He arched up beneath her, going rigid with the hot, wet pleasure as she surrounded him, squeezed him, worked him. He touched her, kissed her, lost himself in her. Then, as she tightened around him and cried out, he reversed their positions and pinned her, surged into her, loved her. She was his, always should have been. Screw Anntah and his blithering about destined mates. She had been meant for him from the very beginning. He had just been too fucked up to see it.
“Reese,” he breathed against her temple as she came apart in his arms, shuddering and calling his name. “Jesus, Reese.”
He surged into her, planted himself deep, and cut loose. And as he came, he gladly lost a part of himself to her.
The orgasm went on, spun out, felt like magic . . . and left him just as ready to crash when it faded. His arms quivered where he was braced over her and his body was practically numb. From the look of her glazed-over eyes, she was in a similar state.
He rolled onto his back, taking her with him. “Gods, woman. I can’t feel my toes.”
She chuckled. “Was that a complaint?”
“Hell, no. It was—” He broke off at the sight of a light flashing on the nightstand. His armband. Someone had left a message in the past few minutes.
Reese followed his gaze, then looked over to where her transponder sat on the floor tangled with her discarded shirt. It, too, was blinking. “Guess they’re looking for us.” She glanced back at him. “You ready for this?”
He thought about it for a second, then nodded. “You know, I guess I am. Way more than I was yesterday afternoon, at any rate.” He caught her hand, kissed her knuckles . . . and stalled on what to say next. He wanted to thank her for coming after him, believing in him, taking him as he was; he wanted to tell her she was beautiful, smart, sassy, honorable, and on some levels way out of his league; he wanted to let her know that he was going to go into the next couple of days stronger because she was behind him, and that he was damned grateful for the chain of events—whether destiny or coincidence—that had brought her back into his life. But all those things wound up jammed together in his chest, so in the end, all he said was, “Cross your fingers that they don’t nail me with a Taser and pack my ass down in the basement.”
She winced. “Not funny.”
And not that far from possible, he thought ten minutes later as, showered and wearing fresh clothes, they headed to the main room together, holding hands.
The sunken great room was jammed with bodies, and everyone there looked up pretty much simultaneously when Dez and Reese came through the archway leading from the mage’s wing. He got the glares he was expecting, with a few notable exceptions: Leah was pale and unusually shaky; Rabbit was glowering, but not at him; and Sasha was looking at him with a hint of pleading, which didn’t make any sense. The decision wasn’t in his hands. It was the king’s call.
Strike was standing on the riser that ran the perimeter of the room and opened into the kitchen, leaning against the wall near the big-screen TV. When he saw them, he straightened and came over. He glanced at their joined hands, nodded fractionally, then tipped his head toward an empty love seat. “Have a seat and we’ll get started.”
Dez swallowed. “I have a few things I’d like to say.” Strike hesitated, expression guarded, and Dez’s gut knotted. “You already made your decision, didn’t you?”
“It’s not what you think.” The king pointed to the two-seater. “Chill. Sit. Listen. Some things have happened that . . . well, let’s just say the circumstances have changed.”
Dez glanced at Reese, who looked just as confused as he was. So they followed orders and sat. But it was evident that whatever they had missed, it was big. And from the looks being shot back and forth among the others, he and Reese weren’t the only ones in the dark on what was going to happen next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Reese’s instincts were shrilling a major warning as Strike leaned a hip against the sofa where Leah was sitting, as though he wanted to be near her but couldn’t sit still. He looked serious and strung out, and she couldn’t quite squelch the thought that under the writs, the punishment for treason was execution. The Nightkeepers wouldn’t go there, would they? What would she do if they did? Visions of her and Dez shooting their way out of the compound locked horns with the memory of Strike’s sleep spell and Rabbit’s mind-bending. Would she wake up back in Denver and wonder why Fallon wasn’t speaking to her?
Dez reached for her hand, twined his fingers through hers, and held on tight.
