Help!
she shouted as loud as she could along her connection to the barrier, hoping somebody—anybody, another Nightkeeper, the gods, it didn’t matter—would hear.
Please help me!
Blood trickled down her arm, but even with that sacrifice, the shield magic flickered. A bullet smacked into the edge of the case and ricocheted away; another bounced off the asphalt road a few inches from her bare, bloodied foot. Her eyes filmed with tears of desperation, of anger that this was how it would end.
She hadn’t done so many of the things she’d meant to—hadn’t come into her full powers as a Nightkeeper or proved herself to her king. She hadn’t shown up any of her old “friends” back in Newport, or outgrown the need to do so, and she hadn’t figured out why she sometimes awoke with tears in her eyes, hearing the echoes of a voice she knew belonged to the mother she’d never met. But it wasn’t any of those things she saw in her mind’s eye when the shield winked out of existence and the dark mage unleashed his final salvo. It was the glint of a hawk medallion, one she’d known long before she knew who wore it or what it meant. A wash of desire raced through her, the remembered echo of something that hadn’t turned out the way it should’ve. As she braced herself for the burn of bullet strikes, his name whispered in her heart.
Oh, Nate.
Red-gold light suddenly detonated nuclear-bright, and a shock wave of displaced air knocked her back. The incoming bullets scattered in the blast, and two familiar figures slammed to the ground in front of her.
Nate Blackhawk, with the king at his side.
Both clad in black-on-black combat gear, tall and dark, and larger than life like all full-blooded Nightkeeper males, Nate and Strike should’ve looked similar, but didn’t.
Strike was solid and stalwart, with a close-clipped jawline beard and shoulder-length hair tied back at his nape. Cobalt blue eyes steely, square jaw set, he stepped forward and threw a shield spell around her attacker, his god-boosted powers cutting through the rattle of twisted magic and startling a cry out of the enemy mage. Fighting magic with magic, the Nightkeepers’ king looked like something out of a legend, a man of another age transplanted into the twenty-first century to battle the final evil.
Nate, in contrast, was wholly a man of the day, with short-cut black hair accentuating his strange, amber-colored eyes and aquiline nose. Instead of the black T-shirt most of the others wore under the thin layer of body armor, he wore a black button-down of fine cotton, open at the throat to show the glint of his gold medallion. The combination probably should have looked odd, but on him it looked exactly right, the melding of a successful businessman and a Nightkeeper mage.
Expression thunderous, he crossed to Alexis and threw a thick shield around them both. His magic was stronger than hers, damn him, and the shield muted the sounds of fighting as the king fireballed the enemy mage, who blocked the attack.
Nate glared down at her. “Do you still have the statuette?”
It took a second for the question to penetrate the relief, another for her irritation to rise to match his. She scowled and struggled to her bare, bleeding feet and waved the suitcase at him. “It’s in here. And I’m fine; thanks for asking.”
“Don’t start.” He snagged the case from her, got her by her uninjured arm, and hustled her to the king as dark magic rattled, signaling that the enemy mage was gearing up for transpo.
The muddy brown mist gathered, enshrouding the chestnut-haired man. The last thing Alexis saw was his startlingly clear emerald eyes, locked on her. She heard the echo of his words on a thread of magic.
See you soon. . . .
Then he was gone.
Sirens wailed in the near distance as the mist cleared, leaving the three Nightkeepers standing in the middle of the shoreline drive, near the mangled guardrail and a spray of broken glass.
Strike glanced at Alexis. “You okay?”
She nodded, suddenly unable to trust herself to speak. In the aftermath of the fight, her warrior’s bravery snapped out of existence like it’d never been, and she had to lock her muscles to keep from trembling.
“We should go,” Nate said. “We’ll have company in a minute.” He nudged her closer to the king, whose teleport talent allowed him to ’port himself, along with anyone linked to him through touch, as long as he had enough power to draw from.
Nate and Strike clasped hands. Power leaped at the contact, and the hum gained in pitch as Nate boosted the king’s magic, helping power a three-way teleport.
