Dawnkeepers

“Oh, right. You were unconscious for that part. Congratulations, two of your former teammates tried to use the three-question spell right after you offed the nahwal. They got barriered instead. Barely made it out alive.”

Rabbit pressed the heels of his hands against his ears as the guilt amped. “I said shut up!”

“Reality sucks. Get used to it.” Iago stood and moved toward him. Rabbit tried to throw up a shield, but he’d lost the magic to emotion. Getting inside his space, the mage leaned down to him, his face so close that Rabbit could see the flecks of magic that flickered in Iago’s green eyes. “I’m offering you a choice, kid. You want to switch sides, we’re happy to have you. Otherwise you’re going to be our guest until the equinox. We could use some powerful blood for the sacrifice we’re planning.”

“Fuck you,” Rabbit spat, but all of a sudden his words were slurring and the floor was doing a slow roll beneath him. He couldn’t tell if he’d just hit the end of his reserves, or if there was something else going on— drugs, maybe, or sleep magic. Either way, he was fading fast.

“Think about it,” Iago said. “I’ll have some food brought for you. No sense trying to figure it out if you’re half dead.” The mage headed for the door, which swung open at his approach. He looked back and smirked slightly at Rabbit, as if to say, See how much more powerful I am than your precious Nightkeepers?

“Wait,” Rabbit croaked when he was partway out the door.

Iago turned back. “What?”

“Why me?”

That seemed to startle the Xibalban. Then he started laughing. “Have they honestly not told you?

Gods, that’s pathetic.” He turned back, eyes alight with mockery. “Why do you think they’re so afraid of your magic? Your mother was one of us.”

The kick of emotion that hit Rabbit square in the chest and drove the breath from his lungs probably should have been surprise, only it wasn’t. Something inside him said, Of course, as though he should’ve known all along, or maybe a piece of him had guessed long ago. “Oh,” he said, only it came out more like a groan.

“Think about it, kid. I’m offering you a family, and more power than you could possibly imagine.”

Then Iago turned and left. Moments later the door swung shut and a lock clicked into place from the outside. A few seconds after that, Rabbit felt a buzz of unfamiliar ward magic settling into place, sealing him into the cabin.

He lay there for a long moment, unmoving, thinking about Iago’s offer of more power than he could possibly imagine.

Well, Rabbit could imagine a whole lot of power.

As far as Nate was concerned, by inviting Iago for a parley, the Nightkeepers were just asking for trouble.

Strike thought it was imperative that they at least talk to the bastard, given how few Nightkeepers there were. Nate thought it was fucking stupid, and told the king that in so many words the day after the opposition ceremony, when he was still running hot on magic and frustration, and an edge of hurt that Alexis didn’t need him anymore. He and Strike had gotten into it, had gotten loud, and then Alexis had waded in, shouting right back. Nate wasn’t sure if she really thought the meeting was a good idea or if she just wanted to argue with him, but they’d gone at it for a bit before the king separated them and announced that he wanted Nate to be part of the group that would meet Iago outside the front door of the training compound, beyond the wards.

Which was why, two days after the opposition ceremony that’d nearly killed him and Alexis and had liberated her instead, Nate found himself standing beside her, with Strike and Leah on his other side. Anna was there too. She and the members of the royal council had spent a chunk of the prior evening hashing something out, so Nate had a feeling they were planning more than a simple parley, but he wasn’t in on that piece of things. He was just window dressing, another body standing by the front gate, waiting for Iago.

Who was late.

“Maybe it’s a trick,” Nate said after ten minutes had turned to fifteen and there was no rattle of

’port magic in the air. “A distraction.”

“Allowing them to do what?” Alexis asked. “If he had the ability and the desire to ’port straight into Skywatch, he would’ve done it by now.” She didn’t look at him; at least, he didn’t think she did. It was hard to tell, when she was wearing a pair of three-hundred-dollar sunglasses that shaded her eyes and hid her expression.

“Isn’t the whole point that we don’t have a clue what he can and can’t do?” he challenged.

Before she could say anything, Strike interrupted. “Incoming.”

Moments later Nate felt it too: the rattle of magic that felt like Nightkeeper power, but wasn’t. It geared up to a roar, displaced air exploded outward in a cloud of brown smoke, and Iago and a striking-looking woman appeared several feet away, zapping in with their feet planted on terra firma with no stumbling, no awkwardness.

Wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt, with a long black duster over the top, Iago looked like just another guy with a bit of cool on. But Nate saw disdain in his face, and thought how he’d promised the old woman in the doily cottage that he would make sure her killer was punished.

Iago’s eyes skimmed over the Nightkeepers, pausing briefly on Nate as though feeling the hatred, or maybe seeing it in his eyes. Then he moved on, his message clear: You don’t scare me.

No? Nate thought on a flare of anger. We’ll have to fix that.

The woman at his side locked onto Anna immediately, and her lips tipped up in a small, mean smile. That’d be Desiree, then. Nate wasn’t sure who she was to the Xibalbans, or why she was at the meeting, but one thing was for sure: Malice radiated off her in waves. Anna, in contrast, seemed detached, disinterested, standing there with her eyes unfocused and her hands jammed in her pockets.

Which didn’t totally make sense, given that she’d flown all the way to New Mex in order to go at it with her enemy on the Nightkeepers’ turf.

“Nochem,” Iago said to Strike, who stood slightly ahead of the others and had rolled up the right sleeve of his black T-shirt to reveal the hunab ku, the geometric mark of kingship that was located on his upper arm, where only kings and gods were marked.

“Call me Strike.”

“Then I’m Iago.” The mage looked past the king. As he did so, a faint rattle of background magic started up, an annoying buzz that made Nate’s jaw ache. “I assume these are your advisers?”

“Yes,” Strike said simply.

Nate quashed a knee-jerk protest. It didn’t matter what they called him; he was just there to counteract some of Alexis’s less rational ideas. That didn’t make him an adviser.

Iago snorted. “Fine, I get it. You’re not inviting me in for tea and cookies or whatever. You’re the one who asked for a meeting, so let’s meet. What do you want?”

Strike nodded. “Okay, here goes. Your order has gotten some seriously shitty press over the millennia, but I’m thinking that we may have a common goal at this point. Doesn’t do you any good to have the world end any more than it does us. So I thought we might be able to come to terms, maybe cooperate. You’ve got some of the demon prophecies; we’ve got some of them. What if we combined our forces?”

Iago smirked. “You’ve got one of them, and I’ve got the other six, you mean. I should thank you for the last three, by the way. Your archives must’ve contained info that mine didn’t, because I couldn’t find Cabrakan’s bowl, the Volatile’s knife, or the Ixchel statuette for love or money until your archivist started Googling them and my filters caught the keywords.” He grinned and flexed his fingers. “Gotta love the Internet.”

Which unfortunately meant he’d already found Kulkulkan’s altar stone, Nate realized, his gut knotting on anger and disappointment, made worse by the annoying subsonic buzz of magic. Gods damn it. But some of the other information was new, namely that the knife they’d almost gotten in New Orleans was connected to the Volatile. Which meant it was vital that they get the thing back.

“We have a common goal,” Strike persisted. “Both groups want to stop the apocalypse.”

Desiree shifted her attention from Anna to Strike and sneered. “You’re trying to stop the inevitable.”