Dawnkeepers

’port. Why hadn’t he just zapped in and grabbed the knife?

Well, he hadn’t, so that gave them an opportunity they couldn’t afford to walk away from. Nate shifted to his left, then caught Rabbit’s eye and gave the kid a little nod, sending him a few steps to his right, so they were flanking the wannabe witch.

He was just about to move in when Alexis said, “My offer expires in two hours.” She turned away, headed back toward the light. “Come on, guys.” She walked out, leaving the room’s single exit wide-

open.

Mistress Truth looked straight at Nate and smirked. “You three should really get on the same page, you know.”

Having lost the element of surprise—and not sure he’d ever really had it—Nate followed Alexis out, with Rabbit at his heels. Nate crowded close to her and hissed, “What the hell was that?”

“It’s called a strategic retreat. And you’re not the negotiator here.”

“Fuck negotiating,” he said succinctly. “We should grab the knife, leave the cash, and get the hell out of here.”

Her eyes went cool. “We don’t all have the same set of flexible ethics as you, Nathan. And we can’t hold ourselves out as the saviors of mankind if we run around acting like street thugs.” She said the last very softly, letting him know that she too knew they were being watched. But if she was sharp enough to catch the furtive movement in the shadows, how could she not see that they were setting themselves up for disaster by leaving now?

Unless that was what she wanted to have happen.

Suddenly convinced there was something else going on here, something he wasn’t aware of, Nate growled, “Exactly what the hell are you up to?”

“Later,” she said as they moved from the bookcase labyrinth to the front of the store. She indicated the door. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

But when they hit the street, Rabbit wasn’t with them. Nate cursed under his breath and was just about to go back in when the kid came through the door with a strange look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Nate demanded.

Expression blanking, the teen shrugged. “Nothing. I thought I saw . . . nothing. I’ll take first watch.”

He turned away, heading across the street to a nearby bakery as though the only thing on his mind were chowing a couple of beignets, not setting up a surveillance post that faced the tea shop.

Alexis watched him go. “Creepy kid,” she said after a moment.

“Why?” Nate snapped, irritated. “Because he’s a half-blood? Watch it, princess, your winikin’s showing.”

Her eyebrows climbed. “What’s up your ass?”

You, he wanted to say. The witch. The ersatz Xibalban. All of it. The entire setup stank, just like Edna Hopkins’s cottage had. His blood buzzed with anger, with impatience. He wanted that knife, hated that they’d just walked away from it, and resented his growing suspicion that Alexis had an agenda he hadn’t known about. How the hell was he supposed to watch her back if he didn’t know the whole plan? “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”

“It’s an experiment.” She paused, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, gauging his response when she whispered almost soundlessly, “Strike thinks Rabbit’s mother was Xibalban. He wants to know if he reacts to the redhead’s magic.”

Stifling his first response, which involved the words fuck and me, Nate snarled, “So this isn’t just a recovery mission; it’s a science-fair project? Jesus, what kind of prioritization is that? Strike’s off his rocker.”

“We need information,” she said, but avoided his eyes.

Shit. This wasn’t the king’s plan. It was hers, or maybe a bit of both. “What are you doing, Alexis?”

Nate kept his voice low, but reached out and took her hand, feeling a buzz of contact that was a potent mix of sex, magic, and memory. He hung on when she would’ve pulled away, and said softly, “Talk to me.”

She lifted her chin. “Consider this an extended job interview.”

“You’re not going to earn the king’s trust by being stupid,” Nate said, letting go of her hand because he wanted to keep holding on. “Think it through. We go back in there, steal the knife, and bring it back to Skywatch. Mission accomplished. What more could Strike ask?”

“That’s the sort of thought process that got you thrown in jail, isn’t it?”

The universe went very still. “Don’t go there.”

Something flickered in her eyes—regret, maybe, or nerves—but it was quickly gone, leaving coolness behind. “Sorry,” she said, sounding unrepentant. “The point is that I’m not going to get what I want by doing the minimum. I have to prove that I’m ready for more, that I’m ambitious and aggressive.”

“That sounds like something Izzy would say.”

“I’m saying it,” she replied evenly, but then her expression softened. “Look, I know you want to follow your own path; I get that, and I’m not asking you to buy into something you don’t believe in.

But the thing is, I do believe in fate and destiny, and I’d be honored to follow my mother into an advisory position. I’d appreciate it if you’d help me out.”

Translation: You owe me. And the thing was, Nate realized, maybe he did. He’d slept with her when the pretransition hornies had hit him hard, and he’d broken it off when the urges waned. In reality there’d been more to it—a whole shit-ton more—but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that he’d used her when he’d needed to get his rocks off and dumped her when the mating urge leveled out. So yeah, he probably did owe her. And if the payback was him helping her impress the king by getting both the knife and an idea of whether Rabbit’s magic reacted to the redheaded mage, then so be it.

“Okay.” He nodded. “Fine. I’m in.” He still thought it was a piss-poor idea. But he also knew her well enough to figure she’d try it with or without his help. “Come on. I guess we watch and wait.”

He headed for the coffee shop where Rabbit had disappeared to, and he didn’t look back.

In the small cafe, Nate and Alexis sat together at a table so small that their knees bumped beneath it, while Rabbit sulked at a stool by the window, shoveling in calories at a rate of about a thousand a minute, in the form of beignets, lemon squares, and coffee-laced hot chocolate. All three of them had decent views of the alley that ran around the back of Mistress Truth’s shop, leading to the rear exit. If anyone came or went from the tea shop, they’d see.

The waiting, Alexis soon found, was the hardest part. Or rather, waiting with Nate was, because he was crowding her, getting inside her space, under her skin. And he wasn’t even trying to, damn him.

Her dream-vision of the two of them making love in the underground temple had undone the four months’ worth of forgive-and-forget she’d managed to build up since their relationship ended. She wanted to scratch at him for dumping her, for not remembering what her gut told her actually had happened between them in the stone chamber. At the same time, she wanted to be skin-on-skin with him, wanted to ride him, race him, roll with him like they’d done before, when they’d packed more than her prior lifetime of sex into a couple of short months that’d ended long before she was ready.

And she wanted, more than anything, to get a grip on herself.

The writs said that what had happened before would happen again, and boy, was that the truth. As hard as she’d tried to do otherwise, she’d put herself right back where she’d been too many times before—dealing with an ex on a daily basis and having to pretend it was no big deal. Before, it’d been her clients, wealthy men who had wanted her for her business acumen as much as for her body, and had generally been bored with her body long before they were finished with her stock tips. When she’d broken up with Aaron after catching him below-decks on his yacht with a bimbo twofer, she’d vowed to do better the next time.

Yeah, that worked, she thought, glancing at Nate, only to find him looking back at her. Their eyes connected, and the punch of remembered heat was tempered with a twist of regret. Maybe it was the magic of the coming eclipse, which was thinning the barrier and strengthening the sexual pull that’d been there from the beginning. Or maybe it was their close proximity, or the vision. Whatever the reason, even though she