Dawnkeepers

Sumerian warriors who had served the Nightkeepers back in ancient Egypt. When Akhenaton went monotheistic in 1300 or so B.C. and ordered his guard to off the priests of the old religion—

including the Nightkeepers—the servants had managed to escape with a handful of the Nightkeepers’ children. The sole surviving adult mage, acting under the influence of the gods, had magically blood-

bound the servants to their Nightkeeper lineages, creating the winikin. Or so the story went. The upshot was that the winikin were fiercely loyal to their blood-bound charges. They acted partly as the Nightkeepers’ protectors, partly as their servants, and almost always as the little nagging voices on their shoulders.

Carlos, who on the king’s request had transferred responsibility for his original Nightkeeper charge to his daughter and taken over as Nate’s winikin when the Nightkeepers had been reunited seven months earlier, was an Olympic-level nagger. Worse, he had ambitions. He was jonesing for Nate to follow in the footsteps of his father, Two-Hawk, and become an adviser to the king. The winikin just didn’t get why that wasn’t going to happen . . . i.e., because Nate had no intention of getting in any deeper than he absolutely had to. Hell, he’d volunteered to go get the statuette only because he’d needed some distance from all of the destiny shit, and a chance to get away from the stress of trying to be a Nightkeeper while running Hawk Enterprises long-distance. And he’d needed to put some serious miles between him and Alexis after the way things had ended between them.

Besides, he’d figured it’d be an easy deal: Fly out, buy the statuette off the old lady, and fly home.

That’d worked well. Not.

Nate, who kept score in his head, like any good gamer, figured that if he called the Nightkeepers’ first big fight with the Banol Kax level one of the battle, then they had more or less won their way through when they’d banded together during the previous fall’s equinox and driven the demon Zipacna back through the barrier to Xibalba, where he belonged. Which meant they were on to level two now, and the bad guys had scored the first hit when they’d snagged the demon prophecy out from under Nate’s nose.

“Edna Hopkins is dead and the statuette’s gone,” Nate told Carlos, his voice clipped. “Someone—or something—got here ahead of me.”

Which was not good news, because it meant they’d been wrong in thinking that the lack of activity at the intersection during the winter solstice had meant the Banol Kax had fallen back to regroup. The demons must’ve sent something through the barrier after all, though gods only knew how they’d done it. The sole transit point between the earth, sky, and underworld was the sacred chamber beneath Chichen Itza, and sure as shit nothing had come through there. The Nightkeepers had been there, waiting.

Which probably meant the demons had managed to punch through the barrier and convince an evil-

souled human host to undergo the makol ritual, as they had done at least twice the prior fall. The makol, who could be identified by their luminous green eyes, retained their human intelligence and free will in direct relation to their degree of evilness and willingness to be possessed. Maybe the demons had created one or more makol during the winter solstice and sent them after the statuette. But why now? And why had they left the body untouched?

“Are you safe?” Carlos asked, though they both knew the question was more protocol than real concern.

“Yeah. Whoever or whatever killed her is long gone.”

“Was she sacrificed?”

“She’s intact.” Which had Nate seriously on edge. The dark magic of Xibalba was largely powered by the blood sacrifice of unwilling victims. If makol had taken the statue and killed Edna Hopkins, they would’ve taken her head and heart, too, as those were the seats of power. Yet there hadn’t been a mark on her, and she’d looked peaceful rather than terrified. Which meant . . . Hell, he didn’t know what it meant, and the discrepancy had him rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, where the hairs at his nape were doing a shimmy. “Don’t let anyone else leave the compound until I get back, okay? I have a bad feeling about this.”

Skywatch was protected by a blood ward that had been set in the 1920s by the willing sacrifice of two senior Nightkeepers, and was reinforced by regular ceremonial autolettings by the resident magi.

The ward meant the training compound was impenetrable to all but the strongest of the underworld denizens. If the Nightkeepers stayed put they’d be safe from Edna Hopkins’s killer, buying them time to identify the threat and figure out how to neutralize it.

Strike and the others might be willing to follow prophecies carved in stone temples. Nate preferred legwork, strategy, and firepower.

But Carlos was silent for too long. That, combined with the tickle at the back of Nate’s neck, warned him there was a problem even before the winikin said, “Miss Alexis left last night for an estate auction in Monterey.”

Nate’s gut clenched and his voice went deadly chill. “And you’re only just telling me this now?”

“You’ve made it clear that she isn’t your concern.” There was an edge to the winikin’s voice, coming from Nate’s refusal to buy into the whole gods-given-mate thing.

Screw refusing to buy in; he was actively fighting it. He respected Alexis, and yeah, they’d clicked physically—hell, the sex had been scorching. But it’d been too much, too fast, at a time when his life had been doing a screeching one-eighty, swerving around a bit and then skidding off into a ditch. If it hadn’t been for the magic and the Nightkeepers, he and Alexis never would’ve met. If they had, odds were that they would’ve felt the spark, acknowledged it, and moved on, because it was godsdamned obvious that while they might have chemistry, they didn’t always like each other.

Hera, he understood; Alexis, not so much. But that didn’t stop his gut from locking up at the knowledge that she was outside the wards and didn’t have a clue there was a makol or something after the demon prophecies. And if the demon spawn were tracking the artifacts by piggybacking on the Nightkeepers’ investigations, whether by magic or good old-fashioned e-hacking, which was the only way the timing of Edna Hopkins’s death made any sense, then the odds were good that Alexis was going to have company very soon, if she didn’t already.

Shit. Nate hit the brakes, yanked the rental over to the side of the road, and grated, “Get Strike here.

Now.”

“The king’s ability to teleport isn’t a convenience.”

“Fuck convenience. Consider this a rescue.”

In the ornate ballroom of a recently foreclosed estate on the Monterey coast, the auctioneer introduced lot two twelve, a thirteen-hundred-year-old Mayan statuette of the goddess Ixchel. Bidding started at two grand and jumped almost immediately to five. At fifty-five hundred, Alexis caught the spotter’s eye and nodded to bump the bid. Then she leaned back in her folding chair, projecting the calm of a collector.

It was a lie, of course. The only things she’d ever collected were parking tickets at the Newport Marina. She looked the part, though, in a stylish navy pin-striped pantsuit that nipped in at the waist and pulled a little across the shoulders, thanks to all the hand-to-hand training she’d gotten in recent months. Her streaky blond hair was caught back in a severe ponytail, tasteful makeup accented her blue eyes and wide mouth, and she wore secondhand designer shoes that put her well over six feet. A top-end bag sat at her feet beside a matching folio, both slightly scuffed around the edges.

Understated upscale, courtesy of eBay. Her godmother, Izzy, might’ve pushed her into finance rather than fashion, but Alexis had put her love of fabric to good use regardless, calling on it to build an image.

In her previous life as a private investment consultant, her look had been calculated to reassure her wealthy friends and clients that she belonged among them but wouldn’t compete, wouldn’t upstage.

She’d played the part for so long prior to the oh, by the way, you’re a Nightkeeper revelation that it’d been second nature to dress for this gig. But as bidding on the statuette topped sixtyfive hundred and Alexis nodded to bump it to a cool seven grand, she felt a hum of power that had been missing from her old life.

I have money now, the buzz in her blood said. I deserve to be here.

It wasn’t her money, not really. But she had carte blanche with the Nightkeeper Fund, and orders not to