Nightkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  There was absolute silence on the other end of the phone.

  Knowing that was all the answer he needed, Brandt closed his eyes for a second, damning himself for never pressing her about her family, for never pushing the conversation they should’ve had years ago, when they’d woken up with their bloodline marks and hidden the truth from each other. ‘‘They’re coming for you,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t pack, don’t ask any questions, just get out of there.’’

  He hung up, trusting that she’d know what to do, and why.

  Patience couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She sure as hell couldn’t move.

  Brandt was a Nightkeeper, too. Holy crap.

  It made a crazy sort of sense, really. He was ridiculously big and handsome, and had always seemed larger than life. And when they’d met on spring break, she’d fallen for him instantly, as if they’d had some sort of karmic connection. They’d met at the ruins of Chichén Itzá and gotten drunk together, only neither of them had remembered drinking that much. Apparently the memory lapse hadn’t been alcohol. It’d been the spring equinox.

  She sank to one of the kitchen chairs, brain spinning as she looked at the marks on her arm. ‘‘Oh, boy,’’ she breathed. ‘‘That’s not a tattoo, is it?’’

  Get out, Brandt’s voice whispered in her head. They’re coming for you.

  Her heart hammered. She’d already decided not to go, decided it wasn’t worth giving up her life for a responsibility she’d never asked for, didn’t feel prepared for. And besides—

  The doorbell rang.

  She bolted to her feet with a shriek. Something sizzled through her blood, feeling like anger, only hotter, headier. Her skin felt too tight and her mouth went dry, and her feet barely touched the floor as she ran from the kitchen into the nursery, where Harry and Braden were asleep in their oversize crib, wearing their footie pj’s with cars on them.

  Or rather, Harry was asleep and Braden was wide-awake, plotting his next mischief. She could tell from the look in his eyes, and the ESP that she’d found had come with motherhood.

  She held a finger to her lips. ‘‘Ssh. Don’t make a sound.’’

  He must’ve realized she was serious, because he didn’t immediately do the opposite of what she asked. Instead, he touched Braden’s shoulder, waking his brother. She got them out of the crib, balancing one on each hip even though, at nearly three, they’d grown too heavy for her to comfortably carry them both. But she stalled at the nursery door.

  Where was she supposed to go?

  The doorbell chimed again, speeding her heart rate even further and making her blood hum in her ears so loud it almost sounded like the wind, only there was no wind inside the house, no wind outside, no wind—

  It wasn’t wind, she realized with a sudden certainty that came straight from her bones. It was power. Her power.

  A flicker of movement caught her peripheral vision. She looked down, and gaped when she saw nothing. Literally nothing. She had disappeared, along with the boys.

  I’m invisible, she thought as shock fisted itself around her throat and squeezed until only a thin trickle of air got through. Impossible. Except it wasn’t impossible. She was a Nightkeeper, wasn’t she?

  ‘‘No. I’m not,’’ she whispered. ‘‘I don’t want to be.’’

  She had other priorities now. Her sons were more important than her being a Nightkeeper and saving the world. She didn’t want the boys used, didn’t want them thrown into an impossible war, didn’t want them orphaned the way she and Brandt had been. Yes, she’d had Hannah and he’d had his godfather, Woodrow, who must’ve been a winikin, as well. But it wasn’t the same, had never been the same as having parents.

  ‘‘You need to be really, really quiet,’’ she whispered to the invisible boys, and thought she felt the warm bundles in her arms nod acquiescence.

  Breathing through her mouth, she tiptoed out of the nursery, listening for any stray sound that could give her away, and hearing nothing. You can do this, she told herself. You can.

  The doorbell was at the front of the house, but there were two other exits—the garage and the back door. She would’ve gone out through the garage, but starting the car would negate the whole invisibility bonus. That left the back.

  A quick glance showed her that the coast was clear. She eased out, juggling the boys and trying not to feel the pull in her right shoulder, which she’d strained during a judo class the week before. She’d head around the side, cut through the Fitches’ backyard and across the next street over. Her friend Joanie lived two blocks down from there. She’d help.

