He should know. He’d been one of the ones doing the shooting.
In answer to Dez’s question, he shrugged. “I’ve got a few thoughts. But I’ve gotta ask… what the hell happened out there today?”
“You first.” Dez tossed him a pool cue. “And we’ll play while we talk.”
Sven caught the stick on the fly and masked his impatience, knowing that the king had his own system, his own agendas. “What’re we playing for?”
Turning his back on Sven, Dez started racking up another game of nine-ball. Over his shoulder, he said, “Future claim?”
“Fuck that.” There was no way he wanted to owe the Nightkeepers’ master manipulator something like that. “Fifty bucks.”
“A hundred.”
“Deal.” It wasn’t like the money really mattered, anyway. Even with the dicey economy and some big-ass withdrawals they’d needed for techware and weapons, the Nightkeeper Fund was more than flush. It had been intended for an army of hundreds, even thousands. Not a dozen Nightkeepers and fifty or so winikin.
“Shoot for break,” Dez ordered. “And start talking.”
Sven lined up on the cue ball and shot it straight for the far bumper, trying to land it as close to the dotted line as he could. But it rolled like a damn ball bearing on a foosball table, and went well past the mark. As they swapped out, he began, “For starters, I don’t think any of the winikin were responsible for letting those things into the compound.”
After putting his ball nearly on the mark, Dez set up for the break. “How sure are you?” He shot, scattered the neat diamond, and then muttered a curse when the yellow-striped ball bounced just short of the corner pocket, denying him the insta-win. Nothing else dropped into a pocket, so he stepped back.
“Pretty positive. I’ve spent the past few days ghosting in and out of their stomping grounds and quartering the compound with Mac, looking for hot spots, and I haven’t found jack. There’s no evidence—at least that I can see—that any of the winikin have the kind of power that would’ve been needed to punch through the blood-ward and bring those things through the barrier. Hell, I’m not seeing that any of them have any kind of magic, period.”
Dez’s expression flattened. “Yeah. Shit. I keep hoping for a miracle there.” Waving Sven toward the pool table, he added, “How much trouble are the rebels going to be over the next few months, do you think?”
As he lined up his shot, Sven shook his head. “That’s a tougher question to answer, especially after what happened today.” He paused, looking at Dez with a raised eyebrow.
“Just give me your general impressions.”
Frustration kicked, along with the suspicion that there was more going on here than just a debriefing and a game of nine-ball. “Most of them are about where you would expect, given the history. On a personal level they don’t trust us Nightkeepers as far as they can throw us, and they hate being under the rule of a mage king… but on the save-the-world level they’re committed to doing whatever they can. There are a few outliers, of course. Sebastian was talking about taking a band sander to his bloodline mark, and I think he’s capable of doing it.” At Dez’s wince, Sven nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, he’s loud and pissed off, but I don’t think there are layers to him. You kind of get what you get, ya know? Then there’s Threefer, Nance, and Wyeth. They’re young, impulsive, and angry. I don’t think they would start something, but they’d be the first ones to jump on board.” He finally lined up, closed one eye, and shot, banking the one ball and getting it—barely—into the side pocket. Shit, he was rusty. Two years ago, he could’ve run the table, no problem.
“That it for people who ping on your ‘need a closer look’ radar?”
“Yeah.” Sven missed with the two on a nearly impossible shot, but managed to hide the cue ball in a corner behind the six.
The king curled his lip in an appreciative snarl, but then hopped the white ball right over the six and sank the two. “You sure about that?”
Had he caught something in the tone, or did he have suspicions of his own? Sven wasn’t sure, and he didn’t know if he really wanted to go there, but after a moment, he nodded. “Okay, no, I’m not sure. There’s someone else: Zane.”
“Seriously?” The king’s expression suggested that either he’d been fishing, or his suspicions had been leaning elsewhere.
Shit, he should’ve kept his mouth shut, especially when he wasn’t sure whether the brush-haired bastard was hitting his radar because of his obvious interest in Cara, or because there was really something going on beneath the military exterior. But it was out there now and he couldn’t take it back. “It’s just a hunch. A bad vibe, a few looks I haven’t liked. Maybe it’s just that he’s in such a key position that it’s hard not to look at him and think that he’d be perfectly placed to make trouble.” He shrugged. “Not to mention that I just flat-out don’t like the guy.”
“Noted.” Dez took his shot, and the three ball kissed two bumpers before dropping into a corner. “Question becomes: Is that coming from your warrior’s talent or something else?”
Careful. Now he’s definitely fishing. And Sven didn’t have any intention of giving him a nibble, just in case this conversation wasn’t entirely about the winikin, after all. “I don’t know. The feeling’s mutual, so it could just be bad chemistry.” That was what he kept telling himself, in fact, trying not to let personal stuff get in the way of his investigation. When Dez just nodded, he pressed, “Come on, spill. What the hell happened out there today? One minute Mac and I were patrolling one of the temples, and the next we’re in the middle of a firefight—hell, it wasn’t even a fight, more like a paintball bloodbath.” And it had been too damn easy for him to gun down the winikin, too much like what he’d spent the past six months doing.
