Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  PART I

  PENUMBRAL LUNAR ECLIPSE

  The earth shadows the moon, making it appear

  orange or bloodred. May be associated with shifts

  in the earth’s electromagnetic fields, heightened

  spiritual sensitivity, and rebirth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  February 6

  Present

  The smell of death hit Nate Blackhawk the moment he pushed open the door to the seashore cottage, letting him know why Edna Hopkins hadn’t answered his knock.

  “Hell.” Mouth breathing, Nate crouched down, fumbled with his ankle holster, and pulled out a snub-nosed nine-millimeter loaded with jade-tipped bullets.

  The jade would be overkill if he met up with bad news of the human variety, but the sacred stone was one of the few things that made a dent in the underworld nasties he’d gotten to know up close and personal over the past seven months, ever since his life had swerved off Reality Road and plunged into something that bore more than a passing resemblance to the quest fantasies he wrote for a living. Or what’d used to be his living.

  “Mrs. Hopkins?” he called into the cottage. “It’s Nate Blackhawk; we spoke on the phone yesterday. Are you okay?”

  He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t get one.

  There was a dead Christmas wreath hanging on the door, and jingle bells tinkled as he let the door swing shut at his back. The decoration was six weeks past its prime, suggesting that the old lady hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she was having trouble keeping up with her house, living alone.

  The Cape Cod beachfront cottage was one level, maybe four or five rooms, tops, decorated right out of the Yankee Candle catalog, with an added dose of doilies. The place made Nate—at six-three, two hundred pounds, amber eyed, dark haired and sharp featured, wearing a black-on-black combination of Nightkeeper combat gear and don’t scare the old lady casual wear—feel seriously out of his element.

  It wasn’t exactly the first place he’d look for an ancient Mayan artifact that’d been out of circulation for nearly eight decades, either, but this was where the trail had led.

  “Mrs. Hopkins?” He moved across the main room to a short hallway, where the air was thicker. “Edna?”

  There was a bathroom on one side, followed by a closet and a neat-as-a-pin guest room done in Early Ruffle. On the opposite side was a single door, open just enough to show a slice of pale blue carpet and the edge of a lace-topped mahogany dresser. He used his toe to nudge open the door and then stepped inside, grimacing at the sight of a sunken-cheeked woman tucked into a queen-size adjustable bed, with a lace-trimmed quilt pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were closed, her skin gray, her face oddly peaceful. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, but next to her sat a polished keepsake box Nate recognized from her description as the one that had held the small figurine she’d inherited from her grandmother, who’d gotten it from hers.

  The box was open and empty, the statuette gone.

  “Shit.” He felt a beat of grief for the seventy-something widow, along with a serious case of the oh, hells at the realization that the Banol Kax had known what the Nightkeepers were looking for, and had somehow gotten there first.

  Or had they? he wondered, frowning at the neatly smoothed quilt, the carefully positioned body. The Banol Kax and their blood-bound human emissaries, the makol, weren’t big on subtlety; he would’ve expected her to be hacked up pretty good if they’d been the ones to steal the statuette. But if not the demons, then who had offed the old lady and taken the artifact?

  Not your problem, Nate told himself. You’re just the courier. But still, he stared down at the dead woman.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her. Less than twenty-four hours ago they’d spoken by phone about the statuette, and the things she could do with the money he’d offered for it. She’d wanted to move south, where it was warmer in winter, and go into assisted living, because her daughters had no time for her and even less inclination to get involved. Nate had figured he’d offer to help her with the move; he knew what it felt like to have nobody give a crap where you were or what you were doing. That wouldn’t be necessary now, though, because whoever had taken the statuette had taken her life with it. Like that had been necessary. A low burn tightened his gut. Bastards, he thought. What harm would it’ve done to leave her alive?

  He wanted to tell her that he’d get the shitheels who’d taken away the promise of a better life, but he wasn’t sure the sweet-seeming lady would care for the idea of revenge on her behalf, so in the end he said nothing. He just nodded to her, touched the hawk medallion he wore around his neck, and made a private promise to see justice done. Then he headed back the way he’d come, mentally tracking what he’d touched, wiping as needed, because there was no sense in being stupid when the cops had his prints on file.

