Son of a bitch. “If I made you—” he began, but broke off when she practically exploded out of the chair.
She got right in his face, and poked him hard in the chest, eyes blazing. “You can cut the big brother shit right now, Mendez. It won’t play anymore. I’m responsible for my own choices, my own mistakes. Nobody makes me do anything.”
She drilled him again, and he had to stop himself from catching her hand, holding it, holding her. His blood heated, and in the back of his brain something dark and greedy whispered: Mine. Except she wasn’t his, hadn’t ever been. Couldn’t ever be, given the threat of the serpent bloodline.
And fuck it all, he should’ve knocked her out, called for a pickup, and left her with a note that if Rabbit didn’t wipe her memory and Strike didn’t’port her home and leave her alone, there would be hell to pay.
He took a step back, which put him in his own room, and raised his hands. “Reese, calm down. If you —”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” She shot him a look of pure venom. Then she slammed the door that connected their rooms. And locked it on her side.
The next morning not long after dawn, Reese opened her side of the connector and tapped on the other panel. Expecting the click of the lock, she jolted when the door swung open immediately to reveal Dez, wearing desert-camo pants and a tight, dark brown Under Armour shirt that zipped up to his throat and showed every ridge and bulge. His sleeves were pushed up on his forearms, baring not just the dark blue-green tattoo bands that hid his scars, but also the three stark black glyphs on his right forearm: the swirling ovals of the warrior?s mark; the plumed serpent’s head; and the stacked, intricately decorated circles that identified him as a lightning wielder. She had first seen the marks the day she had grabbed him out from underneath Strike’s nose. At the time, she had thought they were just affectations. Now, though, she knew they were real, understood what they meant.
He’s a new man, Strike had written of Dez. But if that was true, why had he gone off on his own? What wasn’t he telling the others? That’s what I’m trying to figure out, she told herself, ignoring the twist of unease that warned her motives weren’t so simple.
“Morning,” she said to him, holding out a Dunkin’ Donuts bag containing three egg sandwiches and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. “Here.”
He took the bag with a raised eyebrow. “Making sure I’ve got enough calories on board to do the bloodhound thing?”
Her face heated. “More like an apology for losing it last night. I’d like to blame the pain meds, but the truth is that I probably would have melted down regardless. Yesterday was . . .” She trailed off.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yesterday definitely was.” He paused. “Feeling better?”
“Fine, thanks.” And she was, physically. Emotionally . . . well, she would deal.
“You ready to get on the road?”
She exhaled, then nodded. “Yeah.” The sooner they found Keban, the sooner she could get back to reality and away from a man who was simultaneously the boy she had loved, the guy who had broken her heart, and a stranger she didn’t trust in the slightest.
They drove up a winding pathway, to the top of a forty-some-foot cliff overlooking the S curve where Keban had abandoned his car the night before. Reese’s gut and basic logic said that the winikin had made his getaway in a second vehicle that he had stashed somewhere, and that the plateau would’ve made a good hiding spot. But Dez spent only a few minutes pacing back and forth along the flattened parking area before he shook his head. “I’m not sensing anything up here. You see anything down below?”
Lowering the binoculars she’d been using to scan the crash site, she said, “Nothing is jumping out at me.” With the wreckers apparently having come and gone the night before, there wasn’t much left of the crash beyond a crumpled section of guardrail, some skid marks, and scattered debris. “I keep thinking there should be more,” she said, remembering the jolt of impact and the wrench of going over the edge . . . and then his magic feathering over her skin, making her feel like she was inside a giant Fourth of July sparkler.
He came up beside her, standing close enough that his sleeve brushed against hers. “There probably is more. If not right here, then somewhere along the trail.”
“Booby traps, you mean.”
Nodding grimly, he said, “He needs to slow me down enough that meeting him on the twenty-first is my only option. He’ll want to call the shots and set the scene.”
“Do you know what kind of a spell he’s planning on casting?”
“He can’t do magic. That’s why he needs me.” It was an answer of sorts, but she was keenly aware that he was avoiding her eyes.
Damn it. More disappointed than she should have been, she turned back to surveying the site. “If there’s a trap down there, I can’t see it.”
“I’ll keep my senses wide open.” He shrugged out of his desert-camo jacket and hooked it over her shoulders. His eyes were unreadable behind dark, frameless sunglasses. “Stay up here and watch my back.”
Until she was surrounded by his secondhand body heat, she hadn’t really realized she was cold—her jacket was fine for A-to-B-ing it in the city but not much else, which meant that the weight of his coat was a major improvement.
Not wanting to examine her sudden flush of warmth any further, she nodded. “Will do.”
As he headed down the narrow trail that led to the road, she folded back the sleeves and tried not to think that once upon a time, his simple gesture would have made her weak. Now it just made her hope they found Keban quickly, and that Dez’s secrets would turn out to be no big deal.
A few minutes later, her armband gave a faint crackle on the short-range channel. “You reading me?” He was well back in the trees down at the base of the overlook.
“I’m here.”
“I’m not sensing anyone else, and I’m not seeing or smelling anything that screams ‘booby trap.’ How’s the traffic looking?” They had agreed it would be best for them to stay out of sight. Two totaled cars with no bodies or identifiable owners would have made local law enforcement curious, if not downright twitchy.
She scanned the road. “There are two cars coming toward you from the south and a smallish box truck coming the other way. Once they’ve gone past, you’ll have a gap.”
“Ten-four.” He waited out the traffic, his shadow-dappled body so motionless that he practically disappeared into the tree line, even though she knew exactly where to look.
When the box truck had lumbered past with a gear-jamming belch and rattle, he slipped out of concealment and ghosted over to where shattered glass glittered blue-white in the sun. From there, he walked careful parallel tracks back and forth, searching.
She kept up a constant scan, watching not just the road, but also the forest and the sky, because Keban wasn’t their only potential problem. The Nightkeepers were also fighting rearguard actions against Iago and his makol, and the missing villagers raised the gruesome possibility that a Banol Kax could already have slipped through the barrier. The sum total of it all made her feel very small.
Catching movement on the horizon, she straightened. “You’ve got company coming,” she told him. “Three pickup trucks, matching paint jobs, orange bubbles. DPW, maybe? They’re not cops, but it’d be a good idea for you to make yourself scarce.”
“Ten-four.” He headed for the trees, but stopped halfway there and crouched down near a small trio of stones at the edge of the parking area. “Wait. I’m getting something. I think he—Fuck. Reese, run!”
Vapor puffed up, and he went down hard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Dez!” Reese screamed. Fear and adrenaline hammered through her in a terrifying fusillade as she raced down the trail, scrambling, stumbling, moving as fast as she could and deathly afraid of what she would find at the bottom.
