pockets, and pass off cold reads as fortune-telling. Even if that was all she was really trained to do in the outside world.
“I don’t like it,” Dez grumbled.
“Me either,” she said, then realized he was talking about the cave. Regrouping, she added, “But if we’re going to try this, we need to give it the best chance of succeeding.” Duty first, she thought, blah, blah, blah and yadda-yadda. It was the truth, though. Now more than ever, their priorities needed to be to the war, the gods, their leader, and from there on down, with personal wants way at the bottom of the list.
Thus, the cave.
She and Dez went back and forth for a few more minutes, but in the end he agreed to her plan with a few choice expletives and a worried sigh that touched her more than it probably should have, warning her that her emotions were way too close to the surface right now, and she needed to find a way to dial them down before she met with Rabbit.
“Do you want to tell him, or should I?” Dez asked.
“Can you take care of it?”
“Consider it done.” Hell glanced down at the book, then closed it and handed it back to her with a scowl of well, hell. “Looking at this from an earth-magic angle was good thinking, by the way. Very good thinking. In fact, I’m going to have Lucius and the rest of the brain trust do a broader search along these lines and see what else they can come up with. Okay with you if they give a shout-out with any questions?”
“Of course.” The vindication helped some.
The Witch’s spells might’ve been the bastard child of voodoo, devil worship and ancient Aztec rituals, but she’d kept a few Wiccan texts on the shelves for the sake of appearances. Myr had memorized the incantations and practiced them in secret, hiding her small crystals and hoarded scents. And now, at Skywatch, the earth magic was hers alone. More, there was no blood or violence, no sacrificing or swearing away bits of her soul; there was only the peace of incense, the solidity of crystal, the supple strength of wood and a sense of connecting to something far bigger than herself that welcomed her, supported her, and asked nothing in return.
It appealed to the person she sometimes thought she would’ve been if she hadn’t wound up with the Witch. Heck, it still appealed to the person she was, despite everything.
So use it, she told herself, and felt the fear recede a little. Who knew—maybe she could find other pieces of real magic in the books she’d bought. Maybe she wouldn’t be giving all her powers to Rabbit.
Still, though, dread pinched.
“When do you want to do it?” Dez asked.
She wanted to close her eyes and block out the sympathy in his. It would still be in his voice, though, and in the air between them. “Let’s get it over with. Say, an hour? Tell him I’ll meet him at the cave.”
The king hesitated, looking like he wanted to say a whole bunch of things, but in the end settled for, “Wear your armband, park as close to the entrance as you can, and keep your panic button primed.” The newer Jeeps were fitted with transponders that could pick up her signal and bounce it to Skywatch, hopefully overcoming the reception problems that had been getting worse and worse as the zero date approached and the barrier flux increased.
“Will do. And Dez?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for always treating me like I’ve got a right to an opinion.”
Rather than the platitudes she would’ve gotten from most of the others—the ones who’d been raised by their winikin and had always been given choices—he nodded. “Street smarts recognize street smarts, Myrinne, and ambition recognizes ambition. You’ve got more than your share of both, and I’m the last guy who’s going to ding you for that.”
Her spine straightened. “Is that a warning?”
“Nope. I’m not that subtle—if I thought you were heading for trouble, I’d tell you straight out. It was an observation, nothing more.”
But as she left the royal suite, she was pretty darned sure Dez was far more subtle than he let on. In his own way he was as much of a manipulator as the Witch had been, though with far better intentions. And right now, those intentions involved protecting the Nightkeepers’ agenda—which meant her giving up the magic to Rabbit.
“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” she muttered as she headed down the hall. But that didn’t stop her from feeling the pressure of being involved in something so much bigger than herself. It dogged her as she stalked out of the royal wing and across the main kitchen, and had her turning away from her suite.
Her rooms were too quiet, too empty and at the same time too hemmed in, sparking a sense of suffocation that chased her out a side door. There, a stone-lined path flanked the garage, but she didn’t want to snag a Jeep and keep on driving today. Instead, she headed for the magic-imbued cacao grove beyond the winikin’s hall, where the air was rainforest humid, the ground soft and the trees green and fragrant.
She slipped into the grove and picked her way to the open space at its center. There, she sat cross-legged, with her hands open on her folded knees. And—for a little while, at least—she found peace in the whirring sound the leaves made in the faint breeze, and the feeling of the earth surrounding her.
“I’m trying to get it right,” she said aloud. “I’m doing my best.” Deep down inside, though, she wondered whether that was the truth. Because when she came down to it, she didn’t want to give back the magic, not one bit.
It wasn’t fucking fair.
At the appointed time, Rabbit sat outside the winikin’s cave for a good five minutes before he managed to make himself get out of the damn Jeep. He didn’t want to be here. More, he wished he could forget the way he’d acted the last time he’d been at the cave, wished he didn’t see the parallels. And he wished to hell his knuckles weren’t throbbing like a bitch from punching his damned fridge when he got Dez’s message.
It was a dumb fucking idea to go around punching appliances, no matter how pissed off he was. More, he couldn’t let himself get pissed off, not like that. For a few minutes, he’d felt like the guy he used to be, the one who’d lashed out without thinking, doing major damage. He needed to be better than that, damn it. He needed to control the part of him that used to take over and make him do dumb things—not the stripped-down creature he’d become while imprisoned, but the angry, unloved kid who wanted to set the world on fire and watch it burn.
Or maybe the two were flip sides of the same anger.
“Pull your shit together,” he muttered. He owed Myr his absolute best self, even today. Especially today.
He hated that it had come to this, hated that she was going to be the one making the sacrifice when she deserved the magic a hell of a lot more than he did. He hated it . . . and he respected the hell out of her for making the call. She would be dreading the mind-meld that the spell required, he knew, and was determined to make it as easy as he could for her, just as he’d done his damnedest to quell the raw gut punch of lust that had nailed him every time he had gotten near her over the past week and a half.
It was his problem that he couldn’t be satisfied with what he’d gotten back already, his problem that he wanted more, wanted her, with a churning desire that was equal parts magic, lust, history and fascination with the stronger, sleeker, glossier woman she’d become . . . and one hundred percent Not Happening.
It was also past time for him to get his ass down there. Bad enough he was supposed to take her magic, worse to make her wait on him.
He had parked on the bank of the wide wash, where flash floods created a huge river and filled the cave when the rains came. It was dry now, so Myr had parked with her Jeep’s nose stuck into the cave mouth, no doubt partly so it could act as a transponder, partly so the trick door—a huge stone slab that was geared to uncertain magic—couldn’t slide into place and trap them inside.
As he got out of his vehicle and headed down there, kicking up pebbles and sand with his worn boots, he remembered all too well the fury that had carried him into the cave the last time, the anger and betrayal that had blasted through him when he’d seen her there with his eccentrics. Phee’s lies had been whispering in his head, stroking the rage and chaos inside him until he’d let it loose.
Not again. Never again.
Taking a deep breath, he brushed past her Jeep and stepped into the darkness. It took a moment for his
