She just loved money. She loved the feel and smell of it. She loved what it could buy—not just the things, but the respect. The power. It wasn’t actually until she’d been at Skywatch for a few weeks that she’d realized that the money thing was simple biology. The Nightkeepers were bigger, stronger, and more graceful than average humans, pumped with charisma and loaded with talent. At least, most of them were. Alexis had somehow gotten the bigger-and-stronger part without the other stuff, particularly the grace, which meant she tended more toward the clumsy side of life. She’d worked long and hard to camouflage the klutz factor, and most days managed to control her freakishly long limbs. That effort, however, left her seriously low on charisma, and so far she was average in the magical talent department, as well.
Ergo, the cash. She liked living as large as possible. So sue her.
“It’s going to take a minute,” the staffer said. “The computer’s being glitchy today.”
“No rush.” She flipped the folio shut and turned away, figuring she’d use the brief delay to check in —which consisted of powering up her PDA, shooting off a quick text message to Izzy reporting that she had the statue and was headed back to Skywatch, and then powering off the unit without checking her backlogged messages.
She wasn’t in the mood for the chatter—hadn’t been for a while, which was why she’d jumped at the chance to fly from New Mex out to the California coast for the auction. The quick trip had given her a chance to breathe air she wasn’t sharing with the same group of Nightkeepers and winikin she’d been cheek-by-jowl with for the past half year. She wasn’t the only one feeling it, either. Tensions were running high, thanks to the lack of both privacy and enemy activity.
Besides, she could guarantee the messages on her cell were nothing critical, because she wasn’t in line for the important stuff yet. Strike had his advisers—Leah and the royal winikin, Jox—and the three of them handled the heavy lifting, with the lower-impact jobs delegated to the newly inducted Nightkeepers.
For now, anyway. Alexis had her sights set higher. Her mother, Gray-Smoke, had been one of King Scarred-Jaguar’s most trusted advisers, holding political power equaled only by that of her adversarial coadviser, Two-Hawk. That pretty much figured, because Two-Hawk’s son was Alexis’s own personal nemesis, i.e., the someone who’d been seriously pissing her off over the past few months, ever since he’d dumped her on her ass right after the talent ceremony, with no explanation given beyond the old standard: It’s not you, it’s me.
Damn him.
“Ma’am? You’re all set.” The staffer held out her paperwork. “I have a couple of messages for you too. She said it was important.”
“Thanks.” Alexis took the slips, glanced at them, and tucked them into her pocket. Just Izzy mother-
henning her. The winikin would’ve gotten the text message by now, so they were square.
A grizzled, heavyset security guard set a metal case on the table and flipped it open so she could see the statuette nestled inside a shockproof foam bed, alongside the Mayan death mask she’d bought earlier. At her nod, the guard shut the case and slid it across the table to her, rumbling in a basso profundo voice, “Dial the numbers to what you want, and hit this button.” He pointed to an inset red dot. “That’ll set your combination. If you don’t want to bother, just leave it all zeros and it’ll act like a suitcase. Got it?”
“Got it.” A whim had her dialing in a date and hitting the red button. There was something satisfying about hearing the locks click.
Hefting the case, she gave the guard a friendly nod and headed out, mission accomplished. When she stepped through the front door of the estate, she found herself under the clear blue sky of a perfect February day in Nor Cal. The warm yellow sun and crisp, faintly salty air made her wish she’d opted for the convertible when she’d rented her car. But it’d been drizzling when she landed, so she’d treated herself to a sporty silver BMW that hugged the road like a lover. Convertible or not, the silver roadster ought to be automotive muscle enough to entertain her on the way back to LAX.
Sure enough, once she was on the road with the metal case in the passenger seat beside her, the feel of engine power and smooth leather lightened her mood, sending a victory dance through her soul. She had the statuette, and she wasn’t technically due back at Skywatch for another day. There was a sense of freedom in the thought, one that had her cranking the radio to something loud and edgy with a heavy backbeat as she pulled onto the narrow shoreline drive that led away from the lavish private estate that was being sold off, piece by piece, to settle the owner’s debts.
