Storm Kissed n-6 Page 8

  She had told herself not to buy into it, not to expect anything. But the prickle of tears and a sudden jones for tiramisu said she hadn’t done as good of a job with that one as she had thought.

  Suck it up, she told herself. You don’t need his permission to drag his ass back to Skywatch. She didn’t have her Taser anymore, but Strike was waiting for her signal, and the magi could take care of the rest. You’re just a locator these days, remember?

  But there was an edge of desperation in his eyes. A silent plea. And her instincts were suddenly telling her not to make the call, that this was one of those targets who might be better off staying lost, at least for a while.

  When it came to Dez, though, history suggested that her instincts sucked. And the Nightkeepers’ writs said it best: What has happened before will happen again.

  She met his eyes. “You don’t get to decide whether or not this is my fight, especially not when your king, my contract, an unlimited expense account, and the end of the freaking world all say it is.”

  “I could drop you with a sleep spell, call them to pick you up, and be gone before they got here.” He suddenly seemed bigger and more menacing than before, though he hadn’t moved. The foxfire drifted ahead of him, illuminating his face but revealing nothing.

  “I’d just hunt you down again,” she countered. “And the next time you wouldn’t even know I was there—I’d just dart you like a rabid dog.” He didn’t say anything, but for a second she saw something in his eyes. In another man, it would have been desperation. She softened her voice. “Come back to Skywatch. They need you.”

  “They’re fine without me,” he said flatly.

  Which was a total crock. The Nightkeepers were bracing for massive attacks as the end-time countdown passed the one-year threshold. The prophecies hinted at disasters but were frustratingly low on details, leaving the magi scrambling for answers and needing all hands on deck . . . but Dez knew that. Yet here he was, out here on his own, tracking Keban. And he didn’t want the others involved. Either his transformation wasn’t nearly as complete as the others thought . . . or there was something else going on.

  “What are you hiding?” The slight narrowing of those pale eyes said it was a direct hit. Taking a deep breath to settle the sudden churn in her stomach, the one that reminded her of other arguments, other secrets, she pressed, “What don’t you want them to know?”

  For a moment she thought he was going to ignore the question, or outright lie. But then he met her eyes. “I don’t have any right to ask you to trust me.”

  The churn got worse. “Damn right you don’t.”

  “I’m asking anyway. Let me go. I have to find Keban and the artifacts on my own. It’s important.”

  For a second, she saw a flash of the boy who had saved her, the young man she had loved. Problem was, she wasn’t sure if that was real or calculated. “You want me to tell Strike I couldn’t find you?”

  “I want you to go back to your life.” His expression darkened almost imperceptibly. “And I want you to live this next year like it’s your last, just in case it is.”

  Somehow, that hit her harder than any of the strategy sessions she’d sat in on at Skywatch. During those meetings, the magi and winikin had talked about the barrier and their enemies—both earthly and demonic—and the first real stirrings of war, but now she realized that part of her had held itself apart, treating the threats as another set of stories. Fiction. Maybe a big, flashy movie.

  Dez’s words, though, made her picture Denver a year from now, full of harried shoppers ramping up to do the holiday thing while bitching about the cold, and then—

  Gone.

  A shudder crawled down her spine at the thought, another as she tried to put herself into the picture. The offer was still open for Rabbit to tweak things so she could go back to that life, blissfully unaware that the tinfoil hatters had it right when it came to the countdown. Or she could return with her memories intact and, like Dez said, live the next year like it was her last. But those pictures refused to form. How could they, now that she knew about the Nightkeepers, knew what they were trying to do?

  “I’m not playing you,” Dez said when she was silent too long. “And I’m not going to hurt the Nightkeepers. I swear it on my sister′s soul.”

