Except, perhaps, some hope. And she owed them that.
Thinking fast, she looked over at Lucius. “You can translate carvings, right?”
He looked startled at first; then his eyes took on a gleam of interest. He nodded. “Definitely.” Glancing outside to where the dusk was still a few hours off, he said, “It’ll have to wait a little if you’re talking starscript, though.”
“No, regular glyphs. I want you to sit down with the Ixchel statuette—Jade can get it for you out of archive lockup. See what you can make of the plain carved text. The auction house had translated the writing on the piece I bought and said it was a love poem, nothing spectacular. But maybe it’ll take on a new meaning once it’s read in its entirety, with the other piece. Maybe it’ll give us a clue how to fight Camazotz or find the Volatile.”
Or not, but it was something to try, anyway, something she’d only just now thought of, and wondered why they hadn’t tried it before. But that wasn’t fair, either. They were playing catchup to Iago, trying to map out the next few years without nearly enough information. It was a start, though. In the absence of any other semibrilliant ideas, Alexis didn’t bother trying to order any of the others around, because she figured they were all grown-ups, and she wasn’t much in the way of a leader. But as they dispersed, Patience, Sven, and Brandt to sleep off their exertions, the others to various tasks, she got a nod here, a “way to go” there.
Nate was the last to leave, and as he passed her he stepped in close. “Congratulations.”
He touched his lips to hers before she’d guessed his intent, before she’d had a chance to brace herself. But there was no need to brace, no need for defense. Where before their kisses had been all about heat and need, this was about tenderness, about affirmation.
Weakened by surprise, she shuddered against him, let herself lean for a second. Then he eased away and looked down at her, his amber eyes intent on hers. For the first time she felt like his entire focus, as if he was seeing not just the outer shell of her, but actually seeing
her
.
Then he took a big step back, away from her, and tipped his head in a nod that was almost a bow. “I’m happy for you. I know this is what you wanted.”
And he turned and walked away.
She stood there, torn between letting him go and calling him back. The kiss had been entirely different, almost like one she would’ve expected on a first date, an exploration rather than a possession. But what did that mean? Did it mean anything? She didn’t have a clue, and because she didn’t she let him go, watching where he’d been long after he’d pushed through the sliders, headed for the firing range.
Sensing that she was being watched, she turned and glanced toward the kitchen area, and found Jox standing there. “Well,” she said on a sigh, “what now?”
She wasn’t entirely sure if she was asking about the next step she should take as an adviser or the next step—if any—she should take with Nate, with the goddess, with the magic. She figured she’d let the
winikin
pick; she was open to suggestions at this point.
“Now we wait,” he said, giving a vague answer to her vague question.
“Yeah,” she said, dipping her head in a nod. “We wait. We watch. We do the best we can.”
So the Nightkeepers and
winikin
waited, watched, and did the best they could. They waited until Leah and Strike came back, drooping with fatigue and defeat. They waited for Rabbit to contact them, growing more concerned as the days passed without any word from the teen, without Strike being able to connect to him with a teleport thread. And they waited as the hours and days passed, Saturn moved into opposition, and the barrier thinned. And as they waited, they did their best. Strike and Leah continued to search for the altar stone, only to be frustrated each time it seemed they were getting close. They had zero luck tracking down Iago, and there was still no sign of Sasha Ledbetter. Alexis practiced her magic, honing her shield and fireball spells, both of which glowed with rainbows. And she sat long into the nights with Strike, Leah, and Jox, arguing the options, until they finally settled on a calculated risk for the Saturn at Opposition ceremony.
Alexis, with Nate as her power boost, would travel into the barrier and attempt to work the three-question spell. That seemed like their only option for gaining the information they needed about the Volatile and Ixchel’s defense against the first demon prophecy.
If they were lucky, the spell would work even though the opposition wasn’t a cardinal day.
He’d been living there the past couple of days, ever since he’d bolted from the MFA and dumped his phone. With five hundred dollars cash in his pocket and a valid ID, it hadn’t been difficult for him to upgrade his wardrobe and hop on an Amtrak headed south. With his telekine powers, it also hadn’t been hard to bust into the tea shop and make himself at home, hoping Myrinne would check back. He was more or less safe and comfortable, and off the grid. The thing that sucked, though, was how much he missed being a part of something.
It wasn’t that he missed Skywatch so much—it was a pretty cool place, but it was just a place. As for the people . . . well, he’d never spent much time away from Strike or Jox before, but they were both busy with their own stuff now, and besides, the compound was so big, he’d been able to go days without seeing them if he wanted to. He’d been living in his old man’s cottage for the past few months, had gotten used to being alone. But after a couple of days of traveling, then shacking up in the tea shop, he’d realized that “alone” was a pretty relative thing back at Skywatch, where there was always somebody nearby, always something going on. In the tea shop he was totally solo. Granted, the streets of the French Quarter never actually quieted all the way down . . . but still, it wasn’t the same as being back in the training compound. He found he loved the isolation during the day, when he could ghost around the neighborhood looking for Myrinne, or just spend a few hours poking through the witch’s stuff. Most of it was crap, of course, but he’d gotten a power buzz off a few things, and had set them aside to fiddle with.
