She lifted her chin, trying not to let the nerves show. “How about we make a deal? I’ll tell you everything I know about it, on one condition.”
“Which is what—a ticket back to Boston and a vow that we’ll forget you exist?” he asked dryly.
She tamped down the kick of excitement brought by the impossible offer. “If you promised me that, I’d know you were lying.” She shook her head. “No, no plane ticket. Let’s go with straight-up barter instead. You get me out of here and into a kitchen, hook me up with some fresh ingredients, and I’ll answer your questions.”
His gorgeous eyes went blank for a moment. She’d surprised him. Good.
“That’s your demand?” he asked after a moment. “You want to cook?”
She shrugged. “You’ve looked into my background, so you know that’s what I do—I cook. I cook when I’m happy or sad, when I’m celebrating with friends or all alone with my thoughts. Cooking is my outlet, one of my greatest pleasures.” When the word stirred the physical memory of another, greater pleasure, she hurriedly continued, “I haven’t been in a kitchen or touched real food in nearly a year. So, yeah. That’s the trade. You give me an hour in a kitchen, I’ll you what I know about the library.”
A true warrior might not have gone for the pots and pans as her first demand, but she’d never pretended to be a warrior, despite Ambrose’s claims otherwise—and his last brutal attempt to prove those claims. She was who she was, nothing more. And in this stupid, screwed-up situation where everybody had the power except her, she needed, for a few moments, anyway, to pretend she was back in her own world. More, she needed to get the hell out of the cell, and a kitchen was a fine place to start.
Michael held her gaze for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “Let me talk to the others. I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll be here,” she said blandly.
He looked at her a moment more, then turned with fluid grace and headed for the door, where he paused and said something under his breath. She assumed it was some sort of secret password, one that cued a guard on the other side of the door to unlock it, far preferring the idea of a password over the suspicion that he’d been casting a “spell” to let him through, sort of a Nightkeepers’ “open sesame.”
Once he was gone, she prowled her cell, trying to remember everything she could about the Nightkeepers. Her childhood had been filled with stories of the powerful magi, their rules and responsibilities. Their talents. Their magic. She knew their legends, knew what drove them. At least, assuming that Michael and his fellow de lusionals were buying into the same set of stories Ambrose had taught her. The question was, how could she use that information? How could she—
The lock rattled, interrupting her midthought. The panel swung inward and her pulse accelerated as she braced herself for bad news and the need to come up with a plan B.
Michael stood in the opening, filling the doorway with his body, filling the room with his presence.
Instead of coming in, though, he stepped aside. And waved her out into the hallway beyond.
Pulse bumping, she moved toward him, then stalled. “Seriously?” It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she hadn’t expected her new captors to give in to her demand. It made her suspicious that they had. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch.” He lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes you’ve got to offer trust in order to get it in return.
I’ve asked the others to make themselves scarce for the time being, so it’ll just be you and me. And a really big kitchen with all the Cuisinart and Copper Clad you could ask for.”
She yearned. Tried not to let it show. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“After you.”
She moved past him, but stopped in the doorway, facing him. She was close enough to catch his scent, which she’d caught on her own skin when she’d awakened. He’s a means to an end , she reminded herself. And you can’t trust him. The flash she’d seen in his eyes suggested there was far more to him than what showed on the surface. And if that only made her more intrigued, that was her imagination at work again, and she knew she couldn’t trust that bitch.
At his gesture, she led the way along the short hall, toward a short flight of stairs, acutely conscious of the big, solid man following close behind her, his heat radiating to her skin and prickling each individual neuron to unwanted sensual awareness.
The regularly spaced doors on one side of the hallway all looked the same, and presumably led to more storerooms like the one she’d just been in. On the other side there was a single set of glass double doors. Through them, she caught a glimpse of a huge room filled with high-end gym equipment. The hallway led to a corner behind her and kept going, making her think the building’s footprint had to be enormous, far bigger than that of a normal house. Yet the woodwork on the staircase leading up looked more residential than not, and orange sunlight spilled down from above.
He’d called the place Skywatch and claimed it was the Nightkeepers’ training compound, but that didn’t make any sense. None of it did.
Stay on task. Keep focused. Keeping her goals in mind, she headed up the stairs, still too aware of the warm solidity of the man who followed close behind.
Then she reached the main level, took one look at the wide room spread out in front of her, and stopped dead as all thought was swept aside by a powerful surge of emotion, one that welled up and nearly flattened her, scared the shit out of her.
Oh, holy hell. She recognized this place.
Sucking in a breath, she stumbled back, missed a step, and would’ve crashed down the stairs if it hadn’t been for Michael’s strong arms catching her easily and holding her against his wide, warm chest for a moment, a few heartbeats when she could feel his pulse hammer in time with hers.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice a low rumble in his chest.
“I—I know this room,” she said, unable to keep her voice from shaking as she pushed away from him and stood on her own, on a landing that was part of a wide strip running three-quarters of the way around a sunken sitting area. To her left, the space opened to hallways on either side of a huge, open-
plan kitchen done in marble and industrial chrome, but not even that lure was enough to snap her out of her oh, shit fugue as she kept looking, trying to convince herself that it was just a casual resemblance, that the room wasn’t actually the same as the image in her mind. Problem was, she couldn’t talk herself into the lie.
