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 li
ttle 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.
A year ago, Sven would’ve laughed his ass off. Now, he just wished he’d remembered to mute the damn ringer. He was low on patience, felt like crap, and wanted to get this over with so he could get some space. Normally he loved the trips to El Rey—the ruin was right on the coast, giving him a rare chance to breathe salt and see endless blue-green ocean. Now, though, he had his back to the harbor and just wanted to go home. He wanted dust in his sinuses, dry heat on his skin, and packed earth beneath his feet.
“You okay?” Patience asked in an undertone.
“Yeah.” Realizing he was bottlenecking the uplink, he refocused and channeled the magic as the phone went silent and dumped to voice mail. “Sorry.”
She shot him a worried look. “Don’t be sorry. If something’s wrong, talk to me. Or if not me, talk to someone.”
“I’m fine. Really.” He lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug, covering the wince when the move pulled at the bandage he wore on one biceps, hidden beneath his pullover.
The damn wound was taking far too long to close up. He would’ve thought his healing skills were on the fritz, except that his other injuries were doing fine. Which meant . . . shit, he didn’t know. He couldn’t even remember how he got the jagged slice. And he couldn’t think about it now. Focusing on the uplink, he kept the magic zinging around the circle as Rabbit gripped the small carving he’d gotten from a dying Xibalban mystic the year before. Although the flattened stone didn’t seem to have any real power, it had become his talisman. Now, he held it out in front of him as he leaned on the magic and cast a new spell that Jade and Lucius were hoping would work.
Magic flared around the uplink, moving smoothly and ramping up, making the air sparkle red-gold. More, the spell coalesced and took shape in an unusually visible form, a cloud of glossy glitter that was headed for Rabbit. It coalesced, sped up, took form and substance as it neared him, and then—
Without warning, it doubled back and accelerated straight into Sven.
Holy shit. He gaped as it thwumped into him feeling like a feather pillow doing forty. The impact sent him staggering back, breaking the uplink. Power flowed into him, arrowing to the injury high on his biceps, and from there dragging him straight into a vision that was more a series of impressions than anything: He breathed dust, walked on hard-packed ground that burned his feet. He was searching, searching, missing something. But what? He heard a hawk’s cry, a scurry of small feet, a death keen. Then wings flapping back up into the sky.
“Sven?” Cool hands touched him, sending magic that brought him out of the vision. “Sven, can you hear me?”
For a few seconds, the words didn’t make any sense; they were only sounds. Then they came clear, as did the sight of his teammates clustered around him as he lay flat out on the rocky ground. Sasha was bent over him, touching him, healing him.
“My arm—” he began, then broke off because she already had his sleeve up, the stained bandage off. But his skin was whole and unmarked, like he’d never been hurt.
He was searching for something, needed something, didn’t know where to find it. Hot sun. Burning feet. Thirsty. The world tunneled down, blackening at the edges and withering inward until all he could see was Sasha’s face, her eyes wide and worried, her lips shaping his name. Then dust washed across his vision and he coughed, fighting for breath, fighting the hands that tried to hold him, take him captive.
“The spell is linking to something, but I can’t follow it,” she said, her voice nearly lost beneath the howling noise of a sandstorm. “Rabbit, get in here and—”
Blackness.
Somewhere off Virginia Beach
Voices washed over Cara Liu, unintelligible at first and then slowly coming clear, followed by other sensations: a cool, wet deck beneath her, the gentle roll of waves, the smell of the ocean, the humid air that was at odds with her parched-dry mouth.
“Give her some room,” said an older-sounding woman, the kind with the built-in cluck in her voice. “Let the poor dear breathe!” The tone brought the image of a weathered sixty-something in a crazy pink sun hat as Cara’s brain came back on line—sort of—and worked to match the voice with one of the forty-three passengers on the Discovery III.
Right. She was doing the naturalist thing. Or rather, doing the “ex-journalist pretending to be a naturalist” thing. Out at sea. Whale watching.
“What happened?” The voice belonged to a man, and sounded more excited than worried. Probably one of the three bored husbands who had congregated by the snack bar.
“She was talking about migration patterns and just fainted,” clucked Crazy Hat Lady.
“We should sit her up.” Another voice, young and piping, female. One of the dozen interchangeable bouncy teens who had taken the trip together. Gymnasts, maybe, or cheerleaders.
“Wait. No, don’t move her. She might’ve hurt her spine. Someone should call the Coast Guard!” That was Bored Husband, far more interested in a possible medical emergency than humpbacks. Or maybe he just wanted to hitch a ride back to shore.
“She passed out,” said Captain Jack, having apparently descended from the pilothouse to restore order to his little kingdom. “She didn’t go overboard.”
“But—”
“I’m fine,” Cara croaked, cracking her lids and forcing herself to pull it together before Bored Hubby had her strapped to a backboard and being winched aboard a rescue chopper.
Flamingo pink straw eclipsed the sun. “Are you sure, dearie?”
“Positive. I just . . .” Cara trailed off, not sure what had happened or why. One second she had been talking about humpbacks traveling north from the Bay of Fundy, and the next, click. Lights out.
Captain Jack—fiftyish, grizzled, and straight out of central casting—eased Crazy Hat aside and held out a hand to help Cara up. “On your feet. No napping on the job, girlie.” But his eyes were kind and concerned, telegraphing: You okay?
She had been on the Disco for only a month, but he had a daughter her age who was too busy to call, and Cara had daddy issues. They had bonded instantly.
“Sorry,” she said aloud, giving him a nod. I’m okay. But she wasn’t, really. She felt like unholy crap—woozy and tired, as though she’d been up for a week. Was last night’s takeout coming back to bite her? Ugh, hope it’s not another flu.
For the past few years she had gotten every sniffle and cough within a fifty-mile radius, to the point that some of her friends joked that she might as well teach kindergarten or work at a hospital. The doctors hadn’t been able to find any real reason for it, had advised her to wear a mask. Since she co
uldn’t bring herself to go out in public looking like something out of a disaster movie, she lived on Airborne, vitamin C, and echinacea, and took her sick days and then some. It had cost her several good jobs. Oh, her bosses hadn’t said it directly, of course—it wasn’t kosher to can people for health problems these days. But whatever the reasons that had gone into her files, her health had been the problem. She hadn’t been able to put in the hours, and there had been a waiting list of junior reporters who could work ridiculous hours for pennies, and wouldn’t call in.
That was one reason she loved working on the Disco: Not only had Jack still hired her even after she had warned him about being a sicko, but it had turned out that the sea air was good for her—she hadn’t had to miss a single day so far. Sigh. Guess it was too much to hope that would last.
“You need to lie down?”
She shook her head at Jack’s question. “God, no.” Her sea legs were great when she was up and walking around or when the boat was moving, but she didn’t do so well with sitting—never mind lying—down for long with the boat stationary and rolling beneath her in long, undulating waves. The sway was already getting to her: A low churn of nausea checked in to join the fatigue and deck spins. She needed to get up, breathe the salt spray, feel the wind in her face, and remember that she had come a long way from who she used to be.
Summoning a bright smile for the crowd that was still gathered around her, she said, “Thanks for your concern, everyone, but I’m good. I’m great. Let’s get this show back on the road.”
“Take it easy for a few minutes,” Jack said. “I’ll need to hunt up a new whale.”
A glance over the railing showed that the gently swelling waves were cetacean-free. “Shoot. That was a good sighting.” She sighed. “Sorry.”
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