Nightkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  The footsteps sounded again from below, and this time they were headed her way.

  Come on, come on. She reached toward the knife, fingers straining, her entire attention focused on the black resin handle.

  And the knife moved.

  The rational part of Leah gaped, but the rest of her, the part that belonged to the yellow-gold pressure inside her mind, kept straining, kept concentrating, panicking as the ladder leading up to the attic creaked.

  Come on! she thought, only the words that formed in her head didn’t sound right, didn’t sound like English at all.

  Half a second later, the knife slid out from underneath the diary and floated across the floorboards as if it were swinging on an invisible string, coming to rest against her bloodstained palm.

  Impossible, she thought, even as she grabbed the knife and twisted her hand, jamming the blade beneath the zip ties and sawing frantically. That didn’t just happen. Yet somehow she had the knife.

  Working fast, she cut her left hand free, then her right, and was working on her feet when the trapdoor lifted and swung all the way open, and a slightly built man appeared, wearing jeans and a cartoon-covered T-shirt, walking backward up the ladder because he was carrying something bulky in his arms. A carved wooden chest, to be exact.

  The zip ties gave, and she stumbled to her feet, lunging toward the guy as he hit the top of the ladder and turned. Her brain froze at the sight of filed-sharp teeth and a hollow earplug. It looked like her ex-snitch, Itchy Pasquale, except that his eyes were a bright, luminous green. An impossible, glowing green that should’ve existed only in the movies. But though her brain cramped with horror, her body kept moving. She hit him waist-high, and her unexpected attack drove them both across the attic floor.

  Cursing, Itchy dropped the carved chest and grabbed her blood-slicked wrist in a bruising grip. He twisted her arm up and back with one hand and raised his other hand to her head. The press of a gun muzzle had her stilling.

  ‘‘Don’t make me kill you,’’ he said, his voice rasping in her ear. ‘‘Don’t—’’

  She screamed and twisted away from the gun, then reversed and slammed her knife into the side of his neck. He howled and ripped the knife free, reeling back and losing his grip on the gun.

  She grabbed the weapon—a good-size Glock—and came up straight into Itchy’s fist. The punch drove her away from the trapdoor, away from freedom.

  Tasting blood, she fell against the wall, dazed. Pain was a dull roar, overtaken by the command of a strange voice inside her, one that shouted, Get the chest!

  Itchy swiped at the side of his neck, and his hand came away red with blood. His face contorted and he came at her with the knife. ‘‘Fucking bitch!’’

  Shaking, she struggled to her feet and unloaded the Glock into his face at point-blank range. Blood sprayed, bone shattered, and unidentifiable gristle chunks spattered her in the blowback. Someone was screaming, and it took a second to realize it was her, shouting curses and prayers and sobs, all mixed together as she ran through the clip.

  Itchy’s body—it had to be a body, because there was no way anything could survive with its head hamburgered up like that—hit the back wall and slid down, drawing a gory streak.

  Shaking, sobbing, she bolted for the ladder, her only thought to escape, to get free, to get somewhere, anywhere far away. Then her eyes locked on the carved chest, which sat near the trapdoor. Yes, the voice inside her said. Open it.

  ‘‘I don’t know how,’’ she whispered. There was no latch, padlock, or keyhole, no obvious way to get the thing open.

  Yes, you do.

  No, she didn’t. But somehow she did. She held her torn wrists over the lid and waited for a few drops of blood to fall. When they did, she whispered, ‘‘Pasaj.’’

  She didn’t have a clue what it meant or where it’d come from, but it worked. The trunk opened, not by the boring old lock-and-lid method, but by freaking vaporizing, puffing out of existence as though it’d never been. Inside the box lay a square packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a shoelace. It glowed red and resonated a high, sweet note in her soul.

  Mine, Leah thought, and reached for it. Her fingers closed over the packet, and cool heat radiated up her arm as she tucked the thing into the back pocket of her jeans. Her headache snapped out of existence, and the pressure disappeared as though it’d never been, leaving a silence inside her head that crackled with electricity, with power. With urgency.

