Nightkeepers

She got darkness. Gray static. An indistinct sense of longing.

Shaking her head, she climbed to her feet. ‘‘Nothing.’’

‘‘You need to practice more.’’

‘‘You need to step off,’’ she said with more weariness than heat. ‘‘Don’t assume I’m going to fall into line just because Strike did.’’

‘‘You have a responsibility to your bloodline.’’

‘‘I also have a responsibility to my husband and my students.’’ She glanced over at him. ‘‘Maybe that sounds small to you, but some of us are destined to do small things.’’

‘‘Not you. You would’ve made a good king.’’

She stiffened at the suggestion—and the sudden spark of intensity behind it—but said only, ‘‘Thank the gods for patrilinear inheritance, then.’’

They stared at each other for a moment in silence before Red-Boar turned away. He said a prayer for the dead in the old language, then palmed his ceremonial knife to prick his elbow, which was one of the most honored autoletting sites. He handed over the blade without a word and Anna did the same, and they let their blood drip down onto the fresh grave.

‘‘Safe journey, stranger,’’ she whispered.

When it was done, they smoothed the disturbed earth above the sinkhole, then split up to search for Ledbetter’s campsite. They could’ve searched together, might have been safer that way, but they both needed the distance. Traveling together had been bad enough. Sharing an experience like burying Ledbetter had been far worse.

Moving into the thicker growth beyond the clearing, she touched her effigy and sent out a faint questioning thread, not jacking in fully, but tapping the power and asking it to guide her to where Ledbetter had been. In theory. In practice her subconscious was blocking the hell out of her sight. And who could blame it? The last time she’d had a full-fledged vision, she’d shouted Lucius’s name in Dick’s ear.

Branches scratched her face and caught at her clothes as she pushed her way deeper into the rain forest, thorny fingers grabbing at her, begging for attention. Where have you been? the undergrowth seemed to say. Where are you going?

When she heard the words a second time and magic touched her skin, she stopped, wondering if she’d imagined it. ‘‘I can hear you,’’ she said softly. ‘‘What do you want?’’

She never in a million years expected a response.

But she got one.

The figure of a man appeared in front of her, coalescing out of the humid air. He was taller than she, but stick- thin and wrinkled, with obsidian eyes that had no whites.

Anna gasped and backpedaled, snagged her heel on a root, overbalanced, and fell on her ass. She froze there, her heart pounding as she gaped up at the figure, and pain seared the skin between her breasts where the effigy rested.

A nahwal. On earth.

Impossible.

But when she blinked and looked again, it was still there. Then it turned and disappeared into the undergrowth.

‘‘No!’’ She scrambled to her feet, pulse racing. ‘‘Come back!’’

There was movement up ahead, a flash of motion that left the foliage undisturbed. Head spinning with power and desperation and a strange sense of shifted reality, Anna followed on shaky legs, running deeper and deeper into the forest along an ancient path.

Where was—There! Power rippled along her skin and she saw another flash of motion as the nahwal passed into a low cleft in the earth. Anna followed, flying along the path and ducking through the cave without hesitation, only briefly registering the carved lintel and square walls of a temple. Two steps into the cave, she was plunged into darkness.

Four steps in, the world dropped out from beneath her and she fell, screaming. She hit hard and her head banged against rock. Pain flared and pressure snapped tight in her chest, and for a second she thought she was flying. Then she thought she was drowning. Then burning.

Then there was nothing but blackness around her, inside her. The darkness lasted for minutes, maybe hours before she felt a hand grip hers, lending solidity to the world around her, and heard a voice that called her back from the edge.

‘‘Gods help us.’’ His harsh whisper roused her, though she wasn’t capable of more than an answering moan. The world spun around her, made of blackness and pain.

‘‘Sleepy,’’ she whispered, the word coming out as little more than a puff of air. Lassitude cocooned her, warming her until even the pain seemed friendly rather than raw.

Red-Boar didn’t answer. She heard the click of him flipping open his satellite phone, heard a bitter curse. ‘‘No signal.’’ Then he was leaning over her, touching her gently, though she could barely feel it. ‘‘Come on. We’ve got to get you out of here.’’

He helped her sit up. That was when the nausea hit.

Her vision kicked back in as she doubled over, retching. She saw too-bright light filtering in from outside, saw Red-Boar’s forearm clamped across her torso, beneath her breasts, holding her upright as she gagged on bile and little else. The world slewed, but when she sagged down again, reaching for the ground and the blessed unconsciousness of sleep, he wrestled her to her feet, holding on to her forearms just beneath her elbows. ‘‘Anna,’’ he snapped. ‘‘I need you to stay with me.’’

Closing her eyes against the painful glare from outside, she sucked in a deep breath, trying to settle the