“Anything big going on back there?” he asked casually.
She shook her head. “Nothing really. They’re gearing up for the solstice. Strike’ll pick you and Myrinne up for the day, like we planned.”
The lie was still there. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t going to wait for the solstice, or else the solstice was part of it, but there were already major plans being made . . . without him. Anger flared, hot and hard and feeling like fire. For a second, he thought about yanking down his mental blocks and getting inside her head, looking for what she’d chosen—or been ordered—not to tell him. What is it? he wanted to scream at her. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want me there? But he held it together. Barely.
She looked at him for real, finally, and he didn’t see the lie anymore. It had been there, though. He was sure of it. “Be strong,” she said softly. “Your time will come.”
“Thanks,” he said. But inwardly, he was thinking, What-the-fuck-ever.
“Was there something else?”
He didn’t know if that was a hint, or if she really wanted to know the answer, but either way, he wasn’t in a sharing mood anymore. Maybe he’d hiked over to the ugly castle rather than called because he’d been toying with asking her about the Order of Xibalba and some of the stuff Myrinne had been bringing up lately, sort of get Anna’s take. But now? Forget it.
“Nah. Just wanted to check in with some face time, so you can report back to big brother that I’m behaving myself.”
She smiled, the expression reaching her eyes. “I’ll do that. And, Rabbit?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you.”
Under other circumstances—like if she hadn’t just lied to his face—that might’ve caught him hard. Gods knew he was working his ass off not to fuck up these days. Given the scenario, though, he just faked a smile. “Thanks. Some days, I’m proud of me too.”
But as he headed back across campus, he didn’t know what the hell he was, other than torn. For a change he was doing his damnedest to think through all the possible outcomes and talk to the right people, rather than going off half-cocked and burning up on impact. Literally. But it wasn’t easy to talk things out when he didn’t know who the hell to talk to anymore.
Anna had said time and again that she owed him, but he didn’t trust her not to blab if she thought it was in his best interest. She wasn’t a stickler for the writs, but if it came down to a choice between Rabbit and her brother, Strike was going to win out every time. Same applied to Jox. Michael was a possibility for a go-to guy; he’d gone to the mat for Rabbit the previous winter, when the gods had demanded his execution and Michael had refused. But Rabbit figured he owed the guy big for that one, and wasn’t sure it was kosher to dump something on top of that debt. Besides, although Michael had ruthlessly followed his own path in the beginning, now that he and Sasha were together, his path paralleled the party line more often than not. Which left Rabbit . . . where? Who could he go to when his usual go-to girl was the one he needed to talk about?
A name ghosted through his brain, one he’d long ago told himself to forget, at least in that context. Not that he’d ever actually managed to forget her.
Patience. The youngest of the Nightkeepers, she was only six years older than him, and after Red-Boar’s horrific death, she’d stepped in as his friend, his sister figure, his mother figure, and his first massive crush, all wrapped into one. She and the twins had let him into their lives, made him feel like he had a family, like someone gave a shit whether he woke up each morning, and whether he descended into the same sort of funk his old man had turned into an art form. Brandt had let him in too, but only because Patience had insisted. And after the twins were sent away and the problems in their marriage had gotten more and more obvious, Brandt had wanted less and less to do with him, until the day the shit finally hit the fan: Rabbit had been on guard duty during an op and got distracted, and Patience had paid for it. Terrified, Rabbit had bolted. By the time he’d made it back to Skywatch, he’d had Myrinne with him. He’d meant to apologize to Patience, but somehow that never happened, and then it got to a point where it was too late to apologize, too late to try to fix things.
“Which is why you shouldn’t go there,” Rabbit told himself as he crossed a parking lot and sent a couple of waves at guys who “hey, Pyro’d” him.