As Strike closed his eyes to find their way home and lock onto their destination, Nate glanced at the crumpled guardrail, then down at Alexis, his expression fierce. “Let me guess—that wasn’t a Hyundai, and you put it on the AmEx.” He paused. “Jox is going to be pissed, you know.”
That surprised a bubble of laughter out of her, one that threatened to turn into a sob. The golden light powered up and the hum changed its note as Strike found the way home. The transport magic built, crowding them closer together. She found herself standing too near Nate, their bodies touching in too many places, reminding her of what they’d had, what they’d lost. That memory, and the relief of being safe, was enough to unlock the words she wouldn’t have said otherwise: “Thanks. I owe you one.”
He looked away, jaw locked, and as the teleport swept them up, the last thing she heard was his clipped response: “Don’t kid yourself. I came for the statuette.”
The three of them landed with a jolt, and Alexis sagged against Nate. He propped her up by looping an arm around her waist, and tried to throttle the anger that rode him hard, the sharp pissed-offedness that she’d been in the line of fire. He might not want to be mated to her, but he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, either.
“I’ll take her.” Izzy stepped in and practically dragged Alexis away from him, glaring daggers, like he’d been the one to put her in danger.
He held up both hands in mock surrender. “By all means.”
Carlos was there too, he saw, and Jox: three
winikin
to look after the three returning Nightkeepers. Each of them wore the
aj-winikin
glyph, which roughly translated to
I am your servant
, along with small bloodline glyphs, one for each living member of the Nightkeeper bloodline they served. Jox was the only surviving
winikin
with two bloodline members to protect: Strike and his sister, Anna. Carlos wore two different glyphs: the coyote for Sven, who had been his original charge, and the hawk for Nate, who had become Carlos’s problem by default.
Poor bastard.
Nate waved off his
winikin
when Carlos showed signs of hovering. “I’m fine.”
“You need to eat something,” Carlos countered, “or you’ll fall over.” Magic was a huge energy sink; in the aftermath of major spell casting, the magi needed to pack in some serious calories and rest, not necessarily in that order.
“Fine. Whatever.” Nate focused on Strike. “We need to bring the others up to speed on what just happened.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” The king strode off, firing orders as he went. “You round them up while I get Leah. Meet me back here in five, so we can discuss what just went down.”
We’ve got company,
Nate thought. That was what’d gone down.
The Nightkeepers were no longer the only magi on the block. The new guy had mad skills and looked like he’d been practicing way longer than the seven months or so the Nightkeepers had been reunited. And what was with him wearing a red forearm mark and trying to get at the lost artifacts? All high on the not-good scale.
But on the upside, the score was even. The bad guy had Mrs. Hopkins’s artifact, but the Nightkeepers had the Ixchel statuette, thanks to Alexis.
He glanced over and saw her sitting at the end of one of the big sofas in the main room while her
winikin
fussed. Alexis was pale and looked shaky around the edges. Her blue eyes were huge in her face, and her full lower lip was caught between her teeth as though she were trying not to let it tremble. Her fancy suit might’ve been all curves and attitude when she’d put it on that morning, but it was a writeoff now, torn and soiled, one sleeve hanging by a thread to reveal the bloodstained white shirt beneath.
Close to six feet even without her heels, Alexis was rawboned and muscular, and far smarter than she gave herself credit for most days. Except for days like today, when she’d put herself in danger with no backup, and then cut off communication. Irritation rose at the thought. He was pissed that she’d ignored her messages, pissed that she’d gone all snotty on him when he’d mentioned it.
As though she sensed the impending lecture, she pushed herself to her feet, waved Izzy off, and headed for the residential wing, where most of the Nightkeepers lived in a series of three-room suites running off a main hallway. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said in his direction. Tugging her torn blazer sleeve down, she glanced at the injury she’d gotten in the firefight. “I’ll clean up and grab some calories. Izzy can collect the
winikin
. You want to get the others?”
“Sure. That’ll be fine,” Nate gritted, doing his damnedest to keep his tone even when all he wanted to do was grab her and shake her. Nightkeepers healed fast in general, even quicker when they were jacked into the barrier or doing magic, but he hated the sight of the bullet crease and her bare, torn feet.