“From a dream?” Michael asked, his voice carefully neutral.
“No. A photograph,” she said faintly. “I saw it when I was a kid, snooping through Ambrose’s things.” She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen, and had only just begun to comprehend the depth of her father’s insanity, the complexity of the construct he’d built up around a group of people who didn’t exist. “It was mixed in with some other papers—tax records and garbage like that, nothing unusual except for this picture of Ambrose in his late teens or so, standing with a couple of other guys, their arms around one another, mugging for the camera.” She moved now, walking slowly around the raised platform until the angle was right. Then she looked through the sliding glass doors that led out to a huge blue pool surrounded by a pressed cement patio. “The furniture and paint were different. The curtains. But the room was the same, and the scenery, that was the same. He was here. He lived here.”
The photo had been faded, but time hadn’t changed the ridgeline in the distance, where the back end of a box canyon rose up in a sheer cliff. Not all of the buildings near the main house looked the same, and there was a tree now where there hadn’t been one before. In the distance, though, in the wan, strangely orangeish sunlight of late morning, she could see the regular patterns of light and shadow created by a Puebloan ruin, high on the rear canyon wall.
The scenery matched. The room matched.
“We’re in New Mexico, near Chaco Canyon, aren’t we?” she asked softly, but didn’t wait for his answer. Instead, she continued, “He wanted his as
hes spread here. I tried to find the place once, but couldn’t.”
“It was hidden by a curtain spell for nearly two decades.”
“Special effects,”she said,her voice going thin.“Desert-style camo netting.”
“Magic,” Michael corrected, and nudged her in the direction of the kitchen. “Are you taking orders?”
“I don’t do real well with orders,” she said, seriously grateful for the subject change. “Or didn’t your background check mention that was why I’d had nearly a dozen jobs over four years? I have a problem following recipes, and I don’t like doing things the same way over and over again.” But she let him guide her to the kitchen as she fought to regain her mental footing. So what if Ambrose had lived here when he was a kid? Just because this . . . cult, or whatever it was, went back four decades or so didn’t make their paradigm any less bullshit than it’d been when she had finally called her father on the gaps between his beliefs and reality.
She’d been thirteen, just hitting menarche and snotty with it, and had sassed him that the so-called magic he preached didn’t work worth a damn. Instead of ignoring her like he usually did when she mouthed off, that time he’d dragged her into his “temple”—a hallway closet he’d done up with stone veneer and a chac-mool altar—and locked them both in while he’d chivvied her through the usual ritual of letting blood and burning the sacrificial offerings, as they usually did for each of the solstices and equinoxes. That time, though, his chants had sounded different, more complex. And when, as usual, nothing happened, he’d been furious, accusing her of not believing, of not having prayed hard enough. He’d acted like something should have happened during that particular ceremony, that she had failed him. More, that she’d failed herself.
Later, looking back, she’d realized it was after that ceremony that they’d truly begun growing apart —she in teenage rebellion, he into depression. It had taken several more years and his last final, brutal effort to make the nonexistent magic real before she ran, but that had been the beginning of the end for them.
“Hey,” Michael said, breaking into her thoughts with a gentle touch at her elbow. “You okay?
Feeling shaky?”
Brought abruptly back to reality—or at least his version thereof—she shook her head. “No. Well, maybe a little. Do you blame me?”
“You want to sit for a while? I’m no trained chef, but I know my way around a kitchen. I could make us something.”
His offer reminded her of where they were, and why. And although the memories had knocked her off-kilter, they had also reminded her in lurid detail why she had to get the hell out of there. “I’m fine,” she said, forcing herself to focus on the present—and the possibility of escape. Taking a look around, she saw that the large kitchen he’d brought her to flowed out from an upper ledge running around the sunken great room, and was separated from the big space by a breakfast bar that had leather-topped stools pushed into place beneath. The countertops were all marble, the cabinets good wood. The appliances were commercial steel, the pans Copper Clad, as promised, the knives surgical-
sharp. Even better, there were fresh herbs everywhere—hung from the rafters in drying bunches, growing in pots, and spilling out of a window greenhouse. A quick check showed that the cabinets, pantry, and commercial fridge and freezer were overstocked with just about anything she could want, especially if her taste leaned toward Mayan cuisine, which it did. Always had.
For a moment, she let herself wallow in the sense of being, finally, someplace that was familiar because of who and what she was, in a way that had nothing to do with her father. But really, her being there had everything to do with Ambrose. And she had to get her ass out of there.
Starting to pull ingredients with more thought to their spiciness than the flavor combinations, she set a trio of hot sauces on a nearby counter and stalled by asking, “Who’s the foodie?”
