Dawnkeepers

really didn’t like talking about magic. Not exactly a primo source of info. But Alexis nodded, mostly to appease her winikin. “Fine. I’ll talk to her.”

“And you won’t make any decisions until then?”

Alexis snorted. “Nate and I are headed to New Orleans tomorrow to buy a knife from a wannabe witch who calls herself Mistress Truth. We’ll be lucky if we don’t kill each other on the plane ride, never mind finding time for some one-on-one.” Still, she felt a kick of excitement at the prospect of the trip, and the thought of Nate seeing her at her best—negotiating a purchase. Which just went to show that she so wasn’t over him, despite what she kept telling herself.

“Promise me,” Izzy said, her voice low.

“Fine, I promise I won’t do anything about the vision,” Alexis said, tempering it with a mental, for now, anyway.

Since her swimming mojo had been thoroughly disrupted, she exchanged good-nights with Izzy and headed back to her room to read over the references Jade had found to the Order of Xibalba. Sitting on the elegant gray sofa she’d had shipped down from the city, Alexis started reading the summary report Jade had pulled together.

Strike seemed to think the enemy mage might have something to do with the Xibalbans, while Jox kept insisting the order was nothing more than a bogeyman legend the Nightkeepers and winikin had used to scare the crap out of their kids and keep them more or less behaving. But eventually Jox had admitted that the legend, like so many others, was rooted in fact. The Order of Xibalba had existed, and its members had been seriously bad news.

More important, they’d been marked with a quatrefoil glyph that represented the entrance to hell.

Which meant . . . what? Was the guy she’d gone up against a surviving member of the original order, or someone who’d gotten hold of their magic, maybe through a spell book or something? And if it was one of those things, what the hell did it mean for the Nightkeepers?

Unfortunately, the more she read, the worse it sounded.

Some of the references Jade had uncovered said the order had arisen from the Mayan shaman-

priests themselves, who had been astronomers and mystics in their own right, aside from their association with the Nightkeepers. Other references suggested the order arose when a group of rogue Nightkeepers split off and began to teach the Mayan priests some of the Nightkeepers’ spells, which was forbidden. When the Nightkeepers’ king had learned of the betrayal he’d gone after the rogues and their followers, who had fled into the highlands and disappeared into hiding, emerging only on the cardinal days, when they practiced their dark arts.

After that point the stories converged to agree on one major point: Around the year A.D. 950, the Xibalbans—which was how they’d come to be known by that point—had somehow breached the barrier and unleashed several of the Banol Kax onto the earth plane. The demons had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Maya, wiping out entire cities and putting the empire on the brink of collapse. The Nightkeepers had eventually managed to recapture the creatures and restore the barrier, but the damage had been done. The Mayan Empire had never recovered to the heights it’d achieved prior to the Xibalbans’ attack, soon losing ground to the vicious Inca, Aztecs, and Toltecs, who had flourished with the help of the Xibalbans until the fifteen hundreds, when the Xibalbans convinced them to welcome Cortes and his conquistadors. The Nightkeepers warned that the conquistadors should be sent away, but their counsel went unheeded. The two decades following Cortes’s landing had seen the deaths of ninety percent of the Maya, Inca, Aztec, and Toltec; the destruction of the Mayan writing system; and the slaughter of all the polytheistic priests. A few dozen Nightkeepers had escaped, and the Xibalbans had disappeared entirely from the historical record, which was largely why Jox and the others assumed they’d been wiped out.

Had they, like the Nightkeepers, hidden themselves, focusing on training for the end-time wars? Or had the order truly disappeared, meaning that the enemy mage was a new breed of danger?

Damned if I know, Alexis thought, flipping Jade’s report back to the first page and starting to reread it more carefully, in case she’d missed something critical the first time through. As she did so, though, she knew she was just avoiding thinking about her convo with Izzy, and the fact that she and Nate were going to be doing the close-proximity thing the next day when they traveled to Louisiana.

They were flying commercial because Leah had long ago decreed that Strike’s teleport powers were emergency-only. Which only made sense; they didn’t know enough about the magic to predict its limitations. What if he had only so many zaps in him, and they used them up blip-ping off to get beer or something? Bad idea.

So it was Delta, first-class, nonstop, which almost made up for the fact that Alexis hadn’t been able to talk Strike out of sending Nate with her as backup. It wasn’t as though she’d been able to tell him the truth, either, because hearing about her dream-vision would’ve only increased the king’s determination to throw her together with Nate, for two major reasons: one, because gods-intended, mated Nightkeepers were so much more powerful together than an unmated Nightkeeper alone; and two, because Strike himself had dreamed about Leah long before he met her, and vice versa, even though neither male Nightkeepers nor humans were supposed to be precogs or visionaries. The king was a big believer in dreams and portents, and he’d already made it clear that he thought Nate and Alexis would make a strong pair-bond, and that a relationship between them would be an asset to the Nightkeepers in the coming war.

“So sad, too bad for him,” she muttered under her breath. “Because a happy couple we very definitely are not. Sex doesn’t make a lasting relationship if the people engaged in said sex can’t carry on a civil convo to save their lives.”

“Then I take it you won’t mind me adding a third wheel,” the king’s voice said from the doorway to her suite.

Alexis jolted, but stopped herself from an instinctive gasp and spin because she was always aware of how Strike saw her, what he thought of her, and how she could improve that impression. How she could make herself useful in an advisory capacity. He already had Jox’s long-range perspective on Nightkeeper matters, and Leah was at his side to give him the cop’s view and the female opinion. As far as Alexis figured, her best commodities were her business experience and negotiating skills. Either way, she knew she had some serious impressing left to do if she wanted to take her mother’s place at the king’s side.

Still, when she turned to wave Strike in, she wasn’t sure she liked his wary expression, or the way he closed the door at his back, as though he didn’t want anyone listening in.

“You’re coming to New Orleans?” she asked, hoping it was that simple—and that much of an opportunity.

“Nope, sorry.” Strike exhaled, looked around her carefully decorated room and shifting inside his T-

shirt like he wasn’t feeling right inside his own skin. “I want you and Nate to take Rabbit with you.”

Squelching her knee-jerk no way in hell, Alexis went with a neutral hum while she processed the info and came up with only one good conclusion. “You want him out of the way.”

Strike shook his head. “He’s getting squirrelly and needs to get the hell out of the compound. That’s all.”

“No, it’s not.” Alexis kicked her feet up on the soft gray ottoman she’d bought to match the sofa, and folded her hands across her chest, thinking. “Given what happened today it’s not a good time to be sending anyone who doesn’t absolutely need to be off property, so there’s a reason you want Rabbit gone.” She sucked in a breath as she made an intuitive leap she was pretty sure was right.

“Something’s wrong with Patience and Brandt?”

Of all the current Nightkeepers, Patience and Brandt White-Eagle were special thrice over: once because they’d found each other long before the barrier reactivated, meeting in Mexico on the night of the spring solstice, and waking up together the following morning wearing their marks; a second time because they’d defied the teachings of their winikin by getting married and having kids; and a third time because those kids were twins, which were sacred to the Nightkeepers because of their abilities to boost each other’s powers. The kids, Harry and Braden, hadn’t been put through any of the ceremonies yet, in order to protect them from being detected by magic seekers, but they lived at Skywatch among the bound Nightkeepers, watched over by Patience and Brandt’s winikin, Hannah and Wood, when Patience and Brandt were unavailable. Which they’d been more and more lately, Alexis had noticed, as though they were drawing away from the Nightkeepers—or each other—and didn’t want anyone else to know.