He should’ve gotten to her faster, he thought as he watched her walk away, hating the way her normally long, aggressive strides had been cut down by the slash of a glass cut across one of her heels. He almost hadn’t gotten there in time. Thing was, they’d tried to get there sooner, but Strike damn well hadn’t been able to lock onto her. For the king to ’port, he needed to picture a destination in his mind, either a place or a person. They didn’t fully understand the limits of his talent—like so much of the Nightkeepers’ magic and prophecies, crucial information had been lost over time—but the general rule seemed to be that Strike could latch onto anyone as long as they weren’t underground . . . or dead.
After responding to Nate’s emergency call, the king had wrestled with the teleport magic for nearly twenty agonizing minutes. Meanwhile, Nate had called Alexis’s cell, called Skywatch, called the auction house, trying to get through to her or, failing that, trying to get a damned picture of the estate that Strike could use to ’port. In the end Alexis had somehow made the connection herself, calling out for help at the last possible moment. Nate had heard her whisper in his mind, both a shock and a relief. She wasn’t a ’path, but the sheer volume of magic going down around her must’ve powered the mental shout that’d echoed through the barrier strongly enough that he’d caught it and been able to tell Strike where to look.
Lucky,
Nate thought, scowling.
Goddamned lucky.
He knew he should let it go, that it was over, she was back safely, and it wouldn’t happen again. They knew what they were up against now—or if not what, precisely, they at least knew that there was an enemy mage out there, tracking them. Anticipating them. Trying to scoop them on the statuettes, probably because he was either looking to fulfill the seven-demon cycle himself, or to prevent the Nightkeepers from stopping it. And that would be a serious problem, because if the cycle ran through, bringing all seven demons across the barrier to complete the tasks assigned to them by legend, the Nightkeepers were screwed.
The sound of a sliding glass door broke into Nate’s mental churning, and he looked up to see Rabbit coming in from the pool area. The teen was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and the arms cut off, paired with jeans that hung low off his ass, serving mostly to hold the business end of his iPod. Just turned eighteen, Rabbit was the youngest of the magi, the half-blood son of Red-Boar, who had been the last Nightkeeper survivor of the solstice massacre of ’84, when Strike’s father had led the Nightkeepers to the intersection, compelled by a vision that said he could avert the end-time by sealing the barrier. Instead, he’d led his people into genocide. Red-Boar had survived the battle at the intersection, and had later joined up with Jox, who was raising Strike and his sister, Anna. It hadn’t been until the previous year that Jox had admitted there were other Nightkeepers living in secret with their
winikin
—or, in Nate’s case, without them.
Rumor had it that Red-Boar had sired Rabbit while on walkabout in south-central Mexico or Guatemala or something like that. Nate had heard different versions, different explanations of who the kid’s mother had been, and why the teen had some scary-strong powers that didn’t always act like the legends said Nightkeeper magic should.
Seeing that Nate was staring at him, Rabbit stopped dead, shoved his hands in his pockets, and scowled. “What’s your problem?”
Having learned it was safer to ignore the kid’s ’tude when possible, Nate said, “You hear about the meeting yet?”
“I was out at the—” The kid broke off and shrugged. “No. So?”
In other words, he’d sneaked out to the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon again. Nobody knew exactly what he did up in the sprawling collection of rooms, kivas, and burial chambers, but most of the residents of Skywatch gave Rabbit a wide berth anyway. He wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.
“Confab in the big room, five minutes,” Nate said. “You want to help me round up the others?”
For a second Rabbit looked as if he were going to tell Nate to go to hell. But surprisingly, he nodded. “I’ll check the firing range; you hit the rec area and the training hall.”
He was gone before Nate could ask. Not that he was going to—he didn’t really want to know what was going on in Rabbit’s head. Always one to walk on the moody, broody side of life, the kid had gotten even stranger in the months since his father had died during the equinox battle. It wasn’t like father and son had gotten along all that well, either—they’d struck sparks off each other like nobody’s business, and as far as Nate could tell, Red-Boar’d pretty much hated the kid’s guts.
