Storm Kissed n-6

by Jessica Andersen

  Last she had heard, he had been safely ensconced in a locked mental ward. Apparently not anymore.

  Below the photo, the letter finished:

  We’re not sure why Dez didn’t tell us what was going on or ask for backup. Pride, maybe, or something in the letter. But we do know one thing for certain: We need him back. The winter solstice marks the one-year threshold, and the magi must be at their strongest. More, we need to figure out what Keban is up to. He clearly knows things we don’t—and his history and mental state make him dangerous.

  So that’s what we want from you, Ms. Montana. Find Dez, find Keban, and figure out what the hell is going on there, in the order of your choice. After that, if you’re willing to stay, we’ll sic you on Iago. The patterns of his recent attacks are . . . baffling. Maybe you’ll see something we’re missing.

  I hope you’ll take the job, both for Dez’s sake and because it’s the right thing to do. But if that isn’t incentive enough, then how about this: It’ll give you a chance to get back at the man who destroyed the life you could have had with Dez back in Denver.

  Think about it. And when you’ve decided, dial 1313. We’ll be waiting.

  —Strike

  Reese lowered the letter and numbly stared out the window, at scenery that warned her that she was badly out of her element.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, glancing once more at the picture of Keban.

  This was seriously and completely nuts, and it would be insane to even consider taking the job. But she was considering it, for all the reasons Strike had listed.

  Damn the mind-bender for getting inside her head and figuring out which buttons to push. And damn her for being unable to resist the thrill of the hunt or be content with a safe, predictable life. More, she couldn’t ignore the pressure that fisted beneath her heart as Strike’s words circled in her head . . . He’s not that guy anymore . . . It was a curse . . . back to his old self . . .

  In the weeks after Dez’s death—supposed death?—she had been buried in memories of the young man she had loved. The old Dez had driven her crazy with his stubbornness, but despite his protectiveness he’d never tried to box her in. The gang task force had been her thing, but he’d always had her back. He had nagged her into her GED, and had brought her chocolate and information, knowing they were neck-and-neck in her universe. And when the nights got cold and too dark, he had told her stories about magical warriors who could move things with their minds and hear each other′s thoughts, and who drew their greatest powers from love.

  Back to his old self . . . a Triad mage . . . incredibly powerful.

  “Bullshit.” She lurched to her feet, stomach knotting. The ache wasn’t quite hunger, but it was safer to call it that, so she headed for the kitchen, figuring the apartment looked lived-in enough that it ought to have some staples, even if it was just a guest suite . . . or a prison cell with better-than-average amenities. That thought brought a shudder, but the moment she got the fridge open, both the queasiness and her appetite disappeared—boom, gone.

  Oh. Shit.

  She stood there for a long moment in the cold wash of air, shivering as she stared at the items that were clustered together on the top shelf, as if tossed back in after a snack: horseradish mustard, olive loaf, grape jelly, and pumpernickel bread. Four cans of Mountain Dew were racked in the door.

  A low moan broke from her as her heart took up a heavy thud-thud beat in her ears. Nobody could come up with that combination accidentally, and there was only one person on the planet who would do it on purpose.

  Dez.

  Her hand trembled on the refrigerator door. There was no way in hell that this was his suite. It was too bland, too impersonal. There were no high-tech toys, no expensive clothes, no glitter and gloss, no leather or other indulgences. But there was pumpernickel, olive loaf, and the grossest condiment pairing known to mankind.

  He’s not that guy anymore.

  Throat closing on a burn of tears, she whispered, “Damn it.”

  She thought about Denver, about the new life she was building there, and her determination to be a better person, one who didn’t take the same sort of risks the old Reese had, who lived with less danger, less pain. Then she thought about the young man she had known, the one she had mourned even though their relationship had died years before his actual—or faked—death. She thought of the comfort of his spine pressed into hers, crowding her against the wall so she would be warm while he kept watch. And she thought about the puniness of saving the world one person at a time when she could potentially help save the whole damn thing.

