The world went gray-green and slewed sideways, and he crashed into an alley two streets over from the apartment, smack in front of Leah.
This time she did scream.
He grabbed her, envisioned the apartment, and zapped them back hard and fast. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, and she immediately started thrashing, screaming at the top of her lungs. Worse, the world was starting to spin and go fuzzy at the edges, warning Strike that he was running out of magic fast.
With his last ounce of power he put the sleep spell back on her, and she went limp against him.
Breathing hard, he lay there for a minute while the world did doughnuts around him, and he thanked the gods that he’d managed to get her back before the locals noticed her half-naked self parading around the not-very -nice neighborhood. Then he thanked them some more that he’d managed to pull off two teleports and a sleep spell, which meant he wouldn’t have to admit to Jox that he’d nearly screwed the pooch and lost her.
Then he lay there a minute longer because his balls hurt and he didn’t want to move.
Eventually, though, the floor got hard and he forced himself to his feet. He laid Leah back on the couch and covered her up with the serape, and she murmured something in a soft, sweet voice and turned on her side, tucking her hands beneath her cheek. With her face smoothed out in sleep, she looked very young and vulnerable.
‘‘Vulnerable.’’ He snorted. ‘‘Not exactly accurate, eh, Blondie?’’
He hadn’t enjoyed the experience, but he admired her flair. She’d played him hard and he’d fallen easy, and props to her. She might’ve gotten away, too, if it weren’t for the magic.
Damn, he liked what he knew of her. She was tough and resourceful, soft and sexy, and she’d held her own against the makol. She was gorgeous and quick-minded and—
And whether he liked her or not, dreamed of her or not, she hadn’t retained any magic past the equinox, which meant she wasn’t part of what was coming. And really, that was for the best, given the prophecy.
At the thought, he looked at the far wall, where a framed piece of parchment hung on a bent nail. It wasn’t a decorative touch. It was a reminder of what was important. Ascribed to the god Kauil, whose origins and allegiances were unknown, the thirteenth prophecy read: In the final five years / The king stands ready / To make his greatest sacrifice. / If the dark lord comes / The end begins.
He sighed. Though he wasn’t the king yet, he was next in line, and the only jaguar male left. That meant the prophecy drove him, shadowed him. For so long he’d hoped it meant nothing, that the five-year mark would come and go, that 2012 would come and go. But now the barrier had churned back online, right on schedule, and now there was an ajaw-makol on the earthly plane, with the power to bring a dark lord through the barrier on the next cardinal day. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think the greatest sacrifice would be coming right on its heels.
And didn’t that just suck. Cursing, he pushed away from the wall, intending to pace.
He nearly fell on his ass.
All of a sudden, his legs felt like bungees hooked to nothing, limp and elastic. The urge to sleep was almost overwhelming, and the floor was looking soft as a mattress, but he knew he couldn’t pass out. Not now. Not here.
No way in hell was he leaving Leah unprotected. Not with a makol on the loose. So he headed back into the main room and scrounged the tinned meat he’d pulled out for their interrupted snack. By his fourth can of by-products, the world had stopped spinning. By his sixth— when the SPAM started tasting like SPAM, which wasn’t saying much—he was feeling almost normal, except for the part about needing to sleep for a week. Since that wasn’t an option, he went for caffeine instead, raiding the coffee supply and drinking the stuff black, because powdered creamer was just wrong.
Fortified with a mug of sludgelike caffeine, he snagged a package of stale cookies from a cabinet, then headed back to Leah. He tucked the serape more tightly around her, set a chair near her head, facing the door, and sat himself down with the cookies and coffee within reach, along with the MAC-10 autopistol he’d pulled out of the gun locker hidden behind a secret panel in the bathroom closet. With the gun on his lap and a spare clip of jade-tipped bullets nearby, he watched the door. And waited.
And waited.
He was still waiting and watching, and was on his third pot of coffee when the dawn broke with quiet ferocity.
In the aftermath of the solstice, the sun rose almost directly behind the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá, a black step-sided silhouette against the fiery red of dawn. The pyramid—dedicated to the creator god Kulkulkan— was a monumental calendar, with ninety-one steps on each of the four sides, plus the top platform, equaling the 365 days of a solar year. Built atop an earlier temple dedicated to the jaguars gods believed to hold up the four corners of the world, the pyramid of Kulkulkan was designed so a serpent shadow descended the stairs at the exact moment of each equinox, in spring and fall. It overlooked the city of Chichén Itzá, which had been the center of religious and military power in the Yucatán from 800-1100 or so, A.D., housing upward of fifty thousand Maya and Nightkeepers at its peak.
Now, as the sun rose over the ancient city, Strike could just see the parking area that would fill with buses and rental cars in the next few hours, as tourists thronged the ruins, oohing and aahing over the ball court, where teams had competed to toss a heavy ball through stone rings set high on the parallel walls of the court. Little would the tourists know that the ball had represented the sun and the ring had symbolized the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which the Maya had believed was the entrance to Xibalba. In that way, they had reenacted the Great Conjunction over and over again, with the game’s winners offering blood sacrifices— and sometimes their lives—to the gods in the hopes of preventing the end-time.
The tourists also wouldn’t know that the Sacred Cenote, a giant sinkhole opening onto the underground waterways that were the only source of freshwater in the Yucatán, was not only a sacrifical well into which the Maya had thrown thousands of offerings, it was also one of the two entrances to the sacred underground tunnels of the Nightkeepers. Because, hello, nobody even knew the Nightkeepers existed anymore. Thanks to the conquistadors and their missionaries, knowledge of the Great Conjunction had faded to an astronomical oddity, and the Nightkeeper-inspired Mayan pantheon had been lost to monotheism.
Which meant what in practical terms? Nothing, really, Strike admitted to himself as the sun continued to climb the sky above the step-sided pyramid belonging to a god who might’ve been forgotten, but was far from gone. The Nightkeepers’ duties had been set long ago, codified into the thirteen prophecies. The Great Conjunction was coming whether mankind cared or not. The Banol Kax would seek to breach the barrier.
And the Nightkeepers—what was left of them, anyway— would stand and fight.
Exhaustion drummed through him. Or maybe that was depression. Grief. It was impossible not to think about the massacre, about what it’d meant. If the barrier was fully back online and the Banol Kax had sent their ajaw-makol to prepare the stage for a dark lord’s arrival, then everything was happening right on schedule despite the ultimate sacrifice represented by the massacre. Which meant his father’s dreams had been lies. Or maybe he’d failed to follow the visions to their conclusion? Nobody knew at this point, which was a real bugger, because it didn’t give Strike a damn bit of insight into how to deal with his own dreams. Or Leah’s.