Skykeepers

around him, feeling his thick hair brush the backs of her hands, the sides of her face as they kissed long and hard, deep and wet.

An ache opened up within her, a hollowness she hadn’t been aware of until that moment. She drew back and sucked in a long, shuddering breath that did nothing to fill the emptiness.

They stared at each other for a long moment, eyes questioning. Did you feel that? she imagined her expression said, with his answering, Hell, yeah.

“We should get upstairs before Rabbit comes back down looking for us,” she said, though she would’ve rather stayed just as they were. The others needed to see him, see that he was okay. And they all needed to hear what he had to say.

“Or worse, your brother.”

She grimaced. “Yeah. He’s not a happy king at the moment.”

“Doubt what I’m about to tell him is going to help.”

“The truth is what it is,” she said pragmatically, her arms still wrapped around his neck, his hands fastened to her waist, holding their lower bodies together, warm and sure, the contact enticing. After a pause, she said, “And the truth is, I was right. I like this version of you.”

You would’ve loved him, he’d said, and she had a feeling that was the truth too. But at the same time, she knew she was in danger of falling for the man he was now, not just because of his kiss, but because of what he’d sacrificed in an effort to keep her safe, how he’d driven himself to the edge trying to do the right thing. Where Ambrose had wallowed in his own pain, rarely noticing when it caused her distress, Michael had tortured himself, nearly killed himself in an effort to protect her.

Could she blame him for that?

No, of course not, her most logical self said. But there’s a difference between not blaming him and loving him, or even trusting him. Who knows what will set him off again? Ambrose had sane spells too.

As if hearing her thoughts, or catching an echo from the bond of their magics, he eased away from her, his expression tightening to wariness. “Don’t make any decisions until you’ve heard the whole story. It’s fucking ugly.”

The harshness of his voice on the last two words had her flinching back. But she nodded. “Okay.

Let’s go.”

They left the cell hand in hand, but when they hit the stairs he released her and led the way. She followed him up, much as he’d done to her that first day. Now it was the other way around, and it was his turn to hesitate at the top step, when the assembled winikin and magi, who were sitting in the great room waiting for his story, all turned at once to stare.

The hesitation lasted only a moment, though. Then he squared his shoulders and kept going. Which was all anyone could do, really, she thought. Just keep going.

But as she kept herself going, heading for an empty spot on one of the long couches while Michael took a centrally located chair that had been left conspicuously empty, she couldn’t help thinking that sometimes going forward wasn’t enough, while other times, life took a sharp corner when she wasn’t looking. And went off the road into uncharted territory.

For all that Michael had sometimes imagined being able to tell the others about the shit inside his head, he’d never come up with the right words. How could he make them understand why he’d made the choices he’d made, why he’d done the things he’d done, when he didn’t even understand it himself? Or rather, he understood why he’d done it, but he didn’t know what it made him, besides royally fucked-up. Was he a hero? A monster? Both?

Michael looked for Tomas, found him up at the breakfast bar with most of the other winikin. A thumbs-up would’ve been nice. He got a level stare he couldn’t even begin to interpret. A glance at Sasha netted him an encouraging eyebrow lift, and he figured he’d have to make do with that. It was probably better than he deserved— she was definitely better than he deserved—but it helped. It was because of her that he hadn’t lost it entirely back at the temple. And he suspected it was because of her that he hadn’t died back there.

Taking a deep breath, he faced the big sofa, where Strike, Leah, Anna, and Sasha sat ranged together, a family unit. Figuring he’d start at the beginning, he said, “First, I owe each and every one of you an apology. I’ve lied to you all, both overtly and by omission. Hopefully by the end of this you’ll get that I honestly couldn’t tell you the truth before. It’s entirely thanks to Rabbit that I can tell you now.” He nodded to the young mage. “Thanks, man.” Not kid anymore.

“My pleasure,” Rabbit said, deadpan, though they both knew that messing around in his sewer of a brain would have been far from pleasant.

Then, Michael drew breath and dove in. “The truth is, I didn’t exactly wash out of FBI training—a man named Maxwell Bryson recruited me into a covert arm of government ops. Washing out and taking the tech job was part of my cover.” Up at the breakfast bar, Tomas jolted upright. Michael waved him down. “Don’t get too excited; it wasn’t nearly as sexy as it looks in the movies. No ‘shaken or stirred’ for me, though I did have a gadget or two.” He paused. “This was maybe a year after nine/ eleven. Homeland Security was running in all different directions, and not all of those directions were purely on the up-and-up. Bryson’s group wasn’t new, but it got expanded to handle situations the other arms of the terror response system didn’t want to—or flat-out couldn’t— handle. I’m not even sure the president knew what we were up to half the time. It was like there was this reflex arc of plausible deniability built into the war on terror. Either that, or Bryson and his cronies didn’t trust that there would be definitive action if it didn’t come from them.”

Sasha said, “You were an assassin.” She didn’t look all that surprised. More like things were finally starting to make some sense.

“Among other things.” Michael had tried—and failed—to imagine how she would take learning that he’d been a killer even before his entrance into the Nightkeepers and their war. Granted, he’d killed in the context of another war—that on terror—but his kills hadn’t come in battle, and he hadn’t sacrificed his victims to a higher power. He’d killed in cold blood, and even among the Nightkeepers, that was murder. He continued, “Here’s where it gets uglier still. They didn’t come after me because I was top of my class—far from it. They wanted me because my psych tests showed a tendency for dissociation. I could split myself when necessary, compartmentalizing the bad stuff, shoving it to the back of my head, and more or less forgetting about it. According to Dr. Horn, who was Bryson’s number two man, I was a budding sociopath, and lucky for me they found me when they did.” He didn’t try to stop the resentment from coloring his tone. “I bought into that because they gave me a choice—I was going to be booted from the FBI program either way, thanks to my psych evals. I could either join Bryson, or they’d cut me loose.”

“An offer of therapy and some meds would’ve been nice,” Jade said sharply.

“In retrospect, that probably would’ve been on the table if I’d turned down Bryson’s offer. But I was young and pissed off, and I’d liked the training part of the academy. I thought I’d be a good agent, and I wanted to make a difference.” He glanced at Tomas, whose expression had gone unreadable.

“That’s what happens when you raise a kid to save the world. Sometimes he gets there ahead of schedule.”

“They trained you to kill,” the winikin said, his voice hollow.

“According to Horn, I was most of the way there on my own. All they did was emphasize the split between the two personalities I already had going on inside my head. Using hypnosis, drugs, and some serious meditation training, Horn taught me to subsume the Other, keeping it compartmentalized until they needed it.”

“The Other?” Sasha asked quietly.

He couldn’t read her, wasn’t sure he wanted to yet. Not until he got through the rest of it. “That was what we called my killer instinct, my alter ego. I was good at both of my jobs. Mostly I sold techware.

A couple of times a month, though, I’d get a call on a second phone, with drop coordinates. There, I’d find info on the target and how they wanted it done. Sometimes it was a straight-up hit, just get it done and get out. Other times it was up to me to make it look like an accident, or frame someone else for the kill. Whatever the powers that be decided would offer maximum results.” He hesitated over the one that had hit him hardest, even through the dissociation that separated him from the Other. “Once it was a kid, designed to look like a drive-by gone wrong. The kill sparked a gang war that nearly wiped out both sides, which had been the point. But the job