Sven sneered. “Takes one to know one. At least I haven’t done time.”
But Michael elbowed him hard. “Shut it.” He tossed the console aside and rose, squaring off opposite Nate, his dark eyes assessing. “Thought you were going after one of the statues?”
“Found a body instead. Then it got weird.”
Ignoring Michael’s raised brow and Sven’s “No way!” Nate turned and headed for the main room, figuring that’d get them moving.
He was right. Michael and Sven trailed after him and joined the growing group in the sunken main room of the mansion. By the time Nate had scored some leftover homemade pizza from the kitchen, which was on the other side of a breakfast bar separating it from the main room, the residents of Skywatch had gathered for the meeting.
Of the eleven Nightkeepers who’d fought together during the equinox battle, Red-Boar was dead, Brandt and Patience White-Eagle were off dealing with the sale of their house in Philly, and Strike’s sister, Anna, had returned home to the “real” world, refusing to fully commit to a life she’d rejected years ago. That left seven Nightkeepers at Skywatch, along with seven
winikin
, plus the twin White-Eagle toddlers, Harry and Braden, and Strike’s mate, Leah, who was fully human, yet a Godkeeper at the same time.
Which, as far as Nate was concerned, went to prove that the prophecies didn’t always get it right. The legends said the Godkeepers would arise at the end of the age, when the Nightkeepers needed them to guard the barrier. So far, though, only the one god had made it through the barrier to possess a female, and it’d bound with Leah, in a process that had nearly cost the ex-cop her life and resulted in an incomplete possession. Even when Strike and Leah had attempted to form a Nightkeeper-Godkeeper mated blood link during the winter solstice, they hadn’t been able to call the plumed snake god, Kulkulkan, and had commanded only a fraction of the god’s powers. In addition to—or perhaps because of—that failure, no god had sought to come through the barrier, even though the Nightkeepers had enacted the transition ritual in the sacred chamber. They had offered up Patience as a potential Godkeeper on the theory that she was already mated to a Nightkeeper, forming the strong bond required to support the powers of a Godkeeper. But that hadn’t worked, leaving them scrambling to find the demon prophecies in the hopes that the starscript writings would give them the information and spells they would need to keep Camazotz’s minions in hell, where they belonged.
While they waited for the king, Nate gnawed on his pizza and looked around the room, and he felt the stir of unease that’d become all too familiar in recent weeks. Only a few days earlier he’d finally been able to identify the problem: The Nightkeepers were stagnating.
They had fallen into their patterns so quickly—too quickly. Jade—quiet and pretty, with dark hair and green eyes, an ex-therapist who’d turned out to be their resident bookworm—spent her time in the archives, cataloging the huge volume of material collected by their ancestors, only a small fraction of which was actually proving useful. Michael and Sven were clearly marking time, though Nate had no clue what either of them was waiting for. The two absent Nightkeepers, dark-haired, businesslike Brandt and his pretty blond wife, Patience, were pretending for their kids’ sake that they were a normal family. Nate was running his company by remote while trying to figure out how to juggle the next four years of his life . . . and Alexis was transplanting her rarified Newport existence to the compound piece by piece, while doing her damnedest to keep a 5.0 GPA in a world that wasn’t keeping score the way she wanted it to.
That was largely her
winikin
’s influence, he figured. Izzy was a formidable woman in a tiny package, and he could easily picture her pushing Alexis throughout her life. He’d seen it himself—the unsubtle mentions of the power of the smoke bloodline and the importance of royal advisers, along with a few equally unsubtle mentions of the hawk bloodline and its unsuitability, whatever that meant.
Nate hadn’t asked, hadn’t cared. As far as he was concerned, the past didn’t matter worth shit. History didn’t automatically repeat itself, and he damn well got to choose his own path. Which meant no patterns, no stagnation. It was time to shake things up a little, he thought. But just then Alexis stepped through the residential hallway door, drawing his attention whether he liked it or not. She carried the heavy-looking, battle-scarred metal suitcase with ease, moving with the grace of a fighter as she set the case on an end table near the big sofa in the center of the room.
