Dawnkeepers

them was pretty damn obvious just seeing them together. Nate just didn’t think the gods had the right to automatically translate that to a pair bond and an insta-queen, whether or not Leah was good at the job. It wasn’t like she’d really been given a choice in the matter.

“In terms of immediate goals,” Leah said, her voice cop-cool, “we need to recover the missing statue and get to the other five artifacts ahead of our competition, whatever he is.” She looked over at Jade. “Any more luck tracking the remaining pieces?”

The pretty, dark-haired archivist nodded. “I’ve got one more nailed down, and am chasing rumors on two others. The one I’m sure about is in New Orleans. We’ve got a meeting set up for tomorrow, and a verbal agreement that the current owner will ‘discuss’ a purchase with us. I think Alexis should go, since she’s our best negotiator.” Jade paused, glancing at Alexis. “Be warned: The owner calls herself Mistress Truth and runs a fortune-telling-slash-occult shop in the French Quarter. She thinks she’s got mad skills, and leans heavily on the woo-woo side of life.”

Nate thought that was a pretty ironic statement, coming from a woman who wore the scribe’s glyph that denoted her as the only one among the Nightkeepers capable of crafting new spells. Then again, Jade hadn’t actually produced a spell yet. For that matter, she avoided the magic as much as possible, spending most of her time in the archives.

But he locked onto the idea of Alexis doing the negotiations in person and outside the wards. He asked, “What sort of skills does our Mistress Truth think she has?”

Jade grimaced. “She claims she bought the artifact—a ceremonial knife carved out of obsidian—

because it ‘called to her.’” The archivist emphasized the phrase with finger quotes. “And she thinks it’s been amplifying her ‘natural powers.’” Again with the finger quotes.

“What’s to say it doesn’t?” Nate asked.

It was Strike who answered. “Unless she’s got Nightkeeper blood, the artifact shouldn’t do diddly for her. Even if you buy into the existence of other types of magic, the relics and resonations of one belief system shouldn’t cross over to another.”

“‘Shouldn’t’ being the operative word there,” said Nate, and this time it was his turn to use finger quotes.

“Yeah, well. I’m doing my best with what I’ve got.” Jade sounded more resigned than anything, and he couldn’t blame her. The Nightkeepers had taken a number of major knowledge hits during their history: In addition to the Egyptian massacre, the conquistadors had practically wiped out the Nightkeepers’ population and had burned all but a few of their texts in the 1530s, and then the Solstice Massacre in the early eighties had decimated the magi yet again, robbing them of most of their written and oral traditions, save for the creation stories passed down by the winikin. That left the Nightkeepers low on numbers, low on power, and limited in their understanding of what the magic could and couldn’t do. Not to mention clueless about who in the hell the guy with the red marks was or worked for.

Strike turned to Nate. “I want you to go to New Orleans with Alexis, as her backup.”

“Of course.” Nate ignored the sharp look she shot him at that. He couldn’t tell if she was pissed that he was going, surprised that he hadn’t argued, or what. If he’d learned anything from the day’s near disaster, though, it was that none of the Nightkeepers should be venturing out solo until they identified and neutralized the threat. Since he wasn’t about to trust Sven, Michael, or Rabbit to watch her back, and the king had bigger things to worry about, it fell to Nate to make the New Orleans trip. Simple math, nothing more.

Strike nodded. “Good, that’s settled.” He turned to Jade. “I want you to push hard on finding the other artifacts. You’ve got Carter helping you?”

Carter was a private investigator, a human Jox knew through a friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The PI had come in handy before; he’d been the one who’d tracked down the scattered Nightkeepers, including Nate, and had aided Leah in the search for her brother’s killer, who had turned out to be an ajaw- makol, a head makol working on direct orders from the Banol Kax. Carter did his job without asking too many questions about his employers, which made him a serious asset, given that the last thing the Nightkeepers needed was to become a segment on 60 Minutes.

Jade nodded. “He’s working on one of the two threads I’m following. We’ve gotten one of the artifacts as far as London in the 1940s, but it’s not clear what happened to it during or after D-day.”

Which meant, Nate figured, it was equally likely that the thing had been blown to bits, or the Nazis had hidden it in a yet-undiscovered cache of antiquities. Bummer.

“Keep on it,” Strike said, “and while you’re at it, pull together whatever you’ve got on the Order of Xibalba.”

There was a beat of silence; then Jox snorted. “Please.” The royal winikin dropped down from the breakfast bar, where he and the other winikin had taken their customary positions watching over their charges. Jox was a small, fit man in his late fifties with longish gray- threaded hair that was caught back in a stubby ponytail. Wearing worn jeans, rope sandals, and a long-sleeved button-down, he exuded the frustrated amusement of a bewildered parent as he crossed to the edge of the sunken area and looked down at the king. “You’re kidding, right?”

Strike’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Isn’t that approximately what I said to you when you handed me a list of names and told me that Anna and I weren’t the last of the bloodlines after all? Just because you’ve been told one thing your whole life doesn’t always mean it’s the gospel truth.”

Jox rolled his eyes. “The Xibalbans are a myth, a group of bogeymen we use to scare kids into behaving.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Strike said, and something in his voice suggested he knew something the others didn’t. He didn’t elaborate, though, saying only, “It won’t hurt to have Jade look into it.”

As if sensing a fight on the horizon, Leah interrupted. “I think now would be a good time for Alexis to show us the statuette she sacrificed a Beemer to save.”

That earned a sour look from Jox, who was clearly not pleased about the dead car. Knowing Alexis, Nate bet she hadn’t ponied up for the extra rental insurance, either.

Alexis leaned over to the suitcase, which was resting on one of the end tables that flanked the overstuffed sofas. She dialed in a combination and popped the locks open. Out of curiosity, Nate leaned in, trying to catch a glimpse. “You use the end-time?” It was an obvious guess, the date they’d all found themselves living for overnight: December 21, 2012.

“No.” She shifted aside and let him see: 6/21/84. The day of the Solstice Massacre.

“Feeling nostalgic?” he asked with a little too much edge.

“Bite me.” She sent him a sharp smile and turned her back on him.

Nate snorted, but didn’t regret the jibe, which had been as much a reality check as anything. The others might be buying into the What has happened before will happen again motto of the Nightkeeper legends, but he figured the history should stay where it belonged—in the past. The modern-day Nightkeepers, such as they were, would out of necessity be a new breed of magi. They didn’t need to learn about the past; they needed to forge their own futures. Screw the prophecies; screw destiny. As far as he was concerned, they should gather the artifacts, boost their powers as far as they could manage, and bust ass through the barrier to hit the Banol Kax on their home turf.

Not surprisingly, he was in the minority on that one.

“Et voila,” Alexis murmured, and lifted the top of the case, revealing not one, but two artifacts.

A murmur of surprise rippled through the assembled Nightkeepers and winikin, and most of them leaned in to see. The first artifact was the statuette she’d been sent after; Nate recognized it from the auction catalog. The second was a flattened clay disk maybe eight inches in diameter, shaped to resemble a man’s face. The formed clay face was slack mouthed, and the man’s eyes were covered with the jade pebbles he would’ve needed on his journey through Xibalba. Holes pierced on either side showed where rope or sinew would have been threaded through, allowing the mask to be tied in place.

Nate recognized it from what little reading he’d done on the Nightkeepers and the customs they’d shared with the ancient Maya. “It’s a death mask.”

It wasn’t just any death mask, either. The dead man had vaguely porcine features, with a flattened nose