After what felt like a long pause, Strike took a deep breath, and said, “There is something very wrong with me. I’m having brownouts, suffering from what I guess you could call psychic brain lesions . . . and yesterday, bringing everyone home from the highlands, I lost the teleport thread. If it hadn’t been for Leah and Rabbit propping me up with their magic, none of us would’ve made it back.”
That so wasn’t what Reese had been expecting to hear, that it took her a moment to process what he’d just said. The same thing seemed to be happening to most of the others, because there was a moment of absolute, blank silence broken only by the muffled sounds of Leah’s jeans and shirt against the sofa when she shifted to take Strike’s hand and press it to her face. A single tear leaked down her cheek.
It was Alexis who finally broke the silence. “I take it Sasha has checked you out?” She was sending the healer a “what the hell?” look, but Sasha was staring at her white-knuckled hands as Michael, himself grim-faced, whispered something into her ear.
“Both Sasha and Rabbit have done everything they can,” Strike said. “Lucius has scoured the library, and I’ve had all the relevant human-style scans we can think of. The scans came back clean; it was Rabbit who found the lesions. He’s done his best to put me back together, but it’s not holding.”
“There’s a shadow,” Sasha said without looking up. “It’s like a phantom blood-link or something. I can’t get a handle on it. Nothing I do makes any difference.” Strike started to say something, but she held up a hand. “I know, I know. It’s not my fault, I’m doing the best I can, blah, blah.” She looked up to glare, red-eyed, at him. “What I don’t get is why the gods gave me this talent but won’t let me heal my own big brother. My king.” She shook her head. “Godsdamn it, I fucking hate this.” And for her to drop an f-bomb was as unexpected as Leah crying, making everything suddenly very real.
A low murmur built as brains started to unfreeze. Reese glanced over at Dez and found him staring at Strike, eyes gone utterly hollow. And she got it: The serpent prophecy said that Dez had to kill his adversary to take the throne, and the prophecy needed to be fulfilled in order to keep Lord Vulture from arising. And Strike was sick. The blood drained from her head, leaving her dizzy as she flashed back: the gleam of a stone knife as it slashed an upturned throat, blood gouting . . . and that other Dez, the one the star demon had turned him into, watching with hot, satisfied eyes as the cobra de rey died beneath him.
She must’ve made some noise, because Dez looked at her. His fingers tightened on hers and his throat worked, but he didn’t say anything. And for the first time in the time she had known him, he looked terrified. But beneath the terror she thought she glimpsed something else . . . or rather someone else. And that made it even worse.
“It started with the dreams,” Strike said, then went on to describe being in his father′s perceptions during the Solstice Massacre. “The details changed over time, until it seemed more like it was me in the dream. The one thing that didn’t change, though, was this moment of realizing that I had it wrong, that when the thirteenth prophecy called for the last jaguar king to make the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ before the four-year threshold, it wasn’t talking about the king sacrificing his mate. It meant that he was supposed to . . . that I was supposed to sacrifice myself.”
Sasha made a low, broken noise and pressed her face into Michael’s arm. He shifted to hold her, hanging on tight. Leah sat there, still and white-faced, staring at the floor with th
e look of a woman who had argued herself sick on a point, and was gearing up for another round. Reese’s heart hurt for them, and for pale, pissed-off Rabbit, who would be truly orphaned without Strike. She hurt for Nate and Alexis, whose parents had been advisers to the prior king, and who had helped steer this one, to the extent he let himself be steered. And she hurt for all of the others, who were staring at Strike with expressions ranging from disbelief and anger to blank shock. She hadn’t yet begun to hurt for herself. She knew it was coming, but didn’t try to brace for it, because how could she buffer herself against something like this?
What has happened before will happen again. Fucking writs.