Dez grimaced. “On one hand, their plan was pretty impressive. It was a slick move putting Zane outside the game zone as a sniper and surveillance, the low-velocity paint grenade was a clever tweak that we’re thinking about using ourselves, and the flares were an effective—if unsubtle—solution to the radio blackout.… But then Cara took a look, saw the situation, and deliberately sacrificed eighty percent of her manpower in order to get herself into the pyramid.” The king shook his head. “Sure, she won, but it was at a hell of a cost.”
“Deliberately? Are you sure?”
“I was watching on the surveillance feeds. I saw it in her eyes. She got a look at where our manpower was headed and she just… blanked, I guess. The next thing I knew, she had signaled the attack, and three of her four teams were headed straight into enemy ambushes. So, yeah. It was deliberate.” The king paused, grimacing. “Thank the gods we were able to spin it to the other winikin as game strategy. A few of them are probably suspicious, but so far they’re not calling for her head.”
Sven’s gut tightened. “Will they?” He didn’t like the sound of that. Hell, he didn’t like the way any of it was sounding all of a sudden. What had happened out there? The Cara he knew wouldn’t blank under pressure or turn against her friends like that, no matter what.
“Not if I can help it, and I could use your help.” Dez sank the four, then looked up, his expression deadly serious. “I need to know that the winikin are solid, Sven, more now than ever before.” He pocketed the five and six in quick succession and then said casually, “What do you think of Cara?”
Sven clamped his lips, but the answers were right there, just as she was right there at the edges of his mind. I think that she’s amazing and doesn’t realize it. I think she terrifies me because she’s so determined to be a good leader that she’s losing track of what it means, especially if what happened today is any indication. I think she’s strong, tough, independent, brilliant… and that she’ll kill herself—and maybe everyone around her—trying to prove it.
Those weren’t the thoughts of his logical warrior self, though. So instead he said carefully, “As a leader, you mean?”
Dez cut a sharp look in his direction. “Of course.” He missed w
ith the seven, though.
“She’s tough, ethical, she works her ass off, and her instincts are generally good.”
“I take it that ‘generally’ doesn’t include the stunt she pulled today?”
“I don’t know what really happened today, and neither do you until you ask her point-blank.” Sven sank the eight with a smooth, deliberate move. “You haven’t, which means you don’t really want to know. You also said that if they won, you’d think about pulling the Nightkeeper leaders off their teams. So I guess the question is… are you going to let the winikin lead themselves? And if so, are you going to let Cara be in charge?” Whether the winikin liked it or not, the Nightkeepers’ king had the final say.
To Sven’s surprise, he tightened up waiting for Dez’s answer. His warrior self—the Nightkeeper mage who thought in terms of strategy and the war—said it would be a bad idea to change things up this close to the end date, a worse idea to have the Nightkeepers’ king be the one to force the change. More, the part of him that cared for Cara didn’t like thinking of her making life-or-death decisions for dozens of her friends… and, worse, learning how to do it too easily, as he had with the killing. He wanted to protect her, insulate her, like he hadn’t done before. He wanted…
Yeah. He wanted. And that was the damn problem.
Dez nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to give them the room to do things their way, within reason. The way I see it, that’s our best chance of getting their full cooperation. And as far as the leadership goes, yeah, I want Cara in charge. She’s still the best choice, for all the reasons Jox picked her.” He paused. “But I want to put a Nightkeeper liaison in place, someone who’ll be a guiding hand, an advocate, that sort of thing.”
A prickle walked its way down the back of Sven’s neck. “Nine, corner pocket,” he said, indicating the shot with a wiggle of his pool cue. Then, casually, “You got someone in mind?”
“You.”
He had seen it coming, could see the logic, even. But he still missed his shot. And, as the nine ball rolled into near perfect alignment with the far corner, giving Dez a winning lie that a blind spider monkey couldn’t have missed, Sven’s hands went numb from his sudden death grip on the cue. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why?”
Because I’ve dreamed about her, kissed her, want her. Because no matter how many times I tell myself we don’t make sense together, I’ve never been able to get her all the way out of my head. And because I know that no matter what happens between us, in the end I’m just going to let her down.
Dez lined up and sank the nine. “That’s the game. You owe me a hundred bucks… and an answer.”
“You’ll get the money,” Sven said slowly, trying to formulate a response that wasn’t a lie, but wasn’t all of the truth, either. Finally, he said, “As for the other thing… I’m a tracker, not a politician, and I do my best work on my own. I’m not saying I won’t do it—you’re my king and I’ll follow orders. I’m just thinking that plenty of the others would do a better job of liaison than me… and that I could probably be more useful somewhere else.”
The king took his time racking his stick before turning back to Sven with steady, serious eyes. “There’s no question I could use you off property. I’m sending a team down to the First Father’s tomb, and you and Mac could be a huge help there. But I’ve gotta ask… are you sure this is the direction you want to go?”
