Skykeepers

even glancing in Michael’s direction. Once he was gone, Michael dropped the shield and slipped into a milling herd of tourists headed back toward the hotels. He hadn’t gotten far when his phone chirped in his pocket. Seeing the main Skywatch number on the display, he flipped the phone and answered, “Stone here.”

“Get yourself someplace private.” It was Michael’s winikin, Tomas, sounding clipped and disapproving. As usual.

Michael stifled a curse at his winikin’s tone. The two of them had been close from Michael’s youngest years through his teens, when he’d lived and breathed martial arts and aced his schoolwork with minimal effort. Tomas had played the role of Michael’s godfather, standing in for parents who had supposedly died in a drunk-driving accident when he’d been a baby. Tomas—short and slight, like most winikin—had been there for Michael through college, and had just about pissed himself with pride when Michael had been recruited into the FBI’s training program. Things had changed, though, when Michael washed out of the program, then took a high-tech sales job and started partying more than he worked out. Tomas had poked constantly, telling him he was better than his job, that he should do something more, be something more. Eventually, they had stopped really talking to each other . . . until almost eighteen months earlier, when the winikin had dropped the dime on the infamous, the Nightkeepers are real, you’re one of them, and you’ve got four years to save the world and six hours to get your ass on a plane to New Mexico bombshell.

Hello, mind-fuck.

After learning that Tomas was actually his winikin, Michael had partway understood where his supposed godfather had been coming from all those years, pushing him to be a fighter, to demand justice, hell, to be the best at whatever he chose to do. But knowing what had caused the pressure didn’t really change the fact that his de facto father had stopped loving him—or even liking him—

when he’d refused to do as he was told.

The tension between them had remained even after Michael gained his bloodline and talent marks, binding him to the barrier as a full-blood mage. Hell, things hadn’t even really improved between them over the past five months, ever since Michael had finally managed to cut ties with his old life and dedicated himself to becoming a better mage. On some level, he’d figured his new level of effort would finally make Tomas happy. That had been a “fail,” though. His growing role within the Nightkeepers hadn’t made any difference in his relationship with his winikin. They still rubbed each other very wrong.

“Get. Your. Ass. Private,” Tomas gritted. “Strike needs to make an emergency grab.”

Oh, hell. Shelving the interpersonal shit, Michael took a quick look around and headed for a likely looking gap between two buildings on the edge of the hotel district. “What’s wrong?”

“Anna just got a phone message from Lucius,” Tomas reported.

Michael’s warrior talent flared hard, revving his magic and sweeping all the other garbage aside.

Strike’s sister, Anna, was a Mayan-studies expert at UT Austin; Lucius had been her grad student until he’d gotten himself possessed by an underworld nasty called a makol, one of the minion species of the demon Banol Kax. In the months since his possession, the Nightkeepers had been unable to find Lucius. Strike hadn’t even been able to get a ’port lock, and there were only three things that could foil ’port lock: death, rock shielding, or the efforts of a mage capable of breaking ’port lock . . . like Iago.

“What did he say?” Michael asked as he headed for the alleyway.

“Supposedly, Iago and thirty or so Xibalbans are holed up in the old Survivor2012 compound.

They’ve got Sasha Ledbetter there . . . and they’re planning on sacrificing her tonight at the height of the meteor shower. They couldn’t torture the library’s location out of her, so they’re going to see if they can get the answer out of her spirit.”

“Oh, hell.” Michael hissed out a breath as a complicated mix of emotions mule-kicked him in the chest and an image plastered itself across his mind’s eye; a promo shot of a dark-haired woman posing in a restaurant kitchen with a handful of peppers and a ten-inch knife, looking sexy as hell.

Sasha was the only daughter of Ambrose Ledbetter, an old-school Mayanist whose body had been found by Anna and Red-Boar deep in the rain forest near a Nightkeeper temple, headless and buried in a shallow grave. That hadn’t been the biggest shock, though. No, the major oh, holy what-the-fuck moment had been when they’d found extensive scarring on his right inner forearm, as though Ambrose —or someone else—had burned that skin away.