“There’s no question that our luck has sucked since I broke the prophecy,” Strike continued. “Given everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, I think that the gods are giving me—giving us—a chance to make up for my having not fulfilled the thirteenth prophecy when I was supposed to.” He paused, voice cracking with renewed regret. “I think maybe the sun god chose Anna as a Triad mage because the gods needed her to deliver the message, and wanted to be sure that I would pay attention.” He shifted his tired, hollow gaze to Dez. “Which is where you come in.”
“No,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t.”
But Strike kept going. “I want you to be my successor and—if it turns out to be the only way to keep Lord Vulture trapped in the underworld—my executioner.”
“Hell, no!” Dez shot to his feet and faced Strike with his hands balled into fists. His shout was echoed by a bellow from Nate, cries from Jade and Alexis, and various other shocked noises. But it was Reese’s softly indrawn breath that cut through him; she was trying very hard not to cry.
Strike stayed leaning hip-shot against the couch, waiting for the furor to die down. When it did, he said, “Setting aside the prophecies for a second, my sickness, whatever the hell it is, has driven home the need for me to name an heir, if you will.”
“Not me,” Dez said flatly. Dear gods, please not me. Not when he and Reese finally had something going right for them after all these years.
“Then who?”
“Nate,” he said immediately, preferring this debate to the other one, because how was a guy supposed to argue an execution with his own potential victim? He continued: “Michael or Brandt would work. Hell, why stick with a patriarchy? Choose Leah or Alexis. Someone who knows the current system, who knows how you run things and how to keep things on an even keel for the next twelve months.”
“I’ve been doing the even-keel thing, and it’s not working. We’ve become a reactionary force, moving in to fix shit after the fact—sometimes way too long after. We need someone who’s going to go out and find the fight, kick ass, take names, shake things up.”
“Shaking things up,” Reese said softly, with a broken little hiccup in her voice. “The western compass quadrant, the one associated with the star demon, represented the ability to transform and shake things up.”
“Reese, no.” He caught her hand in his. “No.” But she wouldn’t look at him.
Leah said, “We read back through all the info we collected on you, back when we were trying to figure out whose side you were on.” She paused. “From a former narc to a former gangbanger, I have to admit, you were a hell of a rey. Under your command, the Cobras expanded their territory and operations, even dabbling in some legit businesses. The local mob wannabes fizzled and died out, the crime and death rates went down slightly in the areas you controlled, and the per capita incomes went up.”
“Great,” Dez grated. “I was a better criminal than Hood. Give me a fucking cookie. Not the Nightkeepers.”
But Reese cleared her throat and said, “She’s right. You made the Cobras into something better than they were. Even Fallon admitted it.”
“That doesn’t mean I’d make the Nightkeepers better.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Strike countered. “I’m asking you to take the team that’s already been built and use them to win the end-time war.”
Leah’s voice flattened, and some of her deeply hidden emotions broke through as she said, “Gangs are essentially urban armies.”
Strike added, “You’re ruthless, ambitious, arrogant, and don’t give much of a shit about anybody’s rules but your own, and even those are flexible when it comes down to doing what it takes to win. You’re a warlord, and we’re headed into war.”
“Jesus.” I don’t want to be that guy. I promised not to be. “You’re acting like naming a successor is the only issue here. What about the prophecies? What about Iago?”
Strike’s tired eyes bore into his. “This is the serpents’ solstice. All the signs point to this being your time.”
“What fucking signs?”
It was Lucius who said, “Aside from you and Iago being the only two people left on the plane who have the potential to wield the serpent staff? Well, the Hopi believe that their snake dance will call a great white god wearing a crimson cape, who will turn back the apocalypse and allow the earth to enter a new age. And if you consider the whole ‘what has happened before’ doctrine, it seems significant that the last time a Triad was summoned, the peccary bloodline lost the throne to the jaguars. Add to that the fact that the sun god basically sacrificed one third of the Triad magic to send you a spirit guide and get you back on track . . .” He shook his head, dispirited. “Yeah. The signs suggest a power transfer.”
Dez couldn’t think. He couldn’t fucking breathe. “Are you ordering me on my oath to do this?”