  She had to get out of there, had to get away. She hadn’t heard any other footsteps down below, but kept the empty Glock at the ready, figuring it’d be good for intimidation if nothing else.

  She was halfway down the ladder when a heavy weight slammed into her from behind.

  Screaming and fighting for balance, she pitched forward and landed hard, rolling onto her back as she scratched for freedom, trying to struggle out from underneath her attacker.

  Itchy’s ruined face loomed over her, which was just unbelievable. He shouldn’t still be alive. But as she watched, the flesh started knitting back, eyes and tendons re-forming, meat growing out to cover regenerating bone. Impossible! she screamed in her head, but knew it wasn’t a dream. It was real.

  Shrieking, she jerked a knee up between them and tried to break free, but he was too strong. She couldn’t get any leverage as his fingers closed over her throat and bore down. Her windpipe folded closed under the pressure, and her consciousness dimmed.

  Help, she cried in her skull. Help me!

  Damn it! Strike’s mind raced as he looked around the featureless mist of the barrier, searching for the others.

  What’d gone wrong? What had—No, never mind that, he told himself. Just go back and get them. If they were already jacked in, he should be able to tap into Red-Boar’s connection and follow from there.

  Closing his eyes, he envisioned his corporeal body still sitting cross-legged in the ceremonial chamber back at the training center.

  Without warning, red-gold light flared behind his eyelids, and power thrummed through him on a high, clarion note of alarm. Everything inside him froze.

  The protection spell had activated. Leah was in immediate fear for her life.

  ‘‘Leah!’’ he shouted, rage and anger coalescing in his soul. ‘‘Hold on!’’ He closed his eyes, thought of her, grabbed onto the travel thread that appeared in his mind’s eye, and—

  Logjammed.

  His mind raced. Leah needed him, but so did the trainees. Given that he’d gotten knocked off course within the barrier, what was to say Red-Boar hadn’t gotten his ass lost, too? The trainees might be alone, stuck somewhere, unable to get back. But Leah was in danger.

  Nightkeepers before mankind, the king’s writ said. Mankind before family and personal desire. But the gods were before all else, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that Leah’s trouble had hit during the aphelion, could it? What if she were still connected to the god somehow?

  Caught between the two, Strike stripped off the heavy headdress and tipped his head back so he could say to the gray sky, ‘‘Gods, I know I haven’t been the best about my prayers, but please hear this one. Please help me make the right choice.’’

  ‘‘Go to her.’’ The words came from everywhere and nowhere at once, in an amalgam of many different voices, all speaking at once, though at different pitches.

  Heart jamming his throat, Strike looked around. ‘‘Who said that?’’

  Nearby, a human-shaped shadow darkened the mist. It was tall and broad, in the way of all Nightkeepers, but stick-thin, as if the muscle and substance had melted away. It solidified out of the fog, a man yet not a man, with nut-brown skin drawn in tight wrinkles over bones and sinew, and gleaming obsidian orbs instead of eyeballs. On its right inner forearm, it wore the mark of the jaguar bloodline.

  ‘‘Nahwal,’’ Strike said quietly, heart thudding against his ribs as he tried to figure out whether he should bow or run. The nahwal of each bloodline embodied a small piece of all the ancestors fro
m that line—not their personalities, but fragments of their wisdom and sight. The creatures lived—if you could call it that—in the barrier and showed themselves when they chose, provided information when they chose. They weren’t supposed to have distinguishing marks, save for their bloodline glyphs. But as this one approached, Strike saw the glint of a bloodred ruby in its left ear.

  Chest tightening, he touched his own left ear, where the piercing he’d gotten in his teens had long since grown over. ‘‘Father?’’

  ‘‘The others must find their own way,’’ the many-voiced voice said without inflection. ‘‘Go now, or the woman dies.’’

  The mists thickened, and it was gone.

  ‘‘Wait!’’ Strike took two running steps toward where the image had been, then slammed on the brakes when the surface beneath him shifted. The ground—or whatever the hell it was—under his feet fell away, sliding like quicksand, or soil running into a growing rift, drawing him with it. The mists around him shifted from green to gray, warning that he was far too close to the edge of the barrier.

