sort of retrograde hallucination. Then, after they had knocked her out, they had kidnapped her and interrogated her under some sort of hallucinogenic. But why? And how long had she been out? Had anyone realized she was missing yet?
The answer to that last one was “no,” she knew. Not after she had made such a big deal about being independent and not needing to clock in or out.
Breathe, she told herself. Pretend you’re asleep. She was pretty sure she was alone, though.
A minute passed, then two, and the panic leveled off. She took a deep breath, then another. Then she opened her eyes.
And froze, heart hammering anew.
It wasn’t the sight of a generically furnished three-room apartment that caught her by the throat and ramped the panic back up . . . it was the view outside the window nearest her: a few buildings, a few trees . . . and a red-rock canyonscape that didn’t look anything like the Cancun hotel district.
Where the hell was she?
Letting out a low moan of terror, she wrenched off the blanket and bolted for the door. It was locked from the outside, the intercom keypad beside it nonresponsive. Damn, damn, damn. Survival instincts clawed at her as she tried the windows, found them locked too.
Breath sobbing between her teeth, she grabbed a desk chair and swung it as hard as she could at the glass.
The chair bounced off with a reverb that sang up her arms and made her hands go numb. But she was only peripherally aware of the pain as she let the chair drop and stared, horrified, through the window, to where a pair of Jeeps and a dune buggy were parked near the steel building.
Holy shit. Oh, holy, holy shit. They were all wearing New Mexico plates.
And she was in serious trouble.
She hadn’t told anyone where she was going or who she was meeting, had left only a breezy “Got a new case; call you when I get a chance” voice mail and turned off her phone. Now, her latest move in the “don’t stifle me” argument had come back to bite her in the ass, because nobody would know where to start looking for her. They would have to track the GPS in her phone, and—Her phone!
She gave herself a hasty pat-down. She was still wearing all her clothes—wrinkled now and damp with fear. The .38 was gone, and her carryall was . . . no, her bag was sitting on a low coffee table beside a blue binder with some papers on top.
Ignoring the paperwork—though the pile sent a clear “read me” message—she grabbed the carryall and pawed through it. She wasn’t really expecting to find her phone, but adrenaline jolted when her fingers glanced off its familiar shape. She yanked it out, flipped it open, started to dial, and then stopped.
There wasn’t any signal. Not even a fraction of a bar.
“Shit.” She started to flip the phone shut, but then froze, eyes locked on the upper corner of the display, where the little digital clock was trying to tell her that less than an hour had passed since she had walked into that tacky-assed Cancun hotel. Which didn’t make any sense. There was no way they could have gotten her from the Yucatan to New Mexico in less than an hour. It just wasn’t possible.
Yet there she was.
It had to be a trick. Someone had changed the time on her phone to mess with her head. She looked around, searching for a clock, for something that would verify that she wasn’t crazy, that it was her phone that was wrong, not her perceptions.
Next to the sitting area, a breakfast bar separated out a small kitchen nook, with a bathroom beside it. On the other side, open doors led to bedrooms—one was furnished, the other looked empty. The decor was relentlessly neutral, all muted beiges and bare walls, the only stab at playfulness a small entertainment center on the wall opposite the couch.
The digital display showed the same time as her phone.
“Bullshit,” she whispered.
Was she still drugged? She didn’t feel woozy, but hallucinations were a better explanation than believing she had somehow been whisked from a Cancun alley to the New Mexican desert in the blink of an eye, like Strike had—oh, shit.
Her stomach knotted as the pieces started coming together in a pattern that was impossible. Abso-freaking- lutely impossible.
“No,” she whispered, stomach knotting. But the denial didn’t prevent her from remembering that New Mexico was where Dez’s family had supposedly lived—and died—in a big-assed training compound hidden in a box canyon. Kind of like the one outside the window.
What. The. Fuck?
Once the idea took root, more pieces fell into place, in the sort of mental cascade that was usually a relief but in this case just freaked her out worse.
Strike and the larger members of his crew were all gorgeous, bigger and better than human norm. Much like Dez. Shit, she thought, pulse hammering thickly in her ears as she inwardly acknowledged that Dez could almost be related to the others. Or, if she wanted to go all the way into a bunch of bedtime stories that couldn’t possibly be true, they could all be members of an ancient race capable of channeling psi energy with their minds. A race whose members had lived alongside humanity for millennia, together yet apart, waiting for the day they would need to defend the earth plane from the rise of the underworld.
“Bullshit,” she whispered. But the pieces fit.
The smaller wedding guests, most of them a generation older, could have been the winikin, the hereditary protectors and tutors of the magi. And they had all been wearing long sleeves—possibly to cover the forearm glyph marks that denoted their bloodlines and abilities . . . like the ones Dez had been wearing when she had dragged him back to jail.
At the time, she had thought they were more tattoos, more signs that he was buying into his own hype. But what if they had been real? What if his magic had finally started working, after all?
Her blood ran simultaneously cold and hot as the pattern gelled into a theory that should have seemed impossible, but somehow didn’t.
Strike and the others—and Dez—could be Nightkeepers.
Holy. Crap.
She had been so sure that the stories he had told her to pass the time had been elaborate fairy tales, creative lies Keban had used to brainwash Dez for the first sixteen years of his life. Then, later, she had talked herself into believing that the things she thought she had seen during the storm had been a concussion-induced hallucination. Because there was no such thing as magic.
Except that Strike had materialized practically on top of her, and then freaking teleported her thousands of miles. Then some guy named Rabbit had interrogated her. Or, rather, he’d read her goddamned mind.
Teleporter. Mind-bender. Oh, holy shit.
This wasn’t part of a story, and it wasn’t a hallucination.
More pieces fell into place, forming connections that left her reeling as she reached the logical—or illogical?—conclusion. Because if the magic and the Nightkeepers were real, then there was a good chance that the other parts of the stories were true, too. Like how the magi were blood-bound to defend the barrier in the years leading up to the end date, when terrible demons would break through and fight to conscript mankind into a hellish army that would make war on the gods.
She was keenly aware that the end date was a little more than a year away, not just because of the connection to Dez, but because it had been impossible to avoid the movies and documentaries, and the news stories about the tinfoil-hat brigades digging into their bunkers and acting like they knew something the rest of the world didn’t. She had laughed all that off. Now she stared out the window at the back-ass end of a box canyon and wondered whether she’d been dead wrong.
Her knees went wobbly, and she dropped back down to the couch, mouth drying to dust like the desert outside. This wasn’t happening. She was still drugged, still hallucinating.
Right?
Closing her eyes, she pinched herself hard on the arm. “Okay, Reese. It’s time to wake up.” But when she opened her eyes the only difference was the presence of reddened fingernail marks on her arm, which stung.
