wanted exactly those things and so much more, she stuffed it deep down inside where all her other stupid fantasies lived. Shaking her head, she turned to Dez. “This isn’t going to work. We’re going to spend so much time butting heads and contradicting each other that we’ll never get a damn thing accomplished.”
“Who else did you have in mind as second in command?” Sven asked unexpectedly.
“I… Shit. Natalie, I guess. She’s got ties to the rebs through JT, but she’s also got a huge appreciation for the traditions. And the others understand why she’s working with Lucius, so there wouldn’t be a problem there.”
“And she doesn’t have an iota of combat experience,” he countered. “Not to mention that it doesn’t make any sense to take one of our few trained Mayan scholars out of the library. I’m not assigned anywhere right now, though, and the winikin might not like me all that much, but they like me better than most of the magi.” He rose from the chair so they were standing facing each other, with the carved coffee table between them. “I don’t need to be in charge, and I’m not going to challenge you or make you look bad. I just want to help you.” His eyes softened slightly. “Call it payback, call it guilt, call it whatever the hell you want, but let me do this, okay? I won’t let you down this time.”
He was right, she realized; she didn’t have an obvious choice for Zane’s replacement, and she’d proven all too well the day before that she didn’t do her best thinking when she was under pressure and didn’t have someone else backing her up with a reality check. Maybe the answer would have been obvious… if it hadn’t been for what had happened in the coyote cave.
It wasn’t just the sex—she thought they could have chalked that up to the magic and the moment, and walked away from it. But all the things he’d said after, and then their argument last night… that had been them, not the magic. At least, it had been for her, and that’d had her reacting from emotion rather than logic. As for him… well, she didn’t actually know where he was coming from. It didn’t make any sense to her that he would be spouting words of almost-love one night, and then the next morning be ready to work side by side with her like it was no big deal. There wasn’t any trepidation in his eyes, no silent plea that she go with it and he’d explain later. Had he pushed his emotions behind the wall of his warrior’s talent? Or had he set them aside that quickly? If he had—
“How about you give it a chance?” The suggestion came from Reese. “Just the two of you on a trial run outside of the compound, a two-person op you can work without feeling like your every move is being scrutinized.” She shot a meaningful look at Dez. “Sometimes things get simpler when you take some time away.”
“I don’t want…” Cara began, but then trailed off, because this wasn’t about what she wanted, hadn’t been in a long time. If she agreed to this, she’d be buying Zane’s and Lora’s lives, not because she sympathized with them, but because they had become political currency. She didn’t think Dez understood just how much they mattered, or how much resentment would be stirred up if they were executed, spell-frozen, or even simply imprisoned. With the wounds of the massacre still too fresh in many of the winikin’s minds, they needed to know that there was a way out of Skywatch somehow. So finally she said, “I take it you’ve got an op in mind?”
It was Dez who nodded and said, “You know the screaming skull the nahwal mentioned? Well, Lucius tracked it to the Playa Maya Museum in Monterey. We want you to steal it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Zane’s brain was a seriously weird place, and Rabbit felt right at home. The twists and turns made sense, like he was driving in a strange town but somehow knew exactly where to find the gas stations and fast food, as if he’d been there before in a previous life. Or, more accurately, as if he’d recently spent time in a very similar town. Zane might’ve been misguided and far too ready to buy into his own self-serving interpretations, but he’d honed some of the same skills Rabbit had found himself needing more and more lately, as he tried with increasing frustration to reconnect with his mother’s spirit, while hiding those efforts from everyone, including Myrinne. Especially Myrinne.
Secrecy. Suspicion. Righteousness. Contempt. Rabbit sent his consciousness through Zane’s mind, passing memories and signpost-bright emotions, picking through the labyrinth until he found what he was looking for.
When he did, he brought his perceptions closer to the surface, to the point where he could feel his own body sitting hunched over beside Zane, and could sense Dez, Sven, and Cara sitting nearby, waiting tensely for the intel that could make or break the winikin’s life. Lora was already free and clear; she hadn’t known anything, and had been painfully easy to reprogram. She was the kind of person who would always look for a pack leader to tell her what to do, how to feel. As far as she now knew, she had spent the past ten months or so as part of a whack-job cult, which she’d been lured into by a guy she met online. She was ashamed of the guy and the cult, and didn’t want to talk about either of them. She just wanted to get back to her life, and shouldn’t present any further problems for the Nightkeepers.
Zane, on the other hand… well, they would have to see.
“He thinks he’s part Nightkeeper,” Rabbit said, channeling the info he was getting from the winikin. “It was a family legend that his twice-great-grandmother had a child with either her own Nightkeeper charge or another member of his family, putting mage blood into the mix. That’s why Zane was trying to sacrifice Cara—he was looking to activate his supposedly latent Nightkeeper powers. It looks like when he first got here, he had a couple of dreams that reminded him of the coyote cave and gave him delusions of grandeur mixed up with some sort of divine plan. He fixated on Cara, first as his mate, then as his sacrifice.”
“Did he talk about it to anybody other than Lora?” Cara asked at almost the same time Sven said, “Did he have anything to do with those creatures showing up at the funeral?”
“Give me a minute.” It took Rabbit longer than that to find the information on Lora, whom Zane had barely registered as more than a spare set of hands. The attack was easier to dial into. “I don’t think you’ve got any other traitors to worry about; it was just him most of the time, with Lora helping out at the end, once she really started cracking under the pressure. As for the attack, he didn’t know anything about it beforehand, but decided it was a sign telling him to act now.”
After a few more questions and answers that didn’t really add anything to the mix, Dez sighed and said, “I think he’s tapped out. Rabbit, what do you think about reprogramming him?”
“Same as with Lora, I can change his memories of the past ten months so he thinks he fell in with a doomsday cult that was pretending to be the Nightkeepers, and scramble it around enough so he won’t come looking for us.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there,” Dez commented.
“Not intentionally.”
“But…”
“Shit.” It felt way hypocritical to rat out a guy whose brain felt more than a little familiar, but Rabbit told himself it was the differences that mattered. “Using Lora was easy for him, and so was leaving Cara in that cave to die. He’s not a full-on sociopath like Iago, and not crazy like Iago was at the end, either. But he’s not hooked into an ethical code, either human or Nightkeeper. I can change his memories, but I can’t promise he won’t do something else if we let him go. He’s… predatory. Hungry. I don’t think that’s going to go away.”
“So what do you think? Should we let him go?”
“I… I’m not sure.” It felt seriously weird that he was being asked to comment on Zane’s moral character, when he himself was a half-blood screwup who had burned down several million dollars’ worth of other people’s property and fallen prey to Iago’s mind games over and over again, jeopardizing the Nightkeepers in the process. He was the Master of Disaster, the guy who gave Murphy’s Law a bad name.… There was no way he was qualified to make this call.
A little help here, gods? Rabbit thought, automatically using his magic to shape the words into a prayer, even though it had been a long time since his prayers had done anything but rattle around inside him. Instead of rattling, though, the prayer whooshed out of him, disappearing and taking some of his magic with it, and leaving stunned silence behind.
Holy shit. What just happened? Heart kicking up a dozen notches, Rabbit sought the prayer, tried to follow it, but came up against the blank walls that bounded his consciousness instead. What the hell? Where did it go? Part of his problem was not knowing whether he was supposed to be praying to the sky or the underworld, not knowing