Alexis had thought it a stroke of luck that the sale had come up just as they’d started tracking down the lost artifacts, but Izzy had reminded her that there wasn’t much in the way of actual coincidence in the world. Most of what people thought of as happy accidents was really the will of the gods.
As she sent the BMW whipping around a low-g curve that dropped off to the right in a steep embankment and a million-dollar view of the Nor Cal coast, the thought of fate and the gods brought a quiver of unease, a sense that she’d already failed.
“If it was that easy to buck destiny it wouldn’t be destiny,” she told herself. Which was true, but still, it was hard not to feel like she’d gotten it wrong in the relationship department. Again.
The day Izzy had revealed her true heritage, Alexis had gotten a mental flash of an image: an etching of a fierce bird of prey. Then, just under a week later, she’d seen it again—on the medallion worn by Nate Blackhawk. No way that could be a coincidence. Neither could the fact that they’d immediately clicked . . . on the physical level, anyway. They’d danced around each other for the first couple of weeks, but once they’d gone through the bloodline ceremony and gotten their first forearm marks and their initial connections to the barrier, the overwhelming hormonal fluxes and enhanced sex drive that came with the magic had overridden their reservations and they’d become lovers. They’d done very, very well together sexually . . . but not so much outside the bedroom, where they’d clashed on almost every level. He was closed and difficult to read, and seemed to spend most of his time trying to prove that the gods didn’t control him, that he was free to make his own choices. In the end, she hadn’t been strong enough to hold them together—hadn’t been sure she’d wanted to, despite the omens that said they were meant for each other, and the knowledge that the magic of a mated Nightkeeper pair was ten times that of either mage alone.
It’d helped that Izzy didn’t like him either. Since the winikin both guided and protected the Nightkeepers, Izzy’s relief at the breakup had helped ease the sting . . . particularly since Izzy was the one who was always pushing Alexis to do her best, be her best, and live up to her mother’s memory.
Gray-Smoke had been a legend in her own time, a powerful mage and adviser to the king. As far as Izzy was concerned, Alexis could be nothing less.
“Unfortunately, that’s proving easier said than done,” Alexis muttered.
Torturing herself, she shoved her sleeve up to her elbow, baring her right forearm, where each of the Nightkeepers and winikin was marked with Mayan glyphs that denoted status and power. The black marks looked like tattoos but were actually magic, appearing fully formed during special ceremonies in which a Nightkeeper went from child to trainee, from trainee to mage. Alexis wore two marks: the curling anthropomorphic b’utz glyph representing the smoke bloodline, and the three stacked blobs of the warrior’s talent mark, which had given her increased reflexes and strength, along with the ability to call up shields and fireballs, though not very effectively as yet. And that was it. Two marks, smoke and warrior. She hadn’t gotten an additional talent during the second ceremony. Granted, only about a third of Nightkeepers got a talent mark, and talents could sometimes appear after the formal ceremony, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to accept that so far she was a dud in the magic department.
“Damn it,” she muttered, shoving down her sleeve and hitting the
gas too hard going into the next curve, which was a blind turn arcing along a sheer drop leading down to Monterey Bay. Easing off and cursing herself for getting all tangled up when she was supposed to be enjoying the day away and a job well-done, she nursed the car around the corner—
And drove straight into a wall of fire.
She screamed and cranked the wheel as flames lashed at the car, slapping in through the open windows and searing the air around her. Worse was the power that crackled along her skin, feeling dark and twisted.
Ambush!
Her warrior’s instincts fired up; she fought the urge to slam on the brakes and hit the gas instead, hoping to punch through the fire, but it was already too late. The car cut loose and slid sideways, losing traction when all four tires blew. Heart pounding, she wrestled with the wheel and forced herself not to inhale. Smoke burned her eyes and throat and the exposed skin at her wrists and face.
