Dawnkeepers

the day looked like nothing much, with little more than a few badly eroded carvings. At night, though, when the stars were bright, the walls showed instructions for opening a secret passageway that was viable for only an hour on either side of an equinox, solstice, or major event like an eclipse.

There were no stars tonight, and the writing didn’t glow quicksilver-bright, but the spell was already familiar. Strike and Leah knelt together, pressed their bloodied palms to the stones at the back of the narrow temple space, and recited the ancient words in synchrony.

When the doorway opened Alexis hung back a little, partially so she could scan the forest for any sign of trouble, and partly so she could avoid being too close to Nate as Strike and Leah led the Nightkeepers down the narrow passageway, and the others started falling in, moving single-file toward the sacred chambers, lighting the way with cheap flashlights.

Magic hummed in the air, heating Alexis’s blood and setting up vibrations where they didn’t belong, drawing her to a man whom didn’t want her, and who she didn’t want. Liar, her inner voice chided, but she ignored it and took up a position at the back of the line, with only Michael behind her.

He always took the rearmost position, because he was the best among them at shield magic. Very few spells worked down in the tunnels, but the shield did, and it could buy them valuable time if they were attacked.

Which left Alexis feeling like a spare wheel, because her shield was for shit.

And you so need to get over yourself, she thought fiercely, not sure where the negativity was coming from, but figuring it had to do with the eclipse, and the things that had happened—real or imagined—

between her and Nate over the past week.

The tunnel sloped gently down, and as the small group moved onward, the sound of running water quickly became audible. They would parallel the river all the way to their destination, which was a rectangular altar room deep beneath the ruins of Chichen Itza. There they would initiate the ceremony, and if—gods willing—a god accepted Patience as its keeper, she and Brandt would in theory get their asses zapped into the circular chamber where Strike and Leah had first met. Now buried beneath a shit-ton of rubble, the sacred chamber was where the Godkeeper ceremony was supposed to take place.

In theory, anyway. In practice, the Nightkeepers had performed the same calling ritual during the winter solstice, and had returned to the surface without a Godkeeper. There was no guarantee that this time would be any different.

When they reached the temple, which was fairly plain, save for sconces set at regular intervals and a large chac-mool altar that took up most of one end of the chamber, they set their flashlights on the floor and reblooded their palms. Alexis barely felt the pain through the humming that’d taken up residence in her brain. The buzz was one of warm urgency and temptation, though she couldn’t have said what it was tempting her to do.

Joining up again, the Nightkeepers spoke the words necessary to jack into the barrier: “Pasaj och.”

Alexis felt the kick of power, felt the split in her brain as part of her went into the barrier and part stayed behind. As planned, Patience began reciting the Godkeeper spell as the others boosted her power. The intersection was a weak spot in the barrier, supposedly created when the Xibalbans had called the demons to earth in the first millennium A.D. There, the earth, sky, and underworld were very close together, though the skyroad was long and winding by comparison to the hellmouth. As such, the intersection was where the Nightkeepers gathered for their strongest spells, especially those designed to call a god. Yet at the same time it opened the way for a demon as well, which was why Strike and Leah joined up and called on their god, Kulkulkan, to cast blockade magic and help keep the Banol Kax from coming through the portal formed by the Godkeeper spell. As they did so, the king and queen were surrounded by a golden shimmer: the light of love, and of the gods.

Alexis turned away from them, her throat closing on a beat of grief for what could’ve been, yet wasn’t. Telling herself that she was an important part of the battle regardless, she opened herself to the magic, reciting the Godkeeper spell in her head only a beat after hearing it in Patience’s sweet voice, supporting rather than ascending, following rather than leading.

Then, suddenly, she wasn’t following anymore.

Sudden urgency gathered in Alexis’s chest and mind, grabbing onto her. She gasped as the power hum increased, then her lungs vised on the exhale. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream.

Panicking, she opened her eyes, not having realized she’d closed them until that moment. She looked for help and latched onto Nate, saw the surprise on his face, the concern. He said something; she didn’t catch what it was, couldn’t hear him over the humming, yearning buzz. She could hear Patience, though, could hear the spell, could feel it grabbing onto her.

Sudden pain tore through Alexis’s hand, though she’d sheathed her knife. She yanked her hands away from the magi on either side of her and looked down in horror. Blood ran from her palms, pooling on the floor and then running uphill to the chac-mool, where it streamed up the lines of the rain god’s carved body in defiance of gravity. The blood collected in the bowl the statue held in its lap, pooling there.

Then, as she watched, the blood flared to fire, though none of the torches around the perimeter of the room were lit.

“Alexis!” She thought it was Nate’s voice calling her back, thought it was his hands that reached out to grab her as she walked toward the fire, called by her own burning blood. She caught his hand, pulled him along with her. She knew this wasn’t what he wanted, and her heart clutched a little at the pain brought by that knowledge. But the humming wouldn’t be denied, compelling her to lean over the flames and inhale a deep lungful of the sacred smoke.

And the world she knew disappeared.

CHAPTER TEN

One moment Nate was in the altar room, doing the spell-casting thing, and the next thing he knew, he and Alexis had somehow gotten their asses zapped into the buried chamber. And that was so not a good sign.

“No, goddamn it!” he shouted. “You’ve got it wrong. You don’t want us; you want Patience and Brandt!”

His words bounced off the curving walls of the circular stone chamber, which were carved with scenes of sex and sacrifice, as befitted the intersection where the earth, sky, and underworld touched one another in an unstable three-way joining that fluxed with the stars and the moon. At the top of the walls, near the ceiling, human skulls were carved protruding from the stone, their jaws agape in silent screams. Torches were set at regular intervals, with incense-burning braziers hung above. The moment Nate and Alexis had appeared in the space, flames had sprung to life, lighting the chamber and the altar that sat in its center, not a chac- mool this time, but a flat slab with manacles that could be fastened to the wrists and ankles of a spread-eagled victim.

The cuffs weren’t original to the chamber, Nate knew; they’d been put there by the ajaw- makol who had sacrificed Leah’s brother to reawaken the magic, then tried to sacrifice her to bring the barrier crashing down. But even though the cuffs weren’t vintage, they made a hell of a statement, one that pretty much said, Bleed here. Die here.

“Oh, shit,” Nate breathed, panic gathering in his chest—not for himself, but for the woman who both was and wasn’t the girl of his dreams. The Godkeeper ritual required death and rebirth, and a sexual sacrifice on the altar of the gods. “Lexie,” he began, taking a step toward where she stood.

She was staring at the room’s single doorway, which was a flat slab of rock, dropped down to seal the circular chamber. From Strike’s description of the Godkeeper ceremony he and Leah had just barely survived, the slab didn’t respond to normal magic, only to the will of the gods. There was no way out unless the gods saw fit to send them back to the altar room.

“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “I know this isn’t what you want.”

“It’s—” He broke off, because she was right. He didn’t want to be a mated protector—didn’t want to be