Skywatch
Rabbit grogged his way to consciousness near daybreak and stared at the mud-daubed ceiling of his hideout, which had two round openings that let in the light and smelled of the animals that used it for shelter when he wasn’t around.
It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in the pueblo, wrapped in the musty-smelling serape, with his head pounding with the “hey, hello” of a hangover. It also wasn’t the first time he’d lain there studying the mud daub, with its ancient handprints and carved zigzag lines, and wishing like hell he didn’t have to go back down to the compound. But it was the first time he dreaded going back because it would mean facing Myrinne.
“Damn it.” He dragged himself vertical anyway. He needed to report in and see how the others were taking the whole dark-magic thing.
At the moment, it was buttoned up safely in the vault, behaving itself. But as he picked his way down the trail, he wasn’t so sure he was in the clear, or even that he should be. If the things that’d happened with Phee were any indication, the dark magic wasn’t good for him. Or maybe it was that he wasn’t good with it, that he wasn’t strong enough to control it, his grip on Nightkeeper magic too weak, his moral compass too fucking imprecise. And if some of that started sounding like his old man—you’re not smart enough, not tough enough, not worth my time—maybe that wasn’t an accident.
“Fuck him. You can handle it this time.” He’d learned his lessons the hard way, and he was determined not to screw up again.
Still, the whispers dogged him as he drove the Jeep back to his cottage, grateful that he hadn’t seen anyone coming or going. Right now, he didn’t want to have any conversations that started with “Hey, how are you” or even “What the fuck happened to you yesterday?”
“Damn it.” With irritation riding him hard, putting his gut into a knot of what-ifs, he shouldered through the kitchen door . . . and stopped dead at the sight of Red-Boar sitting at the kitchen table, scowling at a couple of Cokes.
Well, that explained the feeling of impending doom.
“Don’t even start,” Rabbit said, heading across the kitchen for the main room without giving his father a second look. “I need to shower and get some food in me before I can even think of dealing with you.”
“Or you could sit the fuck down and listen.”
“Blow me.” But Rabbit couldn’t make himself walk away. Not knowing that the king could’ve sent his old man to lay the last order of the Boar Oath on him, in the hopes of taming the dark magic. And that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing. He stopped in the far doorway, and turned back. “Fuck it. What? Did Dez give you an order?”
“Yeah. But not for you.” Red-Boar scowled and took a hit of his soda. “When he heard about the dark magic, he leaned on me to tell him where you really came from.”
That cut right through what was left of Rabbit’s hangover—thud, instant clarity, or close to it.
Back when he’d first returned to Skywatch, he had given the Nightkeepers a full report on his conversations with Phee, hoping there might be something in there that could help them figure out what the Banol Kax were planning. At the time, Red-Boar had listened, stone-faced, and said it was all bullshit. Repeatedly. That was all he’d said on the subject, though. Until now.
Thumping into a chair opposite his old man, Rabbit reached for the unopened Coke. “You going to tell me or not?” He wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to make an announcement like that, then remind him that he’d never sworn an oath to the current king—Dez had taken over for Strike pretty recently—and clam up.
“For starters, everything the demon told you was a fucking lie. Your mother didn’t escape from the Xibalbans, and she and I didn’t fall for each other and live in some godsdamned rain forest paradise until they tracked us down and killed her. And you never had a twin brother. That was all a bullshit fairy tale.”
Rabbit didn’t give his old man the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. “How about you tell me something I don’t already know?”
Disappointment stung, though, warning that some part of him had wanted to think that maybe there had been a romance between his parents, a tragedy that explained why his father hadn’t ever been able to love him, or even like him just a little. And that there had been a twin brother whose absence accounted for the holes inside him, the broken, ragged places that not even Myrinne had been able to fill.
“How much do you already know?” Red-Boar demanded.