  He’d done his time and straightened out in the years since, but still.

  Once he was outside and the jingle bells were quiet in their brown-needled wreath, he reholstered the nine-millimeter and headed for his rental. A few miles out of town he stopped at a pay phone that actually worked—the things were few and far between these days—and called in an anonymous 911. As soon as he was back on the road, headed for the airport, he palmed his cell and speed-dialed the Nightkeeper’s training compound, Skywatch.

  “Yes, sir,” answered his winikin, Carlos, proper as always.

  Nate didn’t bother reminding his sort-of servant to do the first-name thing, because he knew it wouldn’t work. Most of the other Nightkeeper-winikin pairs were pretty informal with each other, having been together for decades. Nate, on the other hand, had lost his original winikin early on, winding up in human-style foster care instead. He’d grown up human, not having a clue about the magic in his blood until seven months earlier, when the Nightkeepers’ hereditary king, Striking-Jaguar, had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, teleported him onto the roof, and dangled him over the side in order to get his attention, then promised to tell him about his parents. That’d been shock number one. Shock number two had come when Nate showed up at Skywatch and met fellow Nightkeeper trainee Alexis Gray . . . who was a pixel-perfect image of Hera, the sex-goddess Valkyrie Nate had written into five installments of his Viking Warrior vid games over the past four years. His friends had a running joke that Nate couldn’t keep a girlfriend because he was always comparing them to Hera, and maybe there’d been some truth to that. Meeting her in the flesh, so to speak, had blown him away. Even better, Alexis had proven to be a woman of worth; he might give her grief about being a pampered princess and a goody-goody overachiever—both of which were true—but she was also tough and resourceful, and had a core of loyalty and integrity he had to admire, even if that sort of shit had never worked for him. But just because she was sexy as sin and a hell of a woman, and they’d hooked up for a few months during the worst of the hormone storms that’d come with getting their powers, didn’t mean they were foreordained to be mates. Nate didn’t believe in predestiny and crap like that . . . which was tantamount to blasphemy in his new life.

  The Nightkeepers’ entire culture was based on fate and prophecy, but as far as Nate was concerned, destiny was just what lazy game developers pulled out of their asses when they couldn’t think of a better way to connect the dots. It was bullshit, right up there with magic swords and the ever-popular “amulet to be named at a later date” that most epic fantasy writers used at one point or another to get themselves out of a jam.

  Nate was willing to believe in the Nightkeepers’ magic because he’d experienced it firsthand, and he was willing to buy into the December 21, 2012, end date because it was based in scientific fact: The Great Conjunction was coming, and in the absence of an ozone layer, the Earth would be vulnerable to the sun flares and magnetic fluxes the eggheads were predicting. He was even willing to accept that there was a powerful barrier of psi energy separating the earth and the underworld, and that it thinned during major stellar events. Based on his recent experiences, he�
��d even stretch credulity and buy into the threat that the barrier would come crashing down on the 2012 end date, and that it was the Nightkeepers’ job to keep the demons on their side of the barrier when that happened.

  He’d seen and done enough magic of his own to buy into those things. But there was no way in hell he was going to believe that the future was already written, that he’d known what his gods-intended mate would look like years before he’d met her in the flesh, that they were destined to fall in love because fate said they should. No frigging thanks. Having spent his first twenty years locked up, first in the foster system, then in juvie and the Greenville penitentiary, he was all about freedom and free will.

  Carlos, on the other hand, was all about “the thirteenth Nightkeeper prophecy” this and “the seven demon prophecies” that, and practically worshiped the idea that time was cyclical, that what had happened before would happen again. According to legend, the winikin were the descendants of the captured Sumerian warriors who had served the Nightkeepers back in ancient Egypt. When Akhenaton went monotheistic in 1300 or so B.C. and ordered his guard to off the priests of the old religion—including the Nightkeepers—the servants had managed to escape with a handful of the Nightkeepers’ children. The sole surviving adult mage, acting under the influence of the gods, had magically blood-bound the servants to their Nightkeeper lineages, creating the winikin. Or so the story went. The upshot was that the winikin were fiercely loyal to their blood-bound charges. They acted partly as the Nightkeepers’ protectors, partly as their servants, and almost always as the little nagging voices on their shoulders.