Then again, who was he to criticize a father-son relationship? Nate thought as he headed for the rec room, which was located past the kitchen and down a short hall toward the forty-car garage. It wasn’t like he had any experience in the area. Besides, he wasn’t part of the whole Nightkeepers-as-family movement that Strike, Leah, and the
winikin
—and Alexis, to a degree—kept harping on. As far as he was concerned, the current residents of Skywatch were nothing more than twenty or so people who’d grown up separately, weren’t related by blood, and had their own lives outside of the whole Nightkeeper thing. They might be a team out of necessity when it came to the end-time stuff, sure, but that didn’t make them inseparable, didn’t make them a family. If Rabbit wanted to march to his own backbeat, Nate wasn’t going to get in his way. He understood privacy and the need for freedom.
Sticking his head through the door of the room they called entertainment central, he saw two of his teammates locked in simulated battle, courtesy of the top-of-the line gaming console Jox had installed a few months earlier. “Hey, you two,” Nate said. “Meeting in the main room, two minutes.”
“Give us ten,” Coyote-Seven said without turning around, his attention glued to the TV, his fingers flying over a gaming console as he navigated his way through the third level of
EmoPunk II
.
Lanky and athletic, with his bloodline and so-far unidentified talent marks bared by a sleeveless black tee, and his long blond hair caught back in a stubby ponytail, Sven was their resident burnout, taking nothing and nobody seriously. As Nate watched, Sven’s computer-generated character took out a pair of overinked street thugs with a series of ninja chops and a kick in the ’nads that had all three of the flesh-and-blooders in the room wincing.
The computerized image shifted as Sven sent his character inside a nearby warehouse. It was dark inside, but a busted-out window in the back let in a ray of light to shine on a guy wearing a medallion that wouldn’t figure in until level five, when it’d be vital. Nate wasn’t sure if the other two knew that, but he did, because he’d helped write the game.
“Gotta get me some of that.” Sven sent his character in a headlong charge for the medallion, missed seeing the bad guy in the shadows, and was dead two seconds later. “Shit!”
“Sucker.” Sitting beside Sven, Michael Stone worked his gaming console with the finesse of a pro. His strategizing wasn’t bad, either, Nate thought. Michael had let Sven charge in blindly and distract the bad guys while he sneaked around and lifted the medallion, then boogied out the back like a good little thief.
Dark and intense and a shade too slick in Nate’s opinion, Michael spoke infrequently, but when he did, his words were exactly right, as though he calculated each sentence, polished each syllable to perfection. His dark eyes held secrets, and when his phone chirped—which it did frequently—he took the calls in private, often well into the night.
The two Nightkeepers in the rec room were diametric opposites: Michael had hidden depths; Sven had no depth whatsoever. Yet somehow they’d become best buds over the past few months, seeming content to shut themselves up in Skywatch while the others tried to find a workable balance between the magi they were supposed to become and the people they’d been before the Nightkeepers’ magical barrier reactivated.
“Let’s go,” Nate said, his voice going sharp when neither of the other guys looked away from the TV screen. “We’ve got a problem. You can rot your brains later.” Just because Hawk Enterprises produced the
EmoPunk
games didn’t mean he thought they were any good.
Nate had kept the connection to the video games on the down-low—not because he minded them knowing about the
EP
s, but because he didn’t want any of them stumbling onto his connection to the
Viking Warrior
games.
Or, more accurately, Alexis’s connection to them and, through them, to him.
It was bad enough that she’d admitted to having envisioned his medallion a few times in the weeks before they’d met. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he’d created her spitting image more than four years ago, and that his buddies had joked that he was saving himself for Hera.
Yeah. So not going there.
“We can’t stop now. He’s on a roll,” Sven protested. Michael didn’t say anything, just kept playing.
Annoyed, Nate reached down and killed the power strip just inside the door, flatlining everything. When Sven yelped, Nate growled, “Cut the shit. What’re you trying to do, oust Rabbit as the local juvenile delinquent?”