‘‘Maybe not, but being consort to the son of the king has to count for something.’’
It took a moment for that to sink in. Then, chilled, she leaned away from him, waited until he looked at her. ‘‘You made love to me for my own protection?’’
Dark anger flashed in his eyes. ‘‘I made love to you because I couldn’t damn well
not
make love to you anymore. Don’t turn it into more than that.’’ He cursed. ‘‘That didn’t come out right. I meant that you shouldn’t read ulterior motives where there aren’t any. I wanted you; you wanted me. End of story. What happens next is completely separate from this.’’
Only it wasn’t, and they both damn well knew it. It’d never been that simple between them and wasn’t about to start.
She got it now. He thought that if they were lovers, the others might not force him to go through with the sacrifice, knowing that a mated Nightkeeper was stronger with his mate than alone, stronger still with a god-bound mate. But that didn’t even begin to address the fact that they apparently had a creator god stuck halfway between the planes, and the thirteenth prophecy loomed large.
Strike, like his father before him, was trying to bend the traditions to save someone he cared for. And if his strategy failed, as it had done for his father before him, the results could be catastrophic.
‘‘Don’t go up against Jox and Red-Boar for me,’’ she said quietly. ‘‘Not without a backup plan.’’
‘‘And don’t you tell me how to do my job.’’ He turned away and started pulling on his pants with quick, irritated efficiency, and she could feel the darkness simmering very close to the surface. She could sense the anger that rode him, the frustration, and knew that what they’d just done had, if anything, made it worse.
Knowing he needed an assurance that she couldn’t give, she dropped down from the altar and pulled her shirt and panties back on. The two of them were close together in the small space, but the gap separating them suddenly seemed wider than ever.
She touched his arm, where his marks stood out in stark relief against his skin in the firelight. ‘‘I’m just one person, Strike. Like it or not, you’ve got a way bigger responsibility than that.’’
‘‘Tell me something I don’t know,’’ he grated out. He sounded angry, but when he spun to face her, she saw grief on his face. ‘‘Do you
want
to die?’’
‘‘Of course not,’’ she snapped, ‘‘but I don’t want to live four more years knowing the world is going to end because I’m still in it.’’
He looked at her long and hard before he said, ‘‘You know what? Maybe I do.’’
Then he strode from the small chamber, bare chested and pissed off. And he didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Strike had a good fume on as he headed to his quarters for a new shirt. Gods, it seemed impossible that he could want someone so much, and want to strangle her at the same time.
It flat-out pissed him off that in the aftermath of some pretty fantastic, earth-rocking sex, Leah had dropped into cop mode on him, looking for evidence in a situation that was governed by
religion
, for chrissakes.
His gut told him there had to be a way to break the connection between her and the god—or better yet, to bring Kulkulkan through to earth—without either of them dying. But instead of trusting him, she’d all but accused him of bending the rules to suit his own needs at the expense of the other Nightkeepers, or the end-time war. And if that thought came too close to some of his father’s failures, then so be it. He wasn’t going to stop thinking for himself and blindly follow some two-thousand -year-old prophecy just because he was afraid of making a mistake.
Even if it could cost the world the rest of the Nightkeepers?
a small voice whispered inside him, sounding very like his mother, or what he remembered of her.
‘‘It won’t,’’ he said aloud. ‘‘I won’t let it.’’ But what if the choice wasn’t his? What if everything unfolded as had been foretold?
And there, he realized, was the crux of things. He hated feeling as if he were acting out a script that’d been written long ago, hated the idea that free will was an illusion, that no matter what he did it was going to come down to his taking up the Manikin scepter and sacrificing the thing that mattered most to him.
‘‘Fuck that,’’ he muttered under his breath, determined not to let it go down that way. But he also knew that Jox and Red-Boar would be on the side of tradition— and, damn it, logic—no matter what arguments he made.
So he went in search of his sister.
He found her in the suite they’d shared as children— two bedrooms and a main room they’d divided with a strip of masking tape. She stood in the middle of the bedroom that had once been hers, wearing the same jeans and sneakers as the night before, along with a borrowed shirt of pale blue cotton. Her dark chestnut-highlighted hair fell to her shoulders in soft waves, and her eyes were the same cobalt blue he saw in the mirror every morning.
