Dawnkeepers

think of it that way, as “the driver,” rather than dealing with the fact that she’d been in the car that’d made those marks, that she’d nearly gone over the cliff trying to get free of a firewall that hadn’t left even a smudge on the street. But it’d been real, she knew, just as she knew her attacker was out there, waiting.

Figuring it’d be stupid to drain herself further, she dropped the shield and hunkered back down behind the rock. She needed a plan.

Calling for help wasn’t an option—her cell phone had gone over with the car, she wasn’t a natural telepath, and she didn’t have a strong enough connection with any of the other Nightkeepers to get through to Skywatch via blood magic. The OnStar signal would’ve called in the local law, but she wasn’t betting on their being in time for whatever happened next. Which meant she was on her own.

Worse, her head was seriously spinning from the drain of the barrier spell, and her fireballs were for shit.

Damn, damn, damn.

Closing her eyes, she tried to remember what she’d seen in the last few seconds before she’d whipped around the corner and driven into the flames. There’d been nothing on the right side of the road but the cliff and the bay beyond, but she was pretty sure she remembered seeing a house just before things went to hell. Could she make it there and take shelter? Would she be any safer if she did? Who the hell knew, but making a run for it had to be better than huddling behind a couple of rocks, especially when power crinkled across her skin, warning that her attacker was gearing up for stage two.

“You’re not getting Ixchel,” she muttered under her breath, holding the suitcase close to her chest as she tried to slow her rocketing heartbeat and call on all the training she’d done recently, the sprints and balance exercises. She took a few quick breaths, managed not to throw up, and got herself in a defensive crouch. Then, casting up the best shield spell she could manage, she scrambled out from behind the rocks and bolted for the road, aiming for the house on the other side of the blind corner.

Behind her power surged, and the rocks that had formed her hiding spot suddenly exploded beneath the force of a smoky brown fireball.

Screaming, Alexis ran for her life. Her feet skidded on rocks and bits of broken glass, and her ankle turned as one of her too-high heels broke off. Cursing, sobbing, she hurled herself up the embankment and scrambled over the guardrail, kicking off her shoes once she was on the pavement. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and adrenaline spurred her on, pushing her past the pain when she stepped on another chunk of glass and it bit deep into the ball of her foot.

Blood flowed, bringing power. She felt the barrier magic reach out and grab hold of her, bolstering her failing strength as she put her head down and hauled ass.

She was halfway there when muddy brown smoke detonated in the middle of the street. Power rattled from the midst of the explosion, and a big man materialized in her path. He was as big as any of the Nightkeeper males, with slicked-back chestnut hair, green eyes, and broad features, wearing dark combat clothes and a weapons belt that looked all too familiar, loaded with a ceremonial knife and an autopistol.

Alexis skidded to a stop, freezing in disbelief at the sight of his bare forearm, where he wore an unfamiliar quatrefoil glyph, done in bloodred rather than Nightkeeper black.

Impossible.

“What are you?” she whispered, fear and confusion jamming her throat and almost robbing her of speech.

“I’m what your kind wish you could be.” His mouth tipped up at the corners, and he held out his hand. “Give me the statuette.”

“Like hell!” She pulled away, but wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t sure if he’d ’ported or just moved incredibly fast, but one second she had the suitcase, and the next she was flying three feet through the air, and he was holding on to the case.

Alexis didn’t think; she reacted, scrambling up with a cry that came from the warrior within her.

She lunged, grabbed the big guy’s knife off his belt before he knew what was happening, and plunged the weapon into the bastard’s hand. He cursed bitterly and let go of the case, and Alexis grabbed the thing and ran like hell.

The enemy mage roared a curse, pulled his machine pistol, and let loose. Gunfire chattered, though most of the bullets bounced off Alexis’s shield spell. At least one got through, though. It plowed into her shoulder and hurt like hell.

She screamed as pain washed her vision red, then screamed again when the rattle of dark magic surrounded her and yanked her off her feet. Pressure vised her from all sides and bound her motionless in midair, suspended on an oily brown cloud. Energy roared through her, along with the peculiar sliding sensation of teleport magic as he prepared to take her somewhere she positively didn’t want to go. She poured everything she had into her shield, hoping it’d make her too bulky to transport or something. The rattle changed in pitch, dipping slightly, and the pressure eased.

Screaming, Alexis tore free of the brown mist. She tumbled to the ground, still clutching the suitcase in fingers gone numb from the death grip she had on the thing. Rolling as she hit, she scrambled up and started backing away as fast as she could, throwing the last of her strength into the shield spell.

The enemy mage fired again, burning through his first clip and slapping a second home, then resuming fire, his face set in anger and determination. Jade-tipped bullets pelted the invisible shield, deflecting no more than a foot from Alexis’s face, but she couldn’t flee and hold the magic at the same time, not now. Her power was too drained, her strength too low. Holding the metal case in front of her as a pitiful defense when her magic flickered and threatened to die, she crouched down, trying to make herself as small a target as possible, trying to minimize the shield’s dimensions and eke it out a few minutes longer.

Help! she shouted as loud as she could along her connection to the barrier, hoping somebody—

anybody, another Nightkeeper, the gods, it didn’t matter—would hear. Please help me!

Blood trickled down her arm, but even with that sacrifice, the shield magic flickered. A bullet smacked into the edge of the case and ricocheted away; another bounced off the asphalt road a few inches from her bare, bloodied foot. Her eyes filmed with tears of desperation, of anger that this was how it would end.

She hadn’t done so many of the things she’d meant to—hadn’t come into her full powers as a Nightkeeper or proved herself to her king. She hadn’t shown up any of her old “friends” back in Newport, or outgrown the need to do so, and she hadn’t figured out why she sometimes awoke with tears in her eyes, hearing the echoes of a voice she knew belonged to the mother she’d never met. But it wasn’t any of those things she saw in her mind’s eye when the shield winked out of existence and the dark mage unleashed his final salvo. It was the glint of a hawk medallion, one she’d known long before she knew who wore it or what it meant. A wash of desire raced through her, the remembered echo of something that hadn’t turned out the way it should’ve. As she braced herself for the burn of bullet strikes, his name whispered in her heart.

Oh, Nate.

Red-gold light suddenly detonated nuclear-bright, and a shock wave of displaced air knocked her back. The incoming bullets scattered in the blast, and two familiar figures slammed to the ground in front of her.

Nate Blackhawk, with the king at his side.

Both clad in black-on-black combat gear, tall and dark, and larger than life like all full-blooded Nightkeeper males, Nate and Strike should’ve looked similar, but didn’t.

Strike was solid and stalwart, with a close-clipped jawline beard and shoulder-length hair tied back at his nape. Cobalt blue eyes steely, square jaw set, he stepped forward and threw a shield spell around her attacker, his god-boosted powers cutting through the rattle of twisted magic and startling a cry out of the enemy mage. Fighting magic with magic, the Nightkeepers’ king looked like something out of a legend, a man of another age transplanted into the twenty-first century to battle the final evil.

Nate, in contrast, was wholly a man of the day, with short-cut black hair accentuating his strange, amber- colored eyes and aquiline nose. Instead of the black T-shirt most of the others wore under the thin layer of body armor, he wore a black button-down of fine cotton, open at the throat to show the glint of his gold medallion. The combination probably should have looked odd, but on him it looked exactly right, the melding of a successful businessman and a Nightkeeper mage.