At night, though, things went quiet and his mind got very loud as it replayed what’d happened back at the museum. Brandt’s anger had stuck with him, along with the knowledge that Patience had gotten hurt because he’d been fiddling with his text messages. Rabbit had bought a new phone and called the investigator, Juarez, to do some checking on the museum break-in, so he knew the others had gotten away from the museum. But the fact that Strike hadn’t locked onto him for a ’port pretty much summed up where the Nightkeepers stood:
You’ve fucked up enough times, kid. Good riddance.
Which meant he was on his own, at least until he found Myrinne. She’d checked out of the shelter Juarez had tracked her to, and vanished. The PI had told him to stay put, that he was on the case, but as the days passed, the stars aligned, and the barrier thinned, and Juarez kept telling him he’d have better news the next day, Rabbit knew what he had to do.
Screw the PI. He could find Myrinne himself . . . with a little help from the three-question
nahwal
.
Lucius had been locked in the storeroom for the duration of the opposition ceremony, lest his connection to the
makol
reactivate when the barrier thinned. Nate felt bad for the guy; lockup was no fun, regardless of the situation. And although the slave bond had been a matter of necessity, Nate didn’t feel good about the royal council’s decision on that one, either. Then again, as far as Nate was concerned, the council could use an outside opinion. Leah might’ve started out as an antiestablishment type, but since being mated to Strike she’d been assimilated, Borg-like, into the Nightkeeper mind-set. Jox was an establishment guy all the way, Alexis was good at improving ideas that were already out there but wasn’t an outside-the-box thinker, and Strike . . . well, as Carlos said, their king was his father’s son—a stubborn dreamer with huge sense of duty and a heart that could send him in the wrong direction with the best of intentions.
Not that Nate was planning on volunteering to sit in on the debates and act as the voice of reason. Or rebellion, he thought, knowing he would be the maverick in the group, the one to counter all the history-steeped decisions.
Which so wasn’t what he should’ve been thinking about as he followed the others into the sacred room at Skywatch.
Focus, dipshit,
he told himself. He and Alexis were about to try pulling some serious magic on a non-cardinal day. He needed to get his head in the game.
The sacred chamber at Skywatch was a circular room located at the end of one of the mansion wings, decorated with intricately carved walls and a
chac-mool
altar like the one in the sacred tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá. Unlike the sacred chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, though, it was open to the stars and moon, which glowed through a glass-paneled ceiling. Where the cardinal-day ceremonies of the equinoxes and solstices were conducted down in the Yucatán, along with those celebrating high-magic events like an eclipse, the lesser ceremonies like Saturn at Opposition were held in-house at Skywatch. Personally, Nate thought they should’ve gone south anyway, given that he and Alexis were supposed to enact the three-question spell. Strike was banking on her Godkeeper powers to fuel the spell, but Nate couldn’t see how it would’ve hurt for them to stack the deck even further by invoking the spell at the intersection. Not that anyone had asked his opinion, least of all Alexis, whom he’d seen less and less frequently as her duties increased.
He hadn’t even realized how much time they’d spent together—or actively avoiding each other—until it wasn’t happening anymore. He missed the contact, missed the arguments. And yeah, he knew it made him a prick, but it wasn’t until she wasn’t around all the time that he realized how much he’d enjoyed having her around. Which made zero sense, given that he’d spent the past six months trying to drive her away, but there it was. He would’ve liked to talk to her about the things he was learning from Carlos about his bloodline, about his family. He wanted to hash over the inconsistencies he was seeing in some of the prophecies, and get Alexis’s take on the Iago situation. But instead he held himself away, figuring he’d muddied those waters for far too long, and she deserved some space.
Whether or not there was distance between them, though, he knew the moment she came through the doorway into the sacred room. He could feel her energy on his skin and hear the hum in the air change in pitch, singing a high, sweet note.
She was wearing the black robes of a Nightkeeper warrior-priest, a long ceremonial regalia worked with stingray spines and shells, with pointed sleeves and a long hood. They were all wearing the robes over combat clothes, except for Jade, who wore scribe’s gray and minimal weapons, and Strike, Leah, and Anna, who wore royal red robes over full combat gear.
But although Alexis was dressed like the others, Nate knew where she was every instant, even with her hood covering her streaky blond hair, and her back to him. He recognized the way she carried herself, the way the air seemed to shimmer in rainbows around her. And as she turned and glanced at him, he recognized the way his blood heated with the attraction he’d never managed to outrun or ignore.
She looked strong and tough, her movements graceful, as though she’d finally stopped wishing to be small and delicate and finally embraced the fact that she was an athlete, a warrior. Her high cheekbones stood out sharply, suggesting that she’d lost weight when he hadn’t been watching, or maybe the magic and responsibility had burned away the last of the human softness, leaving the Valkyrie behind.
“Nate,” she said finally, nodding and moving toward him, because one of them had to do something besides stare across the room.
