Storm Kissed n-6 Page 5

  She hesitated, shaking. He had gotten her away from Hood, but that didn’t necessarily make him any better than the cobra de rey. He might just have wanted the fresh meat for himself.

  When he moved, she flinched back, expecting him to make a grab. But he put his hand over his heart instead. “I’m one of the good guys, okay? And I swear on my sister’s soul that I won’t hurt you.” Then he held out his hand to her, in an invitation that showed where a wide, slashing scar crossed his palm.

  The sight should have scared her. Instead, it made her feel a strange kinship. Nodding, she darted past him and ducked into the tunnel as the gang members′ footsteps got closer and she heard Hood shouting: “You’re mine, bitch. You hear me? Mine.”

  “Not on my watch,” Mendez grated as he pulled the metal sheet back into place, cutting out the light. Then he guided her fingers to the tail of his ragged denim coat. “Be as quiet as you can, and hang on to me. I’ll take care of you, I promise.”

  Then, with him leading the way, they crept into the darkness together, leaving their enemies behind.

  The next time Reese aimed for consciousness, she made it all the way back, waking up to find herself lying on a couch. A thick blanket was tucked around her, its suffocating, too-warm weight threatening to trigger claustrophobia.

  She didn’t let the fear take over, though. Instead, she forced herself to lie still and feign sleep as she tried to get a sense of her surroundings. Given the weirdness that had already gone down, she needed all the intel she could get.

  All she came up with, though, was that the air was clean and processed, the couch and blanket smelled fresh, and her surroundings were silent except for the background hum of appliances. She didn’t hear anyone nearby, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting for her to come around and . . . and what? The fragments that came back to her didn’t make any sense, didn’t tell her where she was, or what Strike and the others wanted from her. Panic sparked. She hated not knowing things. Knowledge was power. Control. Safety.

  Shit. Breathe. In and out.

  Logic said they had drugged her—the impossible memory of Strike appearing out of thin air had to be some sort of retrograde hallucination. Then, after they had knocked her out, they had kidnapped her and interrogated her under some sort of hallucinogenic. But why? And how long had she been out? Had anyone realized she was missing yet?

  The answer to that last one was “no,” she knew. Not after she had made such a big deal about being independent and not needing to clock in or out.

  Breathe, she told herself. Pretend you’re asleep. She was pretty sure she was alone, though.

  A minute passed, then two, and the panic leveled off. She took a deep breath, then another. Then she opened her eyes.

  And froze, heart hammering anew.

  It wasn’t the sight of a generically furnished three-room apartment that caught her by the throat and ramped the panic back up . . . it was the view outside the window nearest her: a few buildings, a few trees . . . and a red-rock canyonscape that didn’t look anything like the Cancún hotel district.

  Where the hell was she?

  Letting out a low moan of terror, she wrenched off the blanket and bolted for the door. It was locked from the outside, the intercom keypad beside it nonresponsive. Damn, damn, damn. Survival instincts clawed at her as she tried the windows, found them locked too.

  Breath sobbing between her teeth, she grabbed a desk chair and swung it as hard as she could at the glass.

  The chair bounced off with a reverb that sang up her arms and made her hands go numb. But she was only peripherally aware of the pain as she let the chair drop and stared, horrified, through the window, to where a pair of Jeeps and a dune buggy were parked near the steel building.

  Holy shit. Oh, holy, holy shit. They were all wearing New Mexico plates.

  And she was in serious trouble.

  She hadn’t told anyone where she was going or who she was meeting, had left only a breezy “Got a new case; call you when I get a chance” voice mail and turned off her phone. Now, her latest move in the “don’t stifle me” argument had come back to bite her in the ass, because nobody would know where to start looking for her. They would have to track the GPS in her phone, and—Her phone!

  She gave herself a hasty pat-down. She was still wearing all her clothes—wrinkled now and damp with fear. The .38 was gone, and her carryall was . . . no, her bag was sitting on a low coffee table beside a blue binder with some papers on top.

