When she reached the main room of the mansion, she found the rest of the Nightkeepers and the winikin waiting for her, taking up the sectional sofa and a bunch of chairs, with the remainder sitting at the bar near the kitchen, or sprawled on the floor. All twenty of them. Back before the massacre, the entire complement of Nightkeepers and winikin wouldn’t have fit in the mansion, never mind the great room. There were so few of them now. Too few.
“Anna.” Her brother rose to his feet and crossed to her, arms outstretched. “Welcome home.”
She returned Strike’s hug and didn’t correct the home thing, mostly because that’d been the upshot of her soul-searching road trip: She didn’t know where home was anymore. She’d thought it was with Dick, had wanted it to be, or thought she did. But how badly could she want it if learning the ID of his mistress had sent her running? The affair was over and done with, and they’d been making efforts to rekindle the romance in their marriage. She should’ve stayed and either talked it out with him or found a way to let the past stay in the past.
But everything that’s happened before will happen again, her suspicions put in, using the Nightkeepers writs to give form to her fears. He’d been unfaithful at least once before; what was to say he wouldn’t do it again? Worse, her gut told her that Desiree was after her because he’d given her reason to think their affair still had a chance. How could she reconcile all that?
She couldn’t, which was why she’d come to Skywatch. And, she realized as she leaned into the solid bulk of her brother, who had grown even larger with the responsibilities of being a mated man, and a king, she’d needed her family, such as it was. “Hey, baby brother,” she said, pressing her cheek to his. “What’d I miss?”
There was a snort from up on the bar stools, where the winikin were sitting, overseeing their charges. “What didn’t you miss?” parried Jox, the man who’d been as much of a father to her as her real father had been even before the massacre.
Moving slowly, feeling the ache of too much thinking and driving, Anna disengaged from Strike and crossed the room to hug the royal winikin. She sketched a wave at Leah and hitched herself up on the bar behind Jox, so she was sitting with the winikin rather than the magi. She smiled at the others, who all looked pretty much the same as when she’d seen them last—young and big and gorgeous, and just starting to come into their powers. “Am I interrupting?”
“We were actually waiting for you,” Strike said. “Command performance.” He handed her a sheet of paper marked with a string of hand-drawn glyphs.
She frowned at the copied inscription. “What’s this?”
“The starscript off the Ixchel statuette. We had good starlight last night, and figured this’d save time, given that you didn’t wind up getting an earlier flight.”
“Long story,” she said, echoing Rabbit’s earlier words to her. “Okay. Give me”—an hour, she started to say, but even before she could finish the thought, the glyphs were rearranging themselves in her brain, forming pictures first, then words.
She didn’t know if it was a vision or something else, but the crimson power of the royal jaguar bloodline flowed through her, sweeping her up and carrying her along. Her vision washed red, then gold, and when the mists cleared she could read the inscription as though it were written in English, plain as day.
“Anna,” Strike said, crossing to her to grab her shoulder and give her a shake. “What’s wrong?”
She batted him away. “Nothing. It’s just . . . Nothing.” She let the paper drop, because the words were burned in her brain. “To paraphrase, it reads: The first son of Camazotz succeeds unless the Volatile—” She broke off.
“Unless the Volatile does what?” Strike pressed.
“That’s it. You must’ve missed some glyphs.”
But he shook his head. “That was all of it. I’m certain. Which means . . .” He trailed off. “It means we’re missing a piece of the statuette. Fuck.”
The obscenity was echoed by another of the magi, one whom Anna didn’t know as well as some: Nate Blackhawk. The dark, handsome Nightkeeper muttered something else under his breath, then shot a look at Alexis Gray, with whom he’d been involved the year before. They must’ve come to some sort of truce, Anna realized, because Alexis met his eyes and nodded, her lips twisting in a smile that held zero humor when she said, “Current score: bad guys, two; Nightkeepers, zero-point-five. Looks like we’ve got another artifact to find.”
