Skykeepers

His mouth was tight. “This was it.” As if conceding defeat, he gave her hand a last squeeze and released it. Anna, too, stepped away from their uplink, leaving Michael the only one still touching her.

After a moment, he too broke the connection and moved back.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said hollowly, failure echoing alongside grief. She hated that she hadn’t come through when her new friends and family had needed her. Did that mean she wasn’t a ch’ulel? Or was Michael right, and she and Rabbit were simply incompatible? But if that was the case, did the fact that she couldn’t hear Michael’s song mean that the two of them weren’t compatible, either?

It seemed depressingly possible.

“What now?” Strike asked. It seemed like a rhetorical question.

“Let me try,” Myrinne said unexpectedly.

“Not an option,” Strike said flatly. “You’re the one who got him into this.”

“Then I should be the one to get him out, don’t you think?” The young woman uncoiled from the chair. With her average height and dark, Gypsy-lush looks, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt that was cropped off at her hips, she would’ve come across as just another college kid if it weren’t for her eyes, which looked far older than her chronological age, and her mouth, which tipped up sensually at the corners, somehow seeming to suggest that she’d been there, done that, and no sort of depravity on earth could surprise her.

The look in her eyes nudged Sasha’s mind back to her time with Iago, pushing at the filters and making her chest ache. What in gods’ name had the girl lived through? What had happened to her?

“Maybe we should let her try,” Anna said slowly. “Her ritual put him under. Maybe she can bring him back.”

“No fucking way,” Strike said. “For all we know, the next woo-woo shit she tries on him will kill him. Besides, whatever’s going on, it’s nothing more than self-hypnosis bringing out Rabbit’s latent talents—and gods know what else he’s got hiding in there that we don’t know about yet. He’s caught in Nightkeeper magic, maybe Xibalban. The woo-woo shit doesn’t work.” Sasha didn’t think he’d thank her for pointing out that, given the existence of magic, it wasn’t logical for the Nightkeepers to claim its sole possession. But something of her thoughts must’ve shown on her face, because he fixed her with a look. “You think I should let her, don’t you?”

She started to give him a whatever you think is best answer, but then stopped herself. Maybe it was her warrior’s mark, maybe the feel of Michael’s eyes fixed on her, silently challenging her to step up into the life she’d chosen, the one that had chosen her. “I think,” she said carefully, “that unless you’ve got a viable plan C, you should give her the chance.”

“If she could’ve woken him up, she would’ve done it back on campus,” Strike countered.

“Not after he lit the dorm.” Myrinne faced the king with a scowl, looking very young and slight in comparison, but defiant as hell. “You don’t think it’s magic? That’s fine with me—let me do my self-

hypnosis shtick. Can’t hurt if that’s all it is, right?”

Caught in his own logic, Strike cursed under his breath. He glanced around the room, tallying a silent vote. Sasha and Anna had already cast their votes. Jox opened a hand, as if saying, Beats the hell out of me.

Michael held the king’s eyes for a moment, then nodded. “I say let her try. He’s fading fast.” The gray cast to his skin predominated now. “Alternatively, you could ’port him to that hospital in Albuquerque. But you’ve got to do something.”

Strike shook his head. “There’s no point giving him over to human doctors. He’s lost in his own magic.”

“Then give him a reason to come back,” Michael said bluntly. His eyes were fixed on Sasha as he said it.

Irritation flared—with him for making it seem like she mattered, and with herself for the quick buzz brought by the words. Damn hormones.

“Fuck.” Strike turned back to Myrinne. “What do you need?”

“Nothing from you,” she said sharply. She slipped from the room, returning quickly with a small metal dagger inset with crystals at its hilt. Taking the seat beside the head of the bed, she pulled the nightstand slightly away from the wall. On it was a fat red candle, halfway burned down in a saucer decorated with flying pigs. She opened the nightstand drawer wide and fished for a box of matches, smirking slightly when Strike looked away from the big box of condoms, torn open and most of the way empty.

He’s got a life that doesn’t include you, the action—and the expression— said.

“Make a circle,” she ordered. “No bloodletting, and don’t lean on your magic. Clear your heads. I don’t care if you believe in this, but keep the negative thoughts out.” Her eyes flicked to Jox, who was edging for the door. “You too.” Something in her voice said, Especially you, as if the winikin had more power here than the others combined. Which didn’t make any sense, really, because a winikin’s marks might be magic, but the winikin weren’t magic users, hadn’t ever been. At Strike’s nod, though, Jox joined hands with the others in a circle that surrounded the bed and included Rabbit, with Myrinne on one side of him, Strike on the other. Sasha ended up between Michael and Anna; she caught a buzz of sexual heat and frustrated anger from one, a trill of harps and song from the other, but suppressed both to focus on Myrinne’s ritual. As she did so, she sent a second prayer: Gods help us all.

Instead of using the knife to cut herself or Rabbit, Myrinne placed it on his blanket-covered chest.

She lit the candle and put it, pig saucer and all, on Rabbit’s stomach, which dipped flat beneath the covers. The assemblage wobbled for a moment, then stabilized as Myrinne took Anna’s hand on one side, Rabbit’s on the other, and said, “We welcome the element of fire, symbol of willpower and courage. We call to the south for inspiration and passion. We call on the goddess Nephthys, ruler of magic and secrecy. And we call on Rabbit to return to us. He is fire, willpower, and courage. He is my inspiration and my passion.” Releasing Anna’s hand, Myrinne leaned in and kissed Rabbit on the cheek. “It’s time to come back now. Follow the sound of my voice and the energy of the people who love you.”

There was no hum of red-gold Nightkeeper magic, no song, no change in the air or the flickering candle flame. For maybe half a minute, absolutely nothing happened. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, Rabbit’s chest rose in a long, drawn-out inhale, and the knife and candle set on his chest moved with the ripple of a long shudder racking his body. Then his eyelids flickered.

Relief curled through Sasha like a song, and she instinctively tightened her fingers on Michael’s.

Whatever Myrinne was doing, it was working.

Rabbit’s consciousness swam up through the sticky layers of gray, fighting inertia, fighting the tide that threatened to suck him back down. He didn’t know where he’d been, didn’t know what he’d been doing, didn’t even know where he was going, only that the familiar contralto voice drew him onward, to a glittering silver interface where the grayness met something else. There was light beyond the interface, and the sense of motion and life. And the voice. Her voice. As he struggled up to the surface, the clinging layers started to fall away and he started reconnecting with himself, with memory.

He affixed the voice to a name—Myrinne—and an emotion: desperate love. At the same time, he saw flames and heard himself scream her name. A waxy face. Blood dripping from a knife.

No! Instinctively, reflexively, he threw a mental block over the nightmare. It wasn’t a true vision, he knew. It’d been a projection of his own terror that no matter how hard he tried to do the right thing, he always fucked everything up, usually destroying shit in the process. But not her. Never her. She was a metaphor for the good stuff he screwed up. That was all. He wouldn’t ever hurt her.

“That’s it, kid. Open your eyes,” another familiar voice said, accompanied by the brush of cool fingers over his forehead. Anna, his mind supplied.

“Rabbit, you’ve got to come all the way back.” That was Myrinne’s voice, and those were Myrinne’s fingers holding his, squeezing encouragement. He latched onto the promise of her, the reality, using that to pull himself the last little bit through the grayness to the interface, then shove himself through.

He jolted back into his own body and spun, disoriented, as his consciousness fought to reconnect with the shell it was supposed to inhabit. When he finally got his eyes open, he found himself blinking up at a whole damn crowd gathered around the bed in his old man’s cottage back at Skywatch. Which reminded him that he’d set