Storm Kissed

by Jessica Andersen

  With most of the others off on assignment—despite his protests, Strike had kept him back for a couple of days on injured reserve—he wasn’t expecting to see anyone on the way to the library. He sure as hell wasn’t expecting to find a standoff out behind the training hall. And certainly not one involving JT and Carlos.

  Okay, JT wasn’t much of a surprise, really. If there was a fight, he was probably in the middle of it. But Sven knew firsthand how much it took to get Carlos all the way pissed off—been there, done that. His winikin was usually dead level no matter what crisis got thrown at him . . . except right now Carlos’s face was flushed a dull red and his fists were clenched and even raised a little, like he wanted to haul off and slug the younger man.

  “You know it’s true,” JT said. “Just give them some assurances.”

  Carlos bared his teeth. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Do you seriously not see how wrong this is?” JT′s wave encompassed the whole of Skywatch.

  Sven hesitated, not sure if he should come out from behind the training hall and mediate, or go back around the other way and let them work it out. Although the winikin acted as the Nightkeepers’ support staff, and were technically lower than the magi in the hierarchy of Skywatch, by tradition they mostly governed themselves. Problem was, tradition hadn’t been hacking it in the nearly a year since their former leader, Jox, had taken off.

  The royal winikin had left the compound to help raise Patience and Brandt’s twins in hiding, with no connection to the magic, no part in the war. Which had left a power vacuum. The rest of the winikin had done their best to adapt, continuing on in their usual roles and informally voting on group decisions, but they had lost serious momentum. Then the two unbound winikin, JT and his girlfriend, Natalie, had shown up. Natalie didn’t have much baggage; she had been an infant when her parents smuggled her out of Skywatch just prior to the Solstice Massacre. JT, on the other hand, had been twelve or so. He had escaped ahead of the attack but his parents, key members of the resistance, had been caught and press-ganged into the fight. So it wasn’t surprising that he hated the Nightkeepers’ caste system with a virulence that bordered on pathological, and that he was calling for some major changes in winikin-land.

  So far, Strike had been doing the “hands off, let them work it out for themselves” thing, but it wasn’t getting better as far as Sven could tell. And frankly, he thought JT had a point.

  Not that the older winikin—including Carlos—wanted to hear his opinion on that.

  Making his move before he could talk himself out of it, Sven continued along the path, then hesitated, feigning surprise. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Carlos frowned. “How much—” He broke off. “Did you need something?”

  “I was just passing through, but I heard a little.” To JT, he said, “You were talking about other winikin, weren’t you? Other unbounds who got out ahead of the attack. Members of the resistance.” Ever since his arrival, JT had said that he didn’t know of any other survivors, that he didn’t have a clue how to contact them if they were out there. Now, it seemed like he’d been saying one thing to the magi, but something else to the other winikin. Sven pressed, “You know how to find them, don’t you?”

  Carlos got in his face. “Don’t repeat that. Don’t even breathe it. You owe me that much.” His eyes were cold and hard, making him look like a stranger, and the sudden and unexpected shift sent Sven back a step.

  For all that the two of them had had their problems, most of them stemming from Sven’s relationship—friendship—with Carlos’s half-human daughter, Cara Liu, Sven had always thought he knew where they stood. Back when he’d lived a treasure hunter′s vagabond life, he had known that Carlos was pissed at him but would be there immediately if there was trouble. Even once they had come to Skywatch and Sven had made the decision to send Cara away, he and Carlos had managed to maintain a functional, if stiff, working relationship. Or so he’d thought. Now, though, he wondered if the two of them had drifted farther than he’d realized.

  “I’m on your side,” he said softly to the only father he had ever known.

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t make this any of your business.”

  “It is if it’s starting to spill over onto the magi.”

  “Which it’s not.”