  Carlos, who on the king’s request had transferred responsibility for his original Nightkeeper charge to his daughter and taken over as Nate’s winikin when the Nightkeepers had been reunited seven months earlier, was an Olympic-level nagger. Worse, he had ambitions. He was jonesing for Nate to follow in the footsteps of his father, Two-Hawk, and become an adviser to the king. The winikin just didn’t get why that wasn’t going to happen . . . i.e., because Nate had no intention of getting in any deeper than he absolutely had to. Hell, he’d volunteered to go get the statuette only because he’d needed some distance from all of the destiny shit, and a chance to get away from the stress of trying to be a Nightkeeper while running Hawk Enterprises long-distance. And he’d needed to put some serious miles between him and Alexis after the way things had ended between them.

  Besides, he’d figured it’d be an easy deal: Fly out, buy the statuette off the old lady, and fly home.

  That’d worked well. Not.

  Nate, who kept score in his head, like any good gamer, figured that if he called the Nightkeepers’ first big fight with the Banol Kax level one of the battle, then they had more or less won their way through when they’d banded together during the previous fall’s equinox and driven the demon Zipacna back through the barrier to Xibalba, where he belonged. Which meant they were on to level two now, and the bad guys had scored the first hit when they’d snagged the demon prophecy out from under Nate’s nose.

  “Edna Hopkins is dead and the statuette’s gone,” Nate told Carlos, his voice clipped. “Someone—or something—got here ahead of me.”

  Which was not good news, because it meant they’d been wrong in thinking that the lack of activity at the intersection during the winter solstice had meant the Banol Kax had fallen back to regroup. The demons must’ve sent something through the barrier after all, though gods only knew how they’d done it. The sole transit point between the earth, sky, and underworld was the sacred chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, and sure as shit nothing had come through there. The Nightkeepers had been there, waiting.

  Which probably meant the demons had managed to punch through the barrier and convince an evil-souled human host to undergo the makol ritual, as they had done at least twice the prior fall. The makol, who could be identified by their luminous green eyes, retained their human intelligence and free will in direct relation to their degree of evilness and willingness to be possessed. Maybe the demons had created one or more makol during the winter solstice and sent them after the statuette. But why now? And why had they left the body untouched?

  “Are you safe?” Carlos asked, though they both knew the question was more protocol than real concern.

  “Yeah. Whoever or whatever killed her is long gone.”

  “Was she sacrificed?”

  “She’s intact.” Which had Nate seriously on edge. The dark magic of Xibalba was largely powered by the blood sacrifice of unwilling victims. If makol had taken the statue and killed Edna Hopkins, they would’ve taken her head and heart, too, as those were the seats of power. Yet there hadn’t been a mark on her, and she’d looked peaceful rather than terrified. Which meant . . . Hell, he didn’t know what it meant, and the discrepancy had him rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, where the hairs at his nape were doing a shimmy. “Don’t let anyone else leave the compound until I get back, okay? I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Skywatch was protected by a blood ward that had been set in the 1920s by the willing sacrifice of two senior Nightkeepers, and was reinforced by regular ceremonial autolettings by the resident magi. The ward meant the training compound was impenetrable to all but the strongest of the underworld denizens. If the Nightkeepers stayed put they’d be safe from Edna Hopkins’s killer, buying them time to identify the threat and figure out how to neutralize it.

  Strike and the others might be willing to follow prophecies carved in stone temples. Nate preferred legwork, strategy, and firepower.

  But Carlos was silent for too long. That, combined with the tickle at the back of Nate’s neck, warned him there was a problem even before the winikin said, “Miss Alexis left last night for an estate auction in Monterey.”

  Nate’s gut clenched and his voice went deadly chill. “And you’re only just telling me this now?”