  Ignoring the paperwork—though the pile sent a clear “read me” message—she grabbed the carryall and pawed through it. She wasn’t really expecting to find her phone, but adrenaline jolted when her fingers glanced off its familiar shape. She yanked it out, flipped it open, started to dial, and then stopped.

  There wasn’t any signal. Not even a fraction of a bar.

  “Shit.” She started to flip the phone shut, but then froze, eyes locked on the upper corner of the display, where the little digital clock was trying to tell her that less than an hour had passed since she had walked into that tacky-assed Cancún hotel. Which didn’t make any sense. There was no way they could have gotten her from the Yucatan to New Mexico in less than an hour. It just wasn’t possible.

  Yet there she was.

  It had to be a trick. Someone had changed the time on her phone to mess with her head. She looked around, searching for a clock, for something that would verify that she wasn’t crazy, that it was her phone that was wrong, not her perceptions.

  Next to the sitting area, a breakfast bar separated out a small kitchen nook, with a bathroom beside it. On the other side, open doors led to bedrooms—one was furnished, the other looked empty. The decor was relentlessly neutral, all muted beiges and bare walls, the only stab at playfulness a small entertainment center on the wall opposite the couch.

  The digital display showed the same time as her phone.

  “Bullshit,” she whispered.

  Was she still drugged? She didn’t feel woozy, but hallucinations were a better explanation than believing she had somehow been whisked from a Cancún alley to the New Mexican desert in the blink of an eye, like Strike had—oh, shit.

  Her stomach knotted as the pieces started coming together in a pattern that was impossible. Abso-freaking-lutely impossible.

  “No,” she whispered, stomach knotting. But the denial didn’t prevent her from remembering that New Mexico was where Dez’s family had supposedly lived—and died—in a big-assed training compound hidden in a box canyon. Kind of like the one outside the window.

  What. The. Fuck?

  Once the idea took root, more pieces fell into place, in the sort of mental cascade that was usually a relief but in this case just freaked her out worse.

  Strike and the larger members of his crew were all gorgeous, bigger and better than human norm. Much like Dez. Shit, she thought, pulse hammering thickly in her ears as she inwardly acknowledged that Dez could almost be related to the others. Or, if she wanted to go all the way into a bunch of bedtime stories that couldn’t possibly be true, they could all be members of an ancient race capable of channeling psi energy with their minds. A race whose members had lived alongside humanity for millennia, together yet apart, waiting for the day they would need to defend the earth plane from the rise of the underworld.

  “Bullshit,” she whispered. But the pieces fit.

  The smaller wedding guests, most of them a generation older, could have been the winikin, the hereditary protectors and tutors of the magi. And they had all been wearing long sleeves—possibly to cover the forearm glyph marks that denoted their bloodlines and abilities . . . like the ones Dez had been wearing when she had dragged him back to jail.

  At the time, she had thought they were more tattoos, more signs that he was buying into his own hype. But what if they had been real? What if his magic had finally started working, after all?

  Her blood ran simultaneously cold and hot as the pattern gelled into a theory that should ha
ve seemed impossible, but somehow didn’t.

  Strike and the others—and Dez—could be Nightkeepers.

  Holy. Crap.

  She had been so sure that the stories he had told her to pass the time had been elaborate fairy tales, creative lies Keban had used to brainwash Dez for the first sixteen years of his life. Then, later, she had talked herself into believing that the things she thought she had seen during the storm had been a concussion-induced hallucination. Because there was no such thing as magic.

  Except that Strike had materialized practically on top of her, and then freaking teleported her thousands of miles. Then some guy named Rabbit had interrogated her. Or, rather, he’d read her goddamned mind.

  Teleporter. Mind-bender. Oh, holy shit.

  This wasn’t part of a story, and it wasn’t a hallucination.

