Dawnkeepers

Please! ”

Shock and horror rattled through the Nightkeepers as they realized that the makol must have fully overtaken Lucius and had somehow escaped its warded room and attacked the winikin.

Panic jolted Alexis, alongside magic and a howl of grief. She grabbed instinctively for Nate’s hand.

“Izzy!”

Strike lunged to his feet, snapping, “Join up!”

Nate pulled free of her hand and got in the king’s face. “No! You know we can’t go back.”

And the hell of it was that he was right, Alexis knew. The goddaughter inside her screamed for them to return to Skywatch immediately, yet the warrior in her knew that whatever was going on back there, it wasn’t their main battle. The more important fight was the one that reached for her even now, as the rippling curtain of light darkened and solidified along the back wall of the stone chamber, and she began to see movement behind it, the imprints of huge bodies pressing against what could only be the barrier.

Strike grated, “Stand aside, Blackhawk. You may not give a shit about anybody but yourself, but I’m not leaving them to die. Rabbit is my responsibility. Jox is mine. They all are.”

Leah moved up to stand at Strike’s side, her face pale and drawn. “We have to go,” she said.

“Skywatch can’t fall a second time.”

“The Nightkeepers are your priority, and mankind,” Nate insisted, refusing to give way. “Not the winikin or Rabbit. As much as it sucks to say it, the immediate future rests on us and what we do here today.”

Of them all, Alexis thought she might be the only one to see what it cost Nate to say that, the only one to hear the pain in his voice, see the horror in his too-controlled expression. He glanced at her, a mute plea for some backup against the furious king, and Alexis stepped up to add her voice to his.

Only her feet didn’t move at first. Then, when they did, they carried her away from the argument, toward the rippling barrier, where she saw colors and darkness battling one another for the upper hand, and achieving only a stalemate. Come, the colors seemed to say. I need your help.

“Alexis, what’s wrong?” Nate’s voice held sharp worry, but he sounded suddenly far distant, his tones wavery and indistinct.

The fabric of the universe dominated her vision, reaching out and drawing her inward. “Call your god,” she said to Strike, only it wasn’t her voice; it was the goddess speaking through her, expending enormous energy to push the message down the skyroad to earth. “The hellroad is open at the city of the clouds. The battle is there.”

Alexis’s mind was suddenly filled with an image of great, soaring mountains. Bare and snow-

covered at their tops, lush and green at their foothills, they wore thick clouds of mist halfway down, where the cold mountain winds met moist tropical air and formed rainy, cool bands of precipitation.

High conical mounds speared through the canopy, green-covered and with a hint of square-edged stone here and there. Lost pyramids rising up from the jungle floor.

Her voice shaking with the effort of the magical contact, which was draining her quickly, Alexis described the scene as best as she could. When she started to sway, she felt a strong arm loop around her waist and knew it was Nate.

“Strike needs a ground-level image to ’port,” Nate said. “We can’t zap in midair.”

His voice didn’t seem so far away now, as she leaned into his strength, his warmth, and felt her own energy drain. She was aware of Strike and Leah leaning over Anna, who had gone silent and still, aware of the awful tension in the room as the Nightkeepers awaited the decision. Skywatch or the hellmouth? The battle for home or the battle for the world?

Strike’s choice was, she realized, very like what his father must have faced in the moment the Banol Kax broke through the intersection and sent their lava creatures to kill the winikin and children back at the training compound. What had happened before was happening again.

Alexis concentrated, sending her need along the skyroad link, and was rewarded with a second, ground- level picture, one that grew dim and gray as her energy faded. Then there was a rasp and a hiss of pain, and Nate was clasping her hand in his bloodied grasp, boosting her power with his own. The image clarified, one of carved stone and a gaping skull mouth wreathed in gray-white vapor.

“It’s high in the mountains,” she said, “just below where the clouds begin. There’s a river flowing in and down, and a dark, deep tunnel.” She kept going with the description of the screaming skull and surrounding cloud forest, trying to give her king enough for the ’port link. When she ran down, when there was no more left that she could think to add, she sagged against Nate, feeling his energy as her own, his fatigue as her own.

With the message passed, the wall behind the altar returned to stone, and Alexis’s Godkeeper connection returned to a baseline shimmer at the back of her skull. The room stopped spinning, and some of her energy returned—thanks, she suspected, to the blood link with Nate.

Knowing he would need his own strength, she pulled away and forced herself to stand on her own two feet, unswaying, as she faced Strike. “We have to go where the battle is.”

Expression stony, the king glanced at Nate. “What do you think?”

“I agree with Alexis.”

“Fuck.” Strike gestured for the others to link up. “Let’s go.”

Alexis knew he never would’ve done it based on their say-so, knew that he recognized it as the right course too. But even so, she felt a sharp bite of responsibility, of worry. As the ’port magic revved up around them, she tried not to imagine what was going on back at Skywatch . . . and failed miserably.

The stories of the prior massacre were too ingrained in her mind, her worry for Izzy and the others too sharp. So as the world slid sideways and went gray-green, she sent a prayer into the barrier: Gods protect our winikin. They’re the only family we have left.

The Nightkeepers materialized in the place she’d described to Strike, the vapor-laden air snapping away from them with an audible pop. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of death and decay, but thin with altitude and cold. The clearing they had landed in was lit by torchlight, and Alexis clutched Nate’s hand hard at the sight of the screaming skull mouth and the dark, brackish water leading into the cave system. For a second everything inside her rebelled at the thought of going inside. Then her eyes locked on a glitter of purple and gray, and rebellion went to horror.

Mistress Truth’s headless body, still garbed in purple velour, was spiked to the wall of the cavern, pointing the way inward, a grisly sacrifice to a brutal pantheon.

Anna said quietly, “Call home. Please. I did what I could through the blood link, but it wasn’t much.” She was very pale, still rubbing her forearm where the ajawlel mark was clearly paining her, but she’d abided by the king’s decision to follow the battle rather than their hearts.

“Already on it,” Strike said. He had the satellite phone pressed to his ear, but shook his head and clicked it off with a curse. “Nothing.”

“Oh, there’s something, all right,” Alexis said, her own voice feeling as if it were coming from far away. She wasn’t sure if that was her talking now, or the goddess. The power conduit felt different somehow, as though it were vibrating on an entirely new frequency. “Listen. Feel.”

There was a faint whistling noise, almost a high scream, barely audible to human ears. The earth beneath their feet shimmied slightly, the faintest of tremors. The cloud forest around them, dank and ancient and rotten, was silent. The air hummed with a waiting tension.

Nate said, “I think—” A huge, grating crack rent the air, the ground gave a massive heave, nearly throwing Alexis off her feet, and the cave mouth shuddered and started to move. At first she thought it was collapsing. Horror coalesced and built when she saw that it wasn’t collapsing at all; the upper jaw of the screaming skull was hingeing, the scream growing wider as the skull mouth stretched open.

Then, darkness spewed from the opening. Evil. A gout of foul purple-black smoke came first, followed by an unearthly howl that nearly sent her to her knees. She was barely aware that Nate held her up, that he shielded her with his body as a dark shape hurtled from the hellroad and took flight, flapping its great, leathery wings as it disappeared into the darkness beyond the torchlight. Then another. Another.