“Count on it.”
Lit by his low-grade fireball, they swam to the short end of the room, where they found that they could stand on the altar itself and keep above water—for the moment, anyway. The window of opportunity was closing fast. In order to both stand on the throne they had to crowd close together, her back to his front, in a position that fit too well as far as Alexis was concerned, one that felt safe and sane, and revved her nerves, not just at what they were about to attempt, but also what she’d vowed to do if they made it out of there alive: try once more, this time letting him know that she wanted him for who he was, not just for the power they could make together.
“Ready?” he asked, his voice a low growl, his lips very near her ear.
“One more thing,” she said quickly, as the water rose to her mouth. “When you shield, try to take as much of the air around your head as you can. Just in case.”
He nodded. “Will do.”
They didn’t need to clarify what the “in case” would be, nor would it help to mention that if their fireballs broke through the weak spot and the water came rushing in, even the shields would buy them only so much time to enlarge the hole if necessary, swim through, and find another air pocket and a way out.
“Okay,” she said, though he hadn’t asked, “I’m ready.” She wanted to hold on to him, wanted to kiss him good-bye, wanted to ask him if he thought there would ever be a right time for them. But in the end she didn’t do any of those things. She just leaned back a little, drawing strength from his strength, and readied her magic, stretching out her bleeding right palm and calling on the goddess for help, for luck. She felt Nate’s magic rev up, felt it touch her own, and felt the two twine together for a moment, somehow becoming more than their sum. Twin fireballs grew from the weeping cuts on her and Nate’s outstretched right hands, growing larger and larger, spinning and spitting and beginning to heat, though the flames didn’t burn their users.
Alexis dug down, felt him do the same, and the fireballs grew and changed from a source of light to one of destruction. She closed her eyes and envisioned the weak spot, envisioned the carved serpent and the rainbow fleeing away from the cracked spot. Her power peaked, and the fireball flared to life.
“Now!” he shouted.
The fireballs winged through the air and hit their target, and the world exploded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Alexis ducked instinctively, though they’d both yanked up their shields, bubblelike around their heads. Seconds later Nate shouted something and dragged her below the water, crowding her close to the throne wall, shielding her with his body and his magic.
A shock wave slammed into them, compressing Alexis’s lungs even through the shield. A freight-train roar of explosion thundered around her. She cried out inside her small sphere of air and clung to Nate, who was hanging on to her, keeping her secure, keeping her anchored. Debris pelted them, pinging off the magic, and she felt Nate flinch, wondered if something had gotten through.
In the aftermath of the shock wave there was a rush of water, colder than the liquid surrounding them, stirring up a current, a tide, as the water moved from one chamber to the next.
They’d done something, she realized. But had they done enough?
Before the water had even begun to settle, Nate kindled a small fireball and urged her into the current. They had to swim hard at first, then less so, as the chamber they were in filled fully with water. And although that had been the plan, Alexis’s heart kicked when she saw the last thin stream of bubbles escape through the hole they’d made.
“Follow those bubbles!” she said, and felt Nate’s fingers tighten on her hand, which he’d clasped and held fast, as though he never intended to let go. And though she knew he’d let go eventually, she let herself lean on the feeling as they kicked toward the gap that’d opened up in the rock wall.
Regret twisted at the sight of the carved stone blocks shattered by the attack. The temple had stood for more than a thousand years, only to fall to the ancestors of its makers. But necessity was necessity, so she spared only a glance back at the narrow room she’d dreamed of, seeing that the carvings of the serpent and the rainbow had disappeared. Then she kicked upward, following Nate’s tug on her hand, and the red-hued glow he held clutched in his outstretched hand. Moments later he extinguished the fireball, because they didn’t need it anymore.
Instead, they swam up toward daylight, and freedom.