“You look good,” he said, forcing himself not to reach out to her, because he’d given up that right rather than get into something he hadn’t been ready to deal with, might not ever be. Nightkeeper sex wasn’t about love; it was about power and necessity, and he’d played that game too many times already.
“You too,” she said, though he had a feeling the return compliment was a formality. He was pretty sure he looked like shit. He’d been eating too little, working out too much, and working on
VW6
long into the nights, hunkered down in his parents’ cottage, typing furiously.
The rest of the story had finally started coming together when he’d realized the source of his block. Hera hadn’t totally clicked with any of the mates they’d sketched out for her—even Nameless—because she hadn’t needed anything from them. Things hadn’t started to flow until he’d hit on the idea of giving her a childhood trauma that had driven her to fight. Once she had that small chink in her armor, covering a larger vulnerability, he’d been able to bring the story line forward, which was why he’d been up way too late, way too many nights lately.
That and the realization that as Hera was becoming vulnerable, Alexis was growing into herself, becoming the woman she’d always wanted to be . . . and he wasn’t part of that change.
“Alexis,” he began, then stalled because he didn’t know what the hell he wanted to say. The things he wanted were all tangled up in his brain with the stuff he knew were supposed to happen according to the gods, and that was crammed against things he knew didn’t work for him, couldn’t ever work.
Her lips turned up at the corners in a small smile that was more acknowledgment than emotion. “Yeah. I know.”
“Okay, gang, let’s do this,” Strike said, breaking up their nonconversation, which was both frustrating and a relief.
At the king’s gesture, the Nightkeepers took their positions, forming a circle within the circular room, with Strike and Leah standing with their backs to the
chac-mool
. Because they were going to be enacting the three-question spell, Nate and Alexis stood outside the circle, one on each side of the altar.
With them outside the circle, Red-Boar dead and Rabbit still missing, the Nightkeepers’ circle seemed very small.
“Ready?” Nate said, and Alexis nodded. She pulled her ceremonial knife and used it to blood her palm, then hesitated and held the knife out to him.
The act of using her knife to carve a bloody furrow in his palm seemed very intimate, and he held her eyes as he returned the knife and they joined hands over the altar. The background hum of magic sparked at the contact, jolting through him and lighting him up, sending his power higher than it’d ever been before, even when linked to the king.
Gods,
he thought, then amended it to,
Goddess
. Because that was what he was feeling: Ixchel’s power. Alexis’s power.
“You remember the spell?” Alexis said quietly.
Nate nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”
They drew strength from the altar, and from the ashes of ten generations of Nightkeeper magi mixed into the mortar beneath the carved stone. They drew strength from each other, though he feared it wouldn’t be enough. Too much divided them, when the Godkeeper’s magic relied on the catalyst of her Nightkeeper mate.
Leaning on the magic they made together, and the humming pool of energy created by their uplinked teammates, they locked eyes and said in unison:
“Pasaj och.”
They blinked into the barrier on a flash of gold and rainbows, with none of the lurching, rushing sensation Nate was used to. One second he was in the sacred room at Skywatch; the next he was in the barrier, standing facing Alexis, their hands linked. They stood on a flat, faintly spongy surface that they couldn’t see because gray-green mist swirled to their knees. The sky was the same gray-green, and the horizon—if there were such a thing in the barrier—was lost in the gray-green monotony of it all. Their entry to the barrier had been far smoother than ever before; before there had been a jolt, a rush, and a churn of nausea. But the barrier itself was the same as before.
“Wow. That was pretty painless,” Alexis said, mirroring his thoughts. She dropped his hands and looked around, as if to verify that they were really in the barrier.
“Thanks to the king’s adviser.” Nate faked a bow in her direction.
“Thanks to the goddess, you mean.”
It’s all you,
he wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he said, “Stage two?”
She nodded. “Stage two.”
The three-question spell required petitioners to jack into the barrier, which meant that their physical bodies remained on earth—in this case, in the sacred chamber of Skywatch—while their incorporeal forms—their souls, for lack of a better term, though it made Nate cringe—entered the in-between gray-greenness of the barrier. Once there, the three-question petitioners had to perform a second bloodletting and another spell. Then, if Nate and Alexis had done everything right and had the magical chops to call the ancestor despite it not being a cardinal day, the three-question
nahwal
would appear.
That was the theory, anyway.
Nate reached into the pocket of his robe and withdrew a pair of stingray spines. He handed one to Alexis and kept one for himself. “I’m so not looking forward to this part.”
“It’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy,” she answered, paraphrasing one of the writs. Then she shot him a look and a sly grin, knowing how he felt about scripture.
Instead of answering, he stuck out his tongue, jammed the stingray spine into it, and ripped the barb free. Pain slapped and spiraled, so much sharper than the familiar bite of blade against palm. Blood flowed down his chin as Alexis did the same, hissing as she yanked out the spine, tearing flesh.
The magic might heal them quickly, but it didn’t stop the pain.
Both a little shaky now, they joined hands, leaning on each other, and chanted the second spell, calling the three-question
nahwal
.