  Sven could’ve listed off a half dozen recent incidents, but he wasn’t sure if they were legit complaints or part of the natural equilibration that had been going on at Skywatch ever since Strike first brought his human mate, Leah, into the compound and she started in with “the winikin aren’t your servants—do your own damn dishes.” Which somehow sounded far less insulting when she said it, compared to JT. Besides, listing grievances would just embarrass Carlos and piss off JT. So instead, he said, “What about Jox’s letter?”

  In it, the royal winikin had named the person who should succeed him if the common-consensus experiment didn’t work. It could only be opened if the winikin voted on it . . . or if Strike decided their lack of leadership was screwing up the war efforts.

  JT bared his teeth. “Fuck that. The new system isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than using blood or magic as a reason to put one person in charge of another.”

  Sven shook his head. “The old ways have been evolving for the past twenty-six fucking millennia, all aiming to put us in the best possible position to defend the barrier on the zero date. Maybe you could just, I don’t know, go with it for another year?”

  “Spoken like a member of the ruling elite,” JT snapped, looking seriously pissed now. He waved Sven off. “Why don’t you go do . . . whatever you were going to do?” He paused, eyes narrowing. “And while you’re at it, you might want to make sure that what you’re doing is something your own ruling elite would like.”

  Sven bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It was Carlos who said quietly, “You’re not eating, you look like hell, and you’re sneaking out nearly every night.”

  “I . . . huh?”

  JT sneered. “Nice. Playing dumb.”

  “Seriously. No clue what you’re talking about.”

  Carlos just looked at him. “Sven—”

  “Never mind.” Suddenly, he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be having this conversation. He needed to walk, run, burn off some steam. “Like I said, I was just passing through.” He headed down the path that was the long way around to the library. And when Carlos called his name, he didn’t look back.

  Strike knocked on the door to Rabbit’s cottage and waited for the “ ‘S open” before he pushed through into the kitchen. The two of them were way beyond knocking formalities, but with Myrinne living there, he’d rather knock than catch an eyeful.

  “You alone?” he asked when he found Rabbit spread out at the kitchen table with his laptop and a shitload of maps.

  “Yep. Myr’s out at the firing range with Jade. Michael’s giving them some pointers.”

  “Good. That’s good.” Strike hadn’t been entirely convinced Rabbit’s human girlfriend—and quasi wiccan—belonged on the team, but she had worked her ass off for the chance, and had continued busting hump to make herself an asset rather than a liability. And there was no arguing that she had been good for Rabbit. Hell, he hadn’t burned down anything unauthorized in nearly two years. “You find anything new?”

  Rabbit sighed and pushed away from the table, rubbing his eyes. “Nothing concrete. Cheech says there are rumors of a third village being hit, but I’m having trouble getting a fix on the actual location from up here. He and his brothers are trying to get me some details.”

  Over the past few weeks, the populations of two villages in the Mayan highlands had vanished, seemingly overnight. The media hadn’t really picked up on it; the only reason Rabbit knew was because he had made some contacts down there as part of trying to learn as much as he could about his mother, who had lived in the highlands—maybe—and been Xibalban—definitely. Even though the Xibalb
ans were an offshoot of the original Nightkeepers and had given rise to Iago’s bloodthirsty sect, the secrecy surrounding the groups meant that the Nightkeepers’ archives were pretty useless in that department, forcing him to search farther afield. He hadn’t made much progress finding out about his mother, but his contacts were proving invaluable now, as the Nightkeepers tried to figure out what the hell was going on in the highlands.

  He flicked at a couple of printouts. “The probes Myrinne and I planted aren’t picking up the sort of power flux that would indicate there’s a Banol Kax in the area. I keep wondering if there’s a human explanation for the disappearances, maybe a new guerrilla army or something.”

  “Fighting who or what?”

  “Dunno. There were rumors of one of the big hotel chains trying to force a couple of villages higher into the mountains so they could clear cut. Or it could be a survivalist thing. According to Cheech, most of the highlanders are either ignoring the doomsday hype or treating the end date as nothing more than the start of a new calendrical cycle. But I’d bet you there are plenty of people up there who are stockpiling supplies, maybe getting together some extra weapons, just in case.”