Later that night, back at Skywatch, exhausted, sore, and dispirited from the day’s events, Nate avoided his teammates, bummed a sandwich off Jox, and hid out in his parents’ cottage. He got his laptop up and running, but couldn’t bring himself to write. Instead he lay back on the sofa and stared at the hawk medallion he wore around his neck. The one that—according to Carlos—his father had entrusted to his winikin just hours before king Scarred-Jaguar led his Nightkeepers to attack the intersection.
The flat metal disk caught the light when Nate turned it from side to side, making the man turn to a hawk and back again. Or, if he stopped it halfway, there was a point where the image was both hawk and man.
It was a symbol of the bloodline, he knew. A family heirloom, nothing more and nothing less. But for a few seconds earlier that day, in the moment that he and Alexis had stood together on the carved altar and called their magic together, he could’ve sworn he’d felt the amulet respond. There had been a frisson of electricity, a jolting sense of change, of connection—there and gone so quickly he kept trying to tell himself he’d imagined it entirely. Only he hadn’t. He was sure of that much.
“Probably something to do with that wonky shield spell,” he said aloud, trying to talk himself out of the crazy thoughts that kept trying to shove themselves inside his head—gamer’s fantasies about magic amulets and the last-minute discovery of powers that could save the world. Thing was, this was reality, or at least a cockeyed version thereof, where men could do magic and orgasm was a pathway to prayer. Was it really so unbelievable to think the amulet was more than a decoration?
“It was your imagination,” he told himself for the fourth time in the past half hour, and forced himself to tuck the medallion back inside his shirt, next to the frigging adviser’s eccentric that he’d tried to give back earlier, only to have Strike tell him to keep it for now.
Which, goddamn it, meant he owed Carlos fifty bucks, because he’d bet the old bugger that he’d never be the king’s man, as his father had been.
Well, fuck that, he thought sourly, forcing himself back upright on the sofa with his feet on the floor, and trying to make his eyes focus on the laptop screen. He was just doing the last read-throughs on the storyboard before he e-mailed VW6 off to Denjie for programming and shit. The story was as close to perfect as he could make it, and it was time to let the thing go. Maybe even time to end the whole series, because he wasn’t sure there was more story to tell. Hera’s past had been uncovered and resolved, her mate found, wedded, and bedded—though not in precisely that order. She didn’t need the quests anymore.
And that was a hell of a thought.
Nate was scowling at the screen, wondering if maybe he should pull back on the whole happily-ever-after thing, when someone banged on the cottage door. Figuring it was Carlos, come to see if he needed anything—and to do some more gloating—Nate called, “Go away; I’m not in the mood.”
The knock came a second time. For all of Carlos’s faults, he was pretty good about fucking off when told to fuck off, suggesting that whatever he’d come to say was important. Hoping to hell that it wasn’t, because he couldn’t stand any more drama today, Nate pushed to his feet and headed for the door, hissing against the pull of countless bruises from the day’s events.
Those small annoyances fled the second he swung open the door and saw Alexis standing there. In their place flared heat and want, and a sense of the inevitable.
She was wearing loose light blue yoga pants and a cropped sweatshirt two shades darker, in deference to the chil
l of the night air. Unlike her usual put-together outfits, which dared a guy to peel them away layer by layer, this one was easy access, two items, maybe a couple more if she was wearing panties and a bra. He was betting not, though, because he knew the outfit, knew it meant she was in the mood. Before, it’d been a signal, a sort of cosmic don’t bother prettying it up with speeches; I need to get off. Now, however, though there was heat in her eyes; there was something else, as well. There was warmth.
“Help you?” he asked, which was about all he could get out through a throat gone suddenly dry.
The year before, her answer would’ve been something along the lines of a coy, “I think we can help each other,” and it would’ve been accurate. But now she paused for a second, then said, “Can I come in?”
The question hung in the air, becoming everything. Before, they’d mostly used her rooms, or a spare bedroom elsewhere in the mansion. If he invited her inside his parents’ cottage, things shifted to a new level, a new degree of importance. If he invited her in, they would have each other, Nate thought, using the safe euphemism when his conscious mind couldn’t cheapen the act to sex, couldn’t call it making love. But more, they would do it with their eyes open to each other’s flaws and the ways they didn’t fit.
