Moving deeper into the gloom with the others breathing down his neck, he paused when he caught a hint of motion in his peripheral vision, there and gone so quickly he might’ve missed it if he hadn’t been watching. “Mistress Truth?” he called softly.
“Keep coming,” a deep, yet feminine voice responded from up ahead, which meant she hadn’t been the source of the motion he’d seen. Filing that, he did as he was told, passing the last row of bookcases and stepping into a space that was at once both open and deeply shadowed, and appeared empty.
“You want the knife.” One of the shadows moved, taking on the form of a dark-haired woman wearing a hooded black cape over a purple velour tracksuit. She was average height, average weight, with regular features that weren’t particularly noteworthy until he got to her eyes, which were dark and intense, and sent a nasty twitch through his gut. Don’t turn your back on this one, said his warrior’s mark, or his own gut instincts. Maybe both.
“We brought cash,” he said, wanting the deal done and them out of there. “Where’s the knife?”
“Here.” She withdrew the weapon from a pocket of her robe, balanced it on her palm, and held it to the light.
At the sight of it, something inside Nate went still. The ancient artifact was polished black obsidian, carved from a single piece of stone. The blade was maybe nine inches long, the haft slightly shorter, and carved with a repeating motif he didn’t recognize, at least not consciously. Something inside him recognized it, though, and the recognition brought a surge of possessiveness. He had an obsessive, overwhelming urge to reach out and grab the thing, but held himself back, remembering what’d happened when Alexis touched the Ixchel statuette.
Even as he did so, a burn of satisfaction raced through him. They’d gotten there in time. The Xibalban—or whatever the hell he was—hadn’t beaten them to the knife.
“Looks good,” Alexis said, moving up to face the self-proclaimed witch. “I believe we agreed on twenty grand?”
The corners of Mistress Truth’s mouth turned up. “Technically you offered twenty and I said I’d think about it.”
“You also agreed to give us right of first refusal,” Alexis added pleasantly, but with a thread of steel in the words.
“Did I?”
“You know you did.” Alexis’s voice went cool, and Nate got a really bad feeling, really quick.
Mistress Truth lifted a shoulder. “Maybe that was before I knew there was another interested party.”
Shit, Nate thought, and would’ve moved forward if Alexis hadn’t waved him back. “We’ll double the offer,” she said.
The older woman’s eyes glinted with avarice. “He offered fifty.”
“Then we’ll give you a hundred,” Alexis retorted without missing a beat. “Here and now, and let’s get it done.”
Mistress Truth pursed her lips. “Let me think about it.”
Which Nate knew really meant, Let me call the big redheaded guy for a counteroffer, which so wasn’t an option—not because Nate cared what they paid for the thing, but because he had no intention of losing to Red again.
Which begged the question of why the other mage wasn’t there already. He’d already shown that he could ’port. Why hadn’t he just zapped in and grabbed the knife?
Well, he hadn’t, so that gave them an opportunity they couldn’t afford to walk away from. Nate shifted to his left, then caught Rabbit’s eye and gave the kid a little nod, sending him a few steps to his right, so they were flanking the wannabe witch.
He was just about to move in when Alexis said, “My offer expires in two hours.” She turned away, headed back toward the light. “Come on, guys.” She walked out, leaving the room’s single exit wide-open.
Mistress Truth looked straight at Nate and smirked. “You three should really get on the same page, you know.”
Having lost the element of surprise—and not sure he’d ever really had it—Nate followed Alexis out, with Rabbit at his heels. Nate crowded close to her and hissed, “What the hell was that?”
“It’s called a strategic retreat. And you’re not the negotiator here.”
“Fuck negotiating,” he said succinctly. “We should grab the knife, leave the cash, and get the hell out of here.”
Her eyes went cool. “We don’t all have the same set of flexible ethics as you, Nathan. And we can’t hold ourselves out as the saviors of mankind if we run around acting like street thugs.” She said the last very softly, letting him know that she too knew they were being watched. But if she was sharp enough to catch the furtive movement in the shadows, how could she not see that they were setting themselves up for disaster by leaving now?