  More pieces fell into place, forming connections that left her reeling as she reached the logical—or illogical?—conclusion. Because if the magic and the Nightkeepers were real, then there was a good chance that the other parts of the stories were true, too. Like how the magi were blood-bound to defend the barrier in the years leading up to the end date, when terrible demons would break through and fight to conscript mankind into a hellish army that would make war on the gods.

  She was keenly aware that the end date was a little more than a year away, not just because of the connection to Dez, but because it had been impossible to avoid the movies and documentaries, and the news stories about the tinfoil-hat brigades digging into their bunkers and acting like they knew something the rest of the world didn’t. She had laughed all that off. Now she stared out the window at the back-ass end of a box canyon and wondered whether she’d been dead wrong.

  Her knees went wobbly, and she dropped back down to the couch, mouth drying to dust like the desert outside. This wasn’t happening. She was still drugged, still hallucinating.

  Right?

  Closing her eyes, she pinched herself hard on the arm. “Okay, Reese. It’s time to wake up.” But when she opened her eyes the only difference was the presence of reddened fingernail marks on her arm, which stung.

  She glanced at the “read me” pile on the coffee table.

  Don’t do it.

  But how could she not? Knowledge was power.

  On the bottom was a blue binder, half full of pages, with its spine marked “Open log, reunion onward” and fluorescent green Post-its flagging a couple of spots. Sitting on top of the binder was a short stack of papers that were clipped together at one corner. She flinched when she saw her name on the first sheet. But she couldn’t not read the note. Dear Ms. Montana,

  Rabbit said that you’d rather have this in writing to digest at your own speed, so here it is. When you’re ready to talk, dial 1313 on the intercom, and someone will come for you. At that point, it will be up to you whether to stay or go. If you choose to leave, you’ll wake up in the hotel remembering only that you turned down the job, and you’ll never hear from us again. But we hope you’ll decide to stay, because we badly need someone like you on our side right now . . . and Rabbit says you’ve always wanted to save the world. Stick with us and you’ll get your chance, gods willing.

  “Oh, shit.” Reese sat back, crossing her arms over her churning stomach.

  That was a seriously low blow, especially when it was those damned stories that had started her crusading in the first place. Back then, she had needed to believe that there were heroes out there, that someone was working behind the scenes to save her. She had been obsessed with Dez’s stories of the Nightkeepers, had pictured herself fighting at the side of a brave and powerful warrior who wore a familiar face. And when Fallon—then an ambitious young detective—had offered her a choice between relocating or helping the cops go after Hood, it was because of the stories that she had chosen to stay. That, and because it had given her a chance to fight, in her own way, at her warrior ’s side. But that was then and this was now, and . . .

  Screw it. She kept reading. You may have already guessed, but if not, here it is: We are the last of the Nightkeepers, and the doomsday war is here. The blue binder contains a rundown of our more recent history, including the massacre that left us scattered as orphans, being raised in secret by our winikin; the events that led to our reunion three years ago; and the things we’ve seen and done since then. You’re in there. You impressed the hell out of me in that warehouse—even more so now that I know that you were trying to save Dez’s ass, and why. And you did a job for another of us, Patience White-Eagle, a while back. You found her sons and their winikin in hiding, and that should have been impossible.

  “The bride,” Reese murmured, putting it together with the funny look the blonde had shot her back at the hotel.

  She remembered the case clearly, not because she had met any of the players—it had all been done by remote control, highly hush-hush—but because it had been a rare challenge. Given that the client had provided her a last-known address, it should have been easy to find a sixty-something couple living with twin kindergarten-age boys. In actuality, she had sweated the job, eventually dumping everything else to focus on that one case, day and night, until she had cracked it.

  The guardians had been winikin, she realized now, hiding a pair of Nightkeeper children. No wonder she’d broken a sweat.

