Skykeepers

out of the cell, and a kitchen was a fine place to start.

Michael held her gaze for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “Let me talk to the others. I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’ll be here,” she said blandly.

He looked at her a moment more, then turned with fluid grace and headed for the door, where he paused and said something under his breath. She assumed it was some sort of secret password, one that cued a guard on the other side of the door to unlock it, far preferring the idea of a password over the suspicion that he’d been casting a “spell” to let him through, sort of a Nightkeepers’ “open sesame.”

Once he was gone, she prowled her cell, trying to remember everything she could about the Nightkeepers. Her childhood had been filled with stories of the powerful magi, their rules and responsibilities. Their talents. Their magic. She knew their legends, knew what drove them. At least, assuming that Michael and his fellow de lusionals were buying into the same set of stories Ambrose had taught her. The question was, how could she use that information? How could she—

The lock rattled, interrupting her midthought. The panel swung inward and her pulse accelerated as she braced herself for bad news and the need to come up with a plan B.

Michael stood in the opening, filling the doorway with his body, filling the room with his presence.

Instead of coming in, though, he stepped aside. And waved her out into the hallway beyond.

Pulse bumping, she moved toward him, then stalled. “Seriously?” It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she hadn’t expected her new captors to give in to her demand. It made her suspicious that they had. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” He lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes you’ve got to offer trust in order to get it in return.

I’ve asked the others to make themselves scarce for the time being, so it’ll just be you and me. And a really big kitchen with all the Cuisinart and Copper Clad you could ask for.”

She yearned. Tried not to let it show. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“After you.”

She moved past him, but stopped in the doorway, facing him. She was close enough to catch his scent, which she’d caught on her own skin when she’d awakened. He’s a means to an end , she reminded herself. And you can’t trust him. The flash she’d seen in his eyes suggested there was far more to him than what showed on the surface. And if that only made her more intrigued, that was her imagination at work again, and she knew she couldn’t trust that bitch.

At his gesture, she led the way along the short hall, toward a short flight of stairs, acutely conscious of the big, solid man following close behind her, his heat radiating to her skin and prickling each individual neuron to unwanted sensual awareness.

The regularly spaced doors on one side of the hallway all looked the same, and presumably led to more storerooms like the one she’d just been in. On the other side there was a single set of glass double doors. Through them, she caught a glimpse of a huge room filled with high-end gym equipment. The hallway led to a corner behind her and kept going, making her think the building’s footprint had to be enormous, far bigger than that of a normal house. Yet the woodwork on the staircase leading up looked more residential than not, and orange sunlight spilled down from above.

He’d called the place Skywatch and claimed it was the Nightkeepers’ training compound, but that didn’t make any sense. None of it did.

Stay on task. Keep focused. Keeping her goals in mind, she headed up the stairs, still too aware of the warm solidity of the man who followed close behind.

Then she reached the main level, took one look at the wide room spread out in front of her, and stopped dead as all thought was swept aside by a powerful surge of emotion, one that welled up and nearly flattened her, scared the shit out of her.

Oh, holy hell. She recognized this place.

Sucking in a breath, she stumbled back, missed a step, and would’ve crashed down the stairs if it hadn’t been for Michael’s strong arms catching her easily and holding her against his wide, warm chest for a moment, a few heartbeats when she could feel his pulse hammer in time with hers.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice a low rumble in his chest.

“I—I know this room,” she said, unable to keep her voice from shaking as she pushed away from him and stood on her own, on a landing that was part of a wide strip running three-quarters of the way around a sunken sitting area. To her left, the space opened to hallways on either side of a huge, open-

plan kitchen done in marble and industrial chrome, but not even that lure was enough to snap her out of her oh, shit fugue as she kept looking, trying to convince herself that it was just a casual resemblance, that the room wasn’t actually the same as the image in her mind. Problem was, she couldn’t talk herself into the lie.

“From a dream?” Michael asked, his voice carefully neutral.

“No. A photograph,” she said faintly. “I saw it when I was a kid, snooping through Ambrose’s things.” She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen, and had only just begun to comprehend the depth of her father’s insanity, the complexity of the construct he’d built up around a group of people who didn’t exist. “It was mixed in with some other papers—tax records and garbage like that, nothing unusual except for this picture of Ambrose in his late teens or so, standing with a couple of other guys, their arms around one another, mugging for the camera.” She moved now, walking slowly around the raised platform until the angle was right. Then she looked through the sliding glass doors that led out to a huge blue pool surrounded by a pressed cement patio. “The furniture and paint were different. The curtains. But the room was the same, and the scenery, that was the same. He was here. He lived here.”

The photo had been faded, but time hadn’t changed the ridgeline in the distance, where the back end of a box canyon rose up in a sheer cliff. Not all of the buildings near the main house looked the same, and there was a tree now where there hadn’t been one before. In the distance, though, in the wan, strangely orangeish sunlight of late morning, she could see the regular patterns of light and shadow created by a Puebloan ruin, high on the rear canyon wall.

The scenery matched. The room matched.

“We’re in New Mexico, near Chaco Canyon, aren’t we?” she asked softly, but didn’t wait for his answer. Instead, she continued, “He wanted his ashes spread here. I tried to find the place once, but couldn’t.”

“It was hidden by a curtain spell for nearly two decades.”

“Special effects,”she said,her voice going thin.“Desert-style camo netting.”

“Magic,” Michael corrected, and nudged her in the direction of the kitchen. “Are you taking orders?”

“I don’t do real well with orders,” she said, seriously grateful for the subject change. “Or didn’t your background check mention that was why I’d had nearly a dozen jobs over four years? I have a problem following recipes, and I don’t like doing things the same way over and over again.” But she let him guide her to the kitchen as she fought to regain her mental footing. So what if Ambrose had lived here when he was a kid? Just because this . . . cult, or whatever it was, went back four decades or so didn’t make their paradigm any less bullshit than it’d been when she had finally called her father on the gaps between his beliefs and reality.

She’d been thirteen, just hitting menarche and snotty with it, and had sassed him that the so-called magic he preached didn’t work worth a damn. Instead of ignoring her like he usually did when she mouthed off, that time he’d dragged her into his “temple”—a hallway closet he’d done up with stone veneer and a chac- mool altar—and locked them both in while he’d chivvied her through the usual ritual of letting blood and burning the sacrificial offerings, as they usually did for each of the solstices and equinoxes. That time, though, his chants had sounded different, more complex. And when, as usual, nothing happened, he’d been furious, accusing her of not believing, of not having prayed hard enough. He’d acted like something should have happened during that particular ceremony, that she had failed him. More, that she’d failed herself.

Later, looking back, she’d realized it was after that ceremony that they’d truly begun growing apart —she in teenage rebellion, he into depression. It had taken several more years and his last final, brutal effort to make the nonexistent magic real before she ran, but that had been the beginning of the end for them.

“Hey,” Michael said, breaking into her thoughts with a gentle touch at her elbow. “You okay?

Feeling shaky?”

Brought abruptly back to reality—or at least his version thereof—she shook her head. “No. Well, maybe a