Skykeepers

playing a role he’d been programmed to forget was a cover story. The plan he’d so carefully executed just after the spring solstice meant that he could finally move on, lose the act, and become the guy he’d wanted to be—or at least try to. He’d been doing his damnedest since then to stay in control, to stay out of trouble and do the right thing, hoping to improve the good to bad ratio the nahwal had alluded to. But he’d blown that all to hell the night before, hadn’t he?

“Probably. But I’d do it again under the same circumstances,” he grated to the empty room, knowing that the sentiment did little to ameliorate the heavy debt on his soul. The writs said a Nightkeeper owed his allegiance first to the gods, then to the king, the end-time war, his fellow magi, mankind, and then his own family, wants, and desires. Or something like that. He wasn’t much into scripture, but he knew that relationships and personal desire went way down at the bottom of the list.

Yet he’d chosen Sasha’s safety over his own nahwal’s directive.

She’s important, he thought. It was worth it, given how badly we need the library. More, he needed the library. Having exhausted the archive, he was banking on the library having some answers, like whether there was some way to fix what was broken inside him.

And he was so rationalizing. He hadn’t been thinking about the library when he’d given over to the Other and its silver magic. He’d been thinking only of Sasha, his thoughts and perceptions telescoping down to her. Which was more evidence of how badly off balance she’d gotten him. She was inside him even now, her face right at the edge of his mind, her scent, her taste imprinted on his sensory memory. He’d dreamed of her and had awakened hard and alone.

“Get used to it,” he told himself. “Sacrifices aren’t easy, and she damn well deserves better.” Or rather, she didn’t deserve a man whose very soul was in question, one Iago seemed to think could become an ally.

Telling himself there was no way in hell he would turn—he’d die first—he headed out of his suite and down the long hallway that led from the residential wing.

The main mansion was a sprawling edifice done in sandstone, wood, and marble, housing a great room connected to a large open kitchen, with a banquet-size dining room that had become a war chamber. Hallways radiated from the great room, leading variously to the residential wings, the archive, a glass-roofed sacred chamber, and forty-car garage. The second and third floors of the main house were empty, as were many of the residential rooms, mute testament to the numbers the Nightkeepers had once boasted. As it had been in his suite, the decor was neutral Southwestern blah, except for the occasional splash of decent art, thanks to Alexis, who wasn’t afraid to hit the near-

bottomless Nightkeeper Fund for upgrade money, and had a good eye for investments.

Michael paused at the arched doorways that opened onto the sunken great room, glancing over at the big, open-plan kitchen. His system said he needed food. His conscience said he needed to talk to Sasha. He hated how he’d been forced to leave things between them. An orgasm followed immediately by a sleep spell wasn’t exactly up to his usual standard. More, there had been nothing “usual” about what had happened between the two of them . . . and she needed to understand that nothing else could happen. Especially given what Iago had said.

Ignoring an echo of his own voice rasping, Mine, he headed across the great room for the basement stairs, figuring she’d be down there for the time being. He was halfway across the sunken sitting area of the great room when Strike appeared in the hallway leading to the royal quarters, and gestured for him to divert. “Debriefing time.”

“Can you give me five minutes?”

The king’s expression flattened. “She’s still asleep.”

“You haven’t been able to wake her?” Michael didn’t like the sound of that. Even if the counterspell wasn’t working, the sleep spell should’ve worn off on its own by now.

“Not yet.” Strike’s cobalt blue eyes glinted with frustration and worry. “I’ve done what I can think of. Even had Rabbit try to bring her around.”

Michael’s head snapped up. “You had the kid mind-bend her? Again?”

Earlier that year, during Rabbit’s imprisonment with the Xibalbans, Iago had borrowed the young man’s talent—one of them, anyway—and used it to crawl inside Sasha’s head and attempt to force her to divulge the library’s location. She had fought the invasion hard, and even though the attempted mind-rape had given Rabbit his chance to escape from Iago, the kid’s eyes still went haunted when he spoke of the incident and its victim. Michael couldn’t believe that anyone had thought another such mind-bend would be a good idea for either party. Strike leveled a long, speculative look in Michael’s direction, one that held a measure of satisfaction, as though he’d just gotten an answer to an entirely different question. All he said, though, was, “I made the call I felt I had to make. Remember, we’re not just looking at her as a potential new mage; we need the library, and we need it fast. And if that means making some tough calls, that’s part of my job description.”

Michael saw the logic even though he still didn’t like it, on a number of different levels, not the least of which being that he didn’t want the kid reliving his and Sasha’s encounter in the stone temple, from her point of view. Oh, holy squick factor. “Uh . . . what did Rabbit come up with?” His blood hummed in anticipation of the answer; it wasn’t that he was ashamed of what had happened with Sasha—far from it. But it was seriously complicated. He didn’t need the entire population of Skywatch involved.

Strike shook his head. “Her mind blocked him with some sort of music, just like before.” The king’s eyes went narrow. “Why? Did something else happen we should know about?”

“Nothing,” Michael said with absolute honesty. The others didn’t need to know any more than they could guess, at least until he’d had a chance to talk to Sasha about it, and set a few things straight.

Which brought him back to the issue of waking her up. “I don’t like that she’s still out. Should we get her to a doctor?”

“Let’s wait on that,” Strike said. “Rabbit said he thought she’d come back on her own sometime today, that her brain just needed some downtime to process what happened to her. While he was in there, he set a couple of filters to block off the memories of her imprisonment. She’ll be able to remember what Iago did to her, but only if she goes looking for the information. We thought it might help her come back faster.”

“That’s borderline,” Michael growled, but couldn’t really say it had been the wrong thing to do.

Rabbit had proven adept at installing spell-cast mental filters designed to reroute thought processes.

When he and Myrinne were on campus, they both wore filters he’d designed to keep them from talking about the Nightkeepers in public, and to keep him from working magic. That’d been Anna’s requirement before she leaned on the UT administration to grant them late admission and dorm singles across the hall from each other, both major concessions at the big school.

“I made a call. You don’t have to like it.” But Strike’s eyes said more than that; they challenged Michael to stake his claim.

He wanted to—gods and the Banol Kax knew he wanted to—but he didn’t dare. The thing inside him could make him unfit to be a mage, never mind a mate. So instead he growled, “Fine. Whatever.

You said you wanted to debrief me?”

“You can have your five minutes with her first.”

“I’ll take your word that she’s still asleep.” Even though he would’ve rather gone straight down to see her, he didn’t want to give his king hope of their becoming a mated pair. “Let me grab some food and I’ll be right in.”

“I’ve got you covered,” Tomas said from the kitchen, surprising Michael, who hadn’t realized he was within earshot. The winikin skimmed a trough-size bowl along the marble-topped breakfast bar that separated the huge kitchen from the great room; the bowl proved to be filled with scrambled eggs, sausage, and syrup-soaked pancake chunks, all mixed together. “Eat up,” the winikin ordered. “The king’s right. You look like shit.”

Michael snagged the bowl before Tomas could do his usual bitch routine over his charge’s postmagic food preferences. “Coffee?”

“There’s a fresh pot and clean mugs in the suite.”

“That’ll do.” Carrying his breakfast, Michael headed after Strike. The men pushed through a set of heavy