  ‘‘Shit!’’ Backpedaling, he scrambled to solid ground, then stood, chest heaving with exertion, with the desire to shout, What the hell is going on?

  But he didn’t have the time for more questions. Leah didn’t have the time. And though he knew the nahwal could’ve been wishful thinking, that he could be following his father’s steps into the place where delusion became reality, he couldn’t—just couldn’t—leave her to die. So he was going to have to screw the writs and go with his gut.

  Closing his eyes, he pictured Leah. Grabbed the travel thread.

  And made the selfish choice, hoping to hell it was the right one.

  Leah wrestled with Itchy’s choke hold, growing weak as oxygen dimmed and her consciousness flickered. Panic kicked alongside an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, as though she’d suffocated before, died before. Only she hadn’t.

  Please help, she screamed in her mind, arching against her attacker in mindless terror, in supplication. Please!

  There was a sharp crack, and a huge ripping noise filled her upstairs hallway with sound and light and wind. The next thing she knew, the blue-eyed guy was there, wearing a seashell-dotted red robe that should’ve made him look foolish but instead made him look like a warrior from another time, a modern samurai.

  He took one look at the situation, and his face contorted with terrible rage. He grabbed Itchy by his bloodstained shirt and pants, hauled the bastard off her, and slammed him into the wall. There was a sickening crack, and Itchy’s ruined head flopped sideways.

  The blue-eyed man lowered the body to the floor. Then, incredibly, horribly, he reached for the knife that’d fallen free during the struggle.

  ‘‘No!’’ Leah surged forward when she saw his intent. ‘‘Don’t!’’

  ‘‘It’d be better if you don’t watch,’’ he said without looking at her. A muscle pulsed at his jaw, and his face was tight with something that might’ve been remorse, might’ve been repugnance, but neither of those emotions made sense. It wasn’t like anyone was forcing him to . . .

  Cut. Itchy’s. Heart. Out.

  Leah knew she should run, or better yet, slap a set of cuffs on Blue Eyes and call for backup. But she didn’t move. Couldn’t move.

  Once he was finished with the heart, he went to work on the head, hacking grimly through Itchy’s neck and spinal cord with the rapidly dulling knife, gagging once or twice. The earthy, tangy scent of blood hung thick in the air, and the dark wetness soaked his robes and coated his hands to the elbows, and he looked miserable as he stood and looked down at the mutilated body. Then he spoke a word that made no sense and sounded like a cat urping a hairball.

  And the body burst into flame—not normal fire, but a greenish purple flame that twisted with black and shed no heat. It looked like sickness. Like evil. And Leah couldn’t stop staring at it.

  The fire burned for a few seconds, then flashed so high she had to close her eyes and turn away, shielding herself. When the light dimmed she looked back to find that the body was gone, as was the gore that’d splashed the hallway and walls only moments earlier. Blue Eyes was clean of blood. But the deed he’d just done was written on his face, and in his eyes when he turned to her.

  When their gazes connected, electricity seared through her as it had that morning when she’d zapped Mr. Coffee, only so much stronger. Something shifted inside her, realigning the universe and leaving everything just a little bit different than it had been before.

  ‘‘Are you okay?’’ he asked, his voice a harsh rasp, as though he’d been through seven kinds of hell getting to her. Only that didn’t make any sense. He’d been in the house all along, hadn’t he? He was one of them, had turned on them for some reason. That was the only way he fit into the ‘‘enemy of the 2012ers’’ theory on the terrorist attack that’d killed Vince.

  But she hadn’t heard his footsteps, Leah realized, her brain spinning perilously close to panic. He’d appeared out of nowhere, out of thin air. And she’d made a carving knife fly. The body and blood spatter had disappeared.

  Even stranger—and more dangerous—golden heat kindled in her core, and a lurching twist of raw lust threatened to overshadow her better judgment. She was dangerously attracted to this man. This murderer who’d butchered her informant in front of her and acted like it’d been the right thing to do. She wanted to be with him, felt like she already had, already knew what it would feel like.