  Don’t do it, her smarter self said. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t—

  “Shit.” She crossed the room in a few strides, went for the intercom pad, and hit 1313 so hard her fingertip stung.

  Strike came on the line immediately, voice sounding resigned and tired as he said, “Give me good news, Ms. Montana. I could really use it right now.”

  “I’m going to need whatever you’ve got on the museum break-in—provenance on the artifact that Keban stole, any cross-refs on similar cases, the works. Dez knows how to hide his tracks, so I’m guessing it’ll be easier to find the damned winikin.” She paused, toughening her voice to hide how small and vulnerable she suddenly felt, how deeply out of her element. “And for future reference? The next one of you who puts a spell on me without permission is going to be choking on his or her own spleen.”

  There was a pause. Then the king of the Nightkeepers said simply, “Welcome to the team.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Aztec Ruins National Park

  New Mexico

  December 10; total lunar eclipse;

  one year and eleven days until the zero date

  Well into hour three of his stakeout, Dez barely even twitched at the sound of a kid-sized stampede approaching from the visitors’ center, followed by the nasal chirp of a teacher′s voice doing the facts-and-figures thing.

  He was well hidden, and knew that the human herd would stay on the marked path that crossed the huge circular footprint of an ancient kiva. From there, they would wind through a few of the hundreds of rooms belonging to the thousand-year-old stone-and-mortar structure, loop up to a smaller, heavily restored building called the Hubbard Site, then back around to the gift shop and picnic area. The tour groups didn’t stray off the beaten path. Not like he had. And not like the man he hunted would do.

  Come on, you bastard. Where the hell are you?

  Ever since Dez had awakened from his Triad-induced coma and his ancestor′s this-is-your-life-and-hey-you-suck reprogramming, he’d been working on curbing his impatience and maintaining control. But sitting and waiting still wasn’t his strong suit.

  He had been chasing Keban’s dust for the past week, always two steps behind the bastard until—thank fuck—yesterday, when he’d finally crossed a fresh trail and recognized the sour scent and faintly off vibration that he’d caught a whiff of at the Santa Fe museum Keban had robbed. He’d followed it to a library downtown, got his hands on the same book the bastard had touched, found the map he had lingered on, along with a reference to shadowscript and the lunar eclipse, and knew he’d finally gotten the break he needed.

  The winikin would be there at dusk. Not long now.

  Dez had picked a spot just inside one of the dozens of low passageways that ran through what was left of the huge ruin. He was fifty or so feet and several chambers away from the self-guided path, but the alignment of the rectangular doorways and thick, rubble-filled masonry walls carried the teacher′s words.

  “Despite the name, these buildings weren’t originally built by the Aztecs. The mistake was made in the mid–eighteen hundreds by scholars who believed the Aztecs had originated here and migrated south to Mexico. But this was most likely a trading center for the Puebloan tribes, and may have had ties to the Chacoans in the canyon country south of here.”

  “Try definitely had ties to the Chacoans,” Dez said under his breath, shifting to get at
his water bottle and take a swig. “This was one of ours.” Even a thousand years later, the place vibrated with echoes of Night-keeper magic, warming him slightly as the sun started its downward slide and the shadows grew.

  “Although early scholars thought the huge North Ruin might be an archaic apartment building, we now think there were maybe only a couple of hundred permanent residents, with thousands of other people gathering here during ceremonial days . . .” The kid-herder’s voice faded as the group moved along the path.

  “. . . sooo bored,” a straggler said, her ennui reaching Dez on an echo.

  “I know, right?” said another. “This blows.” Her voice dropped to a carrying whisper. “You wanna sneak back around to the gift shop? I’ve got my mom’s AmEx.”

  “I—”

  “No,” interrupted an older, equally bored voice, though this one coming from an adult. Auxiliary kid-herder, no doubt. “Come on, let’s go catch up with the others.”

  There were grumbles as the three moved off, with the first of the girls complaining in a put-upon voice, “Why do we have to know this crap anyway? It’s so old. Why can’t we learn about stuff that matters?”

