Nightkeepers notfp-1 Page 2

  ‘‘This way,’’ he said, making the only call he possibly could, though it nearly killed him to turn away from everyone else he’d ever known.

  Making sure Anna was right behind him, he grabbed a dazed-looking Strike by the waist and arm, half carrying, half dragging the boy across the great hall to the covered walkway leading to the mansion. It’d been locked all night, but now the doors stood open, one hanging halfway off its hinge. ‘‘Don’t look,’’ he ordered as their feet slid in the bloody wetness that seemed to be everywhere. He lifted Strike higher and the boy trembled and clung to him like a limpet, pressing his face into the winikin’s chest.

  Jox heard fingernails on blackboard behind them, heard an infant’s wail and a familiar feminine voice screaming a battle cry. Something deep inside him wept— Hannah. But he didn’t turn back to help her.

  He took the king’s children and ran for his life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  June 21

  The present

  The glowing green numbers of the Crown Vic’s in-dash clock ticked from eleven fifty-nine to midnight, signaling the start of a new day. Detective Leah Ann Daniels let out a slow breath, trying to settle her nerves. ‘‘First day of summer used to be a good thing.’’

  ‘‘That was before the locals started drinking the Kool-Aid, ’’ her partner, Nick Ramon, said, then winced. ‘‘Sorry.’’

  ‘‘Don’t be.’’ It’s not your fault my brother joined a cult and drew the short straw. Battling the churning in her gut, Leah scanned the dark, cluttered alley outside the car, looking for Itchy Pasquale, the scrawny gangbanger— and occasional snitch—who’d called her for a meeting, claiming to know where the Kool-Aid was being served this time around.

  She and Nick were parked only a few streets over from Miami’s chichi Wynwood Art District, but the alley could’ve been in another world—one peopled with sallow-faced junkies rather than glitterati and run by gang rule rather than art critics. The Miami-Dade PD made regular sweeps of the buildings on either side of the alley, and the raids turned up pretty much every crime on the books, and occasionally some that weren’t.

  Like human sacrifice.

  The bodies had started turning up eighteen months ago and had followed every three months like clockwork: two at each equinox, two at each solstice. The victims were beheaded, their hearts cut from their chests. The news vultures had dubbed them the Calendar Killings and hauled out all the old favorites—Buono and Bianchi, Dahmer, Kemper, Gacy. Only one reporter had been savvy enough to draw the parallel between the Manson family and Miami’s newest cult, Survivor2012; between Helter Skelter and the doomsday espoused by their leader, Zipacna, who had named himself after the crocodile demon of the Mayan underworld.

  Said clever reporter had turned up right after the vernal equinox, sans head and heart. Next to him had been Leah’s thirty-year-old brother, Matt. Unfortunately, the connections between the Calendar Killings and Survivor 2012 were strictly circumstantial; there wasn’t any evidence the locals or FBI were willing to run with.

  ‘‘Not yet, anyway,’’ she said softly. Anticipation burned in her veins, making her impatient. ‘‘Itchy’s late,’’ she said louder, so Nick knew she wasn’t talking to herself anymore. They’d been partners nearly six years. He’d gotten used to telling the difference.

  ‘‘We shouldn’t even be here. Not our case anymore.’’ But Nick didn’t look bothered by the thought. Long and lean and dark-skinned, he was dancer-graceful, yet sturdy as a hurricane shelter, and wore a plain gold wedding band she hadn’t gotten used to yet.

  Leah had danced at his and Selina’s wedding a month earlier, and toasted them with a big old, ‘‘Better you guys than me,’’ though it’d stuck a little. She and Nick had been there and done that and managed to stay partners in the aftermath, so she had absolutely nothing against the nurse he’d married. Besides, her relationships seemed to have a three-month expiration date, which tended to defeat the whole ‘‘till death do us part’’ thing.

  Didn’t mean she loved being alone, though. Heck, even her subconscious was telling her it was time to start dating again, sending her some seriously hot dreams that had her waking up wanting and lonely, and thinking of a dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes, some righteous ink, and what looked an awful lot like a MAC-10 autopistol on his belt.

  Great. Just what she didn’t need—a crush on a gang-banger. Although she supposed—hypothetically—that a ’banger would be better than a doomsday nut who believed that when the Maya’s backward-counting calendar hit its zero date in a few years, the world was going to end.