Unless that was what she wanted to have happen.
Suddenly convinced there was something else going on here, something he wasn’t aware of, Nate growled, “Exactly what the hell are you up to?”
“Later,” she said as they moved from the bookcase labyrinth to the front of the store. She indicated the door. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
But when they hit the street, Rabbit wasn’t with them. Nate cursed under his breath and was just about to go back in when the kid came through the door with a strange look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” Nate demanded.
Expression blanking, the teen shrugged. “Nothing. I thought I saw . . . nothing. I’ll take first watch.” He turned away, heading across the street to a nearby bakery as though the only thing on his mind were chowing a couple of beignets, not setting up a surveillance post that faced the tea shop.
Alexis watched him go. “Creepy kid,” she said after a moment.
“Why?” Nate snapped, irritated. “Because he’s a half-blood? Watch it, princess, your winikin’s showing.”
Her eyebrows climbed. “What’s up your ass?”
You, he wanted to say. The witch. The ersatz Xibalban. All of it. The entire setup stank, just like Edna Hopkins’s cottage had. His blood buzzed with anger, with impatience. He wanted that knife, hated that they’d just walked away from it, and resented his growing suspicion that Alexis had an agenda he hadn’t known about. How the hell was he supposed to watch her back if he didn’t know the whole plan? “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”
“It’s an experiment.” She paused, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, gauging his response when she whispered almost soundlessly, “Strike thinks Rabbit’s mother was Xibalban. He wants to know if he reacts to the redhead’s magic.”
Stifling his first response, which involved the words fuck and me, Nate snarled, “So this isn’t just a recovery mission; it’s a science-fair project? Jesus, what kind of prioritization is that? Strike’s off his rocker.”
“We need information,” she said, but avoided his eyes.
Shit. This wasn’t the king’s plan. It was hers, or maybe a bit of both. “What are you doing, Alexis?” Nate kept his voice low, but reached out and took her hand, feeling a buzz of contact that was a potent mix of sex, magic, and memory. He hung on when she would’ve pulled away, and said softly, “Talk to me.”
She lifted her chin. “Consider this an extended job interview.”
“You’re not going to earn the king’s trust by being stupid,” Nate said, letting go of her hand because he wanted to keep holding on. “Think it through. We go back in there, steal the knife, and bring it back to Skywatch. Mission accomplished. What more could Strike ask?”
“That’s the sort of thought process that got you thrown in jail, isn’t it?”
The universe went very still. “Don’t go there.”
Something flickered in her eyes—regret, maybe, or nerves—but it was quickly gone, leaving coolness behind. “Sorry,” she said, sounding unrepentant. “The point is that I’m not going to get what I want by doing the minimum. I have to prove that I’m ready for more, that I’m ambitious and aggressive.”
“That sounds like something Izzy would say.”
“I’m saying it,” she re
plied evenly, but then her expression softened. “Look, I know you want to follow your own path; I get that, and I’m not asking you to buy into something you don’t believe in. But the thing is, I do believe in fate and destiny, and I’d be honored to follow my mother into an advisory position. I’d appreciate it if you’d help me out.”
Translation: You owe me. And the thing was, Nate realized, maybe he did. He’d slept with her when the pretransition hornies had hit him hard, and he’d broken it off when the urges waned. In reality there’d been more to it—a whole shit-ton more—but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that he’d used her when he’d needed to get his rocks off and dumped her when the mating urge leveled out. So yeah, he probably did owe her. And if the payback was him helping her impress the king by getting both the knife and an idea of whether Rabbit’s magic reacted to the redheaded mage, then so be it.
“Okay.” He nodded. “Fine. I’m in.” He still thought it was a piss-poor idea. But he also knew her well enough to figure she’d try it with or without his help. “Come on. I guess we watch and wait.”