“Take a few hours and think about it,” Strike said, which wasn’t really an answer. He included Reese in his look. “Both of you. We’ll meet back here at noon, and go from there.” And with that, they were dismissed whether they liked it or not. King’s orders.
Strike watched Dez struggle inwardly for a second before the other man snapped off a nod, and tugged Reese away. She went with him, shell-shocked, yet gutting it out because she’d be damned if she’d lose it in public. Strike knew the type; he lived with a prime example.
If the parallel was as close as he thought, she would . . . yep, there it went: the pause in the hallway, the short, intense conversation. He even knew the script, such as it was: Dez would want to be on his own to process the shock, but he’d push her to come with him, not wanting her to be alone. He wouldn’t do it right, though, or she would see the well-intentioned lie. There it was now—the small shove, the head shake, and then the two of them moving off in different directions to nurse their wounds so later they could present a united front in public.
Or—hello—maybe you’re projecting all of that, and they’re going to meet back up in his suite in five for some raunchy, desperate, “We’ve got less than thirty-six hours before everything goes to hell so screw the other stuff and let’s get it on” sex.
“What are you thinking?” Leah said, rising from the sofa to sit beside him on its arm, close enough that he could answer in an undertone.
“That the fun is only half over,” he said wryly, not because any of this was a joke, but because if he didn’t keep his head in a semi-normal place, he would explode. He was barely hanging on as it was, trying to deal with logistics, grief, anger, and despair—his, hers, and more to come—with a brain that felt like oatmeal. Exhaling, he turned toward the others. Their faces—some looking up at him in disbelief, others looking away, angry or tearful—pretty much encapsulated everything he was feeling. He’d been trying to deal with it all since he had awakened in the middle of the night, finally understanding what the dreams were trying to tell him about the thirteenth prophecy: that he was his own greatest sacrifice. And the prophecies needed to be fulfilled.
Alexis scowled. “This is a trick, right? You’re testing his loyalties.”
“I wish. No, this is for real.”
Beside her, Nate shook his head, letting a rare flash of grief show through his normally controlled exterior. “I’m sorry, man. I wish . . .”
“Yeah.” Strike had to push the wo
rd past the huge lump in his throat. “Ditto.”
“Isn’t there anything else we could try?” That came from Patience.
“If you’ve got a suggestion, I’m all ears. Doesn’t matter how far-fetched, I’ll try anything at this point, because the pisser of this thing is that we don’t know what’s going on. Hell, it could be a new talent trying to come through and doing damage in the process. It could be Kulkulkan trying to find a way to communicate without using a skyroad. It could be . . . Shit, I don’t know. Lots of things other than fatal. But there are the prophecies to consider.”
“Break ’em,” Nate said promptly. “We’ve made it this far with the fates pissed at us. We can make it the rest of the way.”
Several of the others nodded, all magi. The older winikin, though, didn’t. They knew how bad things could get when a king went off the rails. More, they weren’t just talking about Skywatch now; they were talking about the whole damn world, and he couldn’t put himself ahead of that, no matter how badly he wanted to. He might buy himself a few more hours, days or even months, but at what cost?
“Lord Vulture symbolizes a nuclear winter,” he said quietly. “I don’t think we can break them.”
“We might be able to reinterpret them,” Lucius said. Strike had brought him in to things just past one that morning, and it showed in his haggard face. But his red-rimmed eyes gleamed. “Some of the prophecies have had tricks to them, loopholes. Like the way I avoided pieces of the library prophecy because it specified the magi, and I’m human.”
“You find me a loophole and I’ll owe you a beer.” Hell, a lifetime supply.
“Deal.”
Strike looked around the room. “I’m not giving up,” he said, giving each word extra weight. “I’m going to fight this thing in my head every step of the way, and I’m sure as shit not going to roll over and play—” Bad word choice. “I’m not going to throw myself on anyone’s knife voluntarily. But in the meantime, I can’t ignore the other shit that’s going down here. And neither can any of you.”
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