Strike knocked on the door frame. ‘‘It’s me.’’ Then he stalled.
There hadn’t been time for an emotional reunion in the grad student’s apartment, and he hadn’t made time for one the night before. Now, in the light of day, it seemed like it was too late, like they’d already settled into the uneasy coexistence that had plagued their growing-up years. He’d been the patrilineal heir to a dead culture; she’d been an
itza’at
seer whose powers had just begun to awaken right before the massacre. And boy had that been shitty timing. While he’d dreamed for years of the
boluntiku
attack and the deaths of all their playmates and
winikin
, she’d been forced to relive the attack at the intersection itself, her seer’s powers showing her the deaths of their parents, the slaughter of the other magi.
Among the survivors, only Red-Boar had seen the same things, forming a bond between them. When the older Nightkeeper had disappeared into the Yucatán rain forest a few years after the massacre, he’d left Anna behind, alone with the memories. At first she’d withdrawn into herself. Then, when Jox had enrolled both of the children in public school, she’d flourished into a normal high schooler, turning her back almost gratefully on the world they’d lost.
Strike had understood even back then. But that hadn’t made it any easier when she’d left for college and they’d all known she wasn’t coming back. Only now she
was
back, and this time it was up to him to make sure she stayed.
She hadn’t answered his hail, just stood there in the middle of the room, staring out the double windows that showed the ball court, and far beyond that the canyon wall, with its darkened pueblo shadows. Her blue eyes were dark with memory and sorrow, and Strike wanted to go to her and tell her everything was going to be okay, that he wanted to protect her now the way he hadn’t been able to when they’d been younger.
But though he would do his damnedest to protect her—protect all of them—there was no way he could promise anything more. Not with the equinox just over a week away, and so much left to figure out. So instead of making promises he couldn’t be sure to keep, he crossed the room and stood next to her to look out the window.
And, because there really wasn’t much else to say, he said, ‘‘Welcome home, Anna.’’
A watery laugh burst out of her, and she sucked it back in as a sob. Still not looking at him, she said, ‘‘God, I hate this place. Nothing here but bad memories.’’
‘‘We’re making new ones now. We have no choice.’’
Now she did turn to him, her blue eyes wet with tears and hard with accusation. ‘‘There’s always a choice. This is America. Land of the free and home of the brave, et cetera.’’
‘‘You know better than that,’’ he said, hurting for her but at the same time feeling the kick of too-ready anger. ‘‘We are, as we have always been, a culture living within another. We live alongside America but we’re not part of it.’’ They couldn’t follow human laws while doing the things they would need to do over the next few years.
‘‘I’m part of it,’’ she said, but her voice was wistful. ‘‘I have a husband, a job I love, friends who care about me. The perfect normal life.’’ There was an edge to her voice that suggested it wasn’t as simple as that, but she continued, ‘‘I don’t want to be here. I can’t help you.’’
‘‘Yes, you can. The question is, will you? Like you said, it’s a free country. You know where the garage is. Keys are on the pegboard.’’ The prickles of anger had him aiming low. ‘‘I’m sure Jox wouldn’t begrudge you his jeep. Gods know you took more than that the last time you ran.’’
She turned to face him, glaring. ‘‘I didn’t take a damn thing that wasn’t mine to take.’’
‘‘You took yourself. I didn’t have that option.’’ He hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t even known he was feeling it, but once the words were out there, they gained weight and truth. He’d wanted to run like she had, wanted to break away from Jox and Red-Boar and the calendar that ruled their lives, the waiting.
‘‘Immaterial now, isn’t it?’’ she said. ‘‘We’re right back where we started.’’
He let out a long breath. ‘‘Yeah. Sometimes that whole history-repeating-itself thing really blows, doesn’t it?’’
That startled a laugh out of her, and for some reason, maybe because of the familiar push-pull that hadn’t changed since they’d butted heads over the masking-tape line as children, or maybe because the situation with Leah was teaching him that sometimes the circumstances were what complicated the emotions, it was suddenly easy for him to drape an arm over his sister’s shoulders and hug her against his side.