  It was the same oath he had used to convince her to go with him on that very first night in the warehouse tunnels. Back then she had sensed his honor and loyalty, had believed he would keep her safe. Now, when she looked at the older, tougher version standing opposite her with magic burning bright in the air around him, she saw an achingly familiar stranger. He had an earnest intensity that made her want to believe. But history repeated itself, and theirs wasn’t good. She shouldn’t—couldn’t—trust him. Yet her instincts said that she should let him go, that it wasn’t time yet for him to be found. More, they said he needed help.

  “Time to choose.” Dez looked past her, up toward the road. “The cavalry is here.” Sure enough, sirens throbbed just at the level of her hearing, then grew louder. He glanced back at her. “You going to let me go this time?”

  She blew out a breath and went with her gut. “Not exactly. I’m coming with you.”

  His face blanked for a second, then clouded. “No fucking way,” he said flatly. “That is not an option.”

  “Newsflash number two: You’re not calling the shots here.” Which was new, she realized. “So it’s time for you to choose: You want to stay out in the field chasing your winikin, we do it together. Otherwise, I’m bringing you in.” When he stayed stubbornly silent, she tipped up her chin. “Unless your Spidey senses are seriously long-range, you’re going to need help finding Keban.”

  The first responders had arrived: The aah-woo, aah-woo of a police car was followed closely by the bwip-bwip of an ambulance, and colored lights strobed Keban’s crumpled car.

  “Damn it . . .” Dez glanced up at the road, then back at her, and his voice dropped. “This is some serious shit, Reese. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Losing you hurt. Every. Single. Time. She didn’t say that, though, because this wasn’t about them. And if that meant she was thinking a little like a Nightkeeper, she was okay with that. So all she said was: “Pick a door, Mendez.”

  “Shit. Fine. We’ll go after him together.” He spun and stalked to the back of the Compass, where the rest of her weapons were stashed in a hidden lockbox. “Get your stuff,” he ordered tersely, not looking at her. “We’ll hike back to my truck. Overland, it shouldn’t take all that long.”

  Reese ignored his tone and pulled her laptop and knapsack out of the wrecked vehicle. But although she had won the argument, she didn’t feel any sense of victory. Instead, as she followed him into the darkness, her stomach was knotted into a hard ball of nerves and a panicked question was rocketing around inside her head: What the hell are you doing?

  She didn’t have a clue. But history was sure as shit repeating itself.

  Skywatch

  When the landline started ringing in the main room, Sven ignored it to slouch deeper into the rec room sofa, his eyes glued to the screen. “Can someone get that?”

  “Get it your damn self,” JT snapped as he passed the door and glanced in, his arms loaded with storeroom boxes. “Playing Viking Warrior version whatever-the-fuck does not count as being too busy to get the phone. And I’m not your godsdamn servant.”

  Which would’ve been more cringe-inducing if the winikin didn’t say it at least five times a day.

  “I’m watching Dog Whisperer, not playing games,” Sven muttered, but he headed out to the main room to grab the phone before JT came steamrolling back and made his point with his fists. A former army ranger who had spent the past seven years exterminating bat demons with a ceremonial knife and a bad attitude, he could more than hold his own.

  So Sven got the phone his damn self.

  “Skywatch,” he said into the handset, keeping it simple because he’d gotten a month of kitchen duty a year or so ago when C
arlos caught him answering with “Screamin’ Demon Central. What is your emergency?”

  “It’s Mendez.”

  The low growl, coming with car noises in the background, brought relief. “Good to hear your voice.” Sven checked the caller ID, saw that it was the cell that had been assigned to Reese. “Guess the bounty hunter earned her rep. You guys headed back?”

  “No, we’re staying on the winikin’s trail from out here. She said she promised to check in twice a day with Strike, so consider us checked in. And I want you to get some info to the brain trust.”

  “Wait.” Sven looked around for something to write on other than his palm. “Shit. Give me a second.” He scored a pen and scratch pad. “Go ahead.”

  He copied down Mendez’s message. “Statue. White god’s head. ‘T’ glyphs on its cheeks. Got it.”

  “They can call us when they have something. We’ll be on this phone.”