Then she was through the fire and back on the open road, but it was too late to steer, too late to correct, if she even could have without rubber on her rims.
The BMW was doing nearly sixty when it hit the guardrail and flipped. Alexis went weightless for a few seconds; then the vehicle crashed down on the other side of the guardrail, cartwheeling, tumbling down a steep, rocky embankment toward a thirty-foot drop-off and the ocean below.
She cried out in pain and terror as the seat belt dug into her chest and thighs. The windshield spiderwebbed, the air bag detonated with a whumpf, and the OnStar did its thing, sending a distress call as the car started coming apart around her. Another flip and bang, and the driver’s-side door tore off, and then the vehicle was right-side up, sliding toward the edge of the precipice.
Body moving before her brain had caught up with her magic-honed warrior’s instincts, Alexis yanked off her belt, grabbed the metal case, and threw herself out the open door. She hit hard and rolled in a tangle of arms and legs, unable to protect herself without letting go of the case, which she wasn’t about to do. Sharp stones scratched at her, tearing her clothes and ripping shallow gouges in her scalded skin, but she clamped her teeth on the howl of pain and dug in her heels to stop the slide.
The BMW went over the edge, and the world went silent for a few seconds. Then the car hit bottom with a splashing crash, which would’ve been the last thing she heard if she’d still been in the vehicle.
Relief flared alongside the fear of what might happen next. Alexis lunged up and scrambled for the scant cover offered by a small pile of boulders near the edge of the embankment. She crouched down behind the rocks, heart hammering in her chest as she pressed herself against the warm stone and breathed through her mouth, panting like a dog that was damn glad to be alive.
Where the hell had the fire magic come from? Where were her attackers now? Her brain spun while her warrior’s talent buffered the fear a little, dampening the panic so she could think. The firewall had been magic, but not Nightkeeper magic. It’d scraped along her skin rather than humming, sounding discordant and wrong, and tasting faintly of salt and rot. She’d really experienced the magic of the Banol Kax only once before, during the equinox battle the previous fall, and she didn’t think it’d felt the same. But if it wasn’t demon magic, then what?
“Hope shield magic works against whatever the hell it is,” she muttered under her breath, and threw up the strongest shield she could muster: a six-inch-thick invisible force field that would repel projectiles and fireballs, and hopefully whatever else her attackers could throw at her. In the process, though, she’d be using up a ton of energy. That was the problem with having puny magic: Even the simplest spells kicked her ass.
Already feeling the power drain of shield magic, she eased around her boulder screen, took a look . .
. and didn’t see a damn thing. The roadway was clear; the fire was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place; and there was no sign of whoever had set the trap for her. There were only her skid marks, a caved-in section of guardrail, and the unholy mess the BMW had made on its way down the slope and over the cliff.
It looked for all the world like the driver had simply lost control and gone over the edge—Alexis decided to think of it that way, as “the driver,” rather than dealing with the fact that she’d been in the car that’d made those marks, that she’d nearly gone over the cliff trying to get free of a firewall that hadn’t left even a smudge on the street. But it’d been real, she knew, just as she knew her attacker was out there, waiting.
Figuring it’d be stupid to drain herself further, she dropped the shield and hunkered back down behind the rock. She needed a plan.
Calling for help wasn’t an option—her cell phone had gone over with the car, she wasn’t a natural telepath, and she didn’t have a strong enough connection with any of the other Nightkeepers to get through to Skywatch via blood magic. The OnStar signal would’ve called in the local law, but she wasn’t betting on their being in time for whatever happened next. Which meant she was on her own.
Worse, her head was seriously spinning from the drain of the barrier spell, and her fireballs were for shit.
Damn, damn, damn.
Closing her eyes, she tried to remember what she’d seen in the last few seconds before she’d whipped around the corner and driven into the flames. There’d been nothing on the right side of the road but the cliff and the bay beyond, but she was pretty sure she remembered seeing a house just before things went to hell. Could she make it there and take shelter? Would she be any safer if she did? Who the hell knew, but making a run for it had to be better than huddling behind a couple of rocks, especially when power crinkled across her skin, warning that her attacker was gearing up for stage two.
