Nightkeepers

makol, and a second time because it drove home the continued separation between him and his sister, Anna—a rift Leah had learned of when she’d come across him one day, sitting at the kitchen table with the mail open in front of him and his head in his hands. Eventually he’d revealed that he’d given Anna a text for translation and she’d sent it back, refusing to get involved. Which left them with no seer, and no translator the Nightkeepers could trust.

With so much of their magic lost over the years—to time, to persecution—they couldn’t afford to waste any of their assets. But instead of zapping to UT Austin and dragging his sister’s butt back to the compound, Strike had withdrawn completely, giving Jox and Red-Boar control of Magic 101 and spending most of his time locked in the archives. When he did come out in public, he was snarly at best, churlish at worst. Even Red-Boar started giving him a wide berth, which was saying something.

As days turned to weeks, Strike’s absence meant that Leah didn’t have to work so hard at avoiding him, and she could spend as much time as she wanted on the firing range at the back of the compound, perfecting her aim with the jade-tips without his figuring out what she planned to do. But it also meant that the buzz of desire became an ache of loneliness. And she wasn’t the only one missing him, either. The trainees, whom she’d gotten to know little by little, were starting to fall apart . . . and she was the only one who seemed to see it.

Granted, on the surface everything looked pretty good. Patience and Brandt were the perfect couple, and their twins didn’t seem to miss not having other kids around. The boys played with each other under the watchful eyes of the winikin, or tagged after Rabbit, who had the rep of a delinquent but seemed to get a kick out of the twins. Of the others, Alexis and Nate were a couple, though they didn’t spend much time together outside of the bedroom, and Michael and Jade’s romance had fizzled out around the one-month mark, right about the time he discovered a knack for casting force fields. Sven was . . . well, he was Sven. He hung loose, seeming even more chilled out after his young winikin went back to college. Even Red-Boar, whom Leah tagged as living on the manic-depressive side of life, seemed to have settled into the teaching role pretty well.

But beneath the surface, she didn’t like how Rabbit spent so much time alone, and how the others treated him differently, not because he was younger, but because he was half-human, and didn’t have his mark. She didn’t like seeing Patience and Brandt with their heads together, shutting out the rest of the world—and not in a we’re deeply in love way, but in a we’re making plans that don’t include you way. She didn’t like that Nate spent a big chunk of his time on the computer, trading e-mails with his business partners and working on something about a Viking sex goddess, or that Michael got a dozen cell calls a day and always took them behind closed doors.

They trained hard; she’d give them that, though it wasn’t like Jox or Red-Boar would’ve tolerated anything less. In the mornings Jox did a sort of Nightkeepers for Dummies, which was a blinding speed-sampling of their history, starting with Atlantis—and boy, had that made Leah’s cop side cringe—and running through to the present, along with a short version of the Popol Vuh creation myth and a dizzying number of prophecies, some coming from the earliest Nightkeepers, others supposedly from the gods themselves.

In the afternoons, the trainees met up with Red-Boar in the steel-sided training building, which was almost always either too hot or too cold. There, they worked on basic barrier spells like shielding and wielding fire. Of the trainees, only Rabbit could reliably make fire, and Michael showed a talent for shields. Patience got pretty good at the invisibility thing—which was the freakiest by far, in Leah’s opinion—and even figured out that she could occasionally throw her talent to distant objects or people, especially if her husband was boosting her with his power. Which was all well and good, but Leah didn’t see how most of the things they were doing—with the exception of Jox’s late-afternoon lessons on the firing range—were preparing them to fight.

Worse, she was pretty sure the others felt the same way. They were taking their classes, finishing their home-work, and otherwise doing their own things. And that was not a good recipe for teamwork.

Maybe she noticed it because she was an outsider, maybe because Connie had exposed the members of the MDPD to a wide range of touchy-feely exercises designed to build their team spirit. Or whatever. But while the cops had universally mocked Connie’s team-building crapola, as far as Leah could tell, the MDPD had been one big, happy, tolerant family compared to the Nightkeepers. And that was bad. They—and that would be the whole- wide-world ‘‘they’’—needed the magi working together, or very bad things were going to happen. Leah believed that, even if she didn’t totally understand it.

A week before the Venus conjunction, she decided she’d had enough of the bullshit, enough of Strike locking himself away and pretending Jox and Red-Boar were a fine substitute for leadership.

So she sucked it up and went to find Jox.

The winikin was in his quarters near the royal suite, and answered the door barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a book about miniature roses. His expression went cool when he saw her standing there. ‘‘Is there something I can help you with, Detective?’’

You can get your thumb out of your ass and take a good look around, she thought, but didn’t figure that would get her very far. So instead she said, ‘‘Yeah. I need you to help me arrange a party.’’

Strike’s eyes were nearly crossed, and he was pretty sure he’d put a permanent kink in his neck from sitting at the long archive tables in front of a messy stack of books. Unfortunately, the Mac Pluses that’d held the computerized files had shit the bed long ago, leaving him working with some sort of perverse index-card system.

He’d been going through the cards for weeks now, one by one, searching the short annotations and pulling likely-sounding journals, translations, whatever, hoping for a clue, any clue that would help them understand why Leah had shown powers at the solstice and again at the aphelion, but had lost every hint of magic since. He’d also take something about how to track a makol when there wasn’t an itza’at seer handy.

There hadn’t been a Zipacna sighting in nearly three weeks. Strike was guessing he’d gone to ground someplace with some serious power lines—one of the old ruins down south, maybe—and used them to construct a ward barrier. Which meant the bastard was functionally untouchable and free to work whatever magic he had at hand until the equinox, when it was a sure bet he’d be at the intersection, looking to bring a dark lord through.

Time was running out too fast. They had three weeks until the equinox, and it seemed highly doubtful the trainees would be ready. According to Jox and Red-Boar, most of the newbies—with the notable exception of Jade —had mastered the basic pretalent spells of jacking in and manipulating the barrier’s energy, but only Patience had shown any spark of breakthrough talent. And Rabbit, of course, but that was a whole ’nother can of worms. Which left them exactly where they’d been six weeks ago—with a group of untrained magi and no idea what they’d be able to do.

At least they had some weapons training now, he supposed. Jox had brought the newbies to the range every day and gotten them up to speed on the MACs, along with a few different types of handguns and a sniper rifle or