Her throat dried and her voice shook when she said, “I don’t.”
“Liar,” he rasped. And brought his lips down on hers.
There were no niceties, no sweet seduction. His mouth crushed hers and his tongue plundered as his hands came up to grip her hips, fingers digging in.
Reese jerked back and he followed. She slapped her hands on his shoulders to push him away, but instead found her fingers spreading to span the wide breadth, then curving up and around the back of his neck. He kissed her deeply, bending her back until she felt helpless beneath his strength, trapped by his body and the wicked, clever things he was doing with his tongue.
Heat slammed through her. Greed. Without the safety of a drugged haze, she felt everything acutely, like each new sensation held the bright, sharp glitter of cut glass as they twined together and the air crackled with a static charge.
Then he made a harsh noise at the back of his throat and broke the kiss to press his forehead against hers, muttering an oath. He was breathing hard; they both were. And she was shaking with the desire that raced in her bloodstream, along with the hot flush of shame and anger that he had overwhelmed her so thoroughly, and with so little effort.
“Your body wants me,” he rasped, taking a long stroke up from her hip to fist a hand in her hair, capturing her and holding her trapped. “But what does that brain of yours think? Can you be with someone you don’t trust, aren’t even sure you really like?” His voice was suddenly hard and intimidating, making her think of the other Dez, his shadow self.
Her hands balled into fists. But before she could decide between punching him or going with frosty politeness, the brain he had mentioned kicked back in—along with her suspicions. Instead of backing off, she leaned into him, pressing her lips near his ear to whisper, “You’re trying to scare me into leaving, but it won’t work. So why don’t you just tell me . . . what are you hiding?”
He jerked away with a bitter oath and strode away a few steps, leaving her sprawled back on the bureau, body still imprinted with the memory of his. When he looked back at her, his expression was nearly blank. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“Don′t lie to me.” The words cracked out of her far sharper than she had intended, riding a slash of anger and disappointment. “And don’t forget that you’re not a mind-bender . . . and Rabbit is. The way I see it, there are only two ways to keep me from diming you out, dragging you back to Skywatch, and hooking you up to your friendly local Nightkeeper lie detector: One, you tell me what’s really going on here, and convince me to help you keep your secret . . . or two, you shut me up. Permanently.”
He took a step toward her with a hard look that made her stomach lurch. But then he stopped and just stared at her, eyes dark and inscrutable. “Jesus, Reese.”
She touched her armband. “Your choice.”
Nothing.
Heart thudding, she activated it.
Still nothing.
She reached for the emergency pickup button.
“I know what Keban is up to.” The words sounded as though they had been dragged out of his chest.
“Go on.” Her hand hovered over the button.
He took a deep breath, hesitated, and then said slowly, “He used to talk about a Xibalban artifact that was so powerful, so destructive, that the Nightkeepers split it up and hid the pieces, on the very slim chance that its power was ever needed.” He paused. “I think he’s trying to rebuild it.”
A chill skimmed through her at the sudden hollowness in his expression. She let her hand fall away from the transmitter. “What, exactly, does it do?”
“It’s a damned WMD—it′ll turn everything inside out, upside down, blow shit up.” He shrugged. “All I know is that when I came out of the coma, I knew for damn certain that if more pieces of the artifact surfaced, it was up to me to destroy them. They’re additive—each has its own power, with new levels being revealed as they’re put together until they’re all one whole. Which can’t happen.” He spread his hands. “That’s why the gods made me a Triad mage: To keep the artifact out of play. Keban was convinced that rebuilding it was the only way to win the end-time war. But he’s wrong. If it gets put back together, we’re all fucked.”
That read to her as the truth. But maybe not all of it. “Why not tell the others?”
“Because this says not to.” He tapped a closed fist over his heart, tattoos and glyphs dark against his skin. “Something—my instincts, my magic, who knows?—keeps telling me that I need to do this on my own, that Keban is my problem, my responsibility.” He paused. “I’m asking you to let it stay that way.”