He knew, Sven realized with a jolt. Somehow, the king knew there was something going on between him and Cara—or at least the potential for it. And what was more, he wasn’t issuing a warning. If anything, he was offering them the room to let nature—the fates, the gods, whatever—take its course. Maybe he thought that the power boost of Sven’s pairing up would be worth the inevitable toll the relationship would take on rebel relations, or that sex magic might trigger in Cara the latent power he wanted to believe was inside the winikin. With Dez, it was hard to tell what he was thinking sometimes, and not worth asking. More, Sven thought he was dead wrong in this case. Even if he managed to win Cara over for real—and that was a big-ass if—there was no way the winikin would forgive and forget. The rebels would be pissed that their leader was messing with a mage, the traditionalists would be horrified that they were crossing social lines, and Cara would bear the brunt of their disapproval. More, he and Cara would both know that it was only a matter of time before his DNA kicked in and the restlessness came back. He could fight it for a little while, but in the end it would win—it always did—and he and Mac would take off without looking back.
And he couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that to her.
“Send me south,” he grated. And, yeah, maybe he was running away again, but at least this time it was for a good cause.
CHAPTER TEN
The winikin could throw a hell of a party, and their celebration to mark the Nightkeepers’ defeat—albeit only in paintball form—was no exception. But as Cara nursed a beer from a corner stool at the end of the bar, she thought the revelry carried an edge of desperation. The training hall was too loud, full of people who seemed determined to have a good time but kept looking sidelong at one another like they were wondering how many of them were still going to be around next week, next month… and next year.
She keenly felt each of those looks, because she knew darn well that if they had gone into battle for real today, the answer would’ve been almost none of them, thanks to her. Worse, she wasn’t sure she could promise it wouldn’t happen again, because in the heat of battle, it had seemed like the exact right answer, the same way it had felt so very necessary for her to rebuff Zane. Yet those same instincts hadn’t so much as peeped a protest when she’d gone into Sven’s arms.
What was wrong with her? Was she in the middle of some sort of existential crisis, or had she always had shitty judgment and it just hadn’t really mattered until now? Because, by the gods, right now she wasn’t sure she should trust herself to pick a movie or order another beer. Especially given that the microbrew she’d chosen kind of tasted like feet.
She rolled the cool, sweaty bottle across her forehead, wishing she could call a time-out on her life.
“Hey!” Natalie appeared beside her, snagged an empty stool, and leaned in to give her a one-armed hug. “Congratulations again! You were awesome out there today!”
Cara didn’t shake her head in disbelief, but she sure as heck wanted to. If that had been real, you and JT both would’ve been goners. But that didn’t seem to be registering, or if it was, the winikin were shrugging it off. It was like today’s training exercise had been the catalyst they had needed to finally come around to wanting to believe in her… which would’ve been great, except that now she didn’t believe in herself.
Natalie’s face went from party-level exuberance to concern. “Cara? What’s wrong?”
“I need to get out of here.” She set her smelly-feet beer on the counter and slipped off her chair. “I want… Shit.” Her heart pounded and her eyes prickled with the threat of tears because she couldn’t have what she wanted, didn’t want what she was being offered, and couldn’t handle any of it. “I need to walk.”
Nat slid off her chair. “I’ll go with you.”
“No. Don’t.” Cara softened the refusal with a quick hug, then turned away before her friend could see that she was on the verge of sniveling. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Cara—”
“I’ll be fine,” she said without turning back. “I just need some air.”
But once she was outside, she found that it didn’t help to lean back against the steel wall and breathe when the atmosphere was thick and heavy with another storm. The horizon was leaden, the stars invisible, and the fine hairs on her arms stirred with a static charge that reached inside her and made her want to move. Giving in, she started walking, not caring that she was running away.
“Cara?” The soft call came from behind her and brought her up short at the edge of the floodlit illumination from the trai
ning hall.
“Damn it, not now,” she muttered under her breath, but then schooled her expression as she turned back. “Yes?”
She had known it wasn’t Natalie from the voice, but was a little surprised to see Lora step out of the shadows. Wearing her fatigue pants, boots, and an army green T-shirt, she looked more ready for a training run than a party, and her expression was all business. “Zane sent me to find you. He’d like a word.”
Damn it, really not now. It didn’t matter whether he wanted to call her out on what’d happened earlier, clear the air between them, or just talk strategy; she didn’t want to deal with him right now. But she couldn’t blow him off, either. So she nodded. “Where is he, inside?”
“No. Back down at the proving grounds.”
“The… Really?” Cara twisted around to look in the direction of the big steel-and-cement pyramid, which was just barely visible as an angular silhouette against the stormy night sky. Her hair blew across her face, moved by a gust that smelled of rain. “What’s he doing down there?”
“He said he had something important to show you.”
“He… Right.” Thus why he hadn’t hit her up on her wrist unit using an open channel, instead snagging a messenger he thought he could trust. He’d done similar things twice before, when his anti-Nightkeeper paranoia had gotten the best of him. Both times, the intel had been good, if not necessarily up to cloak-and-dagger standards. Interest starting to stir despite everything else, she nodded. “Okay. I’ll go.”
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