  The note continued:

  Your skills are part of why we need you. We’re currently fighting a rearguard action against a Xibalban mage named Iago and the creatures he controls, and to do that we need all hands on deck, including Dez. Also, you’ll find that there’s a matchmaker inside most of us, because a Nightkeeper who has bonded with his or her rightful mate is so much stronger than before. I realize that you and Dez had problems, but—

  “Oh, no. You’re so not going there.” Crumpling the three-page note, Reese shot to her feet and strode to the window. But the sight of all that wide-open space made her long to be back in the city. Any city.

  She glanced at the door, then at the intercom. She could hit the magic number and make it all go away.

  Instead, she looked down at the letter. The words “rightful mate” jumped out at her.

  “Better brace yourself to be disappointed on that score,” she muttered. Until she shot her mouth off back at the hotel, Strike and the others hadn’t had a clue that she and Dez had a history. It shouldn’t have bothered her that he hadn’t mentioned . . . Shit. She kept reading. —realize that you and Dez had problems, but I think I can explain some, if not all of them. You know how Dez changed after the fight with Keban? That wasn’t him, it was the effects of magic . . . or, rather, a curse.

  Her blood iced and her palms started to sweat, but she didn’t stop reading. Couldn’t have even if she had wanted to. That night, Keban gave Dez a small obsidian carving of a star demon, a creature of darkness. We don’t know where he got the carving or how he knew what it would do to Dez, but you experienced the fallout. Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together: The star demon amplifies the darker aspects of a mage’s personality until it overrides the good stuff. In Dez’s case, it also allowed him to form a connection with the barrier, even before the magic reawakened. Although he couldn’t use his powers afterward—he was only able to call the lightning that night because it was the equinox and, I’m guessing, because you were in danger—the effects of the star demon’s power twisted him into the man who drove you away. But the thing is, he’s not that guy anymore. A year ago, prophecy said that we had to offer ourselves to the gods and ask them to pick three of us to receive the powers and knowledge of our strongest ancestors. Enacting the Triad spell risked madness, death, possession . . . but forfeiting prophecy carries a heavy price, so we cast the spell. The gods reached out beyond us, all the way to Denver, and picked Dez. But instead of giving him the powers of his ancestors, they gave him a spirit guide—a long-ago ancestor of his named Anntah—who entered his mind, undid the damage the star demon and Keban had done, and taught Dez what he needed to know. He awoke a new man: centered,
powerful . . . and jonesing to make up for the things he had done. Or maybe “new man” is the wrong term—really, he went back to his pre-star-demon personality, his baseline self.

  Reese’s breath rushed out in a hiss. “Bullshit. That’s just bullshit.”

  The details fit the pattern; there was no question about that. But she didn’t for a second believe that Dez had let some piece of rock control him. And if he was acting differently now, it was sure as hell because it suited his purposes, not because of some spell.

  She gritted her teeth, flipped the page, and read on. We didn’t believe his transformation at first, but Rabbit confirmed his turnaround, and over the past year Dez has worked his ass off to prove himself. Then, two days ago he disappeared without a word. Our usual private investigator found that he had received a letter via the old winikin drop system, but Carter couldn’t track him beyond that. He suggested we hire a specialist, and I immediately thought of you. At the time, I assumed that was simple logic. Now, I’m reminded that what the humans call coincidence we call the will of the gods. Don’t believe me? Look on the next page. That’s a printout from some security-cam footage that Dez downloaded the night before he took off. At first, we thought it was just some guy stealing a Puebloan artifact from a small museum outside of Santa Fe. After Dez disappeared, we guessed who it might be. Now that Rabbit has seen things through your eyes, we know for sure.

  A cold chill sliced through her, and she was almost braced for it when she flipped the page and found Louis Keban staring back at her. The photo was blurry and badly lit, and his scars were obscured by shadows, but she knew his eyes and the slightly off-balance way he held himself. Up until a year or so ago, she had still seen him in her nightmares. Now, she had a feeling those bad dreams would be back with a vengeance.