  News flash: Not even the modern Maya believed that shit anymore. Most of ’em, anyway.

  In the Crown Vic’s passenger seat, Nick rolled his shoulders, trying to work out the kinks. ‘‘Long day.’’ He was wearing yesterday’s khakis and shirt, but somehow managed to make the wrinkles look like a fashion statement.

  Leah, on the other hand, was way more wrinkle than fashion in navy pants and a fitted blue button-down that’d done the sexy curve-clinging thing twenty hours earlier, but now chafed beneath the Kevlar vest she’d pulled on for the meet. Her white-blond hair was pulled up in a ponytail and stuffed under an MDPD ball cap, and all vestiges of makeup had hasta-la-vista’ed it hours ago.

  Long day, indeed.

  They should’ve been off shift at nine. Technically, they were off shift, but the snitch’s call had been too good to pass up . . . and too tempting to pass along. ‘‘Itchy won’t talk to anyone but me,’’ she said, faintly defensive because they both knew she should’ve taken it to the task force handling the Calendar Killings, which had ceased including her the moment she’d ID’d her brother’s body.

  ‘‘So where is he?’’

  ‘‘Damned if I know.’’ She tried Itchy’s cell again, but it bounced straight to voice mail.

  ‘‘Wait.’’ Nick pointed as a figure emerged from behind an overflowing Dumpster at the far end of the alley. ‘‘Over there.’’

  Leah’s heart did a bumpity-bump as she identified her informant by the faint hitch in his get-along, courtesy of a drive-by a few years back. ‘‘That’s him.’’ She checked the clip on her .22 and reached for the door handle. ‘‘Stay here. You know how twitchy he gets around you.’’

  ‘‘Dude was born twitchy.’’ But Nick hit the headlights. ‘‘Keep in sight.’’

  Anticipation flared through Leah, alongside something that hummed in her veins and stomach and made her feel like this was it; this was the moment she’d been waiting for—a chance to pin something real on Zipacna and his freakazoid followers.

  Taking a deep breath, she climbed out of the car, leaving the door open in case she needed quick cover. She held the .22 at the ready. ‘‘Hey, Itchy.’’

  The banger was in his late teens, wearing a pair of low-slung jeans and a T-shirt featuring a cartoon penis and a caption she had no desire to read. His head was shaved bald, and a hollow plug stretched his earlobe around empty space the size of a quarter, making him look lopsided.

  He grinned, baring a shiny set of caps with both front teeth filed to points. ‘‘Hey, beautiful. Got a present for you.’’

  ‘‘Zipacna.’’ It was no secret she thought the head of Survivor2012 was the Calendar Killer, but three warrants had failed to find any evidence in the mansion he’d retrofitted for the bloodletting rituals he conducted, claiming to be descended from King Somebody-or-other. Freak.

  Unfortunately, he was a smart freak. She hadn’t even been able to pin him with a parking ticket. Until tonight.

  Lowering the .22, she patted her pocket beneath the Kevlar. ‘‘I’ve got the cash, and the solstice hits in twelve hours. Time for a couple more bodies. You going to tell me where he kills them?’’

  Itchy grinned. ‘‘I’m gonna do better than tell you, baby.’’ His eyes flicked to a point over her shoulder in a blatant signal.

  Shit! Survival instincts going into overdrive, Leah spun and lifted her weapon just as a dark
figure stepped from the shadows and lifted a rocket launcher to shoulder height, aiming it at the Crown Vic. Panic spurted and she snapped off three quick shots, screaming, ‘‘Nick, run!’’

  But her shots missed and her words were lost beneath the rocket thump. Seconds later, the car exploded and a red-orange fireball howled outward, flattening everything in its path.

  The shock wave slammed into Leah, flinging her through the air. She hit a Dumpster with battering force and crashed into a pile of spilled refuse.

  ‘‘Nick!’’ Head ringing, pulse hammering, she scrambled to her hands and knees in the garbage. He got out, she told herself. He can’t be dead.

  Except deep down inside, she knew he was.

  ‘‘She’s over here,’’ Itchy’s voice called, and footsteps rattled as a half dozen of Itchy’s compadres converged around the Dumpster, warning that she could mourn Nick later. She had her own ass to worry about right now.

