pounded and the world threatened to spin around her.
Gods, she just needed a moment, a little breathing room. But she wasn’t going to be doing much breathing in there, it turned out. Because the room reeked of boiled sage and looked like something out of a Top Chef challenge about cooking a six-course meal with a Mr. Coffee.
It was her space, though, and felt safe, even if that was an illusion.
After opening the window to air the place out, she pulled on her new leather against the wintry chill, leaned back against the windowsill, and just freaking breathed for a minute while she tried to figure out if she was making a mondo mistake in agreeing to keep Dez’s secret. She was all about going with her gut, but he was one of the few places where her instincts had failed her, repeatedly and badly. And how could there be logic in hiding the weapon’s existence from the rest of the Nightkeepers? Help, she thought, but there was nobody to turn to. She was on her own.
Looking up at the sky, she said softly, “Is this what you want?”
The suburban universe she had grown up in had been largely Christian, but Dez’s stories—the fairy tales that had driven back the darkness and the fear—had opened her to a world of many gods, each with a different area of expertise. Together with their earthly warriors, those gods were supposed to guard the barrier that closed off the underworld and protected mankind against evil. In theory, anyway. In reality, only a single god remained on the earthly plane right now: the sun god, Kinich Ahau. The others were locked up in the sky, unable to directly contact the Nightkeepers because Iago had destroyed the intersection beneath Chichen Itza, the place where the earth, sky, and underworld had come close together. With the Nightkeepers unable to find another intersection or skyroad, they were cut off from their gods.
But, really, it didn’t take a message from above to tell her what she needed to do next. And really, it wasn’t about Dez or the end-time war, or even her job. This was about her, about something she had put off for far too long.
She had kept hoping that growing up and slowing down would change her feelings. What did it say about her that a good man—a hero in his own right—had left her lukewarm and guilt-stung, where Dez set her on fire? Hello, self-destructive tendencies. Sighing, she pushed away from the window and headed for the bureau, where she had dumped her phone. And she hesitated when she got a look at herself in the mirror.
Wearing combat black and the new jacket, she looked nothing like the woman who had walked into that Cancun hotel a week ago. Yet as much as she liked what she saw, as much as this skin fit far more comfortably than the other, she wasn’t sure how much of that was the core truth, and how much was her trying to go back in time and carve a different outcome for herself. Which was impossible.
“Shit.” Grabbing the phone, she turned her back on the mirror and punched a familiar sequence.
The line clicked live on the second digital burble, and a familiar, resonant voice said, “Hello?”
She took a deep breath that didn’t do a thing to ease the guilt-sting, and said, “Hey, it’s me . . . we need to talk.”
Skywatch
The boluntiku rose above the king with a fingernails-on-blackboard scream. The lava-creature’s vapor form exceeded the boundaries of the underground chamber, its scaly upper body rising up through the floor, its lower parts rooted in Xibalba. Many-fanged mouth gaping wide, it slashed at him with knifelike claws.
Pulse pounding, he fired off a burst of jade-tips and twisted out of the way. Then he spun, and grabbed the woman who was guarding his back. His wife. His queen. His heart.
“Go!” He pushed her toward a nearby door, the only way out of the circular stone room deep underground. “Get to the river!”
The boluntiku shrieked and followed as they raced along the narrow tunnel over dust gone muddy with blood.
When they reached the underground stream, he saw that the sacred water ran black, and was choked with the bodies of the fallen. His bodies. His fallen. None of them would have been there if it hadn’t been for him.
There were others at the river, Nightkeepers and winikin formed up under the command of the royal advisers. “Fall back!” he shouted to them. “Get the hell out of here!”
The attack was a disaster. A massacre. All they could do now was retreat, blow the tunnel system, and hope to hell that was enough to cap off the intersection. The hellroad was wide open, the Banol Kax on the verge of breaking through. Gods help us.
An unearthly shriek rose behind him as the boluntiku began bubbling up from the floor, glowing orange and molten, and thoroughly pissed off. He turned, slapping home a fresh clip, feeling almost freed by the knowledge that it was time to make his stand, his sacrifice. His blood would amp the Nightkeepers’ magic and slow down the demons’ attack. Long enough, he hoped, for the others to get clear.
He risked a look at his queen, saw tears held back by guts and determination. “Go,” he told her. “Get them out of here and blow the tunnel.”
She closed her eyes for a second, whispered his name. But then she somehow found the strength to smile, and say, “I’ll see you in my dreams.”
He pressed his forehead to hers, felt a pulse of warmth at his wrist, where their jun tan marks linked them. His voice and heart broke as he whispered, “Go. Save yourself and the others, and get back to the compound as fast as you can.” The children were safe behind the blood-ward, but . . .
She pulled away with a sob. A second later, her footsteps moved away behind him, the sound echoing off stone and bloodied water as he turned to face the creature of his enemies. And as he raised his weapon, his heart was heavy with the realization that he had been wrong all along. The king’s greatest sacrifice wasn’t his mate’s life, after all.
Red-orange came at him, an eerie scream surrounded him, and a six-clawed attack slashed down with murderous intent.
Strike flailed awake, heart hammering. Where the hell was his gun? He fumbled for it, couldn’t find it, went for his enemy bare-handed. He grabbed the incoming blur, wrenched them both sideways and heard a cry of pain—human, female, familiar.
Leah.
Horror snapped the world around him into too sharp focus. The dream cave became a glassed-in bedroom; the darkness became dawn; his enemy became the woman he loved. He was kneeling on her, had his forearm across her throat.
“Fuck!” He jerked back and off her, hands spread and shaking, thoughts jumbling. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn?t . . . Shit. Did I . . . are you okay?” His chest hurt; he couldn’t catch his breath.
She pulled herself up to a sitting position, rubbing her throat. Her eyes were wide and worried, but she gutted out a wan smile. “I may never sing at Carnegie Hall . . . but then again, I never could sing for crap, so I can’t blame that on you.”
“Don?t make this into a damned joke. I could’ve killed you.” Blood raced through his veins, hammered in his ears. Bodies in the river. Impossible choices. Was that what he was going to face? Hell, was he facing it already? He was sworn to do whatever it took to get the Nightkeepers to the war in the best possible shape to win. But what if that required a greater sacrifice than he was ready to make?
She hesitated, then lifted a hand and showed him a compact Taser. “You had another five seconds before I booted you off and zapped you.” Her cornflower blue eyes were shadowed with concern, her voice softening with regret when she admitted, “Given how bad the nightmares have been getting, I had a feeling something like this was coming.”
“Jesus H. Christ.” He dragged a hand through his sweat-tangled hair, trying to push back the dull ache that had been a constant throb ever since Rabbit had worked on his head. “You’re sleeping with a stunner under your damned pillow.” But in a way, this made things easier. It made the decision for him. “That’s it. I’m moving back out to the pool house.”
“Not without me, you’re not.”
“Leah, be reasonable.”
“Walking away from you—or letting you walk away from me—when you’re going through some traumatic-
