Dawnkeepers

again relationship; he wasn’t an idiot. Seeing it didn’t mean he knew what to do about it, though.

Which was why he headed out to the Pueblo ruins near dusk in early March, five days before the opposition ceremony, needing some serious time to himself. Instead of going all the way out to the pueblo, though, he wound up detouring over to his parents’ cottage, knowing that was where he’d meant to go all along.

When he opened the door and stepped through, he found someone waiting for him in the sitting room, and stopped dead. “Carlos.” Shit.

“Are you ready to listen yet?” the winikin asked, making it sound as if he were willing to wait as long as he needed to, even though they both knew time was running out. The equinox was nine days after the opposition, and Alexis needed to have full access to the goddess’s powers by then if she hoped to have even a prayer of battling the first of the foretold demons. That meant having her Nightkeeper mate’s full support.

The operative word there being “mate.”

“I can’t pull hearts and flowers out of my ass just because it’s convenient for everyone else,” Nate snapped. “And for what it’s worth, I offered. She turned me down. End of story.” Okay, so technically he’d offered some fairly clinical, no-strings sex approximately sixty seconds before she’d asked him about Hera and realized she’d been a stand-in. Or was Hera the stand-in? Fucked if he knew; they were all mixed-up together in his head.

“I wasn’t talking about you and Alexis,” Carlos said mildly. “Although if you’d like to talk about the two of you, I’m more than happy to listen. I had twenty wonderful years with my Essie. I could probably teach you a few things.”

“I don’t,” Nate said between gritted teeth, “want to talk about me and Alexis. I don’t want to talk at all.” But he didn’t turn around and leave, either, just stood in the middle of the sitting room, glaring at his father’s paintings. “Not everything that happened before will happen again, goddamn it. I don’t need to know the history of my bloodline to be a warrior.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” The winikin should’ve looked out of place, but somehow his snap-studded shirt and big old belt buckle fit into the subtle—albeit dated—elegance of the furnishings and decor.

Which, damn it, made Nate wonder about the others who’d sat on that same couch. His mother and father. Their friends. Hell, Alexis’s mother had probably been there a time or two, if only to bitch at his father for something. He didn’t know much about the goings-on at Skywatch prior to the Solstice Massacre, but it would’ve been impossible to miss knowing that Gray-Smoke and his father had spent a good chunk of their time as royal advisers trying to argue each other into the ground.

Kind of like him and Alexis. Not that he believed in history repeating itself. Shit.

Nate dropped down to the sofa and let his head bang against the backrest. He tried not to look at the paintings again, because he already knew from experience that he’d stare at them way too long if he gave himself the luxury.

“I’ve never even seen a picture of them,” he said after a moment, damning himself because he knew he was losing the battle.

Carlos had the good grace not to do a victory dance, saying only, “Have you looked around?”

“Hell, no.” Nate glanced back at the open front door and the fading light of freedom beyond. He’d been toying with the idea of trying the ball court and figuring out the game Lucius kept going on about. Maybe that’d help the restlessness. And, hell, it couldn’t be much harder than basketball, right?

The hoops were higher and set vertical rather than horizontal, but there was no dribbling to worry about on the pounded-dirt surface; it was mostly knees and elbows. He bet he could get the others into the idea, maybe use the game to burn off some frustrations.

He should get started now, he thought. But he stayed put.

Carlos rose. “Come on. I’ll help you find some snapshots.”

“No,” Nate said again, but it was more of a plea than a denial.

T h e winikin ignored him and headed for the second bedroom. Unable to do otherwise, Nate followed.

And stopped dead in the doorway of a frigging nursery.

He didn’t recognize the crib or toys, or the spinning mobile of stars and moons above the bed. He had no memory of the rain-forest scenes painted on the walls, or the birds of prey painted on the ceiling. But his gut confirmed what logic said had to be true: that this was where he’d slept for the first two years of his life.

It wasn’t just any nursery; it was his nursery.

Sucking a breath past a punch of pain, he cursed and turned to retreat. Except his feet didn’t move, planting him there in the doorway as Carlos crossed the room and opened a large closet, which was stacked with toys, clothes, and baby stuff on one side, neatly labeled boxes on the other.

“You snooped,” Nate said, the words coming out on a wheeze. “You cased the joint before I got here.”

The winikin didn’t turn back. “You’re a tough case, Blackhawk. I’ll take whatever leverage I can get.”

Which was pretty much what Carol Rose, his social worker, had said about him. She’d refused to take “fuck off and die” as an answer, and had ridden his ass until he straightened up and made something of himself. He was starting to get a feeling that Carol and Carlos had more in common than the similarities in their names. And that was simple fucking coincidence, he thought bitterly. Not fate.

“So what exactly do you want from me?” he finally asked.

“Nothing much.” Now Carlos did glance back, and his lips twitched. “I just want you to help save the world.”

It should’ve been a joke, probably had been meant as one, at least in part. But the winikin’s words shot straight to the heart of Nate’s frustration, his pounding sense that he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing, yet he couldn’t do what the others wanted him to. Letting his legs unlock, he slid down the wall just inside his nursery until he was sitting on the floor, his spine propped against the doorjamb. Looking up at the stand-in father figure he hadn’t met until seven months earlier, he said, “I don’t know how.”

Rancher-practical, Carlos said, “I can’t tell you how to feel or what to do. But I can tell you what’s been done before, and how those before you thought, felt, and acted.”

“Their history ended in 1984,” Nate said, though the words came out less like a protest and more like a plea. “It’s just not relevant today.”

“Then you will have wasted a few hours listening to an old man’s stories. Is that really any worse than going up to the Pueblo ruins and getting hammered on Rabbit’s stash of pulque?”

“Busted,” Nate said, and found a grin. Forcing himself to breathe, he waggled his fingers in a bring it on gesture. “Okay, winikin, you win. Introduce me to my family.”

Which was how, as the quick desert dusk fell and day turned to night, Nate found himself staring at a snapshot of a tall, handsome man with eyes like his, wearing the hawk medallion around his neck, with his arm curved protectively around the waist of a dark-haired woman who had laughing, loving eyes, and an infant cradled in her arms.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rabbit had lived in Massachusetts for a good chunk of his life, through the misery of junior high and high school, and then for a few months after graduation, up until the barrier reactivated and Strike and his old man had reopened Skywatch. So he pretty much felt like an ass that he’d showed up for the

’port to Boston wearing shorts and a light hoodie, and then gave Strike lip when he’d suggested a jacket. It’d been seventy and sunny in New Mex.

It was, however, thirty and pissing freezing rain in Boston. How had he forgotten the misery of early springtime in New England?