Demonkeepers (20 page)

Granted, the compound wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment, it sure felt that way.

After a failed attempt to ’port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ’ported several of the warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the
Banol Kax
had somehow returned it to the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might usurp the sun itself . . . and from there, how the magi could stop him.

Jade had been left behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously rocked.

Over a breakfast of cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice her new magic.

She felt a quick, hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the far wall. When the light died down, exhilaration roared through her. “I did it!”

The wall was ice crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just barely.

After giving herself a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that wasn’t the slightest bit dignified or decorous, she pulled herself back to the task at hand, namely figuring out whether she could manage the spell. It didn’t take her long to figure out how much energy to put behind the spell in order to create a manageable blast of cold magic that froze whatever it touched and went where she wanted it to. Remembering a scene from
X-Men
, she tried to make an ice-sculpture rose, but wound up with a blob instead, so she decided that wasn’t how the magic rolled. But that was okay, because at least it was rolling. Which meant it was time to try morphing another spell.

Jumpy with anticipation, she headed to the temporary archive—aka an unfurnished spare room where the
winikin
had set up laundry racks and hung the worst of the waterlogged books out to dry under fans. There, she hunted up the
Idiot’s Guide
, which was boxed up among the other books, the ones that had survived relatively unscathed, with just a little frost damage. Flipping to the last chapter, she paged past the fireball spell to the next standard in the warrior’s arsenal: shield magic.
Okay
, she thought,
let’s do this!
She focused on the page and opened herself to the magic.

Nothing happened.

The glyphs were there; the translation was there . . . but the shimmer of power wasn’t. She stared at the page for a full minute before she was finally forced to admit that whatever magic she’d been jacked into the day before had deserted her. Again.

“Oh, come
on
!” she snapped, disgusted. “This isn’t”—
fair
, she didn’t say, because it was probably past time to man up and accept it. Life wasn’t fair, which sucked, but wasn’t something she could change. The magic worked on its own schedule and by its own rules. And more often than not, apparently, it didn’t work for her. Resisting the urge to bang her forearm against the table, to see if the same brute- force approach that worked for her TV remote might apply to her talent mark, she flipped back a couple of pages and tried another spell. Still no dice.

Frustration welled up inside her along with the aching drag of imminent failure.
No
, she told herself.
You’re not giving up. Not this time
. She was better than that, stronger than that.

“Okay,” she said, dropping down cross-legged on the floor. “You’re smart; you can think it through. Yesterday you looked at the spell the first time and there wasn’t any magic. Then, later, there it was. What changed?” When she put it that way, the answer was obvious: The difference had been
her
. The first time she’d been relatively calm. Then Shandi had shown up and dropped an emotional shitstorm on her, and in the aftermath, she’d had her magic. “So . . . what?” she asked the empty room. “I’ve got to be pissed off to access my talent?”

Predictably, the damp books didn’t have an answer for her. But she had a feeling she already knew at least part of the answer; she just didn’t want to go there. Honesty, though, and a certain degree of self-awareness, compelled her to admit that it probably wasn’t about being angry, per se. . . . It was about being open to the emotion. Any emotion. Problem was, emotional openness wasn’t her forte, not by a long shot. Just the opposite, in fact—she had built a career on teaching others how to distance themselves from drama and guard against upheaval. She had Shandi to thank for that. The
winikin
had closed herself off to affection and emotion in the wake of the massacre, and had taught her charge the value of control for control’s sake, making it Jade’s automatic fallback when it might not have been her natural inclination.

The more she thought about her mother, the more she realized that her first, wholly negative reaction to Shandi’s description of Vennie had come from the fact that Jade had been exactly the same sort of strongwilled, brash, egotistical teenager—or she would have been if it hadn’t been for Shandi’s iron discipline. Having been told, over and over again, that impulsiveness was a sin against her bloodline and the gods, that she had to control herself or terrible things would happen, how could she not paint her mother with that same brush? But that brought up the question of nature versus nurture. How much of the person she was today was because of her bloodlines and genetics, and how much of it had been created by her upbringing? Gods knew most of her career was based on a single sentence:
Tell me about your childhood
.

What did the gods want from her, really? They had sanctified her parents’ marriage, but not until after her conception. Was she, then, a child of the gods? The thought brought a shiver, because that was what the triad prophecy—the one that spoke of finding the lost sun—had called for. But if her parents had been meant on some level to unite the harvester and star bloodlines to create her, why had the gods chosen Shandi as her
winikin
?

“That one’s easy,” she said aloud. “To teach me to control the impulsiveness that got Vennie killed.” Or rather, the impulsiveness that had led her mother to sacrifice herself in vain. If Vennie had been a different, steadier mage, still allied with the star bloodline, maybe they would have listened to her. Maybe they would have tried to make her a true Prophet. And maybe, just maybe, she could have averted the massacre. And oh, holy gods, how different things would have been then.

Which meant . . . what? Was she supposed to be open to her emotions or was she supposed to control them, or was there some ineffable balance she was supposed to find between the two?