Frustration stirred, old and ugly, but Rabbit didn’t let that show, either. “Fine, we’ll play it your way. Fucking whatever. Jox told me that not long after the massacre you lost your shit and disappeared into the rain forest, and he gave me the name of a village: Oc Ajal. I went there and discovered that it was full of Xibalbans—not members of Werigo’s sect of wack-jobs, but peaceful dark-magic shamans led by a guy named Anntah. I met him on his deathbed.” In fact, it had been his fault Anntah and the others had been murdered. Iago—Werigo’s son and Anntah’s sworn enemy—had followed him there and razed the village.
Voice thickening, Rabbit continued, “He said that you had stayed with them for a day or so and then moved on. You were looking for Cassie and the boys, convinced they were still alive somewhere.” As far as Red-Boar had been concerned, then or now, his real life had ended with the Solstice Massacre, when his Nightkeeper wife and their twin sons were killed. “He thought my mother had probably been part of Werigo’s sect, either voluntarily or as a prisoner. As far as he knew, the villagers of Oc Ajal were the last of the pacifist Xibalbans.” And because of him, they were all dead now. He drained his Coke, which bit like hundred-fifty-proof pulque. “Anyway, that’s where the trail went cold for me.” He left it hanging, though he didn’t trust his old man to pick up the story. Didn’t trust him to do anything, really.
But Red-Boar gave one of his “you’re an idiot” snorts, and said, “You’ve got it right up to the part where I visited Oc Ajal, but you’re dead-ass wrong about the rest of it. For one, the villagers were far from pacifists. And for another, Anntah wasn’t one of the good guys. Fucking far from it.”
“But—”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
Maybe not. Visiting Oc Ajal and meeting the elder had been a turning point for Rabbit. The village was where he’d learned to think twice before giving in to the impulses that had ruled his life up to that point, where he’d started to learn to control himself rather than hurting the people around him. But it was also where he’d gotten one of the two eccentrics that had summoned Phee. Anntah had given it to him, fuck it all.
Closing his fingers around the empty soda can and not letting himself crumple it, he nodded. “Go on.”
“When I showed up in Oc Ajal, I was pretty fucking out of it, raving about the massacre, the Nightkeepers, all of it. So it took Anntah and the others about two minutes to figure out who and what I was.” Red-Boar glanced down at his forearm, which bore the distinctive black marks of a Nightkeeper warrior. “He got me to admit that I was the only surviving Nightkeeper mage—I didn’t tell him about Strike, Anna and Jox, thank fuck. I kept that much to myself. Anyway, he kept saying that the gods had sent me to him, that he could give me what I wanted.”
“Your family.”
Red-Boar was back to staring at his soda can. “That’s what I thought he meant, what he wanted me to think. He said I should eat and rest. My wife was out hunting, he said. She’d be back soon and she’d be so excited to see me.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t know what he put in the food, but by the time the hunting party got back, I was hammered, horny, and not feeling picky.”
Ew. Rabbit didn’t say anything, half-afraid his old man would elaborate.
“I didn’t know where I was or who I was with. I just went where I was told, did what I was told, and when Anntah put me together with his daughter in a hut some ways away from the village . . . well. Anyway. We did what we did, and I don’t remember any of it. All I know was that the next morning, I woke up alone, hungover and feeling like shit. And when I tried to leave, I couldn’t. The door was locked, and what I thought was a hut turned out to be a cage.” His flat, cold voice gained an edge. “Every night after that for a couple of months, it was the same fucking thing. The food, the drugs, his daughter. Turns out old Anntah had been looking for the last surviving Nightkeeper for a long time. I guess he had a prophecy to fulfill.”
Rabbit’s Coke can was a crumpled mess, though he didn’t remember crushing it. He just stared at it—easier than staring at his old man—for the first time realizing the familiar logo was the color of blood. “He was trying to breed the crossover. Half Nightkeeper, half Xibalban.”
Somewhere far away from his conscious mind, his stomach was knotted and his heart thudded a sickly, sticky beat. But inside his brain there wasn’t much going on except a whole lot of buzzing and a couple of neon
