Demonkeepers

paper out of the printer in the main room—which wasn’t mated to a computer, suggesting that Rabbit and Myrinne were both schlepping their machines—and scrawled a quick note: Strike sent me and Lucius to find out WTF is going on with you two. I’d suggest you phone home soonest. She signed her name, left the note on the kitchen counter, and pocketed the motion detector.

Lucius held the door for her on the way out. As she passed him, he leaned in and whispered, “That was a hell of a kiss. What do you say we get on the road so we can stop sooner than later?”

The heat in his eyes twisted something deep inside her, making her want so much more than he was offering. Self-protection said she should find an excuse, but she was weak enough, wanting enough, that she smiled and hit him with a quick kiss that landed a little off center. “It’s a date.” Or, more technically, a booty call.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Skywatch In her twenty-six years on the earth plane, Patience had been a good girl and she’d been bad. She’d been a student and a teacher, a child and a mother, a sweetheart and a bitch. But she’d never considered herself a sneak, a liar, and a thief. Until now. Her pulse thrummed as she paused in the hallway leading to the royal suite. It was empty; had been for the past five minutes. Strike and Leah were out at the firing range, Jox was in the greenhouse, and, given that the magi were largely scattered to their tasks, the coast was as clear as it was going to get. It was now or never. Yet still she hesitated.

“What are you waiting for?” she murmured to herself. “If you’re looking for an invitation, it’s not coming.” Nor was negotiation or any sort of compromise—she’d been waiting for both of those things for nearly a year now, and was finally ready to admit that it wasn’t going to happen. She’d begged; she’d bargained; she’d worked her ass off in an effort to earn Strike’s confidence, only to learn that it didn’t get her as far as she needed to go.

“Be patient,” Brandt said every time she brought it up. “Their safety has to be our first priority.”

Which would’ve been fine if she’d truly believed that the boys’ safety was his first priority. Over time, though, she’d come to realize that as much as he loved her and their boys, he was bound to the writs first, with his family coming in a distant second at best.

“Fuck that. I need to see my boys.” Having exhausted all her bright ideas for getting what she wanted within the writs, or even within the quasi- human ethics Hannah had raised her with, she was going to have to take it the other way. Sneak. Lie. Steal. Shit.

Taking a deep breath and manning up, she crossed the last distance along the hall and let herself into Strike and Leah’s quarters. Nausea was a low- grade companion as she shut the door and slipped across the entryway, ninja-style. For all that she’d imagined herself a warrior as she’d trained endless hours in the dojos Hannah had brought her to, she hadn’t truly understood what it meant to be a warrior until that first fight against the Banol Kax. And now, she realized, she truly understood the other half of her training: stealth. She strongly doubted Hannah had meant for her to use it against her own king, but once she was inside her doubts sloughed away, leaving her determined to achieve the single goal she’d set herself: Find her kids. Strike knew where they were, or at least how to contact them; he was the only one, though. He hadn’t even told Jox, because the royal winikin had a history with Hannah. Leah might know, but she made Patience more nervous than even the king did. The queen had a look that went right through her. Patience wasn’t sure if that came from cop work, magic, or something else, but she gave the queen a wide berth. And now, as she crossed the royal couple’s sitting room and beelined it for the dining room, where papers were strewn on a dining table turned to office space, she knew she was running a hell of a risk. If she were discovered . . . You won’t be , she told herself firmly. Just do it.

Working fast, she rifled through the papers on the dining table, looking for an address she didn’t recognize, a note in Hannah’s handwriting. Something. Anything. But no. She pawed through Jade’s reports on Kinich Ahau and a bunch of satellite photos of the Ecuadorian cloud forests, but didn’t see anything she could connect with Hannah, Woody, or the twins.

“Did you really expect that he was going to leave it lying around?” she murmured. “Maybe with a big arrow highlighting the phone number?”

She’d thought it through often enough, trying to figure out how to find what she sought. She’d never come up with much of a plan beyond a flat-out physical search, though. The Nightkeepers didn’t put anything important on the Internet-connected computers. Iago’s people had already shown themselves plenty capable of hacking, and a well- made makol could command the thoughts and memories of its human host, meaning that the Banol Kax could usurp their own hackers. Ergo, the sensitive stuff was kept on non-networked machines. Patience was assuming Strike and Leah had at least one of them in the suite. But where was it?

A quick but thorough search of the living space turned up a big, fat nothing. No paperwork, no computer. She forced herself through the bedroom, which boasted glass walls on three sides and was dominated by a big, sybaritic bed that made her decidedly uncomfortable. But not uncomfortable enough to give up the search. She pressed on, skimmed through the closets and bathrooms, her nerves notching higher with each passing minute.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Where could it be? They wouldn’t have taken the safe machine with them to the gun range. It was in the suite somewhere. Heart pounding, she checked the doorways leading along a short hallway that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose . . . until she got to a door about halfway down and hit pay dirt.

As she opened the door, gas torches flared automatically to life, lighting a bathroom-size chamber lined with stone veneer and holding a chac-mool altar. Adrenaline zinged at the sight of a blond woman looking back at her; it took her a half second to recognize herself, wild-eyed and nervous, reflected in a highly polished obsidian disk hung behind the altar. The king’s heavily carved ceremonial bowl sat on the altar, with an unfamiliar knife beside it, weighing down a short stack of the heavy parchment that was used for small blood ceremonies. The room was imbued with magic, and a weighty sense of history. Under any other circumstance, Patience would’ve backed her ass out of there and pretended she knew nothing about Strike’s private place of worship. And she would have done that now . . . if it hadn’t been for the laptop case tucked in the corner of the ritual chamber. It was hidden, she suspected, not so much from Leah but from Jox.

Last chance, a little voice whispered inside Patience. You can still take off. Nobody would know you’d been here. Which was true . . . except that she would know she’d wussed out. And that wasn’t an option for her, either as a warrior or a mother.

Her legs shook a little as she knelt; her hands trembled as she fumbled open the case and powered up the little mininotebook. There was no password or security—why would there be? Strike wouldn’t have imagined anyone would break into his quarters, into his freaking shrine, and fire up his machine.

“Come on, come on!” she chanted under her breath as the stupid thing took precious seconds to boot, longer to bring up the Windows screen, with its reassuring blue background. The desktop was stripped down to the absolute basics, just a couple of folders. She opened one labeled KINGLY CRAPOLA, which was pure Strike.

It contained six subdirectories, none of them obviously what she wanted. She opened each of them and quickly scanned through, discarding anything with last-update codes well before the middle of the prior year, when Strike had ’ported Hannah, Woody, and the twins away from Skywatch. Nothing.

Nothing. Still nothing. Oh, gods . . .

She struck gold on subfolder number four; she couldn’t remember the name, knew only that she was looking at a reference request and credit check on Woodrow Byrd, who was applying to rent a four-

room apartment in Seattle. The first name was right. The date was right. And Strike, with the help of the Nightkeepers’ tame PI, Carter, had made sure the credit checks all came back fine without linking to anything substantive. More, there was a second file in the subfolder: a lease agreement, signed for a year in Woody’s name