  And by then, Patience figured she was going to need some help. Already the buzzing had decreased, and a heavy pounding had started up in her skull. She didn’t know how much longer she could sustain the now you see me, now you don’t routine. Steps dragging, she started toward the Fitches’ yard, only to backpedal furiously when Hannah appeared from around the front, her brows furrowed.

  Patience’s heart gave an uneven bump at the sight of her godmother’s lovely, scarred face beneath a bright pink scarf. She hated knowing she had to disappoint one of the most important people in her life in order to protect two others. Then again, she hadn’t liked keeping her marriage or babies secret from Hannah, either, talking on disposable cells and finding neutral places to meet a couple of times a year. She’d been living a second life, living a lie, and now it was coming back to bite her in the ass.

  Get moving, she told herself. Just go and don’t look back. Instead, she stood for a moment and watched Hannah, wishing impossible things.

  The winikin moved to the back door and said something unladylike when she found it hanging open. She raised her voice and called, ‘‘She’s gone!’’

  ‘‘Not exactly,’’ a male voice said from directly behind Patience.

  Before she could turn, before she could react, something went pzzzt in her brain and everything turned dark. Strong arms caught her as she fell, bearing her weight and grabbing her sons as they started to struggle and squall.

  ‘‘Easy, boys,’’ the man said, and took them. ‘‘Here. Meet your auntie Hannah.’’

  The last thing Patience heard was the man muttering under his breath, something about half-bloods and idiot neophytes who thought their powers worked on mages. No, she wanted to say. I might be an idiot and I’m definitely a neophyte, but my sons aren’t half-bloods. Their father is a Nightkeeper, too.

  And that was the whole problem, because they were her babies. They weren’t weapons in a war nobody could win.

  Nate Blackhawk considered himself a straightforward guy with straightforward goals. He never wanted to spend another night in jail. He wanted to work for himself. And he wanted to make his first million before he turned forty without being ashamed of how he’d done it.

  But he’d never really wanted to be a hero, or a magician.

  Sure, he’d written games for both. Even Hera, the kick-ass hottie at the heart of his Viking Warrior franchise, could see the future sometimes. But he’d never really pictured himself in the role of sorcerer’s apprentice . . . until the dark-haired guy with the tats had hung him off the roof and left him with a business card and some bruises.

  He’d tried to tell himself it was all part of an elaborate scam, that the guy had somehow found out he was an orphan—not exactly something that was front and center on the Hawk Enterprises home page—and was using that as an in. But that didn’t explain the teleporting trick, and it didn’t explain why the stranger had asked about Nate’s medallion, which was the one thing he possessed that he was pretty sure had come from his parents.

  As the SUV limo bounced its way along the optimistically named Route 57, deep in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, Nate pulled the medallion out from beneath his white button-down and rubbed his thumb across the metal disk, feeling the etched marks that looked like a hawk if you turned the piece one way, a man if you turned it the other.

  He’d had the thing for as long as he could remember. Acc
ording to the records, he’d been wearing it when he’d appeared in the waiting room of the University of Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital at the age of two. He’d been wearing soiled pj’s stained with blood that wasn’t his, he’d had the words ‘‘My name is Nathan Blackhawk’’ written on his forehead in ballpoint pen, and he hadn’t spoken for nearly fourteen months thereafter. For a while, they’d thought he was mute.

  He’d had night terrors regularly until his teens and then sporadically ever since—amorphous dreams of bright red-orange creatures that dripped flame and killed everything around them. The prison therapist had told him the monsters represented his mother, and his anger at her for leaving him alone, but Nate was pretty sure the monsters were just monsters. He didn’t hate his parents. He’d never met them, and if they hadn’t cared enough to keep him, then he didn’t care enough to hate them.

  But that didn’t stop him from being curious about what the stranger had hinted at.

  He’d thought about it for a couple of days, until the bruises had gone from red to purple, and then he’d okayed EmoPunk III—God help him—downloaded the storyboard for Viking Warrior 6: Hera’s Mate—he still wasn’t sure about the hero—and hopped a flight to New Mexico.

  Odds were he’d be back in Denver tomorrow, feeling like a schmuck.

  He hadn’t even called ahead, figuring on a surprise attack. Beside, the guy had left his address, sort of. The card said simply: Rt. 57, Chaco Canyon.

