Free Demonkeepers by Jessica Andersen

was painted a different color: red at the bottom, black in the middle, white at the top. As was the case with many Mayan pyramids, human-size staircases ran down the center of each of the four sides, with rectangular doorways set on either side of the staircases on the upper and lower tiers. Practically every available surface was worked with intricate glyph carvings that were the traditional blend of art and language. Unlike the other pyramids she’d seen in person or studied at UT, though, this one didn’t culminate in a ceremonial platform, or with a boxy temple built at the top. Instead, the center of the pyramid was an open, empty space crowned by a series of stone archways running parallel to one another, looking like some ancient creature had died atop the temple and gone to fossil with its rib bones bared to the bright, sunless sky.
    Wonder shimmered through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.
    “Do you think that’s the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels. The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier or traveling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it while he stayed on the earthly plane.
    Instead, he—a human who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the title—had somehow been sucked . . . where?
    When he didn’t answer her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath. “You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas. Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba, but somehow they had gotten through.
    Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the makol demon had been in full control of his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing entrance to Xibalba.
    “The library is hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the underworld already, the Banol Kax wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s makol . Which suggested the library wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were they there? “Do you think someone—or some thing —pulled us here?”
    “More things are possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get weapons, maybe reinforcements.”
    “You’re assuming the way spell is going to work.” The