Anna nodded. “And it’d help if we figured out what exactly this Volatile is supposed to be and how it works.”
“That much we managed to do,” Strike said, tone dark. He glanced at Jade, indicating that the archivist had been the one to find the record.
“And?” Anna pressed.
“It’s a damned shape-shifter.”
After the meeting broke up, Nate headed out along the narrow, rocky path that led from the training compound to the small Pueblo ruins high on the cliff face at the back of the box canyon. He needed some time alone to deal with the frustration that rose exponentially with each minute that brought them closer to the lunar eclipse. They were down to less than twenty-four hours and counting, and he could practically see magic in the air and smell sex on the breeze.
Or was it that he had sex on the brain? Either way, it was all he could think about. He was hard and horny, and pissed off at learning that the Ixchel statuette wasn’t complete. How had they missed seeing that a portion was broken off? The overturned basket or whatever the goddess sat atop had a flat side they’d assumed had been left rough on purpose, but now it was looking like a fracture plane, damn it. Which meant . . . what? They didn’t even know what the missing piece looked like. How the hell were they supposed to find it?
“For fuck’s sake,” he said aloud, trying to gain control over the irritation, which he knew was as much about the magic as real anger. Then he heard footsteps coming up the pathway behind him, and the anger redirected itself, going from fury to a raging heat that he had even less control over. He knew who it was instantly, not through magic, but because the quick, self-assured stride could’ve belonged to no one else but Alexis. The warrior-princess.
When she rounded the corner, the sight of her was a kick in his chest. She was lovely in the moonlight—not soft, never soft, but the angles of her face and jaw combined into a mysterious effect, one that made him think of secrets and shadows, and the things they’d done to each other in the dark of night.
The eclipse fire rose up, threatening to take him over, to make him do things he wouldn’t do otherwise. “What do you want?” he snapped, temptation roughening his voice.
She hesitated. “Carlos is looking for you.”
“You didn’t come all the way out here to tell me that.”
“No.” She lifted her chin in challenge. “I came to see you.”
Holding himself still was a struggle. “Bad idea.”
“Probably. But don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.” She glanced up at the sky, where the moon shone nearly full. “It wouldn’t have to mean anything, or take us back where we were before. We could agree that it’s just the barrier talking. The magic.”
Which was exactly what he didn’t want it to be between them. Heat flared in his veins, a sharp-edged howl of lust and need, but he dug his fingernails into his palms and forced his hands to stay still when they would’ve reached for her. “Tell Carlos I’ll talk to him in the morning,” he said, rejecting her offer by not mentioning it.
She stood there for a long moment, limned in moonlight. Then she turned and walked away, leaving him sitting alone in the night by the burial ruins of an ancient people much younger than his own. He was still there, dry eyed, exhausted, and lonely, when the sun came up and the eclipse day dawned.
The final hours before the eclipse both dragged and flew. As the day wore on, Alexis could feel the tingle of the barrier reaching out to her, making her crazy. Which was pretty much her only excuse for what she’d done—or rather tried to do�
�the night before.
Her cheeks burned at the memory, even though she’d already tortured herself throughout a long, sleepless night. She kept picturing the look on Nate’s face—total disinterest with a liberal dose of annoyance—as she’d pimped herself out, offering strings-free eclipse sex. What the hell had she been thinking? She hadn’t been; that was the answer. She’d simply gone back to old, bad habits.
She’d been the one to go looking for Nate that first time, just as she’d been the one to go after Aaron, and the guy before him, and the one before that, ad infinitum. She was usually the aggressor, the one who gave chase, mostly because she aimed so far out of her own league. And yeah, sometimes she got turned down. But not like this. Never like this. She was becoming that girl, the one everyone else pitied because she kept going back to the ex who hadn’t treated her all that well in the first place. She not only took the booty call when the phone rang; she was the one doing the dialing. And where had it gotten her? No-fucking-where.
She was pathetic.