  Dez snorted to himself. “Consider yourself lucky somebody gives a shit whether you learn it or not. And the old stuff—especially this old stuff—matters more than you’ll ever know.” At least, she would never know if the Nightkeepers had anything to say about it.

  The shadows lengthened further. The air chilled. The park cleared.

  Dez tugged his fleece-lined cap down over his smoothly bald scalp and turned up the collar of the heavy desert-camo jacket he’d bought from an army surplus store, along with night-vision goggles and a KA-BAR knife. He should’ve gone with the lined pants too. He might still be in New Mex, but he was practically on top of the Colorado border, and the sharp wind smelled of snow. Not to mention that serpents didn’t do too well in the cold, and the main effect of the Triad magic—aside from saddling him with a now-decamped spirit guide and some nasty dreams—had been to skew many of his senses closer to those of his bloodline totem.

  The Triad magic had affected each of the chosen magi differently: It had given detail-oriented Brandt a mental filing system that contained all of his ancestors’ spells and talents, yet the same spell had nearly killed Strike’s sister, Anna. It wasn’t clear whether that was because she lacked the warrior′s mark, because she had forsaken the Nightkeepers to live out in the human world, or what, but she had suffered a hell of a cranial bleed. She was up and moving now, and the doctors said her scans were within normal limits, but still she ghosted from day to day, silent and foggy-eyed.

  Seeing her around Skywatch had hammered home to Dez that he was seriously fucking lucky. The Triad magic hadn’t just picked him; it had saved him, given him a second chance. And in the process, it had sleeked him down and enhanced his existing magic. Like a serpent, he used all of his senses, analyzing scent signatures by both smell and taste, and detecting minute changes in body heat. Not to mention that his warrior′s talent gave him the sharpened reflexes and strategic thinking of a killing machine, and the lightning magic gave him some serious shock-and-awe. The three together made him a formidable weapon, and he was determined to be the best damned soldier he could be. He couldn’t undo the past, but since waking up from the Triad transition, he had thrown himself into the Nightkeepers’ war, taking his own ego out of the equation and doing whatever he was damn well told.

  That is, until last week when he got Keban’s strangely formal note—his fucking marching orders: Prepare yourself—and the rest of the magi—to meet me at noon on the day of the solstice. Bring the black artifact. I’ll gather the others that have been found, and on the proper days I will find the two that remain hidden. I will contact you with instructions when the time comes. Be ready.

  Bull-fucking-shit to that. Anntah had made it clear during Dez’s mental Roto-Rootering that Keban had some of his rhetoric right, but he didn’t speak for the serpent bloodline. He was sick and damaged. More, he knew far more than a winikin should about the magic, which made him dangerous. So Dez was prepared, all right . . . prepared to kill Keban and destroy the artifacts. And if there was some grim satisfaction in the chore, he figured he could live with that. He’d never claimed to be a frigging saint.

  A trickle of dislodged rocks interrupted his train of thought and brought his head up. The sound was followed by the faint tread of footsteps coming not from the path, but from the back country on the other side of the park.

  Heat flared as his warrior′s talent came on line, sharpening his reflexes and bringing his fighting magic close to the surface. He bared his teeth when he caught the faintly sour smell he had been trailing for days. His enemy had arrived, and for once he was a step ahead of the bastard rather than chasing behind.

  Easing from the cold passageway into the warmer air outside, he let his magic ramp up, the fine electrical currents making him acutely aware of each neuron and synapse. The sun was gone, the sky a clear, darkening blue going scalloped pink at the edges as he slipped from one shadow-shrouded doorway to the next, working his way through the interconnected chambers of the labyrinthine ruin. The small, furtive noises he was tracking headed for the northernmost point of the ruin, where eight-foot-high stone walls outlined a huge circular chamber.

  Dez wedged himself into the shadowy juncture where an intersecting wall ran into the curve of the room’s outer edge and a small window gave him a decent view of the inner courtyard. Moments later, Keban came into view. And even though Dez had braced himself to see the winikin again—and to kill him—the sight of the hunched-over body and scarred face shot his pulse into the stratosphere. In an instant, he flashed back on that night in the storm, and the look on the bastard’s face as he had pressed the star demon into Dez’s bleeding palms.