  ‘‘Wh-what’s going on?’’ Her voice shook on the question, but she didn’t care.

  He stared at her for a long moment, as though weighing an enormous decision. Then he held out his hand to her. ‘‘Come on. I’ll show you.’’

  His sleeve fell back to reveal four symbols tattooed in stark relief on his forearm, symbols that should’ve meant nothing to her but seemed familiar, as though forgotten memories were struggling to break through some invisible barrier. She stared at the marks, then at him, then asked in a whisper, ‘‘Did you kill my brother?’’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘‘I had nothing to do with Matty’s death.’’

  She froze, gut twisting. ‘‘How did you know his name?’’

  ‘‘A private investigator told me.’’ He kept his hand outstretched. ‘‘I’ll explain everything. I promise.’’

  And though she knew she absolutely, positively shouldn’t trust him, shouldn’t go anywhere with him, what was her other option? There were things going on here that made no sense, that weren’t going to lend themselves to Internet searches and policework. She owed it to the dead to follow through. And damn, she wanted to go with him, wanted him, though that made the least sense of all.

  Knowing it was probably a very bad decision, she nodded. ‘‘Okay, start talking. If I like what I’m hearing, I’ll let you show me whatever you want to show me.’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t work that way.’’ He crossed the distance between them and took her arm. ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

  She pulled back instinctively. ‘‘Sorry for— Aaah!’’ The question devolved to a scream as the world disappeared and they lunged upward, catapulting through a thick gray mist as though they were at the end of a yo-yo that’d just reversed course. She was still screaming as they jolted sideways, then down, and the mist blinked out of existence, leaving them suspended in a glass-ceilinged, circular room that bore way too much of a resemblance to the ritual chamber in the Survivor2012 compound.

  Leah’s brain took a snapshot in the second they hovered. Eight blue-robed figures were seated in a loose circle below them, with wooden bowls perched in their laps. She recognized one of the women and the black-robed man who knelt before the carved stone altar. They had accompanied Blue Eyes to the 2012ers’ compound; Black Robe was the one who’d shot Vince.

  A smaller, older guy in jeans and a T-shirt stood near an open door. He was the first one to notice them, his attention jerking to the ceiling and his mouth going round in shock. Then the yo-yo string snapped, and Leah a
nd Blue Eyes fell right in the middle of the circle.

  He landed first and then Leah hit, driving the breath from both of them. They just lay there for a few heartbeats, staring at each other. Then reality returned— unreality returned?—and she scrambled off him, her heart jackrabbiting and her breath whistling in her lungs as she tried to suck in enough oxygen to get her brain back online.

  ‘‘Holy shit,’’ she whispered, looking around the glassed-in room to the night beyond, where high rock walls and a faint glow of dusk suggested she’d skipped a couple of time zones in the blink of an eye. Or traveled through time. Or both.

  She felt Blue Eyes move up behind her, and knew it was him without turning to look because of the fine warmth that vibrated across her skin. ‘‘Easy, Blondie,’’ he murmured next to her ear. ‘‘Don’t freak-out on me.’’

  ‘‘Cops don’t freak.’’ But she was damn close to it as she looked at the blue robes and realized not one of them had moved. Black Robe hadn’t twitched either. In fact, none of them had responded to her and Blue Eyes’s arrival except the older guy near the door, who was doing a good impression of a guppy.

  The expression quickly morphed to that of a pissed-off guppy when the guy closed his mouth, glared at her rescuer, and snapped, ‘‘We discussed this.’’

  Blue Eyes set his jaw and got big. ‘‘The choice is made, winikin. Deal with it.’’

  ‘‘Wait a minute!’’ Leah turned on him, heart pounding, feeling like she’d stepped out of her own life and into someone else’s. ‘‘What discussion? What choice?’’

  Before Blue Eyes could respond—if he was even intending to—the other nine people, the ones sitting on the floor like they’d been frozen there, snapped out of it, all simultaneously drawing convulsive breaths and coming back to life as though someone had thrown a switch.