She’d cleaned up and changed into at-home jeans and a soft blue-gray shirt almost the same color as her eyes. Her multitoned golden hair spilled to her shoulders in waves that made him remember how the strands had felt between his fingers and against his skin, and that flash of sensory memory had his body hardening. He would’ve cursed out loud at the involuntary reaction, but forced himself to stifle the response. He couldn’t afford to let her know—to let any of them know—that he still wanted her, no matter how badly matched they might be. She’d bought into the Nightkeeper ways so deeply that he suspected that a large part of her desire for him came from the portents that they were meant for each other rather than from actual volition. Or maybe lust and fate were all mixed up inside her, some of it real, some of it created by the situation.
Regardless, he wanted nothing to do with a relationship built on destiny and bullshit, and she believed too deeply for it to be anything else. So why the hell couldn’t he get her out of his head? Even now, five months after they’d stopped sleeping together, he still woke thinking of her, tasting her on his lips, and feeling vague surprise when he rolled over and she wasn’t there.
Blame it on Hera,
he thought, and looked away from Alexis as Strike appeared from the direction of the royal quarters.
“Everybody here?” the Nightkeepers’ king asked as he scanned the bodies crowded into the sunken central room of the big mansion.
Leah was at his side. With her white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and covered with a ball cap, wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt, she looked like what she was: a normal, attractive woman in her early thirties. The glyphs on her inner right forearm, though, marked her as more than that. Far more. She wore the flying serpent, the royal
ju
and the
jun tan
“beloved” glyph, marking her in turn as a Godkeeper, a queen, and a mated woman. The glyphs were three of the most powerful symbols in the Nightkeepers’ arsenal, and by rights they shouldn’t have appeared on a human’s arm.
Then again, the crimson mark on the arm of the big redheaded guy who’d gone after Alexis suggested the Nightkeepers didn’t know everything there was to know about the forearm marks and their significance. The magi simply didn’t have nearly enough information.
As usual,
Nate thought, frowning at Alexis, who pointedly ignored him.
When the king saw that the Nightkeepers were all there, he nodded. “Good. Okay, here’s the deal. . . .”
He quickly outlined what Nate had seen in the old lady’s cottage, then described the attack on Alexis, ending with, “The way I see it, we’ve got a bunch of different issues here. We’ve got to figure out who this guy is and what he’s planning. Is he working alone? He doesn’t have the eyes of a
makol
, but what else could he be?”
“Maybe a leftover from Survivor2012?” Leah suggested, naming the
makol
-controlled human cult that had killed her brother, and had almost killed her in the search for more power, more control over the end-time.
“Maybe,” Strike said, “or maybe we’re dealing with something new.” He waved for Leah to continue. The ex-cop was hell on wheels both as an investigator and in terms of the cat herding required to keep the Nightkeepers more or less united as a fighting force when they hadn’t been raised and trained together, as they would have been had circumstances been different.
Although Strike and Leah weren’t married or even engaged in the traditional human sense, the gods had marked her as both Strike’s mate and the Nightkeepers’ queen. In his less charitable moments, Nate had wondered if that was the gods’ way of fulfilling their own prophecies by telling the two they were mated, whether they liked it or not. Granted, Strike had gone against the prophecies themselves to save her, and the love between them was pretty damn obvious just seeing them together. Nate just didn’t think the gods had the right to automatically translate that to a pair bond and an insta-queen, whether or not Leah was good at the job. It wasn’t like she’d really been given a choice in the matter.
“In terms of immediate goals,” Leah said, her voice cop-cool, “we need to recover the missing statue and get to the other five artifacts ahead of our competition, whatever he is.” She looked over at Jade. “Any more luck tracking the remaining pieces?”
The pretty, dark-haired archivist nodded. “I’ve got one more nailed down, and am chasing rumors on two others. The one I’m sure about is in New Orleans. We’ve got a meeting set up for tomorrow, and a verbal agreement that the current owner will ‘discuss’ a purchase with us. I think Alexis should go, since she’s our best negotiator.” Jade paused, glancing at Alexis. “Be warned: The owner calls herself Mistress Truth and runs a fortune-telling-slash-occult shop in the French Quarter. She thinks she’s got mad skills, and leans heavily on the woo-woo side of life.”