  “Makes sense.” Strike snagged two Cokes from the fridge, dumped one in front of Rabbit and popped the top on his own as he dragged out a chair and sat. “See any evidence of a guerilla compound where there didn’t used to be one?”

  “That’s the thing. Granted, the forests make aerial detection tricky, but I’d expect to see something.” Rabbit lifted a shoulder. “That was why I got to thinking about survivalist stuff.”

  “Underground bunkers? Maybe. But I don’t think we can rule out Iago.” Their opposite. Their nemesis. A Xibalban mage who had bound his soul to that of the Aztec god-king, Moctezuma, to become a nearly indestructible force bent on completing Moctezuma’s planned conquest of the known world . . . which had gotten considerably bigger since the fifteen hundreds.

  Rabbit grimaced. “Trust me. I’m not. But the thing is, even using Moctezuma’s powers, Iago shouldn’t be able to make makol out of innocents—as far as we know the demons can only possess the evil minded. And I just can’t see him warehousing that many people who aren’t makol. So where are the rest of the villagers?”

  Neither of them said the obvious: blood sacrifice. But it hung between them, an almost tangible reminder of how serious things were getting, how much worse they were likely to get over the next year.

  After a moment, Strike said, “I need a favor.”

  Rabbit raised an eyebrow.

  “I need you to mind-bend me.”

  Both eyebrows slammed down. “Why?”

  “There’s something—” An alarm shrilled, interrupting.

  The noise came from both of their armbands plus the intercom panel on the wall: three beats and a pause, three and a pause, which was the signal for a perimeter breach.

  Normally, that would’ve sent them both running. Given the number of false alarms lately, though, they both stayed put. Sure enough, the alarms cut out after a few seconds. A moment later, Tomas’s voice came over the system, sounding disgusted. “False alarm. Sorry, gang. It’s nothing.”

  Strike pressed a button to activate his ’band. “You sure about that?”

  “There isn’t a damned thing on any of the monitors, visual, thermal, or magic. That’s the best I can tell you. And you know how twitchy the new setup is.”

  “Yeah. Okay, thanks.” Strike cut the transmission, grimacing.

  Although the magic sensors that Jade and Lucius had created using her spell caster′s talents were a huge help identifying magical fluxes, the gizmos were pretty hair-trigger. More, because of the increased traffic flowing into and out of Skywatch—deliveries mostly—Jade had tweaked a section of the blood-ward so the winikin could open and close the main gate without needing a magic-user. She was still in the process of fine-tuning the spells, though, and the alarms were crying wolf with annoying regularity.

  Trying not to let it get to him, Strike drained his Coke. Maybe the sugar and caffeine would give him the needed kick in the ass. Nothing else had, lately. He was off-kilter, and couldn’t figure out how to get back on.

  Aware that Rabbit was waiting for him to continue, he stared at the ceiling and said, “There’s something wrong with me.”

  There. He had said it, and the world hadn’t ended.

  Not yet, anyway, he thought with grim humor. Give it a year. Whether he liked it or not, he was the backbone of the fighting force; the fealty oath connected the magi and winikin to their king, making them susceptible to his will. So when the king went south, so did the Nightkeepers—case in point being the part where his father had gone a little crazy and a lot megalomaniacal, precipitating the Solstice Massacre. Which was a hell of a legacy.

  Rabbit didn’t say anything for a moment, just sat there, staring at Strike with an “oh, shit” look on his face. Finally, he said, “Has Sasha checked you out?”

  “I came to you first.” Strike tapped his temple. “I think it’s in here. I want you to see if you can fix it.”

  He had wrestled with the decision, lying awake long into the night while Leah breathed softly beside him, and kneeling long hours in the royal shrine, praying for guidance from gods that couldn’t talk to their earthly warriors anymore.

  “What does Leah think?”

  “She knows.” Which was what Rabbit had really been asking. “She’s the only one besides you. If Jox . . .” Strike trailed off. No point in going there. Jox was where he needed to be, with his Hannah and the Nightkeeper twins they were sworn to protect. “We’re trusting your discretion on this.”