But deep down inside him, a voice was saying, Why not go there? It’d been a while since he and Patience had been tight, but she had an open, generous heart. She might be willing to forgive him for being an asshole. More, although she was loyal to the Nightkeeper cause, she wasn’t too keen on Strike, who still wouldn’t tell her where the twins were hidden. It was for their own good to stay incognito with their winikin, it was true. But still . . . not letting her see her kids for going on a year now? That was harsh. Rabbit figured that’d make her likely to keep her own counsel rather than run straight to the king if she thought he was in danger of making yet another Rabbit-size mistake.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the better it sounded. Or was he talking himself into something stupid? Gods knew it wouldn’t be the first time. But it wasn’t like he could ask Myrinne her opinion. Yeah, that’d be smooth: Hey, babe. I’m not sure whether I like where you’re going with this whole “You should look into the other half of your heritage, because your old man might’ve been a real son of a bitch, but he doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would’ve slept with the enemy. So maybe the Xibalbans aren’t inherently bad. Maybe Iago is an outlier with his own agenda, and the Xibalbans themselves could prove to be allies instead of enemies.” Which sounds good when you say it, but feels pretty cracked when I think about it on my own . . . so I was wondering what you thought about me hooking back up with Patience to talk about it. Yeah, Myr would just love that. Not only was she big into the idea of him doing his own thing, whether or not it coincided with the Nightkeepers’ paradigms, but she and Patience didn’t get along. At all.
Still, before he was really aware that he’d made the decision, he had detoured off the track leading off campus to his and Myrinne’s summer sublet, and parked his ass on a cement ledge that was part of the so-called landscaping at UT—which, to his largely New England-raised self was more land-pouring than landscaping, and suffered from a definite lack of green. But regardless, it was a place to park ass while he dug out his cell phone. Then, not letting himself think it through any further, because thinking hadn’t gotten him real far yet in this particular case, he punched in the number for Patience’s private cell.
When it started ringing, he had a fleeting thought that she might’ve changed the number by now, or ditched the phone entirely. He was so expecting to hear a recorded voice tell him the line was no longer in service that when she answered with a breathless, anticipatory whisper of, “Yes, yes, I’m here,” he went mute for a second.
It was a second too long.
“Hello?” she said, her tone going from hushed excitement to dread in an instant. “Hannah? Woody?” Her words tumbled over one another, the way they did when her brain started bounding ahead, cascading from one thought to the next. “Oh, gods. There’s something wrong. What is it? What’s wrong? Where are you? What—”
“Stop!” Rabbit interrupted. “Just stop.” Shit. She’d kept the phone as a secret line of communication to the winikin guarding her sons, and must’ve forgotten he had the number. Now she was heading toward full-on panic mode.
Before he could get into an explanation, she snapped in a horror- laced voice, “Who are you? How did you get this number? If you’ve done anything to my babies, I’ll—”
“Patience!” He did the interrupting thing again, this time rushing on to say, “It’s Rabbit. It’s Rabbit. Do you hear me? It’s not Hannah or Wood, or one of the rats.” He’d called the twins his rug rats, back when they’d been his miniature tagalongs. When she didn’t say anything, just gave a strangled sob, he moderated his tone. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you. I just . . . I need so
meone to talk to.” Now it was his turn to babble a little when there was silence on the other end of the line. “I wanted to . . . Shit. I wanted to talk to you about Myrinne and me, about how she says stuff that makes sense at first, but . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t always mesh with what Jox and those guys taught me. And how am I supposed to know who to trust, who to believe?” When she still hadn’t said anything, to interrupt or otherwise, he started thinking she’d already hung up. “Shit,” he said again, in case she was still on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you like this. And I’m sorry about back then, at the museum. I was a total dickwad, and you got hurt because of it, and then I screwed up by taking off. Now I’ve made it worse. But I’ll hang up now, and I’ll lose this number. You don’t have to worry about me calling again.”
He wasn’t really breathing as he lowered the phone, trying not to think of how crappy he’d just made her feel, how terrified she must’ve been. All because he’d dialed before he thought it through. Another fuckup. Seriously, how could one guy screw things up as consistently as he did? It was a godsdamned talent—that was what it was.