And damned if her gut didn’t say she should go along with it, that bringing this back to Skywatch now would only slow them down at a time when every day counted. So she nodded. “Fine. I’ll help you, and I’ll keep it off Strike’s radar. On one condition.”
She couldn’t read his expression when he said, “Let me guess. We won’t be waking up together tomorrow morning.”
That tugged—both the thought and the deadpan delivery—but she smiled coolly. “I’m capable of making that call on my own. No, I want you to promise me that you’re going to destroy the weapon. Not . . . use it.”
For a second she thought she saw something flash in his eyes, there and gone so quickly that she couldn’t identify it. But after only the briefest hesitation, he nodded and said, “I promise I’ll do everything in my power to protect the Nightkeepers.” Then he crossed his wrists in front of his chest and double-tapped his thumbs to his chest, in a too-familiar oath sign.
Reese froze. Her mouth went dry. And something inside her said: holy shit. Not because of his promise, but because when he crossed his wrists, a new picture was formed by the narrow tattoos he’d gotten a few days after falling under the star demon’s influence. It was an “X” shape that she recognized as the world cross, representing north, south, east, and west. More, when he held his arms like that, in front of his chest, the four compass points became glyphs: the star demon, the wind god, the skybearer . . . and at the point representing “south,” a two-faced mask that was half man and half screaming skull.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed. “The answer′s been in front of us the whole damn time.”
Which damn sure ended the conversation about them sleeping together. And maybe—probably—that was for the best.
The next ten minutes were a blur of phone calls and photo uploads to Lucius, who agreed to track down a two-faced mask like the one hidden in Dez’s tattoo. After that, and before she and Dez could get into any of the zillion unanswered questions that remained jumbled in her head, Reese made a flimsy excuse about packing, and escaped to her own room. Just inside it, she paused and leaned against the wall, closing her eyes as her heart pounded and the world threatened to spin around her.
Gods, she just needed a moment, a little breathing room. But she wasn’t going to be doing much breathing in there, it turned out. Because the room reeked of boiled sage and looked like something out of a Top Chef challenge about cooking a six-course meal with a Mr. Coffee.
It was her space, though, and felt safe, even if that was an illusion.
After opening the window to air the place out, she pulled on her new leather against the wintry chill, leaned back against the windowsill, and just freaking breathed for a minute while she tried to figure out if she was making a mondo mistake in agreeing to keep Dez’s secret. She was all about going with her gut, but he was one of the few places where her instincts had failed her, repeatedly and badly. And how could there be logic in hiding the weapon’s existence from the rest of the Nightkeepers? Help, she thought, but there was nobody to turn to. She was on her own.
Looking up at the sky, she said softly, “Is this what you want?”
The suburban universe she had grown up in had been largely Christian, but Dez’s stories—the fairy tales that had driven back the darkness and the fear—had opened her to a world of many gods, each with a different area of expertise. Together
with their earthly warriors, those gods were supposed to guard the barrier that closed off the underworld and protected mankind against evil. In theory, anyway. In reality, only a single god remained on the earthly plane right now: the sun god, Kinich Ahau. The others were locked up in the sky, unable to directly contact the Nightkeepers because Iago had destroyed the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá, the place where the earth, sky, and underworld had come close together. With the Nightkeepers unable to find another intersection or skyroad, they were cut off from their gods.
But, really, it didn’t take a message from above to tell her what she needed to do next. And really, it wasn’t about Dez or the end-time war, or even her job. This was about her, about something she had put off for far too long.
She had kept hoping that growing up and slowing down would change her feelings. What did it say about her that a good man—a hero in his own right—had left her lukewarm and guilt-stung, where Dez set her on fire? Hello, self-destructive tendencies. Sighing, she pushed away from the window and headed for the bureau, where she had dumped her phone. And she hesitated when she got a look at herself in the mirror.
