Skykeepers

cause her body to heal itself?

“Doesn’t matter,” she told herself as the embers of the strong woman she’d once been kindled to a low, guttering flame of determination. “Don’t waste whatever time you’ve got trying to figure out what’s going on. Just get your ass out of here.”

Rising from the narrow, blanketless cot, she stood for a moment, thrilling to the sense of balance and power that coursed through her, the awareness of her own body. She acutely felt the weight of her sweatshirt and pants, the press of the floor against the soles of her feet. In the back of her head lurked the fear that this was nothing more than another sort of torture, that Iago had given her back herself only to take the feeling away again. But on the heels of fear came determination. “If that’s your plan, you bastard, you’re going to regret it,” she said softly. “That’s a promise.”

Outside in the hallway, muffled slightly by the heavy metal door of her cell, she heard the measured tread of footsteps in the hallway. One set, heading in her direction. She froze, imagining the possibilities. Was one of Iago’s acolytes coming to her room? Oh, please, yes. I dare you.

Adrenaline sizzled in her veins and her pulse hammered as she cast around for a weapon. There wasn’t time to disassemble the bedframe, if she could even manage the feat, and the toilet was bolted in place. The only other thing in the cell was her meal tray, where a microwaved mac-and-cheese sat half-eaten, a plastic spoon sticking out of the congealed mess.

“It’ll have to do,” she hissed, grabbing the makeshift weapon and pressing her body tight against the wall, on the hinged side of the door. Letting the handle end of the spoon poke between her fingers, she imagined shoving it into one of Iago’s gloating, emerald green eyes. Rage and excitement rose up, nearly choking her. She hated him, hated what he’d done to her, to Ambrose. Hell, for all she knew, the bastard had killed Pim, too. It was Pim’s funeral that had precipitated her fleeting reunion with her father in late June of the prior year, and it had been the memory of his grief that had prompted Sasha to call him months later, only to learn that he’d fled to his rain forest. If Iago had been trying to force Ambrose over the edge of his tenuous grip on sanity, killing Pim would have been the perfect trigger.

Not because Ambrose had loved her, but because she’d kept him as contained as he ever got, giving his sanity an anchor.

It fit. It played. And it rankled deep inside Sasha as the footsteps paused outside her cell door and the lock clicked. Moments later, the metal panel swung inward and a gray-robe stepped through. Sasha took a split second to make sure it wasn’t her brown-haired maybe-ally. Then she attacked.

Now! Propelled by a year’s worth of rage and hatred, along with the gut-deep knowledge that this might be her only chance of escape, she attacked. Lunging from behind the door, she slammed the spoon handle into the gray-robe’s face. She nailed him in the left eye, the spoon handle sinking in with a moment of resistance followed by a liquid give that made her gag.

Her victim shouted, spun, and staggered, clapping both hands to his ruined eye as blood and fluid spurted. Sickened, Sasha slashed a kick that folded his knee sideways, dropping him howling just inside the door. A second kick, this one to the side of his head, had him going limp. She searched him hurriedly; he was carrying a high-tech com device but no weapon, damn it. Slipping into the hallway, she shut and locked the door, then leaned back against it, gulping air.

Keep it together, she told herself. You can do this.

Unable to figure out how to turn off the handheld com, and afraid it would make noise at exactly the wrong moment, she ditched it. Then, with her heart hammering a tempo of fear and victory, her shaking hands stained with the blood of her enemy, she took off running down the metal-lined corridor. She had no clue where she was going, but anywhere had to be better than where she’d been.

In the blue-black of dusk in the Everglades, eight Nightkeeper warriors and one human ex-cop materialized in the swamp just beyond the former Survivor2012 compound.

The nine fighters wore black-on-black combat clothes, all a variation of a tee or turtleneck and Kevlar- impregnated cargo pants tucked into lightweight, grippy boots. Body armor went over the top —black again—and their utility belts held MAC-10 autopistols and spare clips of jade-tipped bullets on one side, ceremonial knives on the other. Night-vision opticals gave them eyes in the gathering darkness, and military-grade earpiece-throat mike combos would allow them to reach out and touch, as long as there wasn’t too much interference.