  Now he was thinking the surprise was on him, because 57 was a damn gravel track, and they hadn’t passed a house or cross street in a good ten minutes. There was nothing outside the air-conditioned cabin of the stretch pimp-mobile besides sun, scrub brush, and more sun, with the occasional rock for variety.

  ‘‘Great,’’ he muttered. ‘‘This is a total waste of time.’’ He didn’t tell the driver to about-face, though. Instead, he palmed his handheld and called up a set of graphics, not of the pasty-faced hero his developers had come up with, but of Hera.

  Big, blond, and angular, but with a pixie-delicate face and wide hazel eyes, capable of kicking ass equally well in swordplay and hand-to-hand, she was his queen, the cornerstone of Hawk Enterprises. The guys on his team might tease him about his imaginary girlfriend, but as far as he was concerned she was perfect. She never bitched at him for being a slob, never complained when he slept at his desk. She was always there when he wanted to see her, but disappeared with the touch of a button. Okay, she wasn’t real high on the bed-warmer scale, and he was pretty sure he’d torpedoed his last two relationships because the women hadn’t measured up to the Hera that lived in his mind, but please. He was twenty-six and in no hurry to settle.

  She was out there. He didn’t know why or how he knew that, but he was sure of it. He just hadn’t met her yet.

  ‘‘Here’s something,’’ the driver said through the buzzed-down privacy window as he let the limo roll to a stop. ‘‘Want me to try it?’’

  Off to one side, a two-lane track had been beaten into the prairie, as though a convoy had been through recently. About a half mile ahead of them, it looked like the dirt road twisted down and disappeared. ‘‘Does it head toward the canyon?’’

  ‘‘Seems to.’’

  ‘‘Then let’s go. What’s the worst that could happen?’’

  ‘‘We drive off the road, get stuck, try to walk back, and die miserably of dehydration and sunstroke,’’ the driver offered, but he grinned as he said it, and turned the stretch SUV down the track. ‘‘Hang on.’’

  It wasn’t bad at first, but as they hit the bend in the road and it did, indeed, drop down into Chaco Canyon, Nate gave up his dignity, strapped on his seat belt, and clung to the armrests as the vehicle bounced and shuddered all the way to the bottom.

  When they turned the final corner, the driver let up on the gas. ‘‘Well, hell.’’

  Something twisted in Nate’s gut at the sight of the buildings scattered in a small box canyon about a quarter of a mile farther up. ‘‘I guess this is it.’’

  It looked like a construction site at first, with tri-axle dumps raising big dust clouds and double crews working on high scaffolds, securing the roof of a huge steel-span building off to one side. But as they got closer he realized it was a mix of old and new buildings, some under construction, with a patch of blackened earth the size of a football field and a huge tree that seemed utterly out of place. There were other structures in the rear that he couldn’t quite make out, and the whole thing was fronted by a new-looking masonry wall that ran from one side of the box canyon to the other.

  The gates were wide-open, though, and the driver rolled him right up to the front door of the main house, which was more mansion than house, three stories of pale pink-and-gray limestone, with trim that practically vibrated shiny white from a new coat of paint.

  After they’d sat there for a moment, the driver looked at him. ‘‘You getting out?’’

  Yes. No. He didn’t know. Shit.

  Nate didn’t consider himself a weenie, but this so wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but this wasn’t it.

  He took a deep breath and reminded himself he’d planted a time-delayed e-mail in the system back at work, ready to drop a mayday in a couple of hours if he didn’t delete it. ‘‘Yeah, I’m getting out.’’ He left his laptop and bags in the car, though. ‘‘Give me fifteen minutes to check out the situation and I’ll let you know if I’m staying or not.’’

  Then the front door of the mansion opened and his heart stopped for a second, then started up again, hammering in his ears so loud he could barely think. ‘‘Scratch that,’’ he said, fumbling for his bags. ‘‘I’m staying.’’

  Hera stood in the doorway.

  Alexis held her ground as the newcomer strode toward her, his long legs eating up the distance that separated them, his eyes fixed on her. She recognized the look; ten bucks said he was going to invite her for a ride in his mine’s-bigger-than-yours chauffeur-driven dick-mobile.

