She couldn’t place it. Not her father, certainly. Had she been away so long that she had forgotten the others?
“This is Cara,” she said. “I need to talk to my father.”
There was a beat of silence. Then, “And who would that be?”
She wouldn’t have thought she could feel any shit-tier and still be upright. Wrong. Breathing shallowly through a stab of pain, she said, “I’m Carlos’s daughter.” She should’ve stopped there, but couldn’t help saying, “Out of sight, out of mind, huh?”
“Not really. I’m the new guy. Which is why I’m on comm and gate duty.” He paused. “Well, that and because the others still aren’t sure what to do with me.” Before she could process that, he continued: “Carlos is out getting supplies. You want his cell number? Oh, duh. You probably have it.”
No, she didn’t. And she couldn’t handle this, any of it. But it was clear that the winikin, at least the ones back at Skywatch, didn’t know there was something very wrong. “You call him, please. Tell him he needs to find Sven, fast. There’s something . . .” She trailed off, choked up. Whispered, “Just tell him for me, okay?”
She cut the call before he could say anything, ask anything, knowing that her father would do what needed to be done. Then she bolted for the head. And was miserably sick.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
December 14
Bandera Crater and Ice Cave
New Mexico
The sign at the end of the access road identified the privately owned attraction as the LAND OF FIRE AND ICE. Which didn’t half suck, Reese had decided.
The site offered two short hikes: one to ogle the blown-out cone of the Bandera volcano, the other to climb down inside a kiva-shaped cave where a combination of water seepage and convection airflow created a crazy microenvironment that never got above freezing. The underground pool at the bottom of the cave was perpetually frozen and glowed green in the sun, tinted by a strain of algae that was otherwise found only in the Arctic. Most of the long-ago tribes in the region—and those who traveled to it from afar—had called it Winter Lake and mined it for ice. But Lucius had turned up a reference in a British explorer’s journal that described seeing thirteen warrior- priests wearing serpent-headed masks and making blood sacrifices to call the rain god.
Ancient sacred site, check. Pro-snake ritual, check. And it was located right at the southern point of the compass cross that could be drawn from the places where the other artifacts had been found. Granted, the pattern assumed that ten years earlier, when Keban had told Dez that the star demon was coming to him courtesy of Montezuma, he wasn’t using an alternate spelling of the god-king Moctezuma’s name, but rather talking about the Palace of Montezuma, which was a Pueblo ruin located just over the Arizona border. Given that the compass lines connecting north to south and east to west then crossed directly over Chaco Canyon, Reese was just fine with the assumption. More, one of the local black-market guys she had tracked down was holding an endangered rattlesnake for pickup by a guy with a scarred face, who had put in the order a week ago and paid cash.
This was the place. It had to be. And tonight was the night; the Gemenid meteor shower would be starting soon.
But as she and Dez, both lightly shielded by his magic, slipped past the locked entrance gate for the third night in a row and followed the cow pasture–flanked road to the trading post that marked the trail-heads, it bothered her that they hadn’t been able to pinpoint Keban. Hell, they hadn’t even caught a whiff of him. Granted, the winikin had been trained to disappear, and he would have gone deeper under once he knew Dez was after him, but still. It didn’t feel right.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she murmured as they passed the trading post and took the ice cave trail, the details gone green behind her night-vision goggles. She was very aware of Dez, sleek and solid beside her, his movements predator-smooth in the darkness. Despite her best intentions and the fact that they had been strictly hands off over the past three days, focusing on the job, his taste and the way he had felt inside her seemed burned into her neurons. “Can you sense him?” she asked, voice sharper than it needed to be.
He shook his head. “I’m not getting a damn thing.” Which could mean that although Keban’s potions couldn’t knock him out anymore, they could still camouflage the winikin’s scent trail . . . or it could mean there was nothing to sense.
“He’ll be here,” she said as they moved off again. He had to show up. Not that they wanted to fight for the two-faced mask, but they needed to get their hands on the white god’s head and the red skybearer, too. And they needed to do it before Iago got wind of the weapon’s existence. The Nightkeepers had the black star demon safely locked up behind a heavy, magic-cloaking ward, but still.
White, red, black, yellow, she thought, because they were expecting the two-faced mask to be made of yellow stone. Once she had figured out the trick of what they had taken to calling the compass artifacts, Lucius had come up with another layer to the symbolism: In Nightkeeper lore, each direction was associated with a color and certain traits. Black-west was the power of shadows and dreams, as well as the ability to shake things up. Which was Dez in a nutshell, and explained why he had connected so strongly with the star demon, but hadn’t felt the same pull to the white god’s head, which represented truth, integrity, and the winds of change. Red-east represented inspiration, passion, and flashiness; no doubt he’d click with the skybearer statue when they got their hands on it. Not so much the two-faced mask, though, because yellow-south was connected with patience and balance, neither of which was his forte.
He was trying, though—or he seemed to be. In the days since their post-sex showdown he hadn’t given her any new reason to distrust him. He was still stubborn and prone to shortcuts, but he listened to her, argued patterns with her, and had even won a few of those arguments, reminding her what it was like to debate someone who thought so far outside the box. But through it all she had been aware that a part of her was standing back and watching him, trying to figure out whether it was real or part of an act, even one he wasn’t aware of putting on. He’d always had a knack for talking himself into doing what he wanted, after all.
“Look,” he said, pausing to point through a spot where the dark tree branches gave way to the horizon. A streak of light crossed the night sky. Then another. The meteor shower had begun.
She suddenly was very aware of being alone with him in the darkness, attuned to his breathing and the soft click of his weapons as he shifted his weight and glanced over at her. But all she said was, “We should go.”
“Yeah.” But he looked at her for another long moment before he moved off toward the covered wooden staircase that led down to the cave. She followed him down, nearly piling into him when he stopped on the first landing and turned back to her. “Listen. If this turns into a firefight . . .”
“I’ll stay close to you so you can shield me.”
“But if you can’t get to me, or if things get really bad, I want you to call in the cavalry.”
She raised an eyebrow, trusting that he would see the move with his augmented vision. “What happened to ‘I need to do this on my own. We can’t involve the others’?”
“You happened,” he said. And suddenly, the air between them held more than just the shield magic.
“Don’t,” she said, then couldn’t get another word out, because he was lifting a hand to brush a strand of hair away from her face and tuck it behind her ear.
“It’s one thing to risk my own life, another to risk yours. I couldn’t . . . I don’t want you hurt again because of me.”
Her heart went thudda-thump and her breath thinned in her lungs, but she lifted her chin. “It’s my choice to be here. I’m not your responsibility.”
“Promise me you’ll call for backup if things get hairy.”
She nodded, because what was the point of arguing about something she was already planning to do? “I promise.”
Without another word, he turned and moved ahead of her, pulling his .44 as he headed down the stairs
