Skykeepers (5 page)

Carter’s factoid-laden report sketched the story of a child who had been raised partly in the field by her father, partly stateside by Ambrose’s live-in girlfriend, and had wound up breaking from them both when she left for culinary school. Estrangement, too, was something Michael could relate to, as was her extensive childhood training in martial arts. He’d always been a sucker for a woman with fight training.

Michael had spearheaded several searches of potential Xibalban hideouts over the past few months, but those look-sees hadn’t turned up dick, leaving him frustrated and pissed off, and worried about a woman he’d never met, one whose picture was burned into his conscious mind.

She’s in the Everglades
, he thought, his pulse kicking at the realization that they’d finally gotten a break. But logic tempered the rush of battle readiness, and the stir of bloodlust that wasn’t entirely his own.

“It’s got to be a trick,” he said, thinking aloud. “It can’t be a coincidence that Iago suddenly pops up at the old Survivor2012 compound, given how well Leah knows the property.”

A former detective with the Miami-Dade PD, Strike’s human mate had studied the location as part of tying the site’s owner, cult leader Vincente Rincon, to her brother’s death and a series of ritualistic murders in the Miami area. With the help of Strike and the others, she’d gotten her revenge on Rincon, and the cult had disbanded. The property, which had been built up out of some seriously swampy land at the edge of the Everglades, had been resold before the Nightkeepers could snap it up. However, Strike and Leah had managed to search the property, discovering several ritual chambers hidden within a labyrinth of tunnels belowground. The compound had sat empty ever since. According to Carter, the place had been bought by a conservationist group looking to preserve the Everglades.

Ten bucks says the conservationists are a front for the Xibalbans
, Michael thought. But that didn’t necessarily make Lucius’s call a trap. Iago could have been drawn there by the compound’s history, its isolated location, or the power given off by the numerous Mayan relics Rincon had bought on the black market and reassembled on the property.

“You willing to bet the library on its being a trick?” Tomas asked.

“Doesn’t matter either way, does it? We have to check it out.” Michael ducked into a deserted alley, where it would be safe for his king to materialize. “Tell Strike he’s good to zap.”

Tomas hung up without another word. A few seconds later, Michael heard the faint rattle in the air that presaged ’port magic, and then Strike materialized, zapping in maybe six inches off the ground and dropping to a bent-kneed landing.

The king was an imposing figure.Tall,broad-shouldered, and muscular, bigger than even larger-than-average humans, as were all full-blood Nightkeeper males, Strike wore his shoulder-length black hair tied back in a queue, balancing the severity of the look with a narrow beard that traced his jawline. His right forearm was marked with the glyphs denoting him as a member of the jaguar bloodline, as royalty, as a warrior and a teleport. Higher up, on his biceps, where only the gods and kings were marked, he wore the geometric
hunab ku
, the symbol of the 2012 doomsday and the Nightkeepers’ king. Even though he was wearing thoroughly modern clothes in his black-on-black combat duds and heavy boots, he looked almost medieval. He could’ve been a crusader, perhaps, or one of Arthur’s knights. Hell, maybe even Arthur himself.

Without preamble, Strike reached out and gripped Michael’s upper arm, forming the touch link necessary for him to transport another person. “Tomas has your armor and weapons waiting for you. This could be the break we’ve been hoping for.”

“Or it could be a godsdamned ambush,” Michael countered as the ’port magic rose up around them. But ambush or not, he was on board with whatever the king was planning. A fight was a fight. And this rescue was long overdue.

Sasha awoke, blinking up into the light thrown down by an unshielded fluorescent tube.
Something’s different
, she thought. But a quick look around her said it wasn’t the scenery.

She was still in hell. It wasn’t the Christians’ fire-and-brimstone hell or Ambrose’s nine-layered Mayan underworld of rivers and roads and monsters, though. No, this hell was one of cool, blank walls and a narrow cot in a ten-by-ten cell with gray walls, floor, and ceiling. This hell was being the prisoner of an enormous, green-eyed, chestnut-haired man who called himself Iago, but whom the others called “Master.”