  Breath sobbing in her lungs, she scrabbled around, found the .22 half-buried beneath a pile of garbage, grabbed the gun, and came up firing.

  Her first shot caught a shirtless teen in the chest, punching a hole just above the tattoo of a flying crocodile on his left pec. The guy fell back, but that left Itchy plus four others. She got off another shot before she felt a sting of impact, though no major pain. She looked down and saw the double barb of a high-powered Taser hooked onto her pants. Before she could yank it out, Itchy hit the button and nailed her with fifty thousand volts.

  Leah’s jaw locked tight, holding the scream inside as everything went numb and she flopped to the pavement, twitching hard.

  Then they were pawing at her, groping her as they hauled her up and dragged her out of the alley. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe, could do little more than scream inside her own skull as they gagged her, zip-tied her hands and feet, and tossed her in the back of a van. Moments later, she felt a sharp prick in her left butt cheek, and as the doors slammed and the van drove off into the night, everything started to go gray. Then black.

  Then nothing.

  The blonde leaning over the garden center’s display table of annual flats was wearing a tight pink tank top and no bra.

  Not that Strike was looking or anything.

  ‘‘I just love impatiens, don’t you?’’ She bent over further to select just the right six-pack of flowers, giving him an eyeful.

  Hello. He dialed down the water wand he’d been using to fertilize the hanging begonias, and moved around the table. ‘‘Impatiens are pretty enough,’’ he said, pretending to look at the flowers. ‘‘But I prefer the full-sun varieties, myself. No tan lines.’’

  She shot him a gotcha look before nodding at his right arm. ‘‘Nice ink. Aztec, right?’’

  He normally wore long-sleeved shirts to avoid just this sort of conversation, especially from people who noticed that his business partners, Jox and Red-Boar, wore similar glyphs. Today was scorching hot, though, and he’d gone with cutoffs and a black T-shirt that bared his marks: the jaguar that symbolized his bloodline and the ju that marked him as royalty.

  ‘‘They’re Mayan.’’ He could’ve told her that the Maya had been the only society in the New World to develop a fully functional writing system, or that it was because they, like the Egyptians two millennia earlier, had been taught by a warrior culture that went back twenty thousand years or so to Atlantis.

  He didn’t tell her that because, one, she’d think he was whacked; two, lectures weren’t sexy; and three, the details, like the forearm marks, weren’t relevant anymore. The barrier was sealed, the Nightkeepers unnecessary. In four-plus years, the Great Conjunction would come and go with nothing more than a Michael Bay disaster movie and some empty hype.

  Hopefully.

  ‘‘Very nice,’’ she said again, and it was clear she wasn’t just talking about the marks.

  ‘‘Thanks.’’ Strike was bigger than average—most Nightkeepers were, or had been—and he kept himself fighting fit. Add that to deep blue eyes, shoulder-length black hair worn in a ponytail regardless of trends, and a close-clipped jawline beard, and he had a look that either fascinated women or scared them off, depending.

  The blonde didn’t seem scared as she took a long look around the garden center.

  The sturdy barn-red store was flanked with plastic-covered greenhouses, with the one- and five-gallon shrubs grouped out front like leafy islands sprouting from an ocean of parking lot. The balled and burlapped trees were set around the perimeter, and tables of flowers and veg flats were strategically placed so shoppers couldn’t miss them on the way in. ‘‘This place is cute,’’ she said finally. ‘‘Yours?’’

  In other words, was he an owner, a contract landscaper working out of the nursery, or a schlub who, at thirty-three, watered plants for a living at seven bucks an hour?

  ‘‘Mine and my partners’,’’ he said, wondering how she’d react if he told her it was a little bit of all of those things.

  He was part owner, along with Jox and Red-Boar, because all three of their names were on the Nightkeeper Fund started by his umpteenth-great-grandfather after he’d sold off most of the old artifacts. Strike also did some landscaping now and then, when he got the itch. And yeah, he was thirty-three, and although he had an MBA from Harvard Biz and used it to manage the fund, at the moment his career pretty much consisted of watering plants and discussing the intricacies of dried versus composted cow manure.

  That, and studying spells that hadn’t worked in twenty-four years.

  ‘‘Want to give me a behind-the-scenes tour?’’ The blonde shot him a look of pure invitation that normally would’ve had his glands sitting up and taking notice.