Michael hesitated, and for a second she thought he was going to remind her that the deal had involved her giving him info, not the other way around. But then he answered, “That’d be the royal winikin, Jox. He does the lion’s share of the cooking, with the rest of us pitching in or being dragooned, depending. Leah’s been on a kick to get the Nightkeepers doing more of the house stuff, as part of her whole ‘the winikin are not your servants’ thing. Jox doesn’t let too many people in his kitchen voluntarily, though. What you see here is mostly his doing, including the herbs. He and my winikin, Tomas, put in a big garden out next to the ball court, with a greenhouse beside it. They’ve got maize going, along with squash, beans, and about a dozen varieties of peppers. There’s even a small orchard. Sour oranges, thin-skinned limes—you name it. If our ancestors cooked with it, Jox and Tomas are probably growing it, or have at least tried to.”
Sasha’s brain had pretty much shut off after the first part of his answer, though. “You’ve got winikin?” she asked despite herself. She felt like the paleontologist guy in Jurassic Park, who’d gotten that oh, holy shit look on his face and said, “You’ve got raptors?” Because that was about how it felt: cloned dinosaurs. Winikin. Both unbelievable, but somehow believable within the context.
They’re not real winikin, she reminded herself as her head spun and her stomach lurched once again on the sense that she was in way over her head, and sinking fast. They’re just another group of people who’ve bought into an elaborate and extremely well-funded fantasy.
Right?
“Or they’ve got us. Either way.” Michael moved to the breakfast bar, dragged out a leather-topped stool, and propped himself up on it, leaning back against the reddish marble bar with his long legs stretched out in front of him as he continued, “Until about eighteen months ago, most of us thought the winikin were our godpar ents and the Nightkeepers were just bedtime stories. Instead, it turned out that we were the bedtime stories, that we’re the last dozen survivors of the Solstice Massacre of
’eighty four. The winikin had hoped—prayed, really—that the war was over before it began, but then the barrier reactivated, the magic came back online, and Strike—he’s our king—called us together to become the smallest damn fighting force that ever set out to save the world.” Michael’s lips twitched, but there was little humor in his expression. “We came here and learned how to connect to the barrier, how to pull the magic. Ever since then we’ve been playing catch-up, trying to reassemble all the old spells and prophecies, without much luck. Now, we’re just over a month away from the three-year threshold, and we’re floundering.” He focused on her, his gaze direct and silently demanding. “That’s why we need your help, both as the daughter of a mage and as the person who knew Ambrose best. He might not have told you where he hid the library, but you know how he thought, where he might’ve left clues.”
The kitchen took a long, slow spin around Sasha. Denial rose up within her, choking her with thick, viscous fear. The story didn’t make any sense. Yet at the same time, it did.
The magi had suffered population bottlenecks twice before in their history, once in Egypt around
1300 B.C., when the pharaoh Akhenaton declared Egypt a monotheistic empire and slaughtered the polytheistic priests, and again in the fifteen hundreds, when the conquistadors had converted Mesoamerica to Christianity, starting once again by killing the priests. The Nightkeepers. Each of those slaughters had wiped out all but a handful of the magi. From that angle, Michael’s implication of a recent massacre fit with the Nightkeepers’ view on the cyclical nature of time and events. It was also consistent with what she saw around her. The mansion was set up for an army, yet Michael had said there were only twenty or so people in residence. That said population bottleneck to her. Or rather, it does if I buy that the stories are more than an expensive and potentially deadly delusion , she thought, trying not to lose herself.
Throughout her life, she’d fallen prey to her own imagination time and again, talking herself into realities that didn’t exist. Like Ambrose being a good father. Saul being on the verge of proposi
ng.
Hell, she’d even believed in the Nightkeepers long ago, had imagined herself fighting demons in the end-time battle, serving beneath the valiant King Scarred-Jaguar, who Ambrose had spoken of as if he were real, like they all were.
Apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought along those lines. But that brought up another question: Why had Ambrose left what seemed like the perfect location for him to hang out and indulge his obsessions? Should she take that as a warning in its own right, or a hint that there was far more going on here than she’d even begun to grasp? Her mind spun as she had to ask herself: At what point did delusion become a reality?
It doesn’t , she told herself. So get your ass out of here already . It was the best chance for escape she’d had in over a year. She couldn’t not take advantage of the opportunity, just because her mobile mind had cast Michael into the role of hero and lover, despite all evidence to the contrary.
When she pressed her hands to the counter, she noticed her fingers were trembling. Knowing she was close to losing it, she focused on the scene outside the wide kitchen window, which overlooked a football field-size patch of windblown hardpan, where a darker sand shadow outlined where a building must have stood in years past. To the left of that was a scattering of small cottage-type houses, to the right a huge, spreading tree in front of a big, industrial-looking steel building. In front of the tree sat a high-wheeled vehicle—a Jeep-like chassis riding on fat tires mounted on external shocks. Sasha’s pulse picked up at the sight.
“Well,” Michael said from right behind her. “You said you wanted a kitchen. What’s the next step?”
She hadn’t realized he’d moved from the breakfast bar, or that he was so close to her. Sensual awareness skimmed through her, lighting her up. This time, though, it came with the wish that they could have met under different circumstances, as slightly different people. If he’d been a normal guy and she’d been a chef with a little less baggage, she thought they could’ve made it work. For a while, anyway. But as the people they were, in the situation they were in, there was zero hope. The only sane thing she could do would be to get the hell away from him—from all of it—and build a new life.
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