Skykeepers

.”

she began, then trailed off. She looked up at Strike. “Ambrose was my father.” She paused.

Swallowed. Said in a smaller voice, “Wasn’t he?”

Strike’s face was crowded with emotion, but his voice was matter-of-fact when he said, “The winikin stepped in as our guardians. Apparently, Ambrose stepped in as yours.”

Jox had tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, child. I didn’t know. I would’ve looked for you if I did. I would’ve done whatever it took to find you.”

A hot, messy ball of emotion gathered in Sasha’s throat and clogged her chest as she realized that if this was true, if she was really a child of the jaguar bloodline, then Jox should have been her winikin.

She should have been raised as Strike and Anna had been, with love and a fair-minded understanding of who and what they were. Not blood and madness.

“Who am I?” she asked Strike.

The king looked simultaneously shell-shocked and hopeful. “The nahwal said you’re his second daughter. That would make you Anna’s and my baby sister . . . the one who was supposedly stillborn two years before the Solstice Massacre.”

Sasha opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

It was Michael, solid beside her, his eyes dark with an indefinable emotion, who said, “Looks like it was more than a nickname . . . Princess.”

CHAPTER TWELVE University of Texas, Austin

As it got on toward midnight on the night of the full moon, Rabbit killed the music, set his book aside, and started pulling himself together for his late date. Myrinne had told him to come to her room at ten of twelve, not before, and she’d been serious about the timing. So he was following orders, despite the buzz of anticipation that’d played hell with his concentration in the hours leading up to the rendezvous.

He didn’t know what sort of surprise she had planned, but he was hoping it involved getting naked.

He also hoped it wouldn’t include any of the witchy stuff she’d been increasingly into lately. If Anna or any of the others knew Myrinne had been dabbling with Mistress Truth’s spell books and paraphernalia, they’d shit a brick. Rabbit was skirting deep trouble by not saying anything to them, but what was he supposed to do, rat out his girlfriend? That was so not happening. Besides, it was all harmless stuff, not even real magic, as far as he could tell. It seemed to be mostly about centering personal energy flows and crap like that, which made it little more than a glorified yoga class with some extra candles and crystals. If she got in any deeper, he figured he’d say something. For now, he was just glad the rituals seemed to have smoothed out the edges she’d developed in the first few weeks they’d been on campus, when she hadn’t wanted to spend much time with him, preferring to be on her own, or hanging with friends he never seemed to meet.

Lately, she’d been spending more and more time with him, and seemed happier overall. He figured he could overlook the yoga stuff if this was the end result. Gods knew she’d had some major life upheavals over the past year. If this was how she needed to deal, then so be it. It wasn’t like he could judge—he’d spent most of the months following his old man’s death hanging out in the pueblo ruins behind Skywatch, smashed on the drug- laced, highly alcoholic pulque he’d snagged from Jox’s not-so-

hidden stash. In fact, when he thought about it that way, she was probably dealing with things better than he had.

At exactly ten to midnight, his blood buzzing pleasantly with anticipation, Rabbit crossed the hallway and knocked on her door.

Her husky voice called, “Come on in.”

He opened the door and his pulse kicked to find the lights off and fat red candles flickering, and Myrinne wearing the long black silk bathrobe he’d bought her a few weeks ago after she’d bookmarked it on his Web browser as a hint. Her hair was loose and lustrous, and she wore the jade bracelet he’d given her over the summer.

Rabbit grinned. Hello. Guess I’m getting lucky tonight!

It wasn’t until he stepped into the room and locked the door at his back that he saw that the candles weren’t ambience, after all. At least not entirely. They sat at the points of a six-pointed star that was drawn on the linoleum floor in red electrician’s tape, with a double line through the middle of the star.

Myrinne’s expression went wary at his double take. “Problem?” she said, her voice faintly challenging.

Rabbit squelched his first few responses, which were all variations of, Oh, fucking shit, baby, are you trying to get me in trouble? She deserved better than that. Of anyone at Skywatch—or anyone in his life, ever—she’d been the first to be entirely on his side, no matter what. The others kept trying to make him fit into their prophecies, their rules, not seeming to understand that a half- blood, by definition, didn’t conform to the Nightkeepers’ rules. Hell, in the past, no half-blood would’ve even been put through the bloodline ceremony and allowed to perform magic. It was a case of luck, lack of manpower, his own strong magic, and eventually Strike’s royal this is how it’s gonna be that had gained him acceptance as a Nightkeeper, over his old man’s strenuous objections and dire predictions.

And whether because of those predictions or because he was truly a screwup at heart, he’d blown up one opportunity after another, most of the time literally . . . until he met Myrinne. She’d been the first one to appreciate him—and maybe even love him?—for who and what he was, for what he could do.

She wasn’t afraid of him, hadn’t been from the first. In fact, she was always encouraging him to practice more, work harder, develop the multi-pronged talent that set him apart from the others.

Could he do any less for her?

So he took a deep breath and forced himself not to freak out at the sign of the star on the floor and the suspicion that this wasn’t exactly the kind of date he’d had in mind. Unable to think of a better response off the cuff, he said, “Nice candles.”

Some of the fight drained out of her, and she smiled at him, candlelight catching her eyes. “The star represents the two of us. You’re the fire sign—no-brainer—which is the upward triangle, and I’m earth, which is the downward triangle with the line through the middle. Put the two together, and you get the transected star.”

He liked the symbolism just fine, with it joining the two of them together and all. But he wasn’t sure he liked where he thought she was going with the rest of it. “Myr . . . you know we can’t do magic, right? We swore blood oaths to Strike and Anna.”

She crossed to him, moving through the star with a smooth sweep of her robe, somehow avoiding all the candles in the process. On one level, Rabbit thought sourly that if he ever tried that while wearing, say, his ceremonial robes back at Skywatch, he would’ve lit his shit right up. On another, more primal level, his skin tightened at her approach, and his jeans, baggy though they were, grew uncomfortably tight in the crotch.

Stopping very close to him, close enough to kiss, to touch, she did neither, instead raising an eyebrow in challenge. “We swore a blood oath not to do Nightkeeper magic. This isn’t.”

Rabbit’s breath left him in a whoosh, and his brain clicked back into oh, shit mode. Technically, she was right, but he knew damn well that the technicality wouldn’t save him from getting his ass handed to him if Strike or Anna found out. Or Jox. Or, hell, any of the gang back at Skywatch.

But you’re not at Skywatch, are you? said a small, sly voice inside him. They sent you away to grow up. Who’s to say this isn’t part of the process? It’s called making your own decisions, asshole. You might want to give it a try sometime.

“Besides,” Myrinne continued, lifting his right hand to press a small kiss at his wrist, over the bloodred Xibalban mark he’d accepted from Iago in order to save her life, “don’t you have questions?”

He went still. “You’ve got an answer spell?”

“It’s called scrying,” she corrected, “and yeah. Especially since tonight is the esbat—the full moon —I think we should be able to figure out where you can find the spell to call a new three-question