  “Good hunting.”

  Sven decided to walk the message out to the brain trust—aka Lucius, Jade, and the Nightkeepers’ ancestral library, which had magicked its way into a cave at the back of the box canyon. It was a nice day, and he should probably work out some of the kinks. He had taken a pretty good hit the other day during a short, ugly fight with a dozen of Iago’s makol near a ceremonial cave system down in Belize. Even though Sasha had hooked him up with some healing juju the other day, he still didn’t feel right. So he jogged a little, trying to loosen up as he headed down the short flight of stairs beyond the pool area and hit the worn path that led past the picnic area.

  With most of the others off on assignment—despite his protests, Strike had kept him back for a couple of days on injured reserve—he wasn’t expecting to see anyone on the way to the library. He sure as hell wasn’t expecting to find a standoff out behind the training hall. And certainly not one involving JT and Carlos.

  Okay, JT wasn’t much of a surprise, really. If there was a fight, he was probably in the middle of it. But Sven knew firsthand how much it took to get Carlos all the way pissed off—been there, done that. His winikin was usually dead level no matter what crisis got thrown at him . . . except right now Carlos’s face was flushed a dull red and his fists were clenched and even raised a little, like he wanted to haul off and slug the younger man.

  “You know it’s true,” JT said. “Just give them some assurances.”

  Carlos bared his teeth. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Do you seriously not see how wrong this is?” JT′s wave encompassed the whole of Skywatch.

  Sven hesitated, not sure if he should come out from behind the training hall and mediate, or go back around the other way and let them work it out. Although the winikin acted as the Nightkeepers’ support staff, and were technically lower than the magi in the hierarchy of Skywatch, by tradition they mostly governed themselves. Problem was, tradition hadn’t been hacking it in the nearly a year since their former leader, Jox, had taken off.

  The royal winikin had left the compound to help raise Patience and Brandt’s twins in hiding, with no connection to the magic, no part in the war. Which had left a power vacuum. The rest of the winikin had done their best to adapt, continuing on in their usual roles and informally voting on group decisions, but they had lost serious momentum. Then the two unbound winikin, JT and his girlfriend, Natalie, had shown up. Natalie didn’t have much baggage; she had been an infant when her parents smuggled her out of Skywatch just prior to the Solstice Massacre. JT, on the other hand, had been twelve or so. He had escaped ahead of the attack but his parents, key members of the resistance, had been caught and press-ganged into the fight. So it wasn’t surprising that he hated the Nightkeepers’ caste system with a virulence that bordered on pathological, and that he was calling for some major changes in winikin-land.

  So far, Strike had been doing the “hands off, let them work it out for themselves” thing, but it wasn’t getting better as far as Sven could tell. And frankly, he thought JT had a point.

  Not that the older winikin—including Carlos—wanted to hear his opinion on that.

  Making his move before he could talk himself out of it, Sven continued along the path, then hesitated, feigning surprise. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Carlos frowned. “How much—” He broke off. “Did you need something?”

  “I was just passing through, but I heard a little.” To JT, he said, “You were talking about other winikin, weren’t you? Other unbounds who got out ahead of the attack. Members of the resistance.” Ever since his arrival, JT had said that he didn’t know of any other survivors, that he didn’t have a clue how to contact them if they were out there. Now, it seemed like he’d been saying one thing to the magi, but something else to the other winikin. Sven pressed, “You know how to find them, don’t you?”

  Carlos got in his face. “Don’t repeat that. Don’t even breathe it. You owe me that much.” His eyes were cold and hard, making him look like a stranger, and the sudden and unexpected shift sent Sven back a step.

  For all that the two of them had had their problems, most of them stemming from Sven’s relationship—friendship—with Carlos’s half-human daughter, Cara Liu, Sven had always thought he knew where they stood. Back when he’d lived a treasure hunter′s vagabond life, he had known that Carlos was pissed at him but would be there immediately if there was trouble. Even once they had come to Skywatch and Sven had made the decision to send Cara away, he and Carlos had managed to maintain a functional, if stiff, working relationship. Or so he’d thought. Now, though, he wondered if the two of them had drifted farther than he’d realized.

