Dawnkeepers

when she walked away, he didn’t go after her. He stood there looking after her long after the door to her suite closed quietly behind her, leaving him alone.

And later, when he lay in bed, equally alone, he stared up at the picture of the sea and sky, and realized for the first time that none of his father’s paintings had any people in them.

Alexis had meant to go straight to bed, but once she was inside her suite she found herself prowling the small space, unable to settle. She was tempted to go find Izzy and invite her for a drink, which used to be her normal routine when she was involved in a relationship implosion, whether as the dumper or dumpee. This was different, though. This was the first time she’d gone all the way to “I love you.”

“Go find Izzy,” she told herself. “She’ll talk you out of it.” But that was the problem, really, because she knew the winikin would try to do exactly that. Alexis, though, wasn’t in the mood to be talked out of loving Nate. She wanted to wallow in it, revel in it, and curse him for being an emotionally stunted asshat, who also happened to be gorgeous, intelligent, more or less rational, a strong counterweight to her opinions on the royal council, and an increasingly powerful mage of the sort she wanted at her back during a fight.

Oh, yeah, and he was great in bed. But still, an asshat. So instead of calling Izzy, she hit the minifridge for the split of decent champagne she’d bummed from Jox and stuck there on the off chance Nate surprised her and they had something to celebrate. “Face it,” she told herself as she tore the foil, undid the cage, and popped the cork, “you didn’t think you’d be celebrating. This is ‘drown your sorrows’ bubbly.”

Not only that, it wouldn’t hurt to anesthetize her growing fear of what was going to happen at the equinox. Up until this point she’d managed to mostly push thoughts of Camazotz to the back of her mind. Now, though, with the clock ticking down and the two prophecies combining to warn her against the Volatile while at the same time urging her to find him, she was stumped . . . and scared.

Figuring that if she were going to drown her sorrows, she might as well do it right, she booted up her laptop and jacked it into some sort of easy listening station, heavy on the instrumentals, and drew a bath and added some bubbles. She swapped out her clothes for her good robe, pinned her hair up atop her head, and took the bottle with her into the bathroom.

Within a half an hour, the champagne and bubbles had eased the physical aches, if not the ones inside. She let her head fall back on the edge of the tub, thinking as she sometimes did of who might’ve lived in her suite before the massacre, and whether she—or he—had ever done what she was doing at that moment: soaking away a shitty day and wishing the future could be something other than what was written.

Thinking that, she drifted off to sleep . . . and dreamed of a dark-haired warrior with a hawk’s medallion and the power to make her heart and mind soar.

Anna was up early the day before the vernal equinox. Okay, in reality she hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time the night before, so the concept of being “up” was pretty relative. The equinox was still more than twenty-four hours away, but as she lay in her bedroom at Skywatch beneath a sheet and light blanket, she could feel the power buzzing beneath her skin, feel the visions trying to break through. Yet more than anything she wanted to pull the covers over her head and wait until it was all over. Or better yet, go home and pretend that she was nothing more than human, that the marks on her arm were just tattoos, the yellow quartz pendant just a piece of costume jewelry. She missed her bed, missed her home and her husband. She didn’t want to be where she was, didn’t want to be who she was.

Groaning aloud at the self-pity, she tossed the covers off her face and said sternly, “Get up. Stop being such a girl.”

In her mind, the exhortation echoed in Red-Boar’s voice. The older Nightkeeper had wanted her to be as strong as Strike, if not stronger, wanted her to care as much as her brother did, wanted her to turn away from the modern things she craved and focus on tradition and duty. Don’t be such a girl, he would snarl. Do it again. And though they’d been only pretending to work the spells because the barrier had been offline and there was no knowing whether it would ever come back to life, she’d done as he’d said, and had tried harder and harder to be a good Nightkeeper . . . until the day she’d left for college and hadn’t looked back. Only now she was back, and it wasn’t clear that she was being all that helpful. She’d endangered Skywatch and the Nightkeepers by insisting on keeping Lucius alive even though he was a clear threat. Hell, she’d barely even managed to help during the meeting with Iago, getting a single useful detail out of him when there had been so much more to gather, if only she’d known how. But that was a job for a mind- bender like Red-Boar. Or his son.

It was the thought of Rabbit that finally drove her out of bed. He, like the rest of them, hadn’t asked to be born into this mess. What was more, he’d started off at a serious disadvantage, child to a single parent who’d denied him a true Nightkeeper name and refused to accept him into the bloodline until almost too late. Strike and Jox had done their best with the kid, but they’d walked a fine line, trying to help without alienating Red-Boar, who had been antisocial at his best, pathological at his worst.

Then there was Rabbit’s magic, which both awed and scared Anna—a sentiment shared by most of the Nightkeepers and all of the winikin. It might not be fair, but there it was: his magic didn’t play by the rules and neither did he. Was it any wonder most of them had tried not to get too close? That doesn’t make it right, her conscience nudged; he’s just a kid . He was the same age as most of the freshman undergrads in her intro lectures. And he needed help.

Moving slowly, feeling sore all over though there was no reason for it, she dragged on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved pullover and headed for the kitchen.

Izzy met her in the main room, handed her a mug of coffee—cream, no sugar—and aimed her for the stairs that led to the lower level. “Jox says you’re to go down right away.”

“Great,” Anna muttered into her coffee. “I’ve been dressed for, like, three minutes and I’m already late.” But she headed downstairs. She hesitated outside Lucius’s warded door, but then kept going to the adjoining rooms where they’d locked Rabbit and his friend—girlfriend?—the previous night.

Seeing the gold-red shimmer of wards across the doorway and not in the mood for magic, she raised her voice. “Knock, knock? Izzy said you were waiting for me.”

A muffled voice called, “Just a sec.” Magic hummed just behind her jawbone, the red-gold shimmer cut out, and Nate opened the door. “Come on in.”

After what Izzy had said up in the kitchen, Anna was expecting to be the last one there. She hadn’t, however, anticipated how much it would bother her to see Strike, Leah, Jox, Nate, and Alexis looming over Rabbit, who was sitting on the side of a camp cot, wearing track pants and a hoodie and staring at the floor, jaw set in the sort of mulish intransigence she’d always associated with his sire.

His hair had grown out from its skull trim to a military brush, and he was thinner than before, especially through his sharp-angled face, as though the last vestiges of the childhood he’d continually rejected had been burned out of him. His eyes flicked to her momentarily, and she felt him weighing her, trying to decide whose side she was on. Then he looked back down, and she didn’t have a clue where he’d shelved her.

The sight of him was a forcible reminder that he wasn’t a kid at all. Hell, he was light-years from the freshmen she’d just been comparing him to. He was, what, eighteen? Yet at the same time, he was a stronger mage than any of them, save, perhaps, for Iago. And that, she knew, was the problem.

Humans and Nightkeepers alike feared that which they could not control.

Help him, whispered a familiar voice inside her skull, one that she knew was a construct of her own mind, a bit of wishful thinking. Even so, she shot back, I’m going to try. It’s not like he makes it easy, you know.

Besides, she’d already endangered the Nightkeepers by bringing Lucius into the mix. Where did she draw the line?

“Okay,” Strike said, breaking the tense silence. “We’re all here. Let’s get started.” When Rabbit just kept staring at the floor, throat working, the king prompted, “Don’t worry, kid; you’re safe now.

Just start at the beginning and walk us through everything that’s happened since the museum bust.” He took a risk and gripped Rabbit’s shoulder, though the teen wasn’t big on being touched.

Rabbit didn’t shake him off, though, didn’t even react. He just stared at the floor and whispered, “I killed the three-question nahwal.”