Dawnkeepers

They didn’t need to clarify what the “in case” would be, nor would it help to mention that if their fireballs broke through the weak spot and the water came rushing in, even the shields would buy them only so much time to enlarge the hole if necessary, swim through, and find another air pocket and a way out.

“Okay,” she said, though he hadn’t asked, “I’m ready.” She wanted to hold on to him, wanted to kiss him good-bye, wanted to ask him if he thought there would ever be a right time for them. But in the end she didn’t do any of those things. She just leaned back a little, drawing strength from his strength, and readied her magic, stretching out her bleeding right palm and calling on the goddess for help, for luck. She felt Nate’s magic rev up, felt it touch her own, and felt the two twine together for a moment, somehow becoming more than their sum. Twin fireballs grew from the weeping cuts on her and Nate’s outstretched right hands, growing larger and larger, spinning and spitting and beginning to heat, though the flames didn’t burn their users.

Alexis dug down, felt him do the same, and the fireballs grew and changed from a source of light to one of destruction. She closed her eyes and envisioned the weak spot, envisioned the carved serpent and the rainbow fleeing away from the cracked spot. Her power peaked, and the fireball flared to life.

“Now!” he shouted.

The fireballs winged through the air and hit their target, and the world exploded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Alexis ducked instinctively, though they’d both yanked up their shields, bubblelike around their heads.

Seconds later Nate shouted something and dragged her below the water, crowding her close to the throne wall, shielding her with his body and his magic.

A shock wave slammed into them, compressing Alexis’s lungs even through the shield. A freight-

train roar of explosion thundered around her. She cried out inside her small sphere of air and clung to Nate, who was hanging on to her, keeping her secure, keeping her anchored. Debris pelted them, pinging off the magic, and she felt Nate flinch, wondered if something had gotten through.

In the aftermath of the shock wave there was a rush of water, colder than the liquid surrounding them, stirring up a current, a tide, as the water moved from one chamber to the next.

They’d done something, she realized. But had they done enough?

Before the water had even begun to settle, Nate kindled a small fireball and urged her into the current. They had to swim hard at first, then less so, as the chamber they were in filled fully with water. And although that had been the plan, Alexis’s heart kicked when she saw the last thin stream of bubbles escape through the hole they’d made.

“Follow those bubbles!” she said, and felt Nate’s fingers tighten on her hand, which he’d clasped and held fast, as though he never intended to let go. And though she knew he’d let go eventually, she let herself lean on the feeling as they kicked toward the gap that’d opened up in the rock wall.

Regret twisted at the sight of the carved stone blocks shattered by the attack. The temple had stood for more than a thousand years, only to fall to the ancestors of its makers. But necessity was necessity, so she spared only a glance back at the narrow room she’d dreamed of, seeing that the carvings of the serpent and the rainbow had disappeared. Then she kicked upward, following Nate’s tug on her hand, and the red-hued glow he held clutched in his outstretched hand. Moments later he extinguished the fireball, because they didn’t need it anymore.

Instead, they swam up toward daylight, and freedom.

Later that night, back at Skywatch, exhausted, sore, and dispirited from the day’s events, Nate avoided his teammates, bummed a sandwich off Jox, and hid out in his parents’ cottage. He got his laptop up and running, but couldn’t bring himself to write. Instead he lay back on the sofa and stared at the hawk medallion he wore around his neck. The one that—according to Carlos—his father had entrusted to his winikin just hours before king Scarred-Jaguar led his Nightkeepers to attack the intersection.

The flat metal disk caught the light when Nate turned it from side to side, making the man turn to a hawk and back again. Or, if he stopped it halfway, there was a point where the image was both hawk and man.

It was a symbol of the bloodline, he knew. A family heirloom, nothing more and nothing less. But for a few seconds earlier that day, in the moment that he and Alexis had stood together on the carved altar and called their magic together, he could’ve sworn he’d felt the amulet respond. There had been a frisson of electricity, a jolting sense of change, of connection—there and gone so quickly he kept trying to tell himself he’d imagined it entirely. Only he hadn’t. He was sure of that much.

“Probably something to do with that wonky shield spell,” he said aloud, trying to talk himself out of the crazy thoughts that kept trying to shove themselves inside his head—gamer’s fantasies about magic amulets and the last-minute discovery of powers that could save the world. Thing was, this was reality, or at least a cockeyed version thereof, where men could do magic and orgasm was a pathway to prayer. Was it really so unbelievable to think the amulet was more than a decoration?

“It was your imagination,” he told himself for the fourth time in the past half hour, and forced himself to tuck the medallion back inside his shirt, next to the frigging adviser’s eccentric that he’d tried to give back earlier, only to have Strike tell him to keep it for now.

Which, goddamn it, meant he owed Carlos fifty bucks, because he’d bet the old bugger that he’d never be the king’s man, as his father had been.

Well, fuck that, he thought sourly, forcing himself back upright on the sofa with his feet on the floor, and trying to make his eyes focus on the laptop screen. He was just doing the last read- throughs on the storyboard before he e-mailed VW6 off to Denjie for programming and shit. The story was as close to perfect as he could make it, and it was time to let the thing go. Maybe even time to end the whole series, because he wasn’t sure there was more story to tell. Hera’s past had been uncovered and resolved, her mate found, wedded, and bedded—though not in precisely that order. She didn’t need the quests anymore.

And that was a hell of a thought.

Nate was scowling at the screen, wondering if maybe he should pull back on the whole happily-

ever-after thing, when someone banged on the cottage door. Figuring it was Carlos, come to see if he needed anything—and to do some more gloating—Nate called, “Go away; I’m not in the mood.”

The knock came a second time. For all of Carlos’s faults, he was pretty good about fucking off when told to fuck off, suggesting that whatever he’d come to say was important. Hoping to hell that it wasn’t, because he couldn’t stand any more drama today, Nate pushed to his feet and headed for the door, hissing against the pull of countless bruises from the day’s events.

Those small annoyances fled the second he swung open the door and saw Alexis standing there. In their place flared heat and want, and a sense of the inevitable.

She was wearing loose light blue yoga pants and a cropped sweatshirt two shades darker, in deference to the chill of the night air. Unlike her usual put-together outfits, which dared a guy to peel them away layer by layer, this one was easy access, two items, maybe a couple more if she was wearing panties and a bra. He was betting not, though, because he knew the outfit, knew it meant she was in the mood. Before, it’d been a signal, a sort of cosmic don’t bother prettying it up with speeches; I need to get off. Now, however, though there was heat in her eyes; there was something else, as well. There was warmth.

“Help you?” he asked, which was about all he could get out through a throat gone suddenly dry.

The year before, her answer would’ve been something along the lines of a coy, “I think we can help each other,” and it would’ve been accurate. But now she paused for a second, then said, “Can I come in?”

The question hung in the air, becoming everything. Before, they’d mostly used her rooms, or a spare bedroom elsewhere in the mansion. If he invited her inside his parents’ cottage, things shifted to a new level, a new degree of importance. If he invited her in, they would have each other, Nate thought, using the safe euphemism when his conscious mind couldn’t cheapen the act to sex, couldn’t call it making love. But more, they would do it with their eyes open to each other’s flaws and the ways they didn’t fit.

He cleared his throat, and yearned. “Why now?”