Halfway wondering what the forearm mark for “incurable fuckup” would look like, he moved to end the call and delete the number. Before he got there, though, he heard the thin thread of a tear- laced voice say, “Don’t hang up.”
The phone shook slightly as he lifted it to his ear again. “I’m—” His throat closed on the words. He had to swallow hard before he could continue. “I’m still here.”
“So am I.”
The three simple words unlocked a hard, hot torrent of grief. It slapped through him, flailed at him, accused him of all his past sins and more. Then it faded, leaving him clutching the phone, hunching his body around it in full sight of numerous classmates who’d only recently decided he was supercool. He wasn’t feeling cool now, though. He was sweating greasily down his spine. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and this time he wasn’t just talking about scaring her with the call. “I’m so godsdamned sorry.”
“Me too.”
Only two words this time, but they spun through him like sunlight—real, warm yellow sunlight, not the orange shit currently beating down on him. The crushing pressure on his lungs eased, and he could breathe again. His heart could beat again, when he hadn’t been aware of it bumping off rhythm. “How . . . how are you?” He wasn’t sure he had the right to ask, but couldn’t not ask.
“I’m . . .” She blew out a breath. “I’m doing my duty.”
“Yeah. I’m starting to figure that one out myself.”
“I’ve heard you’re doing a good job of it.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not. The word on the street—or at least in the great room and out by the picnic tables—is that our boy has grown up, and he’s looking more like a mage and a man than a punk-ass juvie these days.”
“Then why am I still here? Why hasn’t he—” Hearing the potential for a whine, Rabbit broke off. “Never mind.”
But Patience answered, “Because he’s got a shit-ton on his plate, and he’s had to out-of-sight-out-of-mind a few people and problems that he just can’t deal with right now.” There was no need to clarify who he was. In a way, Strike held both of them hostage.
“Which am I—a person or a problem?”
“A person. Definitely a person. He loves you; don’t think any different. But you scare him too. He isn’t sure how powerful you really are, and what you’re going to be able to do when your magic matures fully.”
I don’t blame him, Rabbit thought, but didn’t say. Hell, he scared himself some days, when he could feel the magic rising up inside him, banging against the filters and demanding to be let out. When that happened, his body temp spiked, his muscles and joints hurt like hell, and he felt somehow old. Sometimes it lasted a few minutes, sometimes a few hours. Once, it’d been two days before he’d felt like himself again; he’d stayed in bed, claimed to have the flu, and kind of liked how Myr had fussed over him, saying his aura was all jacked up. When he’d gotten back on his feet, he hadn’t much liked what he’d looked like in the mirror—all hollow eyed and drawn—but that’d gone away eventually. Since then, the magic had been quiet. Oddly, that hadn’t made him feel any better—which was part of why he was jonesing to get back to Skywatch, where he could get behind the wards, drop his mental shields, and see what was doing with his magic. Not that he’d told Strike any of that; he hadn’t told anyone.
As though he’d responded—or maybe she was following her own inner dialogue?—Patience said thoughtfully, “No, you’re a person to him, as are the twins. The problem I was talking about is Snake Mendez. . . . He’s one of us, but he’s not, you know? And Strike’s dealing with him by not dealing.”
“I guess.” Mendez was a full-blood Nightkeeper, but the winikin who’d saved and raised him hadn’t been the most mentally stable of guardians, and Mendez had gone way off the reservation. More, he’d found the magic on his own, just like Strike and Patience had. Except that Mendez was a hard-ass, and it sounded like he hung way too close to the dark side of the Force. He’d gotten hauled in by some bounty hunter, tossed in the slammer, and had stayed there nearly two years so far: eighteen months on the original sentence, then six more for attacking another inmate. Rabbit was pretty sure that Strike—or, more likely, Jox—had made sure Mendez had stayed put. Out of sight, out of mind, indeed. “He must be thinking that jail’s one of the safest places to keep a guy like that, at least until we get into the library and figure out some of what’s coming next.”