Did that mean he was a lost Nightkeeper, one who had somehow broken his connection to the barrier, thereby surviving the Solstice Massacre? The magi weren’t sure, but that had become an almost moot point when they learned that Ambrose had discovered, moved, and re-hidden the Nightkeepers’ ancient library, an extensive repository of spells and codices that should hold all the information the magi were lacking . . . like the location of a new intersection, and what, exactly, was going to happen during the three-year threshold leading to the end date, which was a little over a month away.

Unfortunately, Iago had gotten to Sasha first. The Nightkeepers had been trying to find the Xibalbans’ main encampment and mount a rescue attempt since then, with no luck . . . until now.

Michael’s gut twisted, partly with relief that she was still alive, partly with sick guilt that she’d been in Iago’s power for nearly a year now. Where the Nightkeepers sacrificed their own blood, the Xibalbans drew power from their prisoners and enemies. More, Iago was a borrower, able to divert talents from other magi and use them for his own purposes. There was no telling what foul magic they’d tried on her.

“Godsdamn it,” he muttered under his breath. The curse wasn’t entirely directed at the Xibalbans, either. If the Nightkeepers couldn’t manage to rescue one woman, how the fuck were they supposed to save the world?

The kick of anger brought an answering stir of heat. He’d never met Sasha, but ever since he’d first dug into the file that had been put together by the Nightkeepers’ tame private investigator, Carter, he’d been unable to get her out of his head. Part of it was revulsion toward the idea of a woman—hell, anyone—being held hostage by the Xibalbans. But that wasn’t what had him looking at her photos far too often, he knew.

There was something engaging about the impish glitter in her dark brown eyes, consistently visible in each of the snaps Carter had culled from a series of restaurant Web sites.The tilt of her dimpled chin carried a hint of go-to-hell defiance he could relate to, and the rest of her stirred his hormones, from her loosely curled dark hair and angular, almost elfin face, to the long, curved fluidity of her body—what could be seen of it beneath chef’s whites, anyway.

Carter’s factoid-laden report sketched the story of a child who had been raised partly in the field by her father, partly stateside by Ambrose’s live-in girlfriend, and had wound up breaking from them both when she left for culinary school. Estrangement, too, was something Michael could relate to, as was her extensive childhood training in martial arts. He’d always been a sucker for a woman with fight training.

Michael had spearheaded several searches of potential Xibalban hideouts over the past few months, but those look-sees hadn’t turned up dick, leaving him frustrated and pissed off, and worried about a woman he’d never met, one whose picture was burned into his conscious mind.

She’s in the Everglades , he thought, his pulse kicking at the realization that they’d finally gotten a break. But logic tempered the rush of battle readiness, and the stir of bloodlust that wasn’t entirely his own.

“It’s got to be a trick,” he said, thinking aloud. “It can’t be a coincidence that Iago suddenly pops up at the old Survivor2012 compound, given how well Leah knows the property.”

A former detective with the Miami-Dade PD, Strike’s human mate had studied the location as part of tying the site’s owner, cult leader Vincente Rincon, to her brother’s death and a series of ritualistic murders in the Miami area. With the help of Strike and the others, she’d gotten her revenge on Rincon, and the cult had disbanded. The property, which had been built up out of some seriously swampy land at the edge of the Everglades, had been resold before the Nightkeepers could snap it up. However, Strike and Leah had managed to search the property, discovering several ritual chambers hidden within a labyrinth of tunnels belowground. The compound had sat empty ever since. According to Carter, the place had been bought by a conservationist group looking to preserve the Everglades.

Ten bucks says the conservationists are a front for the Xibalbans , Michael thought. But that didn’t necessarily make Lucius’s call a trap. Iago could have been drawn there by the compound’s