He headed for the coffee shop where Rabbit had disappeared to, and he didn’t look back.
In the small café, Nate and Alexis sat together at a table so small that their knees bumped beneath it, while Rabbit sulked at a stool by the window, shoveling in calories at a rate of about a thousand a minute, in the form of beignets, lemon squares, and coffee-laced hot chocolate. All three of them had decent views of the alley that ran around the back of Mistress Truth’s shop, leading to the rear exit. If anyone came or went from the tea shop, they’d see.
The waiting, Alexis soon found, was the hardest part. Or rather, waiting with Nate was, because he was crowding her, getting inside her space, under her skin. And he wasn’t even trying to, damn him.
Her dream-vision of the two of them making love in the underground temple had undone the four months’ worth of forgive-and-forget she’d managed to build up since their relationship ended. She wanted to scratch at him for dumping her, for not remembering what her gut told her actually had happened between them in the stone chamber. At the same time, she wanted to be skin-on-skin with him, wanted to ride him, race him, roll with him like they’d done before, when they’d packed more than her prior lifetime of sex into a couple of short months that’d ended long before she was ready.
And she wanted, more than anything, to get a grip on herself.
The writs said that what had happened before would happen again, and boy, was that the truth. As hard as she’d tried to do otherwise, she’d put herself right back where she’d been too many times before—dealing with an ex on a daily basis and having to pretend it was no big deal. Before, it’d been her clients, wealthy men who had wanted her for her business acumen as much as for her body, and had generally been bored with her body long before they were finished with her stock tips. When she’d broken up with Aaron after catching him below-decks on his yacht with a bimbo twofer, she’d vowed to do better the next time.
Yeah, that worked, she thought, glancing at Nate, only to find him looking back at her. Their eyes connected, and the punch of remembered heat was tempered with a twist of regret. Maybe it was the magic of the coming eclipse, which was thinning the barrier and strengthening the sexual pull that’d been there from the beginning. Or maybe it was their close proximity, or the vision. Whatever the reason, even though she and Nate were sitting still, unspeaking, she suddenly felt naked beneath his gaze. Vulnerable.
Excited.
Damn it.
“There,” he said suddenly, leaning forward. “In the shop. Something’s happening.”
They rose and moved to flank Rabbit’s vantage point at the front of the coffee shop. There was motion inside Mistress Truth’s place: blinds being drawn, and a pair of shadows moving behind them, backlit by a glow of warm illumination that was too steady to be candlelight, too dim to be the shop’s fluorescents. The quick February dusk had fallen, showing the figures clearly—one was Mistress Truth, the other far too small to be the big redheaded man. “Two shadows,” Nate said. “The witch and whoever else was in there watching us.”
Alexis shot him a quick look. She’d thought she’d been imagining the sensation of being watched. Apparently not.
“I saw her,” Rabbit said, “I think.” At Nate’s look, he elaborated, “My age, maybe a year or two older. Thin, dark hair, black eye.”
Alexis asked, “As in she had dark eyes, or she had a shiner?”
“A shiner. Looked like someone clocked her good.” The teen shifted on his stool, shrugging restlessly inside his clothes.
Maybe the caffeine was catching up with him. Or maybe it was something else, Alexis thought as she caught a buzz of power off him, a whiff of smoke. Oh, hell, she thought, looking past the teen and catching Nate’s eye. Her stomach dropped when he nodded that he’d sensed it, too.
The kid was jacked in and jacked up, and far too twitchy for his own good. Typically hair-trigger on a good day, Rabbit was wired to blow. He must’ve been more excited than she’d thought about the prospect of some action. Or else it really was the caffeine—who the hell knew with his powers?
The king had ordered her to keep Rabbit safe first and foremost. Learning more about his magic was secondary. Which meant she so wasn’t putting him in front of the Xibalban now. Not like this. The kid was a loose cannon leaking way more power than he ought to be. Add that to the hormonal explosives that came with being eighteen and having aY chromosome, and bad things could happen way too easily.