“Damn it,” she muttered, pacing away from the window of her small suite, shrugging against the chafe of her weapons belt as resentment dug, not just against Nate but against all of them. She was pissed off, and jealous of the other Nightkeepers, who’d headed out to the training center to blow some shit up. Their powers were all ramping up as the eclipse approached. Her powers—what she had, anyway—had stayed flatlined; only her hormones had ramped. Which was just so not fair. Her mother had been a powerful mage, for chrissake. How come she’d lost the magic lottery? Was it because her father had been relatively weak? Izzy had implied that his minimal talents were why she carried her mother’s bloodline name and mark; her parents had been trying to ensure that she had the best chance of gaining power, of being someone.
So far that hadn’t exactly worked out, which was another thing that had anger spiking. What if—
Take a breath, she told herself. This isn’t you. It’s the barrier. The magic was making her nuts.
Stalking into her bathroom, she gave herself a once-over, knowing it was nearly time to meet the others for transpo to the intersection for the eclipse ceremony. The combat clothes she wore had been her mother’s; Izzy had pulled them out of storage and made the necessary repairs once Alexis had graduated from the midnight blue robes of a Nightkeeper trainee. Alexis would’ve preferred to go with modern clothes, but it’d meant so much to Izzy that she hadn’t fought it. The pants were basic black, and loose enough at the waist that Alexis could wear them at her hips, but tight enough at the legs that she looked like a chick rather than a drag queen. The shirt was black as well, made of heavy, stretchable fabric, and the cuffs were worked with intricate sprays of blue and white stone beads that were arranged in stylized designs symbolizing the smoke bloodline.
Looking at her face in the mirror, Alexis tried to see the woman from the vision, tried to see her mother in herself. And failed.
Where Gray-Smoke had been willowy and elegant in every picture showing her, Alexis was sturdy and . . . well, not elegant. Where her mother had had high, narrow cheekbones and a delicately pointed chin, Alexis’s face was broad and anything but delicate. Almond-shaped eyes didn’t match wide and round, and hazel didn’t match blue.
They had nothing physically in common, and even less in terms of magic, yet they were bound by blood, and perhaps by destiny.
“What if I don’t ever find my magic?” Alexis whispered to her own reflection. “What if I fail?”
For a second her reflected image fogged up and wavered, as though it might answer, as though she’d drawn on the barrier to pull scrying magic she didn’t know how to manage. Then she blinked and the picture solidified, and she realized it wasn’t magic at all. It was tears. And she was being a wuss. She was supposed to draw strength from the barrier on the peak days, not cringe away from it. But with her streaky hair pulled back into a practical French braid and no makeup on, she felt exposed. Cool currents of air touched her body, tightening her skin and making her too aware of the brush of the heavy fabric and the weight of what was to come. Once Strike ’ported them to the safe house near the ruins of Chichén Itzá and they descended into the sacred tunnels below the ancient city, they were going enact the transition ritual and support Patience in her bid to become a Godkeeper, with Brandt as her Nightkeeper mate. And if that brought another slice of jealousy, nobody else needed to know how small Alexis really was, how petty.
There was a quiet knock at the door to her suite, followed by Izzy’s voice calling, “You just about ready, princess?”
Don’t call me that, Alexis wanted to snap. She didn’t, though, because she knew the spiky irritability was the magic, nothing more. And besides, Izzy had called her that long before Nate had turned it into a sneer. The winikin meant it as an endearment, a reminder of what Alexis was meant to be. And maybe that was part of the problem. The pressure and expectations came from her bloodline, from her family’s history. Not from her own potential for a damn thing. In a way she didn’t belong here any more than she’d belonged at the Newport Yacht Club, and she kept wondering why nobody seemed to see it except her.
“Coming,” she called in answer to her winikin, forcing herself to shove the insecurities deep down inside, in a locked section of her soul she opened only rarely, when she was down and needed to feel even crappier about herself. Or on days like today, when other people were depending on her and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to produce enough power to help.