Nate thought that was a pretty ironic statement, coming from a woman who wore the scribe’s glyph that denoted her as the only one among the Nightkeepers capable of crafting new spells. Then again, Jade hadn’t actually produced a spell yet. For that matter, she avoided the magic as much as possible, spending most of her time in the archives.
But he locked onto the idea of Alexis doing the negotiations in person and outside the wards. He asked, “What sort of skills does our Mistress Truth think she has?”
Jade grimaced. “She claims she bought the artifact—a ceremonial knife carved out of obsidian—because it ‘called to her.’” The archivist emphasized the phrase with finger quotes. “And she thinks it’s been amplifying her ‘natural powers.’” Again with the finger quotes.
“What’s to say it doesn’t?” Nate asked.
It was Strike who answered. “Unless she’s got Nightkeeper blood, the artifact shouldn’t do diddly for her. Even if you buy into the existence of other types of magic, the relics and resonations of one belief system shouldn’t cross over to another.”
“‘Shouldn’t’ being the operative word there,” said Nate, and this time it was his turn to use finger quotes.
“Yeah, well. I’m doing my best with what I’ve got.” Jade sounded more resigned than anything, and he couldn’t blame her. The Nightkeepers had taken a number of major knowledge hits during their history: In addition to the Egyptian massacre, the conquistadors had practically wiped out the Nightkeepers’ population and had burned all but a few of their texts in the 1530s, and then the Solstice Massacre in the early eighties had decimated the magi yet again, robbing them of most of their written and oral traditions, save for the creation stories passed down by the
winikin
. That left the Nightkeepers low on numbers, low on power, and limited in their understanding of what the magic could and couldn’t do. Not to mention clueless about who in the hell the guy with the red marks was or worked for.
Strike turned to Nate. “I want you to go to New Orleans with Alexis, as her backup.”
“Of course.” Nate ignored the sharp look she shot him at that. He couldn’t tell if she was pissed that he was going, surprised that he hadn’t argued, or what. If he’d learned anything from the day’s near disaster, though, it was that none of the Nightkeepers should be venturing out solo until they identified and neutralized the threat. Since he wasn’t about to trust Sven, Michael, or Rabbit to watch her back, and the king had bigger things to worry about, it fell to Nate to make the New Orleans trip. Simple math, nothing more.
Strike nodded. “Good, that’s settled.” He turned to Jade. “I want you to push hard on finding the other artifacts. You’ve got Carter helping you?”
Carter was a private investigator, a human Jox knew through a friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The PI had come in handy before; he’d been the one who’d tracked down the scattered Nightkeepers, including Nate, and had aided Leah in the search for her brother’s killer, who had turned out to be an
ajaw-makol
, a head
makol
working on direct orders from the
Banol Kax
. Carter did his job without asking too many questions about his employers, which made him a serious asset, given that the last thing the Nightkeepers needed was to become a segment on
60 Minutes
.
Jade nodded. “He’s working on one of the two threads I’m following. We’ve gotten one of the artifacts as far as London in the 1940s, but it’s not clear what happened to it during or after D-day.”
Which meant, Nate figured, it was equally likely that the thing had been blown to bits, or the Nazis had hidden it in a yet-undiscovered cache of antiquities.
Bummer.
“Keep on it,” Strike said, “and while you’re at it, pull together whatever you’ve got on the Order of Xibalba.”
There was a beat of silence; then Jox snorted. “Please.” The royal
winikin
dropped down from the breakfast bar, where he and the other
winikin
had taken their customary positions watching over their charges. Jox was a small, fit man in his late fifties with longish gray-threaded hair that was caught back in a stubby ponytail. Wearing worn jeans, rope sandals, and a long-sleeved button-down, he exuded the frustrated amusement of a bewildered parent as he crossed to the edge of the sunken area and looked down at the king. “You’re kidding, right?”