He cleared his throat, and yearned. “Why now?”
Her lips turned up at the corners in a sad, self-aware smile. “Because for the first time in a long, long time, neither of us needs anything from the other. This would just be us together, because we want to be.”
Which begged the question of whether he wanted to be with her, despite everything. And the answer, damn it all to hell, was a resounding, stupid-simple yes.
So he stepped back out of the doorway. “Come on in.” He probably should’ve said something way smoother, but what smoothness he possessed seemed to have deserted him. She didn’t seem to mind, though. Head high, she marched through, not looking at him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with excitement and, he suspected, nerves.
Or maybe he was the one who was nervous, and he was projecting like hell, knowing that if they had sex now it’d skirt the line of making a commitment he didn’t want. It was bad enough he’d wound up a royal adviser. He wasn’t letting the gods pick his girlfriend—or worse, his wife. He refused to use the Nightkeeper words of “mate” or “jun tan,” because he was a guy first, a Nightkeeper second. Or so he liked to think. The way things kept happening around him, exactly as the gods seemed to have decreed, he had to wonder about that. Problem was, he didn’t exactly have a decent out clause in his contract. Hell, he didn’t even have a contract; it was all blood and ancestors and destiny and shit.
And none of that mattered now, really. He’d already let her inside.
She stopped in the middle of the main room and looked around, unspeaking. He couldn’t read her body language or her expression, and suddenly he realized he cared more than he expected to what she thought about him all but living in his parents’ old place.
“You’ll make some changes,” she said after a moment. “I see you as more of a black-and-chrome sort of guy.”
That surprised a snort out of him. “That’d be my office back in Denver.” He wasn’t sure it suited him anymore, though. Wasn’t sure what the hell suited him except the sight of her in his space, and that was far from a comforting thought. So he went for light. “What, you don’t think shag carpeting is me?”
“Carpet can be replaced.” Her eyes lit on the paintings, and the oversize medallion. Like him, she was drawn to that wall, crossing to stand very near the painting of the Mayan ruins seen from above. “The rest of this place suits you, though, or what I’ve seen of it. It’s practical and stripped down, and there’s not much in the way of family pictures or mementos, but there’s a sense of latent power and . . . an honesty, I guess.” She shot him a look. “I don’t always like what you say, but I know that if you say it, you mean it.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that, or how to deal with the possessive clutch in his chest at the sight of her standing in front of his bloodline symbol. Yes, a thousand generations of his ancestors seemed to say, she’s for you. This is meant.
Because he couldn’t deal with that just then, and maybe because he wanted her to see, he waved toward the bedroom door on the right and said, “Have a look in the spare room.”
He followed her, stood too close to her when she paused at the threshold and breathed, “Oh.” Just that one word. Oh.
It still caught him the same way too. His old nursery, preserved intact for nearly twenty-five years, telling him that he’d come from somewhere, that he’d been loved. That love was in the boxed photos stacked in the closet too, though he didn’t want to show them to her now, couldn’t bear to go through them again so soon.
He wanted to shy away from the snapshots of his parents and his infant self, taken here and there around Skywatch and elsewhere, pictures of his parents with the other magi, his father standing slightly apart from the group, pictures of Nate with other babies and Nightkeeper children. The images were difficult for him to look at, knowing that everyone in them was dead except him, and because he’d spent his entire life not caring about the parents who hadn’t cared enough to keep him. It probably should’ve helped to know that they’d cared, and cared fiercely. But somehow it was worse knowing that he should’ve been with them, or, failing that, with a winikin, growing up like Alexis had, pampered and groomed, always having someone to tell him that he could do better, that he could be better.
It was worse knowing he should’ve grown up thinking he was important, when instead he’d been taught that he was nothing, that he had to scrap to survive, steal when he wanted a little extra, and defend himself every second of every day.