  His final slide had started at that moment. The bad shit that followed had come from inside him, it was true, but Keban had set it free.

  Wait it out, Dez told himself. Let him get the artifact first. He watched through slitted eyes as the winikin skimmed a hand over a section of the wall where the masons had worked a snakelike stripe of green stone into the red-rock background, then paused, lips moving as he read the shadowscript. After a moment, he turned and paced the diameter of the kiva three separate times, scuffing his feet when he hit the center. Then he stood in the place where his scuff marks intersected and started walking north, perpendicular to the plane of the setting sun. When he reached the wall, he dropped to his knees, pulled a folding shovel from his knapsack, screwed the pieces together, and started digging.

  Almost, Dez thought, shifting restlessly in his hiding spot. A second later he realized that the twitchiness was more than his usual impatience—there was a new current humming in the air, an itchy heat that was familiar yet not. Magic, he thought, gut knotting on the realization. Shit. The buzz was coming from Keban, growing stronger the farther down he dug. It was from the artifact, a soft, insistent call that reached inside Dez, seeming to echo in his very DNA.

  Block it out, he told himself, steeling himself against the siren song. He could handle it this time. He would have to handle it.

  He started to sweat.

  The winikin suddenly made a satisfied noise, ducked down and shoved his hands into the hollow he had carved alongside the wall. He came up with a bundle, started unwrapping a layer of rotting fabric, then paused and turned away to paw through his knapsack for something.

  Digging his fingernails into his palms hard enough to draw blood, both as a crude sacrifice and to keep himself from doing something stupid, Dez called the magic for a shield spell, intending to turn it into a damned cage. Power raced in his veins as he spread his fingers and imagined the shield falling into place, but he didn’t trigger the spell. Wait for it, he told himself. Wait . . . for . . . it.

  Keban straightened, holding a flashlight.

  Now! Dez unleashed his shield spell at the same instant that Keban turned on the flashlight. There w
as a spark of electricity, a flare of magic.

  And the world went nuts.

  A fat spark shot from Keban to Dez and back. The winikin cried out and dropped the flashlight, but a flare of blue-white power suddenly engulfed Dez, lighting his surroundings and totally fucking the element of surprise. Keban spun, took one look at him, and bolted.

  Damn it! Dez slammed his crackling shield around the other man. Not invisible like most of the warrior′s defensive spells, or concealing like the chameleon shields Michael or Alexis could call, Dez’s shield was like most of his magic: loud, unsubtle, and supercharged. It arced with blue-white electricity, forming a weblike cage that stopped bullets and buzz-swords, and could make like a Taser if he wanted it to. And hell, yeah, he wanted it to right now. He wanted the bastard to burn.

  Keban skidded to a stop in the center of the magic, and turned back as Dez approached the cage. The blue-white light showed a face that sagged like wax around the scars, eyes that were sly and calculating, but didn’t track normally.

  Nate’s illegal hack into the winikin’s psych ward records had revealed that Keban had suffered an acute psychotic break a few days after that night in the storm. He’d stayed put for a decade, then vanished the day of the Triad spell, which couldn’t have been a coincidence. He’d been rational enough to work out an escape, rational enough to send that letter and track down the artifacts he wanted. Now, though, he stared past Dez’s shoulder, twisting his fingers in the filthy cloth wrappings, and mumbling to himself, looking more pitiful than rational.

  Dez’s rage didn’t quite die, but it sure as hell faltered.

  Up close, the man inside the glowing cage was a deflated, deranged version of the beast he had seen in his nightmares, year after year, until new demons took his place. He didn’t look like the ruthless bastard who had dragged Dez to dozens of crumbling ruins as a kid and turned him loose with a knife and orders to find the temple’s sacred chamber, make his sacrifice, and “for fuck’s sake, get it right.” And he didn’t look like the man who had whipped him bloody each time he failed.