Nightkeepers

Rabbit’s chest felt funny when he nodded. ‘‘Yeah . . . okay. Um. Thanks.’’

Strike’s eyes were very serious and a little bit sad. ‘‘I should’ve done something like this a long time ago.’’

That funny feeling spread up Rabbit’s throat and itched at the back of his eyeballs, and to his utter horror he realized he was about to cry. ' ’S okay,' he mumbled, and reversed course to push past Strike and head for the john.

Halfway there, he turned back and sniffed. ‘‘Tell him . . . please tell Jox that I’ll be right back. And not to start without me.’’

Then he locked himself in the bathroom, turned on the water, and bawled like a baby.

For several days after Vince’s death and Leah’s subsequent suspension for blatantly disobeying orders to ‘‘stay the hell away from the 2012ers,’’ she functioned on autopilot.

She grieved, but it was like there’d been so much grief lately that she’d worn out those neurons, making her numb and angry rather than sad. So she ate too little, slept too much, and spent the rest of the time sitting at her kitchen table, surfing the Internet, and trying to make some sense of it all.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, she dragged her ass out of bed midmorning, stumbled down from the attic, where she still slept beneath the stars. When she hit the button on her Mr. Coffee, a fat yellow spark jumped from her fingertip to the machine, and electricity arced with a sizzle and a yellow flash.

Leah shrieked and leaped back, her arm vibrating with the shock and her heart giving a funny bumpity-bump in her chest, as if whatever’d just happened had kicked it off rhythm.

Hello, static electricity, she thought, though the air was humid and her floors weren’t carpeted. But what other explanation was there?

Mr. Coffee didn’t so much as gurgle when she hit the ON button, suggesting that she’d fried something vital, so she went with tea for her morning caffeine hit as she powered up her laptop and glanced at her notes from the day before.

The Calendar Killer had taken twelve victims that they knew of, two at each equinox and solstice over the past eighteen months, with the exception of the previous month, when the summer solstice had passed without new victims.

Granted, Nick had died that day, but the signature was completely different; the only connection was the ritualistic nature of the Calendar murders, which might or might not point to the 2012ers, and the fact that she and Nick had been waiting for info on the leader of Survivor2012.

Chicken and egg or coincidence? Damned if she knew.

Then there was Vince’s death. Guilt twisted tight when she pushed herself to remember exactly what’d happened. She should’ve insisted that he leave the investigation to the task force. Hell, she should’ve left the investigation to the task force. If she had, Vince would still be alive.

Then again, if they’d left it alone, the task force wouldn’t be taking another look at Survivor2012.

The explosion seemed to have been aimed at the heart of the group, their ceremonies. The Calendar Killings could—although this might be stretching it a little—have been intended to throw suspicion on the group. Which might mean the killer wasn’t necessarily a member of Survivor2012. He could be its enemy.

The thought brought a flash of piercing blue eyes, the image of a big man who had moved like a fighter and bombed a charity gala, yet had somehow gotten her out of a locked chamber before it blew.

Logic said she’d gotten blown clear by the shock wave. But the door had been shut, and even if it’d been open, the shock wave would’ve splatted her on the opposite wall rather than taking a right-hand turn and dumping her in the main hallway.

Logic also said that the dreams were nothing more than a pastiche of her experiences over the past few months, a way for her subconscious to deal with the pain. But the skulls in the older dreams had screamed a blast of water rather than a trickle, and the blue-eyed warrior had worn cutoffs rather than combat fatigues. And rather than a murderer, he’d been her lover.

It didn’t make sense. None of it did.

But she sure as hell intended to figure it out. For Matty. For Nick. For Vince.

For her own sanity.

Ignoring the tea that cooled at her elbow, she got to work. She wasn’t looking for the names and faces of people who might want Survivor2012 gone for good— the task force was already on that, and with a ton more computer power than she had at her disposal. No, she was coming at it from another angle.

She was trying to figure out what made the doomsdayers tick. Maybe it was partly because, if she accepted the 2012ers as the victims rather than the perps, that meant Matty hadn’t been stupid for joining them, meant she hadn’t been irresponsible for letting her brother run with the crowd that’d killed him. Maybe it was because the snippets she’d caught from the 2012ers’ educational programs had been oddly compelling. And maybe it was an effort to understand her own response to the dark-haired stranger.

Whatever the source of the compulsion—obsession?— she worked through the day, bent over her computer until her eyes burned and her joints ached and her head buzzed with strange words that made more sense to her than they ought.

She didn’t get dressed until midafternoon, didn’t have lunch until four. And when darkness fell, she kept working.

As the stars prickled to life overhead, she discovered an author named Ambrose Ledbetter who seemed to know more than all the rest, or maybe he just put it in words that a nonexpert could understand. Either way, his articles seemed to synthesize all the information, ask all the right questions. Ledbetter had written in an article published just before the Calendar Killings began:

Thompson’s elucidation of the Long Count calendar of the classical Maya gives an end date when the backward-counting calendar will reach zero. Mc-Kenna identified complementary patterns buried in the Chinese I Ching also pointing to a paradigm shift on the same day. He called this shift ‘‘Timewave Zero.’’