“Don’t count on the library. It looks like that’s not going to be the answer we’d hoped.” She gave him a quick rundown of Lucius’s latest attempt to breach the barrier, surprising Rabbit, who hadn’t realized Jade had left the university, or that there was any sort of experiment planned. And oh, holy shit on the sun god being trapped in Xibalba, with a rescue needed within T minus seven days and counting. Was that what Anna had been hiding? Maybe, maybe not, he thought, trying to keep up as Patience bounced from one thought to the next, more talking at him than with him, chattering fast, as though she feared he’d cut her off if she slowed down. “But back to Mendez. I’ve been thinking—what if Strike’s wrong about him? What if we’re blindly accepting what the king’s telling us because, well, he’s the king?”
Rabbit zeroed back in on the convo, as what Patience was saying suddenly started to parallel some of what Myrinne had been telling him for the past few weeks. “The jaguars have a rep for being stubborn,” he said carefully.
“Yes!” she said, excited now. “And who’s to say there’s really only one way to accomplish a goal, right? I’m not saying he’s wrong, and I’m not talking treason. I’m just wondering if sometimes maybe we’re too quick to follow the writs. This is the third millennium. Maybe it’s time to . . . update, I guess.”
Rabbit wasn’t so sure he was tracking her anymore, and the greasy sweat that had prickled his back only moments earlier had gone cold, sending a chill down his spine. “That’s kind of why I wanted to talk to you. Myrinne and I have been . . . I don’t know . . . discussing a few things . . . and I wanted a reality check from someone I trust, and who won’t—”
“Shit,” Patience hissed as an aside. “Damn it!”
He sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?”
“Brandt’s coming, and he doesn’t know I still have this phone. I’ve got to go, but I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“But—”
“Sorry, sorry. I know you called to talk about you, and I babbled about me. But don’t you see? You already know the answer; you’re just looking for someone else to say it first. So, okay, I will. If you love her, then you need to trust her, and you’ve got to put her above everyone else in your life.”
“But the writs—”
“Are more than three thousand years old. And Strike’s doing the best he possibly can, but he’s a man, not a god. With the skyroad closed, he
’s feeling his way just like we are. Who’s to say he’s right about everything?”
“I—”
“Gotta go,” she said. “But do yourself a favor, and don’t let other people’s agendas screw up a good relationship.” Her voice descended to a whisper on the last word, and then the line went dead.
Rabbit sat for a few minutes, while the world came back into focus around him. He was dimly surprised to see that he was still at the university, that nothing around him had changed. Students passed him, heading from point A to point B and vice versa with varying degrees of urgency, yet no clue that they were practically on borrowed time unless the Nightkeepers figured out how to get Kinich Ahau back where he belonged, without the promise of help from the library.
Anger stirred again, though more sluggish this time. Why hadn’t Anna—and presumably Strike—wanted him to know about what was going on? Why were they distancing him from the fight just when he was starting to prove his commitment to the cause by keeping his nose clean?
“Shit. I don’t know.” But he couldn’t get Patience’s parting words out of his head. Don’t let other people’s agendas screw up a good relationship. Was that what he was doing? Maybe. If he hadn’t yet, he was definitely in danger of it. Hell, he’d just gone behind Myr’s back with Patience, whom he knew she couldn’t stand.
Damn it.
“Hey,” a voice said from a few feet away. “Everything okay?”
He looked up and for a second wasn’t sure if she was really there or if he’d imagined her. Surely he’d projected the perfect symmetry of her face, with those long lashes and big, dark brown eyes, narrow-bridged nose, and full, sassy mouth? Then she raised one dark eyebrow in question, and became a flesh-and-blood fantasy of long legs and toned arms and tanned skin bared beneath boy shorts and a tight tank, even though it wasn’t that warm out yet. He was suddenly warm, though, as a flush of mingled unease and lust rattled through him.
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 14
