Skykeepers

paused, eyes locking with Michael’s. “I need a fighter with a borderline dissociative personality, if not full-blown schizophrenia.”

Michael swallowed hard, knowing his FBI training was over, one way or the other. “What’s in it for

. . . for this person? If you found him, I mean.”

“I’ll teach him to control the impulses, how to use them to be a better man. I’ll program him so he can put that part of himself away, and take it out only when and where it will do some good.”

“How?” The word escaped before Michael could curb it, or hide some of the desperation he knew had flashed in his eyes.

“The same way I’ll blank your memories of this entire meeting if you turn me down.” Bryson motioned, and the second man detached himself from the shadows across the road and crossed the street to join them. “Dr. Horn will take care of it.”

The doctor wore the same black fatigues but no jacket, and had wisps of white-blond hair crowning his otherwise shiny scalp. His features were pinched and rabbity, and he didn’t move at all like a fighter. When he dipped into one of his thigh pockets and came up with a pair of preloaded syringes, though, his movements carried the grace of long familiarity. “Your call, Mr. Stone,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep given his unprepossessing exterior. “You in or out?”

Michael locked eyes with Bryson. “If I refuse?”

“You’ll wake up in your room tomorrow morning and remember nothing. The e-mail’s already been purged from the computer systems, so as far as you’ll know, you slept through the night uninterrupted.

When you get to your first class, you’ll learn that you’ve been bounced from the program based on your psych profile.”

Michael could picture it all too easily; he’d been projecting exactly that scenario ever since he’d been pulled out for a third round of personality tests that most of the others hadn’t been subjected to.

“And if I agree?”

“Then you receive a very different injection, you come with me, and your training begins tonight.”

“How much time do I have to think about it?” Michael hedged.

“About thirty more seconds.”

Okay, then, Michael thought, brain racing as he tried to figure his options. But was there really another viable answer besides “yes”? He was being offered exactly the sort of thing he’d been gravitating toward in his training, only on a larger, more immediately relevant scale. A childhood spent listening to stories about magical warriors and saving the world had primed him to want to do the same sort of thing in real life, and the 9/11 terror attacks had only reinforced his need to help. Or at least the need of his better half. His darker side just wanted to kick ass.

What if he’d finally found a way to serve both needs? Better yet, what if it had just found him?

Aware that he’d pretty much made his decision the second Bryson offered to teach him not only to control the violence within him, but to use it for the greater good, Michael nodded. “I’m in.”

Bryson’s eyes glittered with something sharper than satisfaction. “Good.” He waved the other man forward. “Dr. Horn, if you please?”

The doctor pocketed one of the syringes, but kept the other one out as he unbuttoned Michael’s right sleeve and pushed the cuff up over his elbow, baring the lighter skin of his forearm. For a second, in the darkness, Michael imagined he saw black marks on the pale skin. But the illusion passed as the doctor moved in and the needle slid home. A pinch was followed by a slow, cool burn that spread up Michael’s arm and across his throat, then downward, until it coated his entire body.

For a moment, the world spun around him. Then he was falling.

Falling.

Fallen.

Present November 19 Three years and thirty-two days until the zero date Skywatch Michael woke fuzzy headed and nauseated, which wasn’t unusual following one of his unwanted trips down memory’s ass. Sitting up in the SUV-size bed he’d had installed in his suite as part of replacing the Southwestern blah decor that characterized much of Skywatch with his own preference of glass, metal, and leather, he groaned and scrubbed his hands across his face, thinking he felt shittier than usual, even given the dream, as though it wasn’t just the memories bothering him; it was . . . He froze midmotion as he remembered the rest of the prior day’s shitstorm in Technicolor, along with the tastes, scents, and sounds that went with it.

He’d found Sasha. He’d made love to her. And he’d saved her . . . by letting the Other come through and using the forbidden magic to insta-cremate one of Ia go’s red-robes. And in doing so he’d gotten himself on Iago’s radar screen. Damn it. Over the past five months, ever since he’d cut the last of his ties with Bryson and Horn, he’d managed to convince himself the Other was safely locked away, that he had the problem under control. Apparently not. The circumstances might’ve called for extreme measures, but in the end he’d done what his nahwal had specifically told him not to—and then he’d lied about it to his king.

Sin upon sin. How do you think your soul’s looking now?

“Oh, hell,” he grated, squeezing his eyes shut behind his hands, even though the weak gesture had never worked before. Still, denial was a natural human response to a situation that had gone well past human-level fuckup status and straight to cosmic proportions. Even worse, part of him didn’t feel shitty at all. It felt powerful, self-satisfied, and hungry for more of the killing, more of Sasha. And neither of those things was happening, period. Still, though, urgency burned beneath his skin, and the monster he’d been stirred within his mind.

The Other. That was what Bryson and Horn had called their creation, the piece of him that they had pulled forward and honed into a killing machine.

“Fuck off. Leave me alone.” But he knew the memories wouldn’t go away on their own. He was going to have to make them leave.

Michael didn’t call on the hypnotic conditioning and drug regimen Horn had used to keep the Other at bay— those blocks had given way during his talent ceremony. Instead, he turned to the mental discipline he’d practiced and honed until his inner shields were almost as good as his magical ones.

Dragging himself out of bed, he dropped down lotus-style on the cold floor. Straightening his spine vertebra by vertebra, he concentrated on his breathing, voiding his lungs of the old, stale air and replacing it with fresh. He breathed. He counted his heartbeats. And when relative calm descended, he pictured the flow of inner energy, and the dam at the back of his brain.

Concentrating, he cranked the heavy sluice gates shut, feeling the effort as a phantom burn in his arms and back, hearing the clank of mechanisms that didn’t really exist outside the construct of his own mind. It didn’t matter whether the physical effort or the metallic clangs were real, though. What mattered was his ability to shut off that part of himself.

The good news was that it worked: The sluiceways shut; the dam held. But, as Michael let himself drift within himself for a moment, he was conscious that closing off that part of himself left him incomplete. Although he’d been trying to improve the man who remained outside the dam, he was still a work in progress. Worse, because of Horn’s conditioning, when he was fully separated, as he was now, he tended to block his own knowledge of his other half, and what it meant, becoming the surface charmer that had been his cover. Remember all of it, you self-centered prick, he thought. Sasha deserves better than your dissociated ass. But even as he hung there, suspended between the physical and metaphysical, he was aware of a thrumming current of excitement, one that urged him to get his butt off the floor already and go see her.

He’d been searching for her for a long time now. And he sure as hell owed her his protection from the others after what had happened the night before. Not to mention an explanation.

Feeling the sharp edges of his soul dulling down, he flowed to his feet, hit the bathroom, shocked himself awake with a cold shower, shaved off a layer of stubble, and chewed a couple of Tylenol tabs on the theory that they tasted foul but ought to hit his bloodstream faster that way. Maybe. Movements quickening, he dragged on black nylon track pants and a ribbed white tank, shoved his feet into a pair of rope sandals, and was ready to go.

Six months earlier, he would’ve been wearing his high-toned salesman duds, even around the mansion, still