Dawnkeepers

and Nate were sitting still, unspeaking, she suddenly felt naked beneath his gaze. Vulnerable.

Excited.

Damn it.

“There,” he said suddenly, leaning forward. “In the shop. Something’s happening.”

They rose and moved to flank Rabbit’s vantage point at the front of the coffee shop. There was motion inside Mistress Truth’s place: blinds being drawn, and a pair of shadows moving behind them, backlit by a glow of warm illumination that was too steady to be candlelight, too dim to be the shop’s fluorescents. The quick February dusk had fallen, showing the figures clearly—one was Mistress Truth, the other far too small to be the big redheaded man. “Two shadows,” Nate said. “The witch and whoever else was in there watching us.”

Alexis shot him a quick look. She’d thought she’d been imagining the sensation of being watched.

Apparently not.

“I saw her,” Rabbit said, “I think.” At Nate’s look, he elaborated, “My age, maybe a year or two older. Thin, dark hair, black eye.”

Alexis asked, “As in she had dark eyes, or she had a shiner?”

“A shiner. Looked like someone clocked her good.” The teen shifted on his stool, shrugging restlessly inside his clothes.

Maybe the caffeine was catching up with him. Or maybe it was something else, Alexis thought as she caught a buzz of power off him, a whiff of smoke. Oh, hell, she thought, looking past the teen and catching Nate’s eye. Her stomach dropped when he nodded that he’d sensed it, too.

The kid was jacked in and jacked up, and far too twitchy for his own good. Typically hair-trigger on a good day, Rabbit was wired to blow. He must’ve been more excited than she’d thought about the prospect of some action. Or else it really was the caffeine—who the hell knew with his powers?

The king had ordered her to keep Rabbit safe first and foremost. Learning more about his magic was secondary. Which meant she so wasn’t putting him in front of the Xibalban now. Not like this. The kid was a loose cannon leaking way more power than he ought to be. Add that to the hormonal explosives that came with being eighteen and having aY chromosome, and bad things could happen way too easily.

“Hey.” Nate put a hand on the teen’s shoulder. “Take a deep breath and chill.”

Rabbit practically exploded off the stool, shooting backward and landing in a defensive crouch.

“Don’t,” he said on a whistle of breath, “touch me.” He stood there for a second, ribs heaving, then looked around and went brick red when he realized he’d quickly become the center of attention in the cafe, and a couple of big dudes in the coffee line were looking like they were thinking about getting involved.

“We’re cool,” Nate said, holding both hands up in a gesture of no harm, no foul.

“Yeah.” Rabbit sent the would-be Good Samaritans a filthy look as he slouched back onto his stool.

“Nothing to see here.”

“Sorry for the commotion,” Alexis put in, and waited until most everyone had gone back to their own business before she glanced over at the teen. “You need to work on your blocks if you’re pulling this much power already. The eclipse isn’t for another forty-eight hours.”

“The witch is leaving,” Nate said quietly.

Alexis looked over in time to see Mistress Truth hustling through the front door of the tea shop, wearing a big purple jacket over the same purple tracksuit she’d had on earlier. Bracing herself for a fight, Alexis said, “Rabbit, listen—”

“I think I should stay here,” he interrupted, then swallowed hard. His voice was shaky, his color was off, and heat crinkled in the air around him. “I’m not feeling so good. I’ll wait here until you get back, maybe call Strike for a pickup if I start feeling too shitty.”

Which so wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “I . . . uh. Yeah. I think that’d be best.”

“We’ve got to go if we’re going,” Nate said as a dark sedan pulled up in front of the tea shop and Mistress Truth climbed in. “Unless you want to stay here with Rabbit?”

She ought to, she knew. She’d promised to keep him safe. But Rabbit shook his head and waved her off. “Go. I’ll keep out of trouble. Honest.”

As Nate headed out to the street and flagged a cab, Alexis wavered. Finally she said, “Okay. I’m going to hold you to that.”

Telling herself it was the right call, she bolted after Nate and jumped in the cab. As the vehicle headed through the French Quarter in pursuit of the dark sedan, Nate glanced at her. “You sure he’ll stay put?”

“Yeah. He promised.” Whatever she might think of Rabbit, a Nightkeeper’s word was his bond.

It wasn’t until they were a good five minutes down the road that she realized that Rabbit had said honest . . . but he hadn’t actually promised her a damn thing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After Rabbit watched Nate and Alexis get in a taxi and do the “follow that limo” thing, he waited ten minutes or so, in case Mistress Truth circled the block to check on the tea shop before driving on. It was what he would’ve done in her place . . . especially since he was almost positive she’d left the knife behind.

He wasn’t sure why the others hadn’t noticed her lack of a power signature—maybe they hadn’t seen the rippling magic coming off the knife in the first place? Either way, he was glad to be rid of them, because he badly wanted to get back inside that shop. There was something in there calling to him: maybe the knife, and yeah, maybe the girl. Either way, he’d played it right and the coast was as clear as it was likely to get.

It was pretty much full-on dark by the time he left the coffee shop and headed across the street, though dark was a relative term given the frenetic lighting of the French Quarter. Already bodies were piling up in the jazz club four doors down from the tea shop. The music and the crowd had spilled out into the street, but to Rabbit the partying seemed tinged with desperation, as though the locals were both tired of Mardi Gras and not quite ready to let it be over yet.

He slipped through the crowd unheeded. Thanks to a recent growth spurt, he was close to five-ten now and had finally broken the one-fifty mark. Still, at times like this it was an advantage being small and average-looking. The full-blood Nightkeepers couldn’t blend to save their lives. Rabbit, on the other hand, barely got a look as he wormed his way through. A couple of glances headed his way when he went for the door of the locked-up tea shop, but the interest level faded fast when he made a show of fumbling with a set of keys. Nobody needed to know they were the keys to an ammo locker out at the Skywatch gun range, especially when a quick touch had the lock giving way.

His fledgling telekine skills were one of the things that set him apart from the full-bloods—no true Nightkeeper had multiple nonspell talents—but that was the one area where being a half-blood was actually an advantage. Nobody knew where the limits were on his magic, and he sure as hell hadn’t bumped up against them yet. He knew it made some of the others—especially the winikin—nervous when he experimented or did something he shouldn’t have been able to do in their limited view of the world, but he didn’t care, not really.

They could have their suspicions. He had the magic.

He let himself into the front room of the tea shop, with its glass cases and tables for two, one of which held a single kerosene lantern that provided thin yellow light. He didn’t see any surveillance or catch the faint background hum of electrical power going to a security grid. There also weren’t any of the magic prickles that warned of spell-cast wards, but he hadn’t expected there to be. He’d figured out pretty much right away that Mistress Truth was a poser; she had props from half a dozen so-called

“magicks,” yet the only thing that’d held actual power was the knife.

She had the trappings but didn’t know what to do with them, and he was kind of disappointed. From the way the taxi driver’d been acting, he’d halfway hoped they were onto something interesting, something’d that’d disprove the Nightkeepers’ bloody-minded insistence that the only workable magic was theirs. Rabbit’s gut told him there were other types of magic out there, and that his mother had used it. That would explain why his power was