Alexis seemed to sense at least part of that, though. She took his hand, threaded their fingers together, and squeezed gently. “I’m here because of who you are in this lifetime, not who you might’ve been.”
He turned to her then, and lifted their joined hands so he could kiss her knuckles, where a faint bruise darkened the skin. “And I let you in the door despite who you are in this lifetime, because even though I keep telling myself I want something—and someone—else, it keeps coming back around to you. To us.”
Her eyes flashed at that and her jaw went a little hard, but then she shook her head ruefully. “There’s that honesty again. Refreshing, if not always complimentary.” Then her lips turned up and she tipped her face to his. “Kiss me before I remember that you annoy the shit out of me and start to wonder why I’m here.”
“You’re here because I annoy the shit out of you,” he said, then obliged by touching his lips to hers chastely, letting the contact kindle warmth as he murmured against her mouth, “You’re here because I won’t pander to you like the boys down at the marina, and because you know that I won’t make promises I can’t deliver on. I might be a gamer, but I’m not a game player.”
She was silent for a moment, then settled against him a little and said simply, “I’m here because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Nate would’ve said something glib in response, but the words jammed in his throat, backing up against the realization that the same was true of him.
Before, he’d resented the demands of a bloodline responsibility he’d never asked for, never sought. He’d wanted to be back in Denver, working the life he’d built for himself, the one that played by familiar rules, with familiar people. The life he was good at. Somewhere along the line, though, that’d changed. Denver seemed far away. He knew he could be there in a few hours, faster if he asked Strike for a ’port. But the city—and the life he’d lived there—had dimmed in his brain, his new life as a Nightkeeper seeming so much more important now.
Granted it was more important on a save-the-world scale. But now even on a smaller, more personal scale, he realized that he didn’t want to be back in the city. He wanted to be where he was: in his parents’ homey, outdated bungalow with the woman he’d never
managed to convince himself to leave all the way. Which, in all honesty, wasn’t fair to either of them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the apology coming out of nowhere, from deep inside him.
Nonsequitur though it might be, she seemed to get it, shaking her head. “Don’t be. We move forward. Everything that happens from here on out, whether good or bad, is new. It’s just you and me, guy and girl. Humans, for what it’s worth.”
Which was so not like her usual rhetoric that he drew back. “What happened to the whole ‘time is cyclical, what has happened before, blah, blah’?”
She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “We’re not our parents. We were raised human. I think we’ve got the right to claim something for our own, don’t you? Well, I claim this, for as long as it lasts.”
He saw the truth of it in her eyes, and tasted it on her lips when he dropped his head for a second kiss, this one longer and moister, and bringing more heat to the moment. When it ended, he glanced out the window to where stars shone over the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon. “I can promise you until morning, at least.”
He’d meant it partly as a joke, but her eyes were serious when she said, “That’ll do for starters.” Using their joined hands to tug him along, she urged him in the direction of the bedroom, then stalled. “Um. Will this be too weird for you?”
“You don’t want to do it in my parents’ bed? What are we, sixteen?” The laughter felt good, as did the rush of heat and joy as he reversed their positions, with him urging her along. “Don’t worry. Carlos made some changes once I started hanging out here. That includes the mattresses and bedding.” Along with a few personal items he didn’t bother mentioning, because, having made the decision, he was done talking.
He got her inside the bedroom and left the lights off, so the space was softly lit by the illumination coming through the door from the main room. The bedroom was sparsely furnished and decorated, as were the other rooms, but with the same few deft touches of character and magic. Another of his father’s paintings hung over the bed, this one of a green sea and an achingly blue sky, a helicopter’s-eye view approaching a verdant island of sand and trees, and a limestone cliff with a Mayan ruin at the top. The domed silhouette marked it as one of the ancient celestial observatories, where Nightkeepers and Daykeepers alike had tracked the movements of the stars and used them to tell the future and the past.
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