Wearing combat black and the new jacket, she looked nothing like the woman who had walked into that Cancún hotel a week ago. Yet as much as she liked what she saw, as much as this skin fit far more comfortably than the other, she wasn’t sure how much of that was the core truth, and how much was her trying to go back in time and carve a different outcome for herself. Which was impossible.
“Shit.” Grabbing the phone, she turned her back on the mirror and punched a familiar sequence.
The line clicked live on the second digital burble, and a familiar, resonant voice said, “Hello?”
She took a deep breath that didn’t do a thing to ease the guilt-sting, and said, “Hey, it’s me . . . we need to talk.”
Skywatch
The boluntiku rose above the king with a fingernails-on-blackboard scream. The lava-creature’s vapor form exceeded the boundaries of the underground chamber, its scaly upper body rising up through the floor, its lower parts rooted in Xibalba. Many-fanged mouth gaping wide, it slashed at him with knifelike claws.
Pulse pounding, he fired off a burst of jade-tips and twisted out of the way. Then he spun, and grabbed the woman who was guarding his back. His wife. His queen. His heart.
“Go!” He pushed her toward a nearby door, the only way out of the circular stone room deep underground. “Get to the river!”
The boluntiku shrieked and followed as they raced along the narrow tunnel over dust gone muddy with blood.
When they reached the underground stream, he saw that the sacred water ran black, and was choked with the bodies of the fallen. His bodies. His fallen. None of them would have been there if it hadn’t been for him.
There were others at the river, Nightkeepers and winikin formed up under the command of the royal advisers. “Fall back!” he shouted to them. “Get the hell out of here!”
The attack was a disaster. A massacre. All they could do now was retreat, blow the tunnel system, and hope to hell that was enough to cap off the intersection. The hellroad was wide open, the Banol Kax on the verge of breaking through. Gods help us.
An unearthly shriek rose behind him as the boluntiku began bubbling up from the floor, glowing orange and molten, and thoroughly pissed off. He turned, slapping home a fresh clip, feeling almost freed by the knowledge that it was time to make his stand, his sacrifice. His blood would amp the Nightkeepers’ magic and slow down the demons’ attack. Long enough, he hoped, for the others to get clear.
He risked a look at his queen, saw tears held back by guts and determination. “Go,” he told her. “Get them out of here and blow the tunnel.”
She closed her eyes for a second, whispered his name. But then she somehow found the strength to smile, and say, “I’ll see you in my dreams.”
He pressed his forehead to hers, felt a pulse of warmth at his wrist, where their jun tan marks linked them. His voice and heart broke as he whispered, “Go. Save yourself and the others, and get back to the compound as fast as you can.” The children were safe behind the blood-ward, but . . .
She pulled away with a sob. A second later, her footsteps moved away behind him, the sound echoing off stone and bloodied water as he turned to face the creature of his enemies. And as he raised his weapon, his heart was heavy with the realization that he had been wrong all along. The king’s greatest sacrifice wasn’t his mate’s life, after all.
Red-orange came at him, an eerie scream surrounded him, and a six-clawed attack slashed down with murderous intent.
Strike flailed awake, heart hammering. Where the hell was his gun? He fumbled for it, couldn’t find it, went for his enemy bare-handed. He grabbed the incoming blur, wrenched them both sideways and heard a cry of pain—human, female, familiar.
Leah.
Horror snapped the world around him into too sharp focus. The dream cave became a glassed-in bedroom; the darkness became dawn; his enemy became the woman he loved. He was kneeling on her, had his forearm across her throat.
“Fuck!” He jerked back and off her, hands spread and shaking, thoughts jumbling. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn′t . . . Shit. Did I . . . are you okay?” His chest hurt; he couldn’t catch his breath.
She pulled herself up to a sitting position, rubbing her throat. Her eyes were wide and worried, but she gutted out a wan smile. “I may never sing at Carnegie Hall . . . but then again, I never could sing for crap, so I can’t blame that on you.”
