Demonkeepers

for the day, like we planned.”

The lie was still there. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t going to wait for the solstice, or else the solstice was part of it, but there were already major plans being made . . . without him. Anger flared, hot and hard and feeling like fire. For a second, he thought about yanking down his mental blocks and getting inside her head, looking for what she’d chosen—or been ordered—not to tell him. What is it? he wanted to scream at her. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want me there? But he held it together.

Barely.

She looked at him for real, finally, and he didn’t see the lie anymore. It had been there, though. He was sure of it. “Be strong,” she said softly. “Your time will come.”

“Thanks,” he said. But inwardly, he was thinking, What-the-fuck-ever.

“Was there something else?”

He didn’t know if that was a hint, or if she really wanted to know the answer, but either way, he wasn’t in a sharing mood anymore. Maybe he’d hiked over to the ugly castle rather than called because he’d been toying with asking her about the Order of Xibalba and some of the stuff Myrinne had been bringing up lately, sort of get Anna’s take. But now? Forget it.

“Nah. Just wanted to check in with some face time, so you can report back to big brother that I’m behaving myself.”

She smiled, the expression reaching her eyes. “I’ll do that. And, Rabbit?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m proud of you.”

Under other circumstances—like if she hadn’t just lied to his face—that might’ve caught him hard.

Gods knew he was working his ass off not to fuck up these days. Given the scenario, though, he just faked a smile. “Thanks. Some days, I’m proud of me too.”

But as he headed back across campus, he didn’t know what the hell he was, other than torn. For a change he was doing his damnedest to think through all the possible outcomes and talk to the right people, rather than going off half-cocked and burning up on impact. Literally. But it wasn’t easy to talk things out when he didn’t know who the hell to talk to anymore.

Anna had said time and again that she owed him, but he didn’t trust her not to blab if she thought it was in his best interest. She wasn’t a stickler for the writs, but if it came down to a choice between Rabbit and her brother, Strike was going to win out every time. Same applied to Jox. Michael was a possibility for a go-to guy; he’d gone to the mat for Rabbit the previous winter, when the gods had demanded his execution and Michael had refused. But Rabbit figured he owed the guy big for that one, and wasn’t sure it was kosher to dump something on top of that debt. Besides, although Michael had ruthlessly followed his own path in the beginning, now that he and Sasha were together, his path paralleled the party line more often than not. Which left Rabbit . . . where? Who could he go to when his usual go-to girl was the one he needed to talk about?

A name ghosted through his brain, one he’d long ago told himself to forget, at least in that context.

Not that he’d ever actually managed to forget her.

Patience. The youngest of the Nightkeepers, she was only six years older than him, and after Red-

Boar’s horrific death, she’d stepped in as his friend, his sister figure, his mother figure, and his first massive crush, all wrapped into one. She and the twins had let him into their lives, made him feel like he had a family, like someone gave a shit whether he woke up each morning, and whether he descended into the same sort of funk his old man had turned into an art form. Brandt had let him in too, but only because Patience had insisted. And after the twins were sent away and the problems in their marriage had gotten more and more obvious, Brandt had wanted less and less to do with him, until the day the shit finally hit the fan: Rabbit had been on guard duty during an op and got distracted, and Patience had paid for it. Terrified, Rabbit had bolted. By the time he’d made it back to Skywatch, he’d had Myrinne with him. He’d meant to apologize to Patience, but somehow that never happened, and then it got to a point where it was too late to apologize, too late to try to fix things.

“Which is why you shouldn’t go there,” Rabbit told himself as he crossed a parking lot and sent a couple of waves at guys who “hey, Pyro’d” him.

But deep down inside him, a voice was saying, Why not go there? It’d been a while since he and Patience had been tight, but she had an open, generous heart. She might be willing to forgive him for being an asshole. More, although she was loyal to the Nightkeeper cause, she wasn’t too keen on Strike, who still wouldn’t tell her where the twins were hidden. It was for their own good to stay incognito with their winikin, it was true. But still . . . not letting her see her kids for going on a year now? That was harsh. Rabbit figured that’d make her likely to keep her own counsel rather than run straight to the king if she thought he was in danger of making yet another Rabbit-size mistake.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the better it sounded. Or was he talking himself into something stupid? Gods knew it wouldn’t be the first time. But it wasn’t like he could ask Myrinne her opinion.

Yeah, that’d be smooth: Hey, babe. I’m not sure whether I like where you’re going with this whole

“You should look into the other half of your heritage, because your old man might’ve been a real son of a bitch, but he doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would’ve slept with the enemy. So maybe the Xibalbans aren’t inherently bad. Maybe Iago is an outlier with his own agenda, and the Xibalbans themselves could prove to be allies instead of enemies.” Which sounds good when you say it, but feels pretty cracked when I think about it on my own . . . so I was wondering what you thought about me hooking back up with Patience to talk about it. Yeah, Myr would just love that. Not only was she big into the idea of him doing his own thing, whether or not it coincided with the Nightkeepers’ paradigms, but she and Patience didn’t get along. At all.

Still, before he was really aware that he’d made the decision, he had detoured off the track leading off campus to his and Myrinne’s summer sublet, and parked his ass on a cement ledge that was part of the so-called landscaping at UT—which, to his largely New England-raised self was more land-

pouring than landscaping, and suffered from a definite lack of green. But regardless, it was a place to park ass while he dug out his cell phone. Then, not letting himself think it through any further, because thinking hadn’t gotten him real far yet in this particular case, he punched in the number for Patience’s private cell.

When it started ringing, he had a fleeting thought that she might’ve changed the number by now, or ditched the phone entirely. He was so expecting to hear a recorded voice tell him the line was no longer in service that when she answered with a breathless, anticipatory whisper of, “Yes, yes, I’m here,” he went mute for a second.

It was a second too long.

“Hello?” she said, her tone going from hushed excitement to dread in an instant. “Hannah?

Woody?” Her words tumbled over one another, the way they did when her brain started bounding ahead, cascading from one thought to the next. “Oh, gods. There’s something wrong. What is it?

What’s wrong? Where are you? What—”

“Stop! ” Rabbit interrupted. “Just stop.” Shit. She’d kept the phone as a secret line of communication to the winikin guarding her sons, and must’ve forgotten he had the number. Now she was heading toward full-on panic mode.

Before he could get into an explanation, she snapped in a horror- laced voice, “Who are you? How did you get this number? If you’ve done anything to my babies, I’ll—”

“Patience!” He did the interrupting thing again, this time rushing on to say, “It’s Rabbit. It’s Rabbit.

Do you hear me? It’s not Hannah or Wood, or one of the rats.” He’d called the twins his rug rats, back when they’d been his miniature tagalongs. When she didn’t say anything, just gave a strangled sob, he moderated his tone. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you. I just . . . I need someone to talk to.” Now it was his turn to babble a little when there was silence on the other end of the line. “I wanted to . . . Shit. I wanted to talk to you about Myrinne and me, about how she says stuff that makes sense at first, but . . .

I don’t know. It doesn’t always mesh with what Jox and those guys taught me. And how am I supposed to know who to trust, who to believe?” When she still hadn’t said anything, to interrupt or otherwise, he started thinking she’d already hung up. “Shit,” he said again, in case she was still on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. I