  Now, though, his libido sort of shrugged and yawned, which gave him serious pause. Oh, come on. How could he not be interested in getting some of that?

  He ought to be . . . hell, he was trying to be, but he was doing the autoflirt thing—and had been for the past few weeks—all because of some seriously funky, sexed-up dreams that had him waking up horny as hell. He could clearly picture the woman in those dreams: her high-cheekboned face and pale blue eyes, a set of full lips that seemed made to wrap around a guy and hang on for the ride, and white-blond hair that sifted through his fingers like spun platinum.

  He looked at Pink Top again to make sure. Nope, wrong blonde. Assuming, of course, there was a ‘‘right’’ blonde . . . which was a serious stretch, because even if the barrier were active, which it wasn’t, and he’d gone through the talent ceremony at puberty to get his full powers, which he hadn’t, Nightkeeper males weren’t supposed to be precogs. Which meant the dreams were just dreams, and he should be good to go.

  Only he wasn’t.

  ‘‘There’s really not much to see out back.’’ He smiled in an effort to soften the brush-off. ‘‘Besides, I’ve got to keep working. My boss is a real ballbuster.’’ There was even a bit of truth to that—Jox might be the royal winikin and thus technically Strike’s servant, but the garden center was his baby, and woe to he who skimped on watering duty.

  Surprise flicked across the blonde’s face, along with a hint of temper he figured she was entitled to. ‘‘Really? Wow. Guess I called that wrong.’’

  ‘‘My bad, not yours.’’ He cranked the water wand and hit a hanging pot of salmon-colored begonias. ‘‘Enjoy the impatiens.’’

  As she huffed off and the begonia pot overflowed, a voice from behind Strike said, ‘‘What are you, fucking stupid?’’

  Exhaling and counting to ten backward, Strike dealt with the water first, shutting it off and dropping the hose. Then he turned and held out a hand. ‘‘That’ll be five bucks, Rabbit.’’

  Wearing low-slung jeans, heavy work boots, and a black hooded track jacket even though it was in the high eighties and rising, with the hood pulled up over his shaved head and his iPod buds stuck firmly in his ears, Red-Boar’s seventeen-year-old son was dressed to depress, and wore the ’tude to match.

  Smirking, the kid dug in his pocke
t, pulled out a ten, and slapped it in Strike’s palm to pay the ‘‘no saying ‘fuck’ on the job’’ fine they’d been forced to institute when Rabbit graduated high school a full year ahead of schedule, blew off his SATs to joyride down the coast in Jox’s truck, and then e-mailed all his completed college applications to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras while swearing to Jox and Strike that he’d submitted the apps on time.

  He’d probably figured—hoped—that his father would cut ties after those stunts, leaving him free to do whatever the hell he wanted. Instead, Red-Boar—aka the only adult Nightkeeper who’d survived the Solstice Massacre—had surprised all of them by rousing his PTSD-zonked self long enough to ground Rabbit’s ass, cancel his AmEx, julienne his license, and order the kid to work at the garden center all summer, where he’d promptly started cussing out the customers.

  Thus, the ‘‘fuck’’ fine.

  Strike pocketed the ten. ‘‘You want change?’’

  ‘‘Put it on account.’’ The kid’s eyes, so light blue they were almost gray, followed the blonde into the store. ‘‘But seriously. How can you not want a piece of that?’’

  ‘‘I take it you’re done pruning out back?’’

  Jox and Strike did their best to keep Rabbit away from the front of the store as much as possible, because they never knew what he’d get into next. Sometimes his ideas were brilliant, sometimes terrifying, quite often both. But Rabbit was Red-Boar’s son, which meant he was one of them. It also meant that he was at a serious disadvantage, because his father was a head case, and nobody knew a damn thing about his mother except Red-Boar, who wasn’t talking. So Strike tried to cut the kid some slack. In the end, the four of them were a family, albeit a seriously dysfunctional one.

  Rabbit lifted a shoulder, still focused on the front of the store even though the blonde was long gone. ‘‘Why don’t you check on the pruning for yourself, Strike-out? ’’

  ‘‘In other words, no.’’ Strike rubbed absently at his wrist, which had started aching early that morning, along with most of the rest of his body. He was tired, and vaguely pissed off for no good reason. There was nothing wrong, but there was nothing particularly right, either.