Back when he’d first returned to Skywatch, he had given the Nightkeepers a full report on his conversations with Phee, hoping there might be something in there that could help them figure out what the Banol Kax were planning. At the time, Red-Boar had listened, stone-faced, and said it was all bullshit. Repeatedly. That was all he’d said on the subject, though. Until now.
Thumping into a chair opposite his old man, Rabbit reached for the unopened Coke. “You going to tell me or not?” He wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to make an announcement like that, then remind him that he’d never sworn an oath to the current king—Dez had taken over for Strike pretty recently—and clam up.
“For starters, everything the demon told you was a fucking lie. Your mother didn’t escape from the Xibalbans, and she and I didn’t fall for each other and live in some godsdamned rain forest paradise until they tracked us down and killed her. And you never had a twin brother. That was all a bullshit fairy tale.”
Rabbit didn’t give his old man the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. “How about you tell me something I don’t already know?”
Disappointment stung, though, warning that some part of him had wanted to think that maybe there had been a romance between his parents, a tragedy that explained why his father hadn’t ever been able to love him, or even like him just a little. And that there had been a twin brother whose absence accounted for the holes inside him, the broken, ragged places that not even Myrinne had been able to fill.
“How much do you already know?” Red-Boar demanded.
Frustration stirred, old and ugly, but Rabbit didn’t let that show, either. “Fine, we’ll play it your way. Fucking whatever. Jox told me that not long after the massacre you lost your shit and disappeared into the rain forest, and he gave me the name of a village: Oc Ajal. I went there and discovered that it was full of Xibalbans—not members of Werigo’s sect of wack-jobs, but peaceful dark-magic shamans led by a guy named Anntah. I met him on his deathbed.” In fact, it had been his fault Anntah and the others had been murdered. Iago—Werigo’s son and Anntah’s sworn enemy—had followed him there and razed the village.
Voice thickening, Rabbit continued, “He said that you had stayed with them for a day or so and then moved on. You were looking for Cassie and the boys, convinced they were still alive somewhere.” As far as Red-Boar had been concerned, then or now, his real life had ended with the Solstice Massacre, when his Nightkeeper wife and their twin sons were killed. “He thought my mother had probably been part of Werigo’s sect, either voluntarily or as a prisoner. As far as he knew, the villagers of Oc Ajal were the last of the pacifist Xibalbans.” And because of him, they were all dead now. He drained his Coke, which bit like hundred-fifty-proof pulque. “Anyway, that’s where the trail went cold for me.” He left it hanging, though he didn’t trust his old man to pick up the story. Didn’t trust him to do anything, really.
But Red-Boar gave one of his “you’re an idiot” snorts, and said, “You’ve got it right up to the part where I visited Oc Ajal, but you’re dead-ass wrong about the rest of it. For one, the villagers were far from pacifists. And for another, Anntah wasn’t one of the good guys. Fucking far from it.”
“But—”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
Maybe not. Visiting Oc Ajal and meeting the elder had been a turning point for Rabbit. The village was where he’d learned to think twice before giving in to the impulses that had ruled his life up to that point, where he’d started to learn to control himself rather than hurting the people around him. But it was also where he’d gotten one of the two eccentrics that had summoned Phee. Anntah had given it to him, fuck it all.
Closing his fingers around the empty soda can and not letting himself crumple it, he nodded. “Go on.”
“When I showed up in Oc Ajal, I was pretty fucking out of it, raving about the massacre, the Nightkeepers, all of it. So it took Anntah and the others about two minutes to figure out who and what I was.” Red-Boar glanced down at his forearm, which bore the distinctive black marks of a Nightkeeper warrior. “He got me to admit that I was the only surviving Nightkeeper mage—I didn’t tell him about Strike, Anna and Jox, thank fuck. I kept that much to myself. Anyway, he kept saying that the gods had sent me to him, that he could give me what I wanted.”
“Your family.”
Red-Boar was back to staring at his soda can. “That’s what I thought he meant, what he wanted me to think. He said I should eat and rest. My wife was out hunting, he said. She’d be back soon and she’d be so excited to see me.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t know what he put in the food, but by the time the hunting party got back, I was hammered, horny, and not feeling picky.”
Ew. Rabbit didn’t say anything, half-afraid his old man would elaborate.
“I didn’t know where I was or who I was with. I just went where I was told, did what I was told, and when Anntah put me together with his daughter in a hut some ways away from the village . . . well. Anyway. We did what we did, and I don’t remember any of it. All I know was that the next morning, I woke up alone, hungover and feeling like shit. And when I tried to leave, I couldn’t. The door was locked, and what I thought was a hut turned out to be a cage.” His flat, cold voice gained an edge. “Every night after that for a couple of months, it was the same fucking thing. The food, the drugs, his daughter. Turns out old Anntah had been looking for the last surviving Nightkeeper for a long time. I guess he had a prophecy to fulfill.”
Rabbit’s Coke can was a crumpled mess, though he didn’t remember crushing it. He just stared at it—easier than staring at his old man—for the first time realizing the familiar logo was the color of blood. “He was trying to breed the crossover. Half Nightkeeper, half Xibalban.”
Somewhere far away from his conscious mind, his stomach was knotted and his heart thudded a sickly, sticky beat. But inside his brain there wasn’t much going on except a whole lot of buzzing and a couple of neon flashes of “Does not compute.” In a way it did compute, though, which was a bitter damn pill to swallow. Because Anntah hadn’t just given Rabbit the stone eccentric, he’d been the one to tell him he was the crossover, the key to the war . . . and he was the one who’d convinced him that the demons were the true gods and the sky gods were his enemies. He’d planted the seeds.
More lies. And Rabbit had bought into every fucking one of them. He’d been so ego-blinded, so ready to believe that he was right and everyone else was wrong, that he’d jumped on the godsdamned bandwagon.
“He wasn’t just trying to breed the crossover,” Red-Boar said. “He succeeded.”
All Rabbit could think was: Don’t puke. Coke in reverse hurt like a bitch, but what other response was there to learning that you’d been bred like a fucking science experiment? “Go on.”
Maybe his old man’s eyes softened a little. Maybe not. Probably not. “After a couple of months, there weren’t any more drugs and she stopped coming around. They kept me there, though, locked up like an animal. A stud dog they were just warehousing in case they needed to rebreed their bitch.”
Rabbit made an inarticulate noise as the last of his illusions crumbled. He’d been looking for his mother, thinking that learning about her would help, when, really, it just made shit worse. He hadn’t had a loving mother, a twin brother, or a father who gave a crap. And Anntah had been his grandfather, his creator. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?
“At first I raved,” Red-Boar continued, “or just sat there like a godsdamned lump. Eventually, though, I started sharpening up, coming out of the place I’d been since the massacre. I finally wrapped my head around the fact that Cassie and the boys were gone. I knew I had to get away and warn the others that the Xibalbans were real, and, worse, that they were working toward their end-date prophecies even though the barrier was sealed off. So I pretended I was still out of it, and waited for my chance. And I listened. The villagers didn’t think twice about what they were saying when they brought my food. That was how I found out what Anntah and the others were trying to do. What the crossover was supposed to mean.”