  “I’m on your side,” he said softly to the only father he had ever known.

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t make this any of your business.”

  “It is if it’s starting to spill over onto the magi.”

  “Which it’s not.”

  Sven could’ve listed off a half dozen recent incidents, but he wasn’t sure if they were legit complaints or part of the natural equilibration that had been going on at Skywatch ever since Strike first brought his human mate, Leah, into the compound and she started in with “the winikin aren’t your servants—do your own damn dishes.” Which somehow sounded far less insulting when she said it, compared to JT. Besides, listing grievances would just embarrass Carlos and piss off JT. So instead, he said, “What about Jox’s letter?”

  In it, the royal winikin had named the person who should succeed him if the common-consensus experiment didn’t work. It could only be opened if the winikin voted on it . . . or if Strike decided their lack of leadership was screwing up the war efforts.

  JT bared his teeth. “Fuck that. The new system isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than using blood or magic as a reason to put one person in charge of another.”

  Sven shook his head. “The old ways have been evolving for the past twenty-six fucking millennia, all aiming to put us in the best possible position to defend the barrier on the zero date. Maybe you could just, I don’t know, go with it for another year?”

  “Spoken like a member of the ruling elite,” JT snapped, looking seriously pissed now. He waved Sven off. “Why don’t you go do . . . whatever you were going to do?” He paused, eyes narrowing. “And while you’re at it, you might want to make sure that what you’re doing is something your own ruling elite would like.”

  Sven bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It was Carlos who said quietly, “You’re not eating, you look like hell, and you’re sneaking out nearly every night.”

  “I . . . huh?”

  JT sneered. “Nice. Playing dumb.”

  “Seriously. No clue what you’re talking about.”

  Carlos just looked at him. “Sven—”

  “Never mind.” Suddenly, he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be having this conversation. He needed to walk, run, burn off some steam. “Like I said, I was just passing through.” He headed down the path that was the long way aroun
d to the library. And when Carlos called his name, he didn’t look back.

  Strike knocked on the door to Rabbit’s cottage and waited for the “ ‘S open” before he pushed through into the kitchen. The two of them were way beyond knocking formalities, but with Myrinne living there, he’d rather knock than catch an eyeful.

  “You alone?” he asked when he found Rabbit spread out at the kitchen table with his laptop and a shitload of maps.

  “Yep. Myr’s out at the firing range with Jade. Michael’s giving them some pointers.”

  “Good. That’s good.” Strike hadn’t been entirely convinced Rabbit’s human girlfriend—and quasi wiccan—belonged on the team, but she had worked her ass off for the chance, and had continued busting hump to make herself an asset rather than a liability. And there was no arguing that she had been good for Rabbit. Hell, he hadn’t burned down anything unauthorized in nearly two years. “You find anything new?”

  Rabbit sighed and pushed away from the table, rubbing his eyes. “Nothing concrete. Cheech says there are rumors of a third village being hit, but I’m having trouble getting a fix on the actual location from up here. He and his brothers are trying to get me some details.”

  Over the past few weeks, the populations of two villages in the Mayan highlands had vanished, seemingly overnight. The media hadn’t really picked up on it; the only reason Rabbit knew was because he had made some contacts down there as part of trying to learn as much as he could about his mother, who had lived in the highlands—maybe—and been Xibalban—definitely. Even though the Xibalbans were an offshoot of the original Nightkeepers and had given rise to Iago’s bloodthirsty sect, the secrecy surrounding the groups meant that the Nightkeepers’ archives were pretty useless in that department, forcing him to search farther afield. He hadn’t made much progress finding out about his mother, but his contacts were proving invaluable now, as the Nightkeepers tried to figure out what the hell was going on in the highlands.