  “You’ve made it clear that she isn’t your concern.” There was an edge to the winikin’s voice, coming from Nate’s refusal to buy into the whole gods-given-mate thing.

  Screw refusing to buy in; he was actively fighting it. He respected Alexis, and yeah, they’d clicked physically—hell, the sex had been scorching. But it’d been too much, too fast, at a time when his life had been doing a screeching one-eighty, swerving around a bit and then skidding off into a ditch. If it hadn’t been for the magic and the Nightkeepers, he and Alexis never would’ve met. If they had, odds were that they would’ve felt the spark, acknowledged it, and moved on, because it was godsdamned obvious that while they might have chemistry, they didn’t always like each other.

  Hera, he understood; Alexis, not so much. But that didn’t stop his gut from locking up at the knowledge that she was outside the wards and didn’t have a clue there was a makol or something after the demon prophecies. And if the demon spawn were tracking the artifacts by piggybacking on the Nightkeepers’ investigations, whether by magic or good old-fashioned e-hacking, which was the only way the timing of Edna Hopkins’s death made any sense, then the odds were good that Alexis was going to have company very soon, if she didn’t already.

  Shit. Nate hit the brakes, yanked the rental over to the side of the road, and grated, “Get Strike here. Now.”

  “The king’s ability to teleport isn’t a convenience.”

  “Fuck convenience. Consider this a rescue.”

  In the ornate ballroom of a recently foreclosed estate on the Monterey coast, the auctioneer introduced lot two twelve, a thirteen-hundred-year-old Mayan statuette of the goddess Ixchel. Bidding started at two grand and jumped almost immediately to five. At fifty-five hundred, Alexis caught the spotter’s eye and nodded to bump the bid. Then she leaned back in her folding chair, projecting the calm of a collector.

  It was a lie, of course. The only things she’d ever collected were parking tickets at the Newport Marina. She looked the part, though, in a stylish navy pin-striped pantsuit that nipped in at the waist and pulled a little across the shoulders, thanks to all the hand-to-h
and training she’d gotten in recent months. Her streaky blond hair was caught back in a severe ponytail, tasteful makeup accented her blue eyes and wide mouth, and she wore secondhand designer shoes that put her well over six feet. A top-end bag sat at her feet beside a matching folio, both slightly scuffed around the edges.

  Understated upscale, courtesy of eBay. Her godmother, Izzy, might’ve pushed her into finance rather than fashion, but Alexis had put her love of fabric to good use regardless, calling on it to build an image.

  In her previous life as a private investment consultant, her look had been calculated to reassure her wealthy friends and clients that she belonged among them but wouldn’t compete, wouldn’t upstage. She’d played the part for so long prior to the oh, by the way, you’re a Nightkeeper revelation that it’d been second nature to dress for this gig. But as bidding on the statuette topped sixtyfive hundred and Alexis nodded to bump it to a cool seven grand, she felt a hum of power that had been missing from her old life.

  I have money now, the buzz in her blood said. I deserve to be here.

  It wasn’t her money, not really. But she had carte blanche with the Nightkeeper Fund, and orders not to come home empty-handed.

  “Ma’am?” said a cultured, amplified voice. It was the auctioneer now, not the spotter, which meant the dabblers had dropped out and he had his two or three serious bidders on the hook. “It’s seventy-five hundred dollars to you.”

  She glanced up at the projection screen at the front of the room. It showed a magnification of the statuette, which rested near the auctioneer’s elbow, top-lit on a nest of black cloth. Described in the auction catalog as “a statuette of Ixchel, Mayan goddess of rainbows and fertility, carved from chert, circa A.D. 1100; love poem inscribed in hieroglyphs on base,” the statuette was lovely. The waxy, pale green stone had been carved with deceptive simplicity into the shape of a woman with a large nose and flattened forehead, her conical skull crowned with a rainbow of hair that fell forward as she tipped her head into her hands in repose, or perhaps tears. She sat upon a stone, or maybe an overturned bowl or basket, and that was where the glyphs were carved, curved and fluid and gorgeous like all Mayan writing, which was as much art as a form of communication.