“Shit. I don’t know.” She knew it was ironic that she was a therapist who didn’t know how to deal with emotions, but there it was. Or rather, she knew how
not
to deal with them, because Shandi had taught her well:
Turn the emotions off. If you’re not having them, they can’t hurt you. You’re not vulnerable
. Now that she understood the reason for those lessons, though, she wasn’t sure they played.

Magic isn’t the answer. Love is
. The words drifted through her brain, bringing a complicated mix of reactions. A warm fuzziness came from Lucius’s having brought her the message, keeping it private between the two of them. But countering that warmth was a kick of self-directed anger that she had wanted—needed—to believe he’d meant more than he had, only to have him withdraw when she reached out to him. More, there was the layer of guilt she suspected he’d meant to in-still with the message, one that said her
winikin
wasn’t the only one to blame for the lack of real friendship between them. As a
winikin
, even a reluctant one, Shandi would have been fully interwoven with the harvester way of life, culturally programmed to support the bloodline’s doctrines. It couldn’t have been easy for her to see the rebelliousness of the star bloodline surfacing within Jade, when such personality traits had led to heartache and loss of face for the harvesters before.
She should’ve said something
, Jade thought as anger stirred.
How was I supposed to know? I—

She broke off the thought train, partly because it wasn’t going to get her anywhere, and partly because there had been no change in the spell book she held open on her lap. The glyphs hadn’t risen up into the air and danced in front of her, shifting to become something else. The page was just a page, the book just a book. Which suggested that the magic didn’t come from anger, and further indicated that the key had to be some sort of emotional openness.
Of course it couldn’t be easy
, Jade thought morosely. Pissed off she could have managed these days. It was the other stuff she was going to have trouble with.

Magic. Love.

Shit
.

Annoyed, she climbed to her feet and returned the
Idiot’s Guide
to its drying rack. Not sure where she was going, just that she needed to be up and moving, she stalked out into the hallway—and nearly slammed into Shandi.

The
winikin
stumbled back, putting up both hands as though warding off an attack. “Whoa, slow down!”

I don’t
want
to slow down
, Jade wanted to snap at her.
I’ve
never
wanted to slow down!
But, knowing that her mood was as much about the magic and Lucius as it was the
winikin
, she held in the knee-jerk snarl and tried to smooth herself out. As she did so, she realized that her previously slow- to-boil temper was heading toward becoming vapor-fast. What had happened to peace, serenity, and her counselor’s cool? She was off balance and reactive, borderlining on the drama she had so pitied in her patients, keeping herself above and apart from it all.

Which way of dealing was right? Was there even a right or wrong? Gods, this was exhausting.

Consciously exhaling, both her mood and a sigh, Jade said, “I’m sorry. I should’ve looked where I was going.” Shandi hesitated with her mouth partway open, as though she’d planned one response, but Jade’s apology called for another. Into that gap, Jade said, “I’m also sorry for how we left things last night. You shared something painful and I made it about me, not you.”

The other woman narrowed her eyes. “I don’t need therapy.”

That’s debatable
, Jade thought but didn’t say, not the least because her own
winikin
was one of the last people she would’ve taken on as a patient. She might be going a little crazy—to use the woefully unprofessional term—with everything she was dealing with right then, but she wasn’t
that
crazy. “I’m not being a therapist right now. I’m apologizing for being insensitive last night, and for not always understanding what you need from me. I’m going to try harder from now on.” That much she could promise. And, as she said it, she imagined she felt a faint tingle of magic.

“I—” Shandi broke off and shook her head. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. You’re wanted in the kitchen.”

The star inside Jade wanted to ask who wanted her, for what, whether it had to be that exact moment, and what the “never mind” meant. The woman inside her, the one who thought she was starting to understand that the three “D”s were less about never rebelling than they were about carefully picking her rebellions for maximum effect, said only, “Okay, I’m on it. Thanks.”

She moved past the
winikin
and headed for the kitchen, but turned back after only a few steps when she realized that the other woman hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry. Was there something else?”

“No. I . . . No.” Shandi’s expression showed a flicker of surprise, there and gone quickly. “Go on,” she said briskly. “The king’s waiting.”

Jade went. She didn’t feel the magic now, didn’t see glyphs morphing in her mind’s eye, but as she headed down to the main kitchen, she thought the magic might be a little closer than it had been before. Unfortunately, any progress she might’ve made in that direction was lost the moment she came through the archway and saw Lucius at the breakfast bar, along with Leah, Strike, Michael, Sasha, and Jox.

Her defenses slammed up to buffer the jolt of body memory that came at the sight of how Lucius’s faded green T-shirt stretched over his wide shoulders and the strong lines of muscle on either side of his spine, and bared his buffed-out arms. His shirt was untucked at the back of his jeans, slopping out casually, as if to say,
I have more interesting things to think about than the way I’m dressed
. That was purely Lucius, both the old and the new, she thought. And with that thought, she realized that she’d almost stopped thinking about which pieces of him she remembered from before and which were new. He was just . . . himself now. And he was taking up far too much of her attention.