me? he sent into the sky, envisioning Kulkulkan, the god that had been his and Leah’s special guardian before the destruction of the skyroad. What am I supposed to do?
There was no answer. Just the slant of the afternoon sun that should have been pleasant but instead was a reminder that their time was running out.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pueblo Bonito
It was sunset by the time Dez was finally finished with Keban. He had refused to cremate him on the sacred ground of Skywatch—and suspected that the others, particularly the winikin, would object if he had tried—but when it came down to it, he hadn’t been able to just dump the bastard in a ditch, either. So he had come up to Bonito, the Chacoan castle built by their ancestors, and he had built a funeral pyre.
The humans considered the ruins a soaring mystery, the last remnants of an elusive tribe that had lived a thousand years earlier, leaving behind a grand stone-and-timber castle with many floors, dozens of kivas, hundreds of rooms, and tricky interplays of light and shadow that could be used to tell time or plot the stars. Some scholars thought it had been a trading center, others a home for the gods. In a way it had been both, though not even his serpent ancestors would have been ballsy enough to call themselves gods. He hoped. Either way, this was the serpents’ castle, and whatever else he had been and done, Keban had served the bloodline by saving its last male descendant. So Dez built a small pyre in a sheltered spot near a curving wall and lit it with a combination of diesel and magic. He watched the smoke curl, blocked out the smell, and listened to the hiss-pop of the fire, let himself drift . . .
It was the day of the Nightkeepers’ planned attack on the intersection, and the training compound was a beehive of activity overlain with tension.
Dez’s vantage was all feet and knees, his perceptions those of a three-year-old, but he felt the tension in the air as the huge, battle-armored warriors and their winikin gathered in the courtyard. Knots of men and women were being kept under guard as they prepared for battle—Dez had heard them called dissy-dents; he wasn’t sure what that meant, but he could see they were mad, and most everyone else was mad at them.
Elsewhere, the younger winikin were herding all the kids into the Great Hall; the grown-ups were all pretending like it was a party—a movie first, dancing later, with pizza and cake. But their eyes were worried, and Dez’s mother and father had hugged him too tightly just now. They had done the same to baby Joy, making her cry. She was still sniffling as Keban tucked her into her bouncy chair.
“Son.”
Dez craned around, but it wasn’t his dad, it was Keban’s father, Keru. The two winikin hugged briefly, looking very alike, though one was old and the other young.
“We’ve got everything packed like you said.” Keban kept his voice very low. “If things go wrong, Breese and I are out of here with the kids.”
Dez sat up straight. Breese was his winikin—she was soft and nice, and smelled like strawberries. Were they all going somewhere? He wanted to ask Keban, but didn’t dare. He was nice to Joy, not always so nice to everyone else.
“Be strong,” Keru said. “And whatever you do, preserve the bloodline. Because gods help us if we have to go into the war without a serpent king.”
The men hugged again, and Keru went off toward the warriors, where Dez’s parents were helping each other with their gear. Keban turned, found Dez staring at him, and started to scowl. Then he seemed to catch himself, and sighed. “Come here, kid. Let’s go find Breese. The four of us need to stick together, okay? No wandering off on your own tonight.” Dez nodded, but the winikin looked unconvinced. He hunkered down and gestured for Dez to come closer. “Hold your sister’s hand for a second.”
Dez complied, sticking out a finger and letting Joy curl her chubby fist around it. She smiled at him, sniffles forgotten.
“Do you know what an oath is?” the winikin asked.
Surprised, because Keban didn’t usually say much to him, Dez nodded.
“Okay, I want you to say, ‘I swear I’ll watch out for my sister tonight. I won’t leave her, no matter what.’”
Dez stammered his way through the oath, feeling very grown up and protective all of a sudden. His father had told him Joy was his responsibility before, but nobody had ever made it his job to stay right with her. It all seemed very important, and a little scary, but it gave him the courage to ask, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing you need to worry about as long as you stay right with your sister. Because if you don’t, bad things are going to happen.” Keban looked up when someone called his name. “There’s Breese. Come on.” He picked up Joy, bouncy chair and all, grabbed Dez’s hand, and headed for the doors to the Great Hall. At the stairs, though, he stopped and looked back. It seemed like a lot of the winikin were doing that.
Dez looked back, too, his eyes zeroing in on his parents. His mother’s laughing eyes were very serious, and his father?s face was drawn, his serpent-bare scalp hidden beneath an armored helmet. He was saying something to Keru, who was his winikin. Dez’s stomach gave a funny shimmy, and he called out, “Mom! Dad!”
They didn’t hear him, and Keban tugged him to keep going, but just as they went through the doors, Keru looked straight at Dez, meeting his eyes. He touched his heart and then his wrist, letting his fingers linger where rows of serpent glyphs sat above the image of a hand cupping the face of a sleeping child.
The vision dissolved, leaving Dez floundering for a moment as his perceptions shifted back to those of his adult self, the one who knew that the glyph was the aj winikin, and the gesture meant “I serve you, serpent.” Keru had been swearing fealty—not just his own but that of all the serpent winikin, who had guessed that the attack would fail and had made clandestine plans to save Dez and Joy.
Staring into the fire, Dez tried not to think how different his life would have been if Breese had made it out, or if Keban had been able to save both him and Joy. If it had gone down like that, the winikin’s mind wouldn’t have gotten fucked over by the magical backlash of him having sacrificed his blood-bound charge. He would’ve been a normal winikin instead of what he had become, and Dez would’ve come out a better man, maybe even a man fit to be a king. Now, though . . . the gods might have done their best to patch him back together with Triad magic, but that didn’t make him the man he should have been. Which made it damn lucky—or the will of the gods—that the Nightkeepers had Strike.
Shaking his head, he added more gas to the fire, and watched it burn. When it was over and the winikin was little more than a smudge of ash and some shitty memories, he scattered the embers and headed back to the parking area, strides purposeful. He had given Strike and the others enough time to hash things over without him, and now it was time to step up and defend himself, make whatever promises they wanted him to.
He didn’t know if the vision had come from Anntah or his own head—but it had brought home that they were all on the same team. It wasn’t the serpents against the other bloodlines, or him against the world; it was about the Nightkeepers against Iago and the Banol Kax. And the Nightkeepers needed all the help they could get, even if it came from a guy like him. Which meant there was no way in hell he was quitting the team; he was there to stay, and they were going to have to find a way to believe that he didn’t want the throne, that the serpent prophecy—if it had ever been anything beyond a serpent-fueled dream—no longer applied. The same went for Reese—he wasn’t letting her go without a fight. He just had to figure out a way to convince her of that, convince her to give him another chance to prove that they were meant to be together.
His steps faltered slightly when he came out from between two high stone walls and saw the remaining Jeep Compass parked next to Keban’s pickup. Reese was sitting on the hood of the Compass, waiting for him, a silhouette in black leather highlighted by the oranges and reds of the setting sun. As he drew closer, he tried to read her expression, but failed. He wasn’t sure if her poker face had gotten better, or if his perceptions had gotten worse, fouled up by how much this mattered. How much she mattered.
Swallowing past the fist-sized lump in his throat, he moved to stand in front of her, caging her in, yet