Where is the library?
his red-robed, forearm-tattooed interrogators asked her over and over again while drug-spiced smoke oozed from stone braziers carved into the shapes of screaming skulls. Each time, her muscles screamed protest at the crucified position they’d tied her in, roping her to a wooden cross that represented not the son of the Christians’ god, but the world tree of the Maya and Aztec, with its roots delving into hell, its branches reaching to the sky.
Where did your father hide it?
Sometimes they lashed her with stone-tipped flails that drew bloody purple-black lines on her body. Other times they didn’t hit her at all, but rather somehow put her in agony without touching her, watching with avid eyes as she writhed and screamed.

She would’ve given anything to make the torture stop, but she couldn’t tell them what she didn’t know. She’d kept insisting that Ambrose had never told her anything about a library. They didn’t believe her, though, which meant that the cycle kept repeating over and over again—days of impotent, drugged fugue interspersed with pain and terror. She thought they might have moved her once or twice, but the details had blurred together, growing ever more distant as her mind insulated her consciousness from the reality her body was suffering. Each time the interrogators had opened the cell door, reality had receded further, her burgeoning fantasies coming clearer.

She knew the waking dreams were nothing more than illusions, constructs that her mind created for her as an escape. But she clung fiercely to the fantasies in her drugged stupor, because if her consciousness was wrapped in the dreams, she wasn’t aware of what was happening in the interrogation chamber. And that was a blessed relief.

Sometimes the fantasies brought her to a strange cave, a circular stone room that should have reminded her of the interrogation room and the horrors within it. But she wasn’t terrified in this chamber, wasn’t hurt. Instead, she was wildly aroused, wrapped around a big, powerful man with long, wavy dark hair and green eyes that reminded her of the pine forests up in Maine. In the dreams, she breathed him in, lost herself in his kiss, and felt, maybe for the first time in her life, like she was exactly where she belonged. Which was how she knew it was a fantasy, because Sasha had done many things in her life, but she’d never truly fit anywhere.

Other times the dreams brought her back to Boston, to the pretty, sun-filled studio apartment where she’d lived across the hall from a firefighter’s widow, an elderly ex-concert violinist named Ada, who’d become her friend. Sasha had cooked for her neighbor a few nights a week, gladly trading pumpkinseed dip and spicy barbecued shrimp for snippets of Bach and Mozart, and the knowledge that someone cared whether or not she made it home at night. Only she hadn’t made it home, had she? Instead she’d gone looking for Ambrose and wound up in hell, stuck there as her menstrual clock told her months passed, almost a year, while she lay dazed by drugs and hopelessness.

Except she wasn’t drugged or hopeless now. She felt sharp and energized for the first time in what seemed like forever.

Hardly daring to trust the sudden change, she sat up on her bunk and braced herself for the pain to hit. It didn’t. Instead, nerves and excitement and all sorts of other sharp, hot emotions poked through the numb confusion that had cloaked her for too long.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked, and jerked at the sound of her own voice, the alien clarity of words that weren’t drugged mumbles or throat-tearing screams.

Starting to shake now—with hope, with fear—she took stock. She was wearing the sturdy bush pants she’d had on when she’d been captured, along with a too-big navy sweatshirt she’d had for a while now, though she didn’t know who she’d gotten it from, or when. Her underwear, T-shirt, and socks were long gone to rags, her boots confiscated. All that was the same as it had been. The cuts on her palms, though, were new.

She stared at the shallow, scabbed-over slices as a hazy memory broke through. Had she dreamed of a brown-haired man bending over her with a serrated combat knife, his eyes flickering from hazel to luminous green and back again? If so, it was a new, less pleasant fantasy than the others, her imagination run amok. But no, she was positive he had been there; she had the scabs to prove it. Had he done something to neutralize the tranquilizers they’d been mixing in her food for so long? Or had the red-robes withdrawn the drugs for some reason, wanting her fully aware for whatever they had planned next?

But she wasn’t just awake; she felt damned good. Energy coursed through her, effervescent bubbles running in her veins, making her want to leap up and run, to scream with the mad exuberance of being alive. More, she was warm. Hot, even, and suddenly needy in a way she hadn’t been in a long, long time. Her heart pounded; her skin tingled. She thought of her dark-haired, green-eyed dream man, and ached for him, for the press of his flesh on hers.

