“Ambrose!” she shouted, still lost somewhere within his energy. “It’s me, Sasha! Your princess.”
The din was incredible; she couldn’t even hear herself. Still, she tried again. “Ambrose? Where are you? Help me, damn it. You’re going to kill me!”
Her only answer was a vicious whip of mad joy, a chortle of glee that sounded all around her.
Panicking, she sought her own body, her own song, but she couldn’t hear it over all the rocketing drums. “Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”
Suddenly a silver gleam cracked through the whirl and wrapped around her. She screamed and struggled, but it yanked her through the drums and madness. She was still screaming when she slammed back into her own body and found herself in Michael’s arms. His eyes gleamed with silver magic and rage. Cursing, he pulled her away from the demi- nahwal, then backhanded the creature, driving it to its knees. Putting himself between them, he jerked the machete from its scabbard.
“Michael!” Sasha caught his arm, and held on when he tried to wrench it away. “Michael, stop!”
He didn’t hear her, just bulled through her restraining grasp and lunged for the demi- nahwal.
“No!” Heart pounding in her throat, Sasha flung herself into the path of the sharp-edged machete.
She screamed as the blade descended in a sweeping arc.
It froze less than an inch from her neck.
She hadn’t realized she had closed her eyes until she was forced to open them in order to look at Michael. He was rigor-locked above her, the cords standing out on his neck and arms, muscles quivering with tension. He stared down at her, eyes dark and wild, but his own. “I almost killed you.”
“You wouldn’t have,” she said with quiet assurance, though the fear knotted in her stomach wasn’t so certain.
His expression went hard around the edges. “You’re wrong about that.”
He was trying to frighten her, she knew. And he was succeeding, not just because of the blade, but because of the silver magic, which was too powerful to be Nightkeeper, too clean to be Xibalban.
What is it? she wanted to ask him. What are you ?
Not sure she was ready for the answers to those questions, she eased away and focused on Ambrose —or rather, the thing that was somehow the embodiment of Ambrose’s ghost.
When she saw a familiar tic come from the otherwise motionless demi- nahwal, Ambrose’s habitual chin twitch, she said, “I think he’s coming out of it.” She was slow to turn her back on Michael, and her warrior’s talent chimed a warning when she did, but she ignored it to hunker down near the demi- nahwal. She touched Ambrose’s scarred wrist, found the thunder of drums within him.
“Ambrose? If you can hear me, I want you to come toward the sound of my voice. Don’t think about the drums; don’t listen to them. Come toward my voice.” She’d seen a similar tactic work for Pim once or twice, though without the part about the drums. If that chaotic beat was his ch’ul . . . she shuddered at the thought of being locked inside a pattern like that. “That’s it,” she said when the tics intensified. “Toward my voice. You can do it.”
The creature reeled and let out a keening noise as it seemed to collapse in on itself. Then it straightened and looked at her, and the madness was, if not gone, then significantly reduced. “Sasha?”
The voice wasn’t Ambrose’s—it was too high, gone otherworldly around the edges. But the tone was right, and the timbre. “I’m here,” she said, speaking quickly because she didn’t know how long he would be able to hold on to reality. “Where is the library scroll?”
“You’re here,” Ambrose said as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’d almost given up hope.” He looked past her and up, to Michael—first his face, then his forearm. A long, slow breath escaped from the demi- nahwal’s body. “You found them. I had hoped you’d come for my body, and see the message I left.”
“Starscript,” Michael explained at her sidelong look. “Lucius found it. That was what led him to Skywatch.”
The knowledge that he’d tried to contact her helped somehow.
“Ambrose,” she said firmly, “Where is the library scroll?”
“It’s down there,” he said, gesturing down the hallway. “In the tomb. The coffin will open during the solstice, and you’ll find the scroll inside. It’ll tell you what you need to know to summon the Prophet. He’ll tell you everything you need to know.” His voice dropped. “You’ve left it almost too late. The spell must be performed by the triad anniversary. After that, the barrier will be too unstable to form the conduit.”
“Which gives us one chance and once chance only.” Michael shook his head. “We should’ve been here earlier.”
“Time happens in time,” Ambrose said cryptically, then reached out toward Sasha. She nearly jerked away, but he didn’t touch her, just caressed the air above her marks, pausing over the jaguar and the ju. “Your mother had a vision that we were all going to die. She couldn’t talk Scarred-Jaguar out of attacking the intersection, couldn’t go against him publicly. But you were the daughter of the sky, the daughter of the prophecy. She knew you had to live. She trusted me, her favorite brother.” His voice had started to weaken, the tone fluctuating. “She told the others you were stillborn, only you weren’t. You were perfect . . . but I wasn’t. The scorpion spell took my magic, but the river broke something inside me. I wasn’t right after that. I wasn’t good for you, wasn’t good to you. I tried. Pim tried. Neither of us was good enough. I tried to find the others, tried to find you a winikin, but they’d hidden too well after the massacre, and I got so confused sometimes. Then other times it all seemed like a dream. The compound was gone. Everyone I knew, everything I understood.” His voice broke to a whisper. “Gone. Nothing there. Just sand. So I did my best to teach you myself. But I couldn’t. You wouldn’t believe.”
Sasha’s voice cracked. “How could I know you were telling the truth, when everything else was so screwed up?”
“Impossible, I know.” His immobile face somehow reflected grief. “But then the barrier woke up. I felt it, even if I couldn’t use it anymore. I went crazy—well, crazier. It scared Pim. I think it broke her. She gave up on me at long last. After she . . . did what she did, I came here to see if I could reconnect with the barrier. When I did, I hid the scroll inside the coffin, where it would be safe. But they found me here—the redhead and the woman. When they started asking me about the library, I knew what I had to do.”
Chill fingers closed around her heart. “You killed yourself.” Iago hadn’t killed Pim or Ambrose, after all. Pim truly had committed suicide, out of despair for the life she’d wanted, the one she’d talked herself into believing Ambrose would give her someday. And Ambrose . . . he’d killed himself rather than reveal the library’s location. He’d been loyal to the end . . . with nobody to honor him for the sacrifice.