  Rabbit slowly closed the laptop, pushed it away, his silver-gray eyes troubled. “What am I looking for?”

  “Something that would fuck some with my concentration and really screw with my ’port magic. I . . .” He flexed his fingers, denting the empty can. “I’m having trouble targeting. When I try to fix on a person or place, my mind starts racing and the travel thread gets . . . slippery, I guess you could call it.” He looked back at Rabbit, found the blank shock he was expecting. “One of the few things we’ve got going for us right now is that I can put a team on the ground anywhere in the world within the time it takes to get geared up. If we lose that ability, we’re screwed.”

  “But if you’re not targeting properly—” Rabbit broke off.

  “It’s not that bad yet. I swear I wouldn’t be jumping if it were. And sure as shit not with anyone else linked up.” If he lost the thread midjump, he—and anybody else he was transporting—wouldn’t just be screwed. They would be dead. “So . . . will you help?”

  “I’ll do my best. But . . .”

  “I know. No guarantees.” But as Strike cut his palm and held out his hand for the blood-link, he was hoping for a damned miracle.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Happy Daze Econo Lodge

  Outside of Farmington, New Mexico

  “The star demon and the white god’s head are made from different stones and don’t really look like they belong together, stylistically,” Dez said into the Webcam’s pickup, “but my magic had the same sort of reaction to them, and Keban’s letter made it sound like they were part of a set, along with the Santa Fe piece. Question is: a set of what?”

  On the laptop he’d snagged from Reese, a video conferencing split screen showed Lucius’s face on one side with the stone walls of the library in the background. The other side held overlapping pictures of the star demon, a grainy image of the Santa Fe artifact that Lucius had captured off the museum’s security-cam footage, and Dez’s own crude sketch of the white statue.

  He hadn’t wanted to involve the others for a number of reasons, but Reese’s arrival—and her insistence on teaming up with him, if only because she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him—had changed that. Hell, it had changed a lot of things. He had thought he was over her—well, over the infatuation, if not the guilt. But one look at her and a few seconds of having her fighti
ng alongside him once more, and he was halfway back in that crazy, wanting place, even knowing that their destinies weren’t headed in the same direction. Maybe they had been, once, but not anymore. He wasn’t a street rat now, or even a normal guy. And he wasn’t free to make his own choices.

  Damn it all, anyway.

  “I think,” Lucius began, but then his eyes shifted offscreen as Jade’s soft voice said something in the background. “Hang on,” Lucius said. “Be right back.” Then he grabbed a crutch off the floor, lurched upright, and hobbled out of view.

  As far as Dez was concerned, that was pretty impressive considering that a makol had sliced his damn leg off with a buzz saw less than a month earlier. Lucius’s low-grade library magic and Sasha’s chu’ulel healing skills had been enough to put him back together and give his recovery a running start, but without the accelerated recovery time of a Nightkeeper, he was stuck waiting it out. Humans just didn’t heal as quickly as the magi.

  Which was not a comforting thought under the circumstances.

  Shifting back in his rickety desk chair, Dez took a look through the open connecting door that joined his and Reese’s rooms. He knew he should’ve fought harder to convince her that he needed to deal with Keban alone. Hell, he would have if it hadn’t been for the go-to-hell glint in her eyes that told him she would have just doubled back and continued searching on her own. And, yeah, she was damned good at what she did.

  “Louis Keban. No, it’s ‘b’ as in ‘bus stop,′ ” she was saying. She sat on the edge of her bed, facing away from him with her cell on speaker and a notebook in her lap.

  She had showered, and her dark hair was sleek and slick, combed back along her skull and trailing down to dampen the collar of her T-shirt. If he could see her face, he suspected it would be bare of the makeup she had been wearing before, a professional gloss that added an edge and aged her a few years past her twenty-eight. He bet that was a deliberate move, because the Reese he had known never did stuff like that accidentally.