Lifting her hands, she cupped her suddenly flushed cheeks, then let her fingertips drift down to skim across her collarbones and along her ribs. Surprise shuddered through her at the feel of smooth, toned flesh. Slowly, almost afraid to look, she lifted the hem of her sweatshirt so her eyes could confirm what her hands had found. Although it seemed impossible, the festering sores on her hips and shoulders had healed overnight, and the crosshatched welts, scabs, and scars of the repeated whippings had faded from her skin. Her wasted flesh had been restored; her arms and legs were muscled, her butt and breasts rounded, as they had been before her captivity.

Stunned, she let the sweatshirt drop back down to cover her irrationally taut, toned stomach. Her head spun with disbelief, but not with drugs.

If she’d believed in miracles, she would’ve called it just that. How else could matching slashes on her palms cause her body to heal itself?

“Doesn’t matter,” she told herself as the embers of the strong woman she’d once been kindled to a low, guttering flame of determination. “Don’t waste whatever time you’ve got trying to figure out what’s going on. Just get your ass out of here.”

Rising from the narrow, blanketless cot, she stood for a moment, thrilling to the sense of balance and power that coursed through her, the awareness of her own body. She acutely felt the weight of her sweatshirt and pants, the press of the floor against the soles of her feet. In the back of her head lurked the fear that this was nothing more than another sort of torture, that Iago had given her back herself only to take the feeling away again. But on the heels of fear came determination. “If that’s your plan, you bastard, you’re going to regret it,” she said softly. “That’s a promise.”

Outside in the hallway, muffled slightly by the heavy metal door of her cell, she heard the measured tread of footsteps in the hallway. One set, heading in her direction. She froze, imagining the possibilities. Was one of Iago’s acolytes coming to her room?
Oh, please, yes. I dare you
.

Adrenaline sizzled in her veins and her pulse hammered as she cast around for a weapon. There wasn’t time to disassemble the bedframe, if she could even manage the feat, and the toilet was bolted in place. The only other thing in the cell was her meal tray, where a microwaved mac-and-cheese sat half-eaten, a plastic spoon sticking out of the congealed mess.

“It’ll have to do,” she hissed, grabbing the makeshift weapon and pressing her body tight against the wall, on the hinged side of the door. Letting the handle end of the spoon poke between her fingers, she imagined shoving it into one of Iago’s gloating, emerald green eyes. Rage and excitement rose up, nearly choking her. She hated him, hated what he’d done to her, to Ambrose. Hell, for all she knew, the bastard had killed Pim, too. It was Pim’s funeral that had precipitated her fleeting reunion with her father in late June of the prior year, and it had been the memory of his grief that had prompted Sasha to call him months later, only to learn that he’d fled to his rain forest. If Iago had been trying to force Ambrose over the edge of his tenuous grip on sanity, killing Pim would have been the perfect trigger. Not because Ambrose had loved her, but because she’d kept him as contained as he ever got, giving his sanity an anchor.

It fit. It played. And it rankled deep inside Sasha as the footsteps paused outside her cell door and the lock clicked. Moments later, the metal panel swung inward and a gray-robe stepped through. Sasha took a split second to make sure it wasn’t her brown-haired maybe-ally. Then she attacked.

Now!
Propelled by a year’s worth of rage and hatred, along with the gut-deep knowledge that this might be her only chance of escape, she attacked. Lunging from behind the door, she slammed the spoon handle into the gray-robe’s face. She nailed him in the left eye, the spoon handle sinking in with a moment of resistance followed by a liquid give that made her gag.

Her victim shouted, spun, and staggered, clapping both hands to his ruined eye as blood and fluid spurted. Sickened, Sasha slashed a kick that folded his knee sideways, dropping him howling just inside the door. A second kick, this one to the side of his head, had him going limp. She searched him hurriedly; he was carrying a high-tech com device but no weapon, damn it. Slipping into the hallway, she shut and locked the door, then leaned back against it, gulping air.

Keep it together
, she told herself.
You can do this
.