Dawnkeepers

hood covering her streaky blond hair, and her back to him. He recognized the way she carried herself, the way the air seemed to shimmer in rainbows around her. And as she turned and glanced at him, he recognized the way his blood heated with the attraction he’d never managed to outrun or ignore.

She looked strong and tough, her movements graceful, as though she’d finally stopped wishing to be small and delicate and finally embraced the fact that she was an athlete, a warrior. Her high cheekbones stood out sharply, suggesting that she’d lost weight when he hadn’t been watching, or maybe the magic and responsibility had burned away the last of the human softness, leaving the Valkyrie behind.

“Nate,” she said finally, nodding and moving toward him, because one of them had to do something besides stare across the room.

“You look good,” he said, forcing himself not to reach out to her, because he’d given up that right rather than get into something he hadn’t been ready to deal with, might not ever be. Nightkeeper sex wasn’t about love; it was about power and necessity, and he’d played that game too many times already.

“You too,” she said, though he had a feeling the return compliment was a formality. He was pretty sure he looked like shit. He’d been eating too little, working out too much, and working on VW6 long into the nights, hunkered down in his parents’ cottage, typing furiously.

The rest of the story had finally started coming together when he’d realized the source of his block.

Hera hadn’t totally clicked with any of the mates they’d sketched out for her—even Nameless—

because she hadn’t needed anything from them. Things hadn’t started to flow until he’d hit on the idea of giving her a childhood trauma that had driven her to fight. Once she had that small chink in her armor, covering a larger vulnerability, he’d been able to bring the story line forward, which was why he’d been up way too late, way too many nights lately.

That and the realization that as Hera was becoming vulnerable, Alexis was growing into herself, becoming the woman she’d always wanted to be . . . and he wasn’t part of that change.

“Alexis,” he began, then stalled because he didn’t know what the hell he wanted to say. The things he wanted were all tangled up in his brain with the stuff he knew were supposed to happen according to the gods, and that was crammed against things he knew didn’t work for him, couldn’t ever work.

Her lips turned up at the corners in a small smile that was more acknowledgment than emotion.

“Yeah. I know.”

“Okay, gang, let’s do this,” Strike said, breaking up their nonconversation, which was both frustrating and a relief.

At the king’s gesture, the Nightkeepers took their positions, forming a circle within the circular room, with Strike and Leah standing with their backs to the chac-mool . Because they were going to be enacting the three-question spell, Nate and Alexis stood outside the circle, one on each side of the altar.

With them outside the circle, Red-Boar dead and Rabbit still missing, the Nightkeepers’ circle seemed very small.

“Ready?” Nate said, and Alexis nodded. She pulled her ceremonial knife and used it to blood her palm, then hesitated and held the knife out to him.

The act of using her knife to carve a bloody furrow in his palm seemed very intimate, and he held her eyes as he returned the knife and they joined hands over the altar. The background hum of magic sparked at the contact, jolting through him and lighting him up, sending his power higher than it’d ever been before, even when linked to the king. Gods, he thought, then amended it to, Goddess.

Because that was what he was feeling: Ixchel’s power. Alexis’s power.

“You remember the spell?” Alexis said quietly.

Nate nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”

They drew strength from the altar, and from the ashes of ten generations of Nightkeeper magi mixed into the mortar beneath the carved stone. They drew strength from each other, though he feared it wouldn’t be enough. Too much divided them, when the Godkeeper’s magic relied on the catalyst of her Nightkeeper mate.

Leaning on the magic they made together, and the humming pool of energy created by their uplinked teammates, they locked eyes and said in unison: “Pasaj och.”

They blinked into the barrier on a flash of gold and rainbows, with none of the lurching, rushing sensation Nate was used to. One second he was in the sacred room at Skywatch; the next he was in the barrier, standing facing Alexis, their hands linked. They stood on a flat, faintly spongy surface that they couldn’t see because gray- green mist swirled to their knees. The sky was the same gray-green, and the horizon—if there were such a thing in the barrier—was lost in the gray-green monotony of it all. Their entry to the barrier had been far smoother than ever before; before there had been a jolt, a rush, and a churn of nausea. But the barrier itself was the same as before.

“Wow. That was pretty painless,” Alexis said, mirroring his thoughts. She dropped his hands and looked around, as if to verify that they were really in the barrier.

“Thanks to the king’s adviser.” Nate faked a bow in her direction.

“Thanks to the goddess, you mean.”

It’s all you, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he said, “Stage two?”

She nodded. “Stage two.”

The three-question spell required petitioners to jack into the barrier, which meant that their physical bodies remained on earth—in this case, in the sacred chamber of Skywatch—while their incorporeal forms—their souls, for lack of a better term, though it made Nate cringe—entered the in-between gray-greenness of the barrier. Once there, the three-question petitioners had to perform a second bloodletting and another spell. Then, if Nate and Alexis had done everything right and had the magical chops to call the ancestor despite it not being a cardinal day, the three-question nahwal would appear.

That was the theory, anyway.

Nate reached into the pocket of his robe and withdrew a pair of stingray spines. He handed one to Alexis and kept one for himself. “I’m so not looking forward to this part.”

“It’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy,” she answered, paraphrasing one of the writs. Then she shot him a look and a sly grin, knowing how he felt about scripture.

Instead of answering, he stuck out his tongue, jammed the stingray spine into it, and ripped the barb free. Pain slapped and spiraled, so much sharper than the familiar bite of blade against palm. Blood flowed down his chin as Alexis did the same, hissing as she yanked out the spine, tearing flesh.

The magic might heal them quickly, but it didn’t stop the pain.

Both a little shaky now, they joined hands, leaning on each other, and chanted the second spell, calling the three-question nahwal.

Alone in the barrier with blood running down his chin, Rabbit finished the chant that should have called the three-question nahwal, but nothing happened. So he said it again. And again. Each time he started the words in the old tongue he threw more magic into it, more of his own blood.

Maybe it wasn’t working because he was alone, because it was the wrong day. Or maybe because he was nothing but a fuckup half-blood, like his old man had always said. But he refused to give up, because frigging Juarez still couldn’t find Myrinne, and Rabbit’s urge to get to her was growing by the hour, along with his conviction that she needed him, that she was important.

His body buzzed with the power and the pain as he said the spell again, taking the magic into him and sending it outward, summoning his ancestors’ wisdom. He wasn’t sure where he ended and the mist began. He was the mist and the mist was him, and he was all alone.

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t alone anymore. The nearby fog thickened, coalescing into a vaguely human shape that stepped forward into the shadowless gray-green light.

The three-question nahwal looked like the bloodline-bound nahwals that had come to the trainees during the talent ceremony. Both types of nahwal looked pretty much like desiccated corpses that happened to be up and moving around; they had no nipples or genitals, and their eyes were pure black, with no whites or emotion. But where the bloodline nahwals were each forearm-marked with their bloodline glyphs, this one was unmarked. And although they were supposed to be emotionless, this one looked seriously pissed off, with V-