the number against a spreadsheet on his iPhone screen, muttering, “And I really don’t want to have to paw through any more boxes than absolutely necessary.” Pushing open the door, he flipped on the lights and waved Rabbit through.
Jox had been in charge of the massive renovation and updating of Skywatch almost exactly two years earlier, when the barrier reactivated and the magi returned to their abandoned home. At the time, Rabbit had been sulking up in the pueblo, listening to tunes and hating the world. When his old man had bothered to hunt him down and nag about him pitching in and helping Jox with the cleanup, he’d sneered and done a fast fade.
Now, looking at row upon row of moving boxes, stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks set with minimal aisles between, like something out of the closing credits of Cold Case, for the first time, Rabbit thought, really thought about what the winikin had been facing. Some boxes were marked with content lists, some with bloodlines, others with names. They were all carefully stored, cataloged, and cross-
reffed in Jox’s database. And he’d done most of the work himself. He’d sorted through the residences of dead men, women, and children—family members, teammates, friends—and although he’d had a hired cleanup crew come in and strip the place of nearly a thousand people’s worth of daily living crap, he’d had to pull out the Nightkeeper-specific stuff first so it wouldn’t hit the mainstream via Goodwill. He’d done it mostly alone too, wanting the rooms pristine, with no sign of their former inhabitants or their slaughter, before the other Nightkeepers and winikin arrived.