“That’s borderline,” Michael growled, but couldn’t really say it had been the wrong thing to do.
Rabbit had proven adept at installing spell-cast mental filters designed to reroute thought processes.
When he and Myrinne were on campus, they both wore filters he’d designed to keep them from talking about the Nightkeepers in public, and to keep him from working magic. That’d been Anna’s requirement before she leaned on the UT administration to grant them late admission and dorm singles across the hall from each other, both major concessions at the big school.
“I made a call. You don’t have to like it.” But Strike’s eyes said more than that; they challenged Michael to stake his claim.
He wanted to—gods and the Banol Kax knew he wanted to—but he didn’t dare. The thing inside him could make him unfit to be a mage, never mind a mate. So instead he growled, “Fine. Whatever.
You said you wanted to debrief me?”
“You can have your five minutes with her first.”
“I’ll take your word that she’s still asleep.” Even though he would’ve rather gone straight down to see her, he didn’t want to give his king hope of their becoming a mated pair. “Let me grab some food and I’ll be right in.”
“I’ve got you covered,” Tomas said from the kitchen, surprising Michael, who hadn’t realized he was within earshot. The winikin skimmed a trough-size bowl along the marble-topped breakfast bar that separated the huge kitchen from the great room; the bowl proved to be filled with scrambled eggs, sausage, and syrup-soaked pancake chunks, all mixed together. “Eat up,” the winikin ordered. “The king’s right. You look like shit.”
Michael snagged the bowl before Tomas could do his usual bitch routine over his charge’s postmagic food preferences. “Coffee?”
“There’s a fresh pot and clean mugs in the suite.”
“That’ll do.” Carrying his breakfast, Michael headed after Strike. The men pushed through a set of heavy wooden doors carved with the royal jaguar motif, and stepped into the main sitting room of the royal suite. Off to their right, a dining table had become a workstation, with laptops, printers, and piles of paper. The kitchen nook to their left was pretty bare, but then again, so were the kitchens in most of the Nightkeepers’ suites; the winikin did the majority of the cooking in the main kitchen. Hallways sprawled off to the left and right of the living room, leading to bedrooms and ritual areas.
Strike took a spot on the long, brown-upholstered couch, where Leah, Alexis, and Nate sat, forming the core of the royal council. Strike’s sister, Anna, sat in a love seat off to one side. She was a lovely woman in her late thirties, with red-highlighted brunette hair and the same piercing cobalt eyes as her brother. Wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater the same color as her eyes, along with an ancient crystal skull that hung from a chain around her neck, she looked tired. Strike must’ve ’ported her in first thing, maybe on the backside of the trip to return Rabbit to the university.
The final member of the day’s council meeting, the royal winikin Jox, lounged in a chair on the other side of a glyph-carved wooden chest that was probably more than a thousand years old, and served the jaguar royals as a coffee table. In his late fifties, with his gray-shot hair pulled back in a Deadhead ponytail, wearing jeans and a dark green button-down with its sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearm marks, Jox was the heart of Skywatch. These days, the royal winikin was spread thin, looking after not only his true bound charges, but also Leah, as Strike’s mate, and Rabbit, who had no winikin of his own, but had been partly Jox’s responsibility since toddlerhood. The royal winikin looked like he could use a serious vacation, but Michael didn’t figure it was his place to suggest it. Besides, it wasn’t like the rest of them weren’t run ragged. There was too much that needed doing, and not enough bodies in residence to do it.
Strike poured him a mug of coffee and handed it over black. “Ready to roll?”
Michael nodded his thanks and took a sip, needing the bite of caffeine. “What do you want to know?” Which was really his way of asking what they thought they already knew.
Leah smiled sweetly. “Nice try. How about you walk us through exactly what happened last night, step by step? And don’t skimp on the deets.”
So Michael went through the rescue minute by minute. He told them about Sasha’s dreams and copped to the power boost he’d gotten from kissing her, though he implied that kissing was as far as they’d gone. He then moved on to describe the red-robe’s arrival and Iago’s entrance, and was even able to tell them that the Xibalbans’ leader was searching for a specific Nightkeeper in addition to Sasha, and needed them both by the winter solstice. Then, for all that he’d vowed to be a better man, he started mixing lies with the truth, hiding the fact that Iago had later said he was the one—and that Sasha would be part of his transformation. He finished with, “Iago tried to grab Sasha and ’port her out, but I slapped the strongest shield I could manage around us both, and Iago’s magic misfired and killed the red-robe. I don’t know what the deal was with the corpse disintegrating like that—maybe it had something to do with using Xibalban magic in a Nightkeeper temple? Or maybe it was intrinsic to the red-robe? He was definitely a magic sniffer, one of the pilli, whatever that means.”
Michael made himself stop before he said too much, knowing that the best lies were the simplest.
Strike didn’t look like he was totally buying the story, but before he could get into it, Anna cut in, saying, “That’s why I’m here.” With a doctorate in Mayan studies and more than a decade in the field, she was their local expert on the historical stuff. “Pilli was a word used to represent a member of the elite nobility. In this case, it probably refers to the more powerful of the Xibalban magi, possibly those wearing the red robes.”
Jox frowned at Anna. “I’ve never heard the word before.”
“That’s because it’s not Mayan,” she said. “It’s Aztec. Which got me wondering . . . What if, rather than paralleling the Mayan system, like we are, the Xibalbans are patterned after the Aztec?” She paused. “Or, more accurately, what if the Aztec were patterned after the Xibalbans? It makes a twisted sort of sense; the Aztec arose right around the time the Xibalbans split off from the Nightkeepers, and were far more bloodthirsty than their neighboring cultures. Where the Maya largely practiced autosacrifice, the Aztec made huge human sacrifices, taking sometimes hundreds, even reportedly thousands of victims at a time by the mid-fifteen hundreds. Granted, those were terrible times, when the influx of the Spanish invaders brought war, famine, and disease. The Aztec were just doing what they believed would appease the gods . . . but what if it wasn’t the gods they were really praying to?”
Nate leaned forward, suddenly intent. “You think the Aztec were being coached by the Xibalbans, that they were actually trying to hook up with the Banol Kax to drive the Spaniards away?”
“The timing fits,” Anna said, “and it would help explain why the Aztec went so far down a path that most human beings wouldn’t consider an option.”
Michael’s inner tension had settled some as the convo evolved around him, veering away from the red-robe’s death. Now he asked, “How does knowing about the Aztec connection help us against the Xibalbans?”
He should’ve kept his mouth shut. He knew it the moment Strike zeroed back in on him as he answered,“We’re not sure yet. Anna is going to work with Jade to put together a rundown of Aztec myths, rituals, and other things that might be pertinent to the issue.” The king hit Jade’s name harder than he needed to, another challenge.