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 fighting 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.
Then again, she wasn’t the same girl, was she? For five years, they had known each other as well as two people could . . . but a whole hell of a lot had happened in the intervening decade. And a big chunk of that—if not all of it—was on him.
They hadn’t talked about the past on the long walk from the crash site back up to his truck, or on the ride into the city. They hadn’t talked about anything, really, but the past had sat between them like a hairy-assed mammoth. He’d let it stay, though, figuring it would be better for both of them if she remembered the bad stuff more than the good. Because as much as part of him—the part that still remembered every touch and sigh from the stormy night they had almost made love—wanted to make things right with her, even beg for a second chance, the man he was making himself into knew that couldn’t happen. He was a Nightkeeper. More, he was a serpent, and what had happened before would happen again.
“Okay, I’m back,” Lucius said, crutching into view. “Sorry about that.”
Dez dragged his attention back to the monitor. “Jade have something for us?”
“For me, yes. For you? Not so much.” Lucius tried for a leer that fell flat, as did his voice when he said, “Strike is sending her, Sven, Nate, and Alexis out to check another blip down in Belize.”
So far most of the spikes reported by their magic-flow sensors had either been false alarms or teams of Iago’s makol trying to take control of power sinks using small war parties that felt more like they were testing the Nightkeepers. But given the countdown, it was only a matter of time before hell broke loose.
“She’s on a good team,” Dez said. Nate’s strategic thinking and Alexis’s aggressiveness would counterbalance Sven’s outside-the-box tendencies and Jade’s lack of experience. “She’ll be fine.” Which was bull, because there were no guarantees.
“Yeah.” Lucius brushed his fingers across the jun tan glyph on his inner wrist that marked him as a mated man, then cleared his throat. “Back to the carvings. If we assume that they’re Nightkeeper in origin and go with ancient Mayan symbology, the ‘T’ glyph represents the wind. Which gives us a black star demon and a white wind god.”
“Any idea what the Santa Fe piece might be?”
Lucius tapped a couple of keys and another picture appeared, showing a carving of a strangely proportioned, squat little man who stretched his short arms over his head, like he was holding something aloft. “I think it was this guy. He was one of the four skybearers who suspended the sky at the corners of the earth.”
Dez frowned. “I thought the four balaam jaguars held up the sky.”
“Depends on who you asked.”
“Have you confirmed this with the museum?”
“The police report just calls it a ‘human figure carved of reddish stone’ and the curator won’t tell me shit. He probably thinks it was smuggled up from Mexico after the ban on cross-border antiquities trading, and thinks I’m looking to come down on him.”
“I thought it came from a Puebloan ruin.”
“Supposedly, it came from the Puye Cliff Dwellings, which are north of Los Alamos on the Santa Clara reservation. But the Puebloans weren’t really known for carved stone, and the artifacts found at Puye have been mostly red-glazed pottery with a . . .” Lucius trailed off, eyes sharpening on Dez. “Actually, they were big into serpent motifs. They believed that spirit snakes guarded their crops and protected them. That could be something, given that it’s your winikin who seems to know all the tricks here.”
Dez lifted a shoulder, playing it casual. “There are a ton of serpent myths out there, and they don’t all track back to my bloodline.”
Lucius nodded. “Fair enough. Hell, if they actually did, I’d be tempted to think you guys were in charge, not the jaguar royals.”
“Anyway. So we’ve got a black star demon, a white wind god, and a red skybearer. What does that give us?”
“A bad joke about walking into a bar?”
“Shit.”
“Sorry. On the upside, they’re all connected to the sky.” Lucius stared at the pictures. “You said there was at least one more, right? That plays for me—these feel like they should be paired off. Black versus white. Red versus . . . Well, that’s what we need to figure out, isn’t it? We need to know what and where it is, and what Keban is planning.”
“He mentioned waiting for ′the proper days′ to collect the two artifacts that hadn’t already been unearthed. If we figure one was tonight, the lunar eclipse, then what’s the next day of barrier activity between now and the solstice?”
Lucius tapped a few keys. “The Gemenid meteor shower on the fourteenth.”
“Which gives us three days to either grab Keban or find the fourth artifact and ambush him when he goes for it.” The winikin wanted to meet on the twenty-first, but Dez didn’t dare let it go that long. “Piece of cake,” he said drily, glancing into the other room, and then going on alert when he realized Reese’s voice had gone sharp. “Or not.”
She was up and pacing, with the phone pressed to her ear. He couldn’t see her face, but her shoulders were tight, her body language radiating annoyance. She caught his eye, then looked away. But she didn’t shut the door.
He straightened, letting his bare feet hit the floor in the narrow space between bed and desk. “You’ll call when you find something?”
Lucius nodded. “It’s not like I’m going to be sleeping tonight. Might as well use the time for research. I’ll check into the powder Keban hit you with, maybe do a little more looking into the locations where these things have been found. I’ll ping you in the morning with an update, sooner if I find something.”
“Catch you later.” Dez ended the vid-con and closed the laptop, aware that the room next door had suddenly gone very quiet. He told himself to leave it alone, keep his damn distance. Close the door.
“You done with the computer?” she called.
“All set.” He folded it up and carried it through.
She was tipped back in her desk chair, eyes closed, one hand raised to pinch the bridge of her nose. Her hair had partway dried and was beginning to fluff out, and he had been right about the makeup—she looked younger without it, reminding him so strongly of the past that it made his chest ache. But her brows were furrowed and her face was etched with strain. And they were in this together . . . for the moment, at least.
He gave the laptop a gentle
toss onto the bed, where it landed in the center of the sagging mattress. “You getting anywhere?”
“I’ve got a couple more threads to pull on the rental, but I have a feeling it’s going to come down to grunt work. Then again, that’s what I’m good at.” She sighed, then pushed herself upright and swung her feet to the floor, wincing as they hit.
“You’re hurting.” It came out like an accusation, though he hadn’t meant it to.
She shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing to me.” He jammed his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her. “And we did just roll the shit out of the Jeep—you’ve earned a few bruises.” He paused. “The vending machine probably has Tylenol.”
“I’ve already taken all the drugs I can if I want to be functional tomorrow. I . . .” She trailed off, pressed her lips together for a moment, and then said resignedly, “I was a little banged up to start with. A few years ago I got sloppy, and it caught up with me.”
Knowing he had given up the right to have an opinion on what she did, or how, he pokered up. “Go on.”
She sent him a measured look, but continued, “I was after a high-dollar bounty nobody else would touch, a real sleaze named MoJo, chasing his ass through this skanky apartment building, when I whipped around a corner and found him waiting for me. With an UZI.” She paused, smiling with zero humor. “I kept going, right out a second-story window. Seemed like the better option at the time.”
A chill washed through him. “Christ, Reese.”
She held up a hand. “Neither of us wants to do the whole ‘So what have you been up to for the past decade?’ thing, so let’s just leave the past where it belongs. But I figure you should know that I don’t bounce back as fast as I used to. I was in the hospital and rehab for a while, then turned private locator when I was back on my feet, partly because I had lost the taste for bounty hunting, and partly because these days I do better with the finding than the grabbing.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m fine on a day-to-day basis, and Sasha worked some healing magic on me while I was at Skywatch, but all the rattling and rolling we did today threw something out of whack again.”
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