Dawnkeepers

to call it. She’d touched the statuette and been transported into a dark, formless corner of the barrier, yet now she was back on earth—she knew it from the taste of the air, and the strong sense of being underground.

When she reached the end of the arcade, the pathway curved and widened, forming a platform in front of the throne. There, in the center of the flat space, she saw shadowy footprints in the dust, human and barefooted, standing facing the throne.

Almost without conscious volition, acting as she had done in the dream, she toed off her shoes and stepped into the footprints. They fit perfectly, as they had in her fantasies. The certainty that she had been in this chamber before, that she’d done this before, was overwhelming, as was the knowledge that the moment she blooded herself, placed her hands on the altar, and said his name, he would be there with her.

The certainty—and the nerves—had her hesitating. Then, knowing she didn’t have a choice, not really, she pulled a ceremonial knife she didn’t recognize from a weapons belt she didn’t remember putting on, and drew the blade sharply across her palm. She hissed against the pain as blood flowed, dark crimson in the amber torchlight. Then she reversed hands and cut her other palm. Her bloodied fingers slipped on the haft of the knife as she set it aside.

“Gods,” she whispered, hope and fear spiraling up within her, “help me to be worthy.”

Izzy had raised her on stories of the Nightkeepers and the heroic warrior-priestess Gray-Smoke, who had been adviser to the king. As a child, Alexis had wished Gray-Smoke was real, wished the Nightkeepers were real. It hadn’t been until the previous year, when the barrier came back online and Strike recalled the Nightkeepers, that Izzy had revealed that not only had Gray-Smoke been a real person, she’d been Alexis’s mother. Ever since then, Alexis had felt as if she were trying to keep up, trying to live up. Now, feeling another consciousness beside her own, feeling another’s life overlap with hers, and knowing deep down inside that it was Gray-Smoke, or at least the memory of her, the essence of her, Alexis could only pray she’d be worthy of the mother she’d never known.

More, she prayed for the gods to help her understand what the dream was telling her. About her mother. About herself. About the man who wore the hawk medallion.

Knowing there was no other way, she closed her eyes and pressed her bloodstained palms to the altar, and said the words that had come to her in a dream, though she was no seer: “Tzakaw muwan.”

Summon the hawk.

A detonation rocked the room. Water splashed on the footpath, and the sound of ripples turned to thin screams coming from the people carved on the walls, who hadn’t moved, yet somehow seemed to gape in awe.

She turned, knowing what she would see.

He stood opposite her, at the edge where the stone and the water met. His eyes bored into hers, hard and intense and no-nonsense. He wore combat gear, with his black shirt unbuttoned at the top to show a glint of gold. He was Nate, yet not, just as she was Alexis, yet not.

She was the smoke and he was the hawk. And that was all that really mattered as his eyes darkened and he strode toward her, his intent as clear as the need inside her.

Sex.

It was a vision, Nate knew, yet it wasn’t. He was part of it, yet apart from it, distancing himself even as his heart pounded and the scent of her touched him, wrapping around his soul and digging in deep, a combination of arousal, musk, and the moist warmth of the tropics. He was vaguely aware of the carved chamber, and the fact that he should be wondering how he’d gotten there. The last thing he remembered was reaching for Alexis, intending to pull her away from the statuette of Ixchel. Then the world had gone gray-green, then black, and now he was here. He didn’t have a clue where “here” was, but that didn’t seem to matter so much. What mattered was the woman standing near the carved stone altar, her bloodstained hands held out to him.

She was Alexis, yet she was someone else. Her features were slightly sharper, her breasts slightly fuller, and when he took her hands he felt confidence exuding from her that was lacking in the woman he knew. He felt different, as well, more centered, more in tune with his body’s demand that he take her here and now, that it was his right and duty.

They were, he thought in a flash of insight, the people they would have become if King Scarred-

Jaguar hadn’t led his people to their deaths. They were the fully trained versions of themselves, warriors who had been thoroughly indoctrinated into the magic and culture of the Nightkeepers, soldiers of the end-time war who were willing to do whatever was necessary, even if it meant pimping themselves out to the gods.

He opened his mouth to speak, to ask her what the hell this was—a piece of the barrier or something else?—but before he could formulate the question, she had raised herself up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. He wanted to pull away, to protest, but her kiss had the new maturity of the woman she’d become, the new confidence, and the added thrill nearly dropped him. Heat slashed through him at the feel and taste of her, familiar yet not, with deeper, darker layers than before. His hands, which he’d lifted to ease her away, wound up dragging her closer instead.

“This isn’t us,” he managed to say in the space between one kiss and the next. “This isn’t real.”

She let go of him and stepped back, but she sure as hell wasn’t retreating. No, she was loosening her weapons belt and letting it fall in a blatant invitation. “It’s as real as we let it be. This is a better version of us. One that doesn’t go beyond these walls, beyond this dream.”

Was that what it was, a dream? He’d never been much of a dreamer, had never remembered his dreams once he awoke, except for the ones about the glowing orange monsters, the ones the therapists had told him were Oedipal projections of his mother and had turned out to be actual glowing orange monsters, the boluntiku that had slaughtered his playmates during the Solstice Massacre.

Aside from those nightmares, he’d never dreamed. Or, at least, not that he remembered.

“If this is what dreaming is like,” he murmured as her hands went to the hem of her clingy black shirt, “then I’ve been missing out.”

Her expression changed at that, showing a flash of uncertainty, a hint of vulnerability he would’ve expected more from the Alexis he knew than from this brighter, shinier version. But then she shimmied out of her shirt and bra, exposing herself, her nipples puckering in the golden torchlight and soft air.

He moved without being aware of making the decision, closed in on her like a hunter, his body moving under the direction of another, one who had absolutely no reservations about the two of them being together. This is meant, that other him thought. This is how it should be.

Nate balked at that, nearly drew away, because it was exactly what he was struggling to avoid—that sense of inevitability and fate, the dogma that came with the Nightkeeper way of life. He wanted to win his woman, not have her handed to him by the gods, or destiny, or some such shit. He wanted freedom, wanted—

Before he could complete the thought, that other, baser part of him kissed her and brought his hands to her creamy flesh. In an instant everything gave way to a roar of heat and need, and the two of him melded into one man—one incredibly turned-on guy who knew exactly how she felt and tasted, yet each time discovered something new about her, about the two of them together. He’d sworn he wouldn’t do this again, wouldn’t be with her, because it wasn’t fair if he didn’t intend to fall in with the gods’ plans for the two of them.

This is a dream, he told himself. Dreams don’t count. And if that played false in the back of his brain, the knowledge was quickly lost to the heat and the needs of the man who both was and wasn’t him.

He pressed into her, crowding her against the throne—altar, whatever—at her back. She braced herself against the soft curves of limestone that had been built up and worn smooth by centuries of dripping water. She grabbed onto a pair of protruding bumps carved by an ancient hand into the shapes of serpents’ heads, their mouths gaping open, their fangs dropping down in menace, or maybe reverence. Nate was filled with that same reverence when he brought his hands up to cup the dip of her waist and the small of her back, then higher, to the heavy weight of her breasts, which were crowned with the tight buds of her nipples.

She moaned and arched against him, digging her blunt, manicured fingernails into his biceps, then shifting to run her fingers up his chest and get to work on his shirt, freeing the top three buttons.

Boosting herself up onto the altar, she leaned into him, curling her hands around his neck to find the