She leaned into him, looping an arm around his waist. ‘‘I missed you.’’
‘‘Back atcha.’’
And for a moment, a few precious heartbeats, it was enough to stand there with his sister and watch a high cloud scud across the blue sky above the canyon wall and feel, if not complete, at least like some small piece of his life had come to rest where it belonged. For now, anyway.
Too soon, though, he had to break the short peace. ‘‘I hate to push, but we don’t have much time. There’s an
ajaw-makol
out there. I need to find him, need to kill him before the equinox.’’ It wouldn’t solve the Godkeeper problem, but it would be a major step in the right direction.
But Anna was already shaking her head. ‘‘I can’t control the visions,’’ she said. ‘‘Hell, I can barely see anything. A few times, like when I saw Lucius in trouble, it’s blasted me out of nowhere. But when I try to see . . . I get nothing.’’ She shrugged, the motion transmitting where they leaned against each other, comfortable together despite so long apart. ‘‘I think I’m blocking subconsciously. ’’
Strike was disappointed but not surprised. Gods knew her powers had brought her nothing but pain so far. Why wouldn’t she want to stop them?
He shifted to face her, dipping into the pocket of his jeans and withdrawing the yellow quartz effigy carved in the shape of a skull. He held it out to her. ‘‘This will probably help.’’
Something moved in her expression—a complicated mix of pain, regret, and reserve, along with reluctant eagerness. She took the pendant, let the chain trickle through her fingers while the skull rested on her palm. Then she closed her fingers around the effigy and nodded, accepting the responsibility that went with it. ‘‘Thank you.’’
Taking a deep breath, he said, ‘‘There’s something else. I need your help going up against Jox and Red-Boar, and it’s probably going to get ugly.’’
She nodded. ‘‘Of course.’’ There was no question, no discussion, just ‘‘of course.’’
Something loosened a little inside him. ‘‘Okay, here’s the deal.’’ He gave her the five-minute rundown, starting with the dreams he and Leah had both experienced prior to the summer solstice, and going up through the
nahwal
’s answers to the three-question ritual. When he got to the part about needing to either free Kulkulkan or bring him through the barrier, he saw something kindle in Anna’s expression. He broke off. ‘‘What is it?’’
‘‘I think I know someone who might be able to help.’’
Strike called a council of war that afternoon, beneath the ceiba tree that symbolized life and community. By the time Leah got out there, the others were already seated on either side of the long picnic table, with Strike at its head. He pointed to the empty space on his right and said simply, ‘‘Yours.’’
She was no expert in the hierarchy department, but the dark looks that one word earned her from Red-Boar and Jox suggested it was a position of power, probably the queen’s spot. She might’ve argued, might’ve sat at the far end of the table in a vain effort to make a point she wasn’t even sure of anymore, but the look Strike shot her said,
Don’t even think it, Blondie
.
So she sat.
On either side of her ranged the other Nightkeepers, with the
winikin
beyond them. Nate and Alexis were sitting as far away from each other as possible, suggesting that their relationship hadn’t survived the talent ceremony and subsequent drop in the mating urge. Sven was staring off into space, Rabbit was hiding beneath a pulled-down hoodie and a sneer, and the other four— Patience, Brandt, Jade, and Michael—looked like they’d shown up ready for anything.
Leah, on the other hand, wasn’t sure what she was ready for. The midmorning sex—and subsequent fight— had left her feeling shaky and out of sorts. She didn’t really know where things stood with Strike, and when she caught his eye all she got was a hard, no-nonsense look she wasn’t at all used to from him.
‘‘Okay,’’ he said when everyone was settled. ‘‘Here’s the deal.’’ To her surprise, he brought them all up to speed on the ‘‘situation,’’ even though he’d indicated earlier that he was limiting the confab to Jox and Red-Boar.
Even more surprising, from the looks on their faces, this was the first the two senior members of the group were hearing about the Kulkulkan connection. While the trainees and other
winikin
were wincing and glancing at Leah with expressions of
Dude, major bad luck,
Jox and Red-Boar just looked pissed.