“You can do it,” she told herself. And went out to face the lunar eclipse.
CHAPTER NINE
When Alexis reached the sunken great room at the center of the mansion, she found that the others were there ahead of her. The air hummed with magic and nerves. Strike stood with Leah on the raised platform that ran around the sitting area. The rest of them, both winikin and the Nightkeepers, stood on the lower level, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking up at their leaders.
As Alexis took her place with the others, working herself as far from Nate as she could get, Strike nodded and said, “Good. We’re all here.”
A soft golden glow surrounded the king and his mate, growing stronger when Strike reached out and took Leah’s hand. The Nightkeeper’s human queen might not have magic on a day-to-day basis, but when the peak days came around, look out. She and Strike together channeled the powers of the creator god Kulkulkan, who had serious skills.
Alexis suffered another tug of envy. Not just at the magic, but at the connection between the two of them, and the soft, intimate look they shared for half a second before turning to the business at hand. Which, in a way, was as much about love as it was about war, because the next god to come through the barrier would most likely offer its powers to a Nightkeeper female who had a strong mate at her side.
Alexis glanced over at Brandt and Patience. They stood close together, holding hands and pressed together at hip and shoulder, looking like they’d worked out whatever had been worrying Strike the other day. This time envy tugged stronger at Alexis’s heart. Was love so much to ask for?
“Okay, gang, here’s how it’s going to work,” Strike said. “We’ll link up and I’ll use the boost to teleport all of us to the new site. We’ll drop in the house, not the forest, because the house ought to be secure.”
The Nightkeepers—or rather Jox—had purchased a run-down rental property in the Yucatán over the winter and retrofitted it with a kick-ass security system and emergency supplies, so they could use it as a staging area for trips down into the sacred tunnels. The move had become necessary when the Nightkeepers’ previous passageway to the tunnels leading to the sacred intersection had been destroyed during the equinox battle. Luckily for them—though gods knew it’d been more fate than luck—Leah had known of a second access point near a small house her parents had rented on vacation when she was a child.
Though finding the entrance during the summer solstice of ’84, amidst the massacre itself, had marked Leah and her younger brother and had eventually
cost her brother’s life, it’d also meant that the loss of the first passageway hadn’t been the disaster it would’ve been otherwise. Gods forbid they couldn’t get to the intersection and undergo the transition ritual, because the legends said the Godkeepers would be the first and best defense standing between mankind and the Banol Kax when the end-time came.
At the moment they didn’t even have one full Godkeeper, though. Which meant they had some serious catching up to do.
Strike continued, “Once we’ve secured the perimeter, the warriors will go down while the winikin and nonwarriors stay topside and cover the entrance.” The king made it sound matter-of-fact, even though it was a serious breach of SOP.
Traditionally, the winikin stayed back at the training compound and watched the Nightkeeper children. But with only the twin boys to watch over and too few warriors, Strike was pressing everyone into service. The female winikin would protect the twins back at Skywatch. The four male winikin, along with Jade, who hadn’t received the warrior’s mark or the attendant fighting prowess, would be heavily armed and tasked with keeping watch for Iago and his ilk, or any other sign of danger.
Alexis had argued along the lines of tradition, but Strike and Leah had overruled her. Still, the debate had helped them clarify a few fail-safes, so she felt like she’d at least added to the convo and justified her place on what was coming to be known as the royal council.
Leah took over, saying, “When we’ve reached the temple chamber, we’ll link up. Strike and I will take whatever boost we need to man the defenses. The rest of the power should go to Patience and Brandt for the Godkeeper ritual.”
Strike’s expression, which had been serious all along, went deadly intense. “We need this, people. We need a true Godkeeper, and we need her now.” He looked straight at Patience as he said, “With a Godkeeper’s power, especially if we get another of the war gods, we might be able to get ahead of Iago, maybe even attack him on his own turf. Without it, we’re vulnerable.”
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