Dez glanced at Reese, who looked just as confused as he was. So they followed orders and sat. But it was evident that whatever they had missed, it was big. And from the looks being shot back and forth among the others, he and Reese weren’t the only ones in the dark on what was going to happen next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Reese’s instincts were shrilling a major warning as Strike leaned a hip against the sofa where Leah was sitting, as though he wanted to be near her but couldn’t sit still. He looked serious and strung out, and she couldn’t quite squelch the thought that under the writs, the punishment for treason was execution. The Nightkeepers wouldn’t go there, would they? What would she do if they did? Visions of her and Dez shooting their way out of the compound locked horns with the memory of Strike’s sleep spell and Rabbit’s mind-bending. Would she wake up back in Denver and wonder why Fallon wasn’t speaking to her?
Dez reached for her hand, twined his fingers through hers, and held on tight.
After what felt like a long pause, Strike took a deep breath, and said, “There is something very wrong with me. I’m having brownouts, suffering from what I guess you could call psychic brain lesions . . . and yesterday, bringing everyone home from the highlands, I lost the teleport thread. If it hadn’t been for Leah and Rabbit propping me up with their magic, none of us would’ve made it back.”
That so wasn’t what Reese had been expecting to hear, that it took her a moment to process what he’d just said. The same thing seemed to be happening to most of the others, because there was a moment of absolute, blank silence broken only by the muffled sounds of Leah’s jeans and shirt against the sofa when she shifted to take Strike’s hand and press it to her face. A single tear leaked down her cheek.
It was Alexis who finally broke the silence. “I take it Sasha has checked you out?” She was sending the healer a “what the hell?” look, but Sasha was staring at her white-knuckled hands as Michael, himself grim-faced, whispered something into her ear.
“Both Sasha and Rabbit have done everything they can,” Strike said. “Lucius has scoured the library, and I’ve had all the relevant human-style scans we can think of. The scans came back clean; it was Rabbit who found the lesions. He’s done his best to put me back together, but it’s not holding.”
“There’s a shadow,” Sasha said without looking up. “It’s like a phantom blood-link or something. I can’t get a handle on it. Nothing I do makes any difference.” Strike started to say something, but she held up a hand. “I know, I know. It’s not my fault, I’m doing the best I can, blah, blah.” She looked up to glare, red-eyed, at him. “What I don’t get is why the gods gave me this talent but won’t let me heal my own big brother. My king.” She shook her head. “Godsdamn it, I fucking hate this.” And for her to drop an f-bomb was as unexpected as Leah crying, making everything suddenly very real.
A low murmur built as brains started to unfreeze. Reese glanced over at Dez and found him staring at Strike, eyes gone utterly hollow. And she got it: The serpent prophecy said that Dez had to kill his adversary to take the throne, and the prophecy needed to be fulfilled in order to keep Lord Vulture from arising. And Strike was sick. The blood drained from her head, leaving her dizzy as she flashed back: the gleam of a stone knife as it slashed an upturned throat, blood gouting . . . and that other Dez, the one the star demon had turned him into, watching with hot, satisfied eyes as the cobra de rey died beneath him.
She must’ve made some noise, because Dez looked at her. His fingers tightened on hers and his throat worked, but he didn’t say anything. And for the first time in the time she had known him, he looked terrified. But beneath the terror she thought she glimpsed something else . . . or rather someone else. And that made it even worse.
“It started with the dreams,” Strike said, then went on to describe being in his father?s perceptions during the Solstice Massacre. “The details changed over time, until it seemed more like it was me in the dream. The one thing that didn’t change, though, was this moment of realizing that I had it wrong, that when the thirteenth prophecy called for the last jaguar king to make the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ before the four-year threshold, it wasn’t talking about the king sacrificing his mate. It meant that he was supposed to . . . that I was supposed to sacrifice myself.”
Sasha made a low, broken noise and pressed her face into Michael’s arm. He shifted to hold her, hanging on tight. Leah sat there, still and white-faced, staring at the floor with the look of a woman who had argued herself sick on a point, and was gearing up for another round. Reese’s heart hurt for them, and for pale, pissed-off Rabbit, who would be truly orphaned without Strike. She hurt for Nate and Alexis, whose parents had been advisers to the prior king, and who had helped steer this one, to the extent he let himself be steered. And she hurt for all of the others, who were staring at Strike with expressions ranging from disbelief and anger to blank shock. She hadn’t yet begun to hurt for herself. She knew it was coming, but didn’t try to brace for it, because how could she buffer herself against something like this?
What has happened before will happen again. Fucking writs.
“There’s no question that our luck has sucked since I broke the prophecy,” Strike continued. “Given everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, I think that the gods are giving me—giving us—a chance to make up for my having not fulfilled the thirteenth prophecy when I was supposed to.” He paused, voice cracking with renewed regret. “I think maybe the sun god chose Anna as a Triad mage because the gods needed her to deliver the message, and wanted to be sure that I would pay attention.” He shifted his tired, hollow gaze to Dez. “Which is where you come in.”
“No,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t.”
But Strike kept going. “I want you to be my successor and—if it turns out to be the only way to keep Lord Vulture trapped in the underworld—my executioner.”
“Hell, no!” Dez shot to his feet and faced Strike with his hands balled into fists. His shout was echoed by a bellow from Nate, cries from Jade and Alexis, and various other shocked noises. But it was Reese’s softly indrawn breath that cut through him; she was trying very hard not to cry.
Strike stayed leaning hip-shot against the couch, waiting for the furor to die down. When it did, he said, “Setting aside the prophecies for a second, my sickness, whatever the hell it is, has driven home the need for me to name an heir, if you will.”
“Not me,” Dez said flatly. Dear gods, please not me. Not when he and Reese finally had something going right for them after all these years.
“Then who?”
“Nate,” he said immediately, preferring this debate to the other one, because how was a guy supposed to argue an execution with his own potential victim? He continued: “Michael or Brandt would work. Hell, why stick with a patriarchy? Choose Leah or Alexis. Someone who knows the current system, who knows how you run things and how to keep things on an even keel for the next twelve months.”
“I’ve been doing the even-keel thing, and it’s not working. We’ve become a reactionary force, moving in to fix shit after the fact—sometimes way too long after. We need someone who’s going to go out and find the fight, kick ass, take names, shake things up.”
“Shaking things up,” Reese said softly, with a broken little hiccup in her voice. “The western compass quadrant, the one associated with the star demon, represented the ability to transform and shake things up.”
“Reese, no.” He caught her hand in his. “No.” But she wouldn’t look at him.
Leah said, “We read back through all the info we collected on you, back when we were trying to figure out whose side you were on.” She paused. “From a former narc to a former gangbanger, I have to admit, you were a hell of a rey. Under your command, the Cobras expanded their territory and operations, even dabbling in some legit businesses. The local mob wannabes fizzled and died out, the crime and death rates went down slightly in the areas you controlled, and the per capita incomes went up.”
“Great,” Dez grated. “I was a better criminal than Hood. Give me a fucking cookie. Not the Nightkeepers.”
But Reese cleared her throat and said, “She’s right. You made the Cobras into something better than they were. Even Fallon admitted it.”
“That doesn’t mean I’d make the Nightkeepers better.”