The ground squelched beneath Michael’s combat boots; the swampy smell was seriously rank, and he was pretty sure something had slithered out from beneath him as he landed. He didn’t comment, though, merely registered the peripheral annoyances as he sought the inner calm he relied on. But balance didn’t come easily, with the possibility of Sasha’s rescue so close at hand. Magic hummed at the base of his brain, responding to the peak of the Leonid meteor shower; the red-gold Nightkeeper power was far stronger than it had been in many months, and carried a jagged, unfamiliar edge of violence that warned him that his control was close to slipping.

Anger pulsed beneath his skin, foreign and tempting; it throbbed in time with the blood that ran hot in his veins. Screw stealth and subtlety; he wanted to use a couple of jade-filled grenades to bust open the gates of the narrow causeway leading into the compound, and go in with guns blazing. He wanted not just to rescue Sasha, but to kill the men who had taken her, who had kept her. Who had, he knew, hurt her.

The pounding, overwhelming need for revenge brought sweat prickling beneath his body armor. The heavy iron tang of blood suddenly coated his sinuses and layered his tongue, and for a second he was awash in violence. Horror—and horrible temptation—locked him in place as death flooded his senses.

He could feel the flutter of a man’s carotid beneath his gripping fingers, smell his fear, taste the moment life cut out and the afterlife took over. Yes, something deep within him thought. Yes!

“No,” he said aloud, gritting the word through locked teeth that he unclenched only long enough to bite the tip of his own tongue, more for the snap of pain than the blood sacrifice—gods knew he was already channeling plenty of magic. That was part of the problem. He didn’t know where the dark surge had come from, unless—

His head snapped up and he took a quick look around at the others, but they were focused on Strike as he went over the basic plan one last time. All except Rabbit, who had been ’ported back from UT for the rescue mission. The sharp-featured young man, his former skull trim grown out into a short bristle of brown spikes, glanced over and met Michael’s eyes. Rabbit raised an eyebrow. Got a problem? the expression said.

Michael looked away.

“I don’t sense any wards,” Alexis said from the other side of the loosely clustered group of black-

clad fighters. Formerly soul-bound to the goddess Ixchel, the tall, blond Valkyrie had retained the ability to sense patterns, both visible and invisible, even after the destruction of the skyroad had severed her connection to the goddess. Michael had to wonder, though, if Alexis was losing the last of her goddess-given skills, because it didn’t make any sense for Iago not to have warded the hell out of his hideout.

“Lucius said he’d take care of getting us inside safely.” That was from Patience, who tended to be a stubborn optimist, even when things were going to shit. And it was true that Lucius had gotten out a second message to that effect, as relayed by Anna. It was also technically possible that it’d happened the way Lucius claimed: that he’d tried to kill himself back in the spring after escaping from Skywatch, but the makol’s powers had healed his injuries, drawing the attention of Iago, who’d taken him into the Xibalbans’ fold. There, the mage had used spells and sacrifices to bring the makol to the forefront, so it overrode Lucius’s human self except during times of increased barrier activity . . . like the one they were experiencing now.

Sure, all of that played. But it was still too damned convenient.

Alexis’s mate, Nate Blackhawk, was thinking along the same lines. The dark-haired, slick-looking warrior growled, “Thousand bucks says it’s a trap.” Nate, a former war game developer, had a decent grip on strategy, and often played devil’s advocate to any plan taken up by Strike and the other four members of the royal council, who did most of the Nightkeepers’ planning.

“We knew that going in,” Michael countered, having been part of the brief confab back at Skywatch. He didn’t wear the small, carved eccentric that symbolized an adviser, but these days he often sat in on the meetings and brought his rather unique perspective to the discussions. Not that the others understood exactly how unique