Nightkeepers

She froze, gut twisting. ‘‘How did you know his name?’’

‘‘A private investigator told me.’’ He kept his hand outstretched. ‘‘I’ll explain everything. I promise.’’

And though she knew she absolutely, positively shouldn’t trust him, shouldn’t go anywhere with him, what was her other option? There were things going on here that made no sense, that weren’t going to lend themselves to Internet searches and policework. She owed it to the dead to follow through. And damn, she wanted to go with him, wanted him, though that made the least sense of all.

Knowing it was probably a very bad decision, she nodded. ‘‘Okay, start talking. If I like what I’m hearing, I’ll let you show me whatever you want to show me.’’

‘‘It doesn’t work that way.’’ He crossed the distance between them and took her arm. ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

She pulled back instinctively. ‘‘Sorry for— Aaah!’’ The question devolved to a scream as the world disappeared and they lunged upward, catapulting through a thick gray mist as though they were at the end of a yo-yo that’d just reversed course. She was still screaming as they jolted sideways, then down, and the mist blinked out of existence, leaving them suspended in a glass-ceilinged, circular room that bore way too much of a resemblance to the ritual chamber in the Survivor2012 compound.

Leah’s brain took a snapshot in the second they hovered. Eight blue-robed figures were seated in a loose circle below them, with wooden bowls perched in their laps. She recognized one of the women and the black-robed man who knelt before the carved stone altar. They had accompanied Blue Eyes to the 2012ers’ compound; Black Robe was the one who’d shot Vince.

A smaller, older guy in jeans and a T-shirt stood near an open door. He was the first one to notice them, his attention jerking to the ceiling and his mouth going round in shock. Then the yo-yo string snapped, and Leah and Blue Eyes fell right in the middle of the circle.

He landed first and then Leah hit, driving the breath from both of them. They just lay there for a few heartbeats, staring at each other. Then reality returned— unreality returned?—and she scrambled off him, her heart jackrabbiting and her breath whistling in her lungs as she tried to suck in enough oxygen to get her brain back online.

‘‘Holy shit,’’ she whispered, looking around the glassed-in room to the night beyond, where high rock walls and a faint glow of dusk suggested she’d skipped a couple of time zones in the blink of an eye. Or traveled through time. Or both.

She felt Blue Eyes move up behind her, and knew it was him without turning to look because of the fine warmth that vibrated across her skin. ‘‘Easy, Blondie,’’ he murmured next to her ear. ‘‘Don’t freak-out on me.’’

‘‘Cops don’t freak.’’ But she was damn close to it as she looked at the blue robes and realized not one of them had moved. Black Robe hadn’t twitched either. In fact, none of them had responded to her and Blue Eyes’s arrival except the older guy near the door, who was doing a good impression of a guppy.

The expression quickly morphed to that of a pissed-off guppy when the guy closed his mouth, glared at her rescuer, and snapped, ‘‘We discussed this.’’

Blue Eyes set his jaw and got big. ‘‘The choice is made, winikin. Deal with it.’’

‘‘Wait a minute!’’ Leah turned on him, heart pounding, feeling like she’d stepped out of her own life and into someone else’s. ‘‘What discussion? What choice?’’

Before Blue Eyes could respond—if he was even intending to—the other nine people, the ones sitting on the floor like they’d been frozen there, snapped out of it, all simultaneously drawing convulsive breaths and coming back to life as though someone had thrown a switch.

The ones in the blue robes looked dazed as shit, shaking their heads and staring around as if they’d been someplace else and were happy to be back. In contrast, Black Robe, older and tougher and seeming just as pissed off as the guppy, shot to his feet, glanced at Leah, and immediately looked like he wanted to kill someone. Again.

He was maybe a few years younger than Jox, and had a Last of the Mohicans thing going on, with a skull trim, hawk nose, and eyes that would’ve done any predator proud. He looked scary as hell, in a don’t-want-to-meet-him -in-a-dark-alley-without-backup way. But when he crossed the room and got in Blue Eyes’s face, the two men seemed evenly matched in brawn and charisma. And pissed-offedness.

‘‘What the hell were you thinking?’’ Black Robe spat. ‘‘Two escorts means two escorts. As it was, I got kicked off course and had to come back here and follow them. If I hadn’t, they would’ve died in there. All of them. How dare you leave them like that to go chase tail? What the fuck kind of kingship is that?’’

Leah’s chest tightened, not at being called a piece of tail—hell, she’d been called worse—but at the reference to royalty, which underscored that she’d somehow wound up exactly where she’d vowed not to go—deep inside Cultsville. If this wasn’t an offshoot of Survivor 2012, then it was something similar, and at least two of its members were killers.

Yet she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she ought to have been, as though the fear and unreality were blunted somehow by the golden warmth that fuzzed her brain.

She glanced up at her dream warrior, who had taken a protective stance a little in front of her, as though he thought Black Robe might hurt her. ‘‘King?’’ she asked in a voice that sounded smaller then she’d intended.

‘‘Call me Strike,’’ he said without looking at her.

The name struck a chord, as though she’d heard it before, but the memory was gone before she could grab onto it.

‘‘I saw my father,’’ Strike said to Black Robe. ‘‘He told me to go to her. That you and the others would be okay, but she’d die if I didn’t go.’’

Black Robe’s breath hissed out. ‘‘You’d risk your people for another vision?’’

‘‘Don’t start. Besides, you got them back.’’

‘‘Barely.’’ Black Robe’s eyes flicked over to the blue robes. ‘‘There were . . . complications.’’

Some of the blue robes were still blinking stupidly, while others were shoving up their sleeves and staring at black tats on their forearms. The youngest of them, a pale teenager, sat apart, both forearms bare.