“Hey.” Nate put a hand on the teen’s shoulder. “Take a deep breath and chill.”
Rabbit practically exploded off the stool, shooting backward and landing in a defensive crouch. “Don’t,” he said on a whistle of breath, “touch me.” He stood there for a second, ribs heaving, then looked around and went brick red when he realized he’d quickly become the center of attention in the café, and a couple of big dudes in the coffee line were looking like they were thinking about getting involved.
“We’re cool,” Nate said, holding both hands up in a gesture of no harm, no foul.
“Yeah.” Rabbit sent the would-be Good Samaritans a filthy look as he slouched back onto his stool. “Nothing to see here.”
“Sorry for the commotion,” Alexis put in, and waited until most everyone had gone back to their own business before she glanced over at the teen. “You need to work on your blocks if you’re pulling this much power already. The eclipse isn’t for another forty-eight hours.”
“The witch is leaving,” Nate said quietly.
Alexis looked over in time to see Mistress Truth hustling through the front door of the tea shop, wearing a big purple jacket over the same purple tracksuit she’d had on earlier. Bracing herself for a fight, Alexis said, “Rabbit, listen—”
“I think I should stay here,” he interrupted, then swallowed hard. His voice was shaky, his color was off, and heat crinkled in the air around him. “I’m not feeling so good. I’ll wait here until you get back, maybe call Strike for a pickup if I start feeling too shitty.”
Which so wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “I . . . uh. Yeah. I think that’d be best.”
“We’ve got to go if we’re going,” Nate said as a dark sedan pulled up in front of the tea shop and Mistress Truth climbed in. “Unless you want to stay here with Rabbit?”
She ought to, she knew. She’d promised to keep him safe. But Rabbit shook his head and waved her off. “Go. I’ll keep out of trouble. Honest.”
As Nate headed out to the street and flagged a cab,
Alexis wavered. Finally she said, “Okay. I’m going to hold you to that.”
Telling herself it was the right call, she bolted after Nate and jumped in the cab. As the vehicle headed through the French Quarter in pursuit of the dark sedan, Nate glanced at her. “You sure he’ll stay put?”
“Yeah. He promised.” Whatever she might think of Rabbit, a Nightkeeper’s word was his bond.
It wasn�
��t until they were a good five minutes down the road that she realized that Rabbit had said honest . . . but he hadn’t actually promised her a damn thing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After Rabbit watched Nate and Alexis get in a taxi and do the “follow that limo” thing, he waited ten minutes or so, in case Mistress Truth circled the block to check on the tea shop before driving on. It was what he would’ve done in her place . . . especially since he was almost positive she’d left the knife behind.
He wasn’t sure why the others hadn’t noticed her lack of a power signature—maybe they hadn’t seen the rippling magic coming off the knife in the first place? Either way, he was glad to be rid of them, because he badly wanted to get back inside that shop. There was something in there calling to him: maybe the knife, and yeah, maybe the girl. Either way, he’d played it right and the coast was as clear as it was likely to get.
It was pretty much full-on dark by the time he left the coffee shop and headed across the street, though dark was a relative term given the frenetic lighting of the French Quarter. Already bodies were piling up in the jazz club four doors down from the tea shop. The music and the crowd had spilled out into the street, but to Rabbit the partying seemed tinged with desperation, as though the locals were both tired of Mardi Gras and not quite ready to let it be over yet.
He slipped through the crowd unheeded. Thanks to a recent growth spurt, he was close to five-ten now and had finally broken the one-fifty mark. Still, at times like this it was an advantage being small and average-looking. The full-blood Nightkeepers couldn’t blend to save their lives. Rabbit, on the other hand, barely got a look as he wormed his way through. A couple of glances headed his way when he went for the door of the locked-up tea shop, but the interest level faded fast when he made a show of fumbling with a set of keys. Nobody needed to know they were the keys to an ammo locker out at the Skywatch gun range, especially when a quick touch had the lock giving way.
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