“You’re not getting Ixchel,” she muttered under her breath, holding the suitcase close to her chest as she tried to slow her rocketing heartbeat and call on all the training she’d done recently, the sprints and balance exercises. She took a few quick breaths, managed not to throw up, and got herself in a defensive crouch. Then, casting up the best shield spell she could manage, she scrambled out from behind the rocks and bolted for the road, aiming for the house on the other side of the blind corner.
Behind her power surged, and the rocks that had formed her hiding spot suddenly exploded beneath the force of a smoky brown fireball.
Screaming, Alexis ran for her life. Her feet skidded on rocks and bits of broken glass, and her ankle turned as one of her too-high heels broke off. Cursing, sobbing, she hurled herself up the embankment and scrambled over the guardrail, kicking off her shoes once she was on the pavement. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and adrenaline spurred her on, pushing her past the pain when she stepped on another chunk of glass and it bit deep into the ball of her foot.
Blood flowed, bringing power. She felt the barrier magic reach out and grab hold of her, bolstering her failing strength as she put her head down and hauled ass.
She was halfway there when muddy brown smoke detonated in the middle of the street. Power rattled from the midst of the explosion, and a big man materialized in her path. He was as big as any of the Nightkeeper males, with slicked-back chestnut hair, green eyes, and broad features, wearing dark combat clothes and a weapons belt that looked all too familiar, loaded with a ceremonial knife and an autopistol.
Alexis skidded to a stop, freezing in disbelief at the sight of his bare forearm, where he wore an unfamiliar quatrefoil glyph, done in bloodred rather than Nightkeeper black.
Impossible.
“What are you?” she whispered, fear and confusion jamming her throat and almost robbing her of speech.
“I’m what your kind wish you could be.” His mouth tipped up at the corners, and he held out his hand. “Give me the statuette.”
“Like hell!” She pulled away, but wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t sure if he’d ’ported or just moved incredibly fast, but one second she had the suitcase, and the next she was flying three feet through the air, and he was holding on to the case.
Alexis d
idn’t think; she reacted, scrambling up with a cry that came from the warrior within her.
She lunged, grabbed the big guy’s knife off his belt before he knew what was happening, and plunged the weapon into the bastard’s hand. He cursed bitterly and let go of the case, and Alexis grabbed the thing and ran like hell.
The enemy mage roared a curse, pulled his machine pistol, and let loose. Gunfire chattered, though most of the bullets bounced off Alexis’s shield spell. At least one got through, though. It plowed into her shoulder and hurt like hell.
She screamed as pain washed her vision red, then screamed again when the rattle of dark magic surrounded her and yanked her off her feet. Pressure vised her from all sides and bound her motionless in midair, suspended on an oily brown cloud. Energy roared through her, along with the peculiar sliding sensation of teleport magic as he prepared to take her somewhere she positively didn’t want to go. She poured everything she had into her shield, hoping it’d make her too bulky to transport or something. The rattle changed in pitch, dipping slightly, and the pressure eased.
Screaming, Alexis tore free of the brown mist. She tumbled to the ground, still clutching the suitcase in fingers gone numb from the death grip she had on the thing. Rolling as she hit, she scrambled up and started backing away as fast as she could, throwing the last of her strength into the shield spell.
The enemy mage fired again, burning through his first clip and slapping a second home, then resuming fire, his face set in anger and determination. Jade-tipped bullets pelted the invisible shield, deflecting no more than a foot from Alexis’s face, but she couldn’t flee and hold the magic at the same time, not now. Her power was too drained, her strength too low. Holding the metal case in front of her as a pitiful defense when her magic flickered and threatened to die, she crouched down, trying to make herself as small a target as possible, trying to minimize the shield’s dimensions and eke it out a few minutes longer.
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