  Instead, he climbed the marble steps, stopped a few feet away from her, and didn’t say a word. He just looked at her.

  A shimmer of awareness worked its way across her skin, sliding along her nerve endings and whispering something she couldn’t hear. She rubbed her arms, which were bare beneath a cap-sleeved T-shirt, brushing away the sensation.

  Sure, he was just her type—wealthy and slick in his Armani suit and trendy, heavy-framed glasses, bigger than her by a good four inches in all directions, and no-holds -barred masculine, with his dark hair slicked back and a layer of stubble on his jaw. But that was the problem—he was just her type, and as her recent nonrelationship with Aaron the Worthless Prick proved, the men that were her type tended to be spoiled, arrogant brats who should’ve been spanked more when they were young.

  And no, she wasn’t volunteering to fix that now. So she narrowed her eyes into a don’t even think it glare. ‘‘Can I help you?’’

  He blinked as though that was entirely not what he’d expected her to say. Recovering, he two-fingered a card out of his pocket and held it out. ‘‘Guy teleported me onto a roof, hung me over the side, then told me to come here if I wanted to learn more.’’

  ‘‘No kidding?’’ She glanced at the card. ‘‘Then you’ve already seen more of the magic than I have, and I’ve already been here a few days.’’ She waved him in. ‘‘We’re in the middle of Magic 101.’’ As an afterthought, she stuck out a hand. ‘‘I’m Alexis Gray. Smoke bloodline. ’’

  He took her hand. His grip was warm and firm, but he’d started to look a little thin around the edges, like he was going into overload. ‘‘Nate Blackhawk. What’s a bloodline?’’

  She cocked her head. ‘‘Didn’t your winikin explain all this shit as you were growing up? The whole Nightkeepers-save -the-world-from-the-2012-apocalypse thing?’’

  ‘‘Winikin?’’ No doubt about it, he’d gone gray.

  ‘‘Oh, shit,’’ she said, making the connection to a con
vo she’d overheard between Izzy and one of the other winikin . ‘‘You’re Carlos’s orphan, aren’t you?’’ When his bags hit the deck and his knees started to buckle, she jammed her shoulder into his armpit and shouted, ‘‘Need a little help here!’’

  But she was too late. They were both headed for the floor.

  Once they got Blackhawk back on his feet and looking more or less steady, Strike herded the trainees back into the sunken great room at the center of the mansion.

  ‘‘Okay. Moving on.’’ He glanced at Blackhawk, who was looking seriously shell-shocked. ‘‘We went over the writs and the thirteen prophecies yesterday. Maybe Alexis can fill you in on that stuff later.’’ He chose her partly because Izzy had given her a strong foundation in Nightkeeper history and partly because Blackhawk was trying way too hard not to stare at her.

  Strike wasn’t interested in making a match of his own, but Jox was right—they were going to need the Nightkeepers to pair up.

  ‘‘We were talking about the barrier,’’ he said to the group. ‘‘Think of it as an energy field that you can use in a bunch of different ways. Once you’ve been through both the binding and talent ceremonies you’ll be able to uplink, tapping the barrier for the power to perform spells. You can do that pretty much whenever, as long as you’ve got enough physical energy to sustain the uplink. During the astral conjunctions—the solstice and equinox and so forth—you’ll be able to jack in and send your incorporeal form into the barrier itself. In extreme cases, with the strongest of magic and sacrifice, you may be able to punch all the way through the barrier.’’

  Alexis nodded. ‘‘Like for the transition spell.’’

  Sven elbowed her. ‘‘Suckup.’’

  ‘‘Burnout,’’ she fired back.

  ‘‘Anyway,’’ Strike said, raising his voice to drown them out. ‘‘Alexis is correct—a Nightkeeper can sometimes punch through the barrier using a transition spell—in theory, anyway. Now that we’re in the final five years of the countdown to zero date, on rare occasions— like the solstice or equinox—it should be possible for a god to travel the skyroad connecting the heavens and earth, in order to enter a female Nightkeeper. When that happens, she’ll becomes what’s called a Godkeeper, and she’ll be able to wield some—or all—of the god’s power with the help of her jun tan mate.’’