“Don′t make this into a damned joke. I could’ve killed you.” Blood raced through his veins, hammered in his ears. Bodies in the river. Impossible choices. Was that what he was going to face? Hell, was he facing it already? He was sworn to do whatever it took to get the Nightkeepers to the war in the best possible shape to win. But what if that required a greater sacrifice than he was ready to make?
She hesitated, then lifted a hand and showed him a compact Taser. “You had another five seconds before I booted you off and zapped you.” Her cornflower blue eyes were shadowed with concern, her voice softening with regret when she admitted, “Given how bad the nightmares have been getting, I had a feeling something like this was coming.”
“Jesus H. Christ.” He dragged a hand through his sweat-tangled hair, trying to push back the dull ache that had been a constant throb ever since Rabbit had worked on his head. “You’re sleeping with a stunner under your damned pillow.” But in a way, this made things easier. It made the decision for him. “That’s it. I’m moving back out to the pool house.”
“Not without me, you’re not.”
“Leah, be reasonable.”
“Walking away from you—or letting you walk away from me—when you’re going through some traumatic-stress shit doesn’t count as ′reasonable′ in my book.” She closed the distance he had put between them, cupped his jaw between her palms, and rubbed her thumbs along the line of his beard in a move that usually made him want to purr, but now just made his chest hurt. “I’m sticking with you,” she said. “Deal with it.”
“But . . .” He trailed off, seeing from her expression that it wasn’t worth arguing—and not really sure he wanted to, as the dream-fever drained and his heart rate leveled off. His queen could take care of herself, and he needed her. Gods, how he needed her.
Impossible choices.
“Was it the same dream as before?”
“Yeah.” Except that this time, he hadn’t been entirely sure whether he’d been seeing the beginning of the Solstice Massacre through his father′s eyes, or if he’d been himself in the middle of a battle that hadn’t yet been fought.
“It’s stress,” she said firmly. “Not a vision. You’re taking too much on yourself.” She pressed her cheek to his. “As usual.”
“I don’t have any choice. I’m my father′s son.” Which meant he was the Nightkeepers’ king, the last male descendant of the royal jaguars.
“Yes, you are. You’re also your own
man.” She wrapped her arms around him, thawing some of the chill. “You won’t make the same mistakes he did.”
“No, I’ll make new ones, with potentially the same consequences. What has happened before—”
“Hush,” she interrupted. Her breath feathered across his earlobe as she reached to capture his hand, then draw it up to cup one of her breasts. “It was just a dream.”
“Maybe,” he said, pulling her down into a kiss that brought their bodies flush, freed their hands to touch, and turned the “maybe” into a growl of, “Oh, yeah.”
But as he wrapped himself around her, sank into her, and lost himself to the jun tan magic and the power of loving his gods-destined mate, he was all too aware that the dream might be changing a little each time, evolving . . . but there was one thing that always stayed the same.
In the end, the king always sacrificed himself.
CHAPTER TEN
December 13
El Rey ruins
Cancún, Mexico
When the theme from Jaws sounded from Sven’s pocket, he winced but didn’t answer. It was kind of hard to “can you hear me now” when he was fully up-linked, with Patience on one side of him and Jade on the other, their bloodied hands intertwined and magic flowing through them. Strike shot him a look but didn’t say anything. They were too deep in the magic to be kibitzing about ringtones.
At the forefront of the arrowhead formed by the ten teammates, Rabbit focused on three man-sized stones that were inset into the ground. About the size and shape of coffins, the carved slabs cast a magical cloak, hiding the entrance to an ancient intersection beneath El Rey. If the Nightkeepers could get through the spell and get the doorway open, they would solve a whole shit-ton of their problems by getting the direct pipeline to the gods they should’ve had access to all along—aka, the skyroad. Problem was, the entrance was hidden by a dark-magic spell and Iago had broken Rabbit’s hell-link, blocking him from the dark magic despite his half-Xibalban heritage. So far, nothing they had tried had even come close to reestablishing the connection, which left Rabbit scowling at the stones while Sven’s phone rang on, the ominous music all too fitting.
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