Nightkeepers (59 page)

Okay, that was even borderline slick, he thought as she rattled off a number and he jotted it down on his palm. ‘‘I’ll give her the message.’’

‘‘Thanks,’’ she said softly. Then she hung up, leaving him staring at the handset, wondering why it felt like the world had just tilted beneath his feet.

The night after the autumnal equinox, once the sun was down and the barbecue was long gone, came the time that Rabbit had been dreading. Red-Boar’s funeral.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to give the old man a proper send-off. It was more that he wasn’t sure he could do it right. The ceremony Jade had found in the archive said the torchbearer was supposed to say good-bye with ‘‘a heart full of grief and regret, and thanks for the one who was lost.’’ Which sounded great in theory. And yeah, he could find the grief and regret, and maybe even the thanks, but there were all sorts of other emotions tangled up alongside, emotions he wasn’t sure the old man needed with him when he set off on his journey.

But Rabbit was the last of the bloodline. The torchbearer’s role fell to him.

So when Strike signaled that it was time, Rabbit led the others to the coffin they’d made of ceiba wood and placed near the life tree, at the drip edge, where Red-Boar’s ashes would mix with the others’ and sink into the root system of a tree that shouldn’t be able to grow where it was growing.

Nate, Sven, and Michael stood together, with Alexis and Jade opposite them, coexisting in uneasy accord. Brandt and Patience stood rock-solid, their unity an almost palpable force, while Strike and Leah were together at the foot of the coffin, surrounded by a faint halo of golden light Rabbit hoped would wear off soon, because it was freaky. The gathered
winikin
formed a second ring around the coffin.

Rabbit took his place at the end of the simple wooden box and tried to think of something to say, just like he’d been trying on and off all day. But none of it seemed right, so in the end he said simply, ‘‘Safe journey, old man.’’

Then he palmed his father’s knife, which he now wore on his belt, and welcomed the bite of pain from the slash. When blood welled, he let it fall onto the coffin.

Without the need for any spell casting, the droplets burst into flame where they fell. The wood caught greedily, the fire fueled by the magic Rabbit felt flowing through him like water, magic he hadn’t consciously called, magic he wasn’t sure he could control.

Within two minutes, the heat had driven the others back. Within five, the coffin and the body within it were gone, leaving behind only a smudge of ash that stirred in the desert wind, blending with the darkened soil nearby.

Eventually the others drifted away.

Alone, Rabbit tried to feel peace but found only anger toward a father who’d never been what he needed. Tried to find forgiveness, and saw only the darkness around him. The angry part of him, the part he could mostly control now even as it grew stronger and started to press, rose up in him, urging him to leave Skywatch.

I need to be by myself for a while,
he thought.
The pueblo. I’ll go to the pueblo
. It wasn’t quite leaving, wasn’t quite staying. And there, sometimes, he found the peace that escaped him.

But when he turned to go, he realized he wasn’t alone, after all. The twin boys, Harry and Braden, stood behind him, unusually silent. Harry held out a hand. ‘‘Rabbit come,’’ he said, though unlike his more brazen twin, he rarely spoke.

‘‘You guys go on,’’ Rabbit said. ‘‘I’ll see you later.’’

But the kid didn’t move, just stood there with his hand out, staring at Rabbit like he knew what was going on inside him, like he understood somehow. ‘‘No cliff. Rabbit come.’’

A chill shivered through him. ‘‘How did you—’’ He broke off as a touch of gold sparkled in the air between them. ‘‘Okay,’’ he said after a moment. ‘‘In we go.’’

He followed the twins into the mansion, away from the darkness.

It was late before things wound down and Strike finally found an opportunity to slip away with his woman. Okay, so he sort of interrupted her midsentence, picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and cavemanned it down the hall to the royal suite, but who was counting?

She squealed and squirmed, drumming her fists on his kidneys, but they both knew she didn’t mean it. If she had, he’d be flat on his back and gasping for air. Which was pretty much where he ended up the moment he got the suite doors closed, because she braced her feet on the wall and used the leverage to overbalance them both onto the carpet, then went to work on him with her hands and mouth the moment they were down.

Not that he was complaining in the slightest.

He fisted his hands in her long blond hair, holding her in place above him as he kissed her hard and hot, which didn’t do a damned thing to take the edge off the horns that’d been riding him since they got back to the compound.
Mine
, he thought fiercely, and again,
mine
.

It wasn’t just the magic of the god, though they both felt it, a kernel of gold at the base of their souls, something they could draw on when they needed it in the months and years to come. They’d won only a single battle. The war was yet to be joined. It wasn’t just the relief of having her still there, either, though that was huge. The thought that he could’ve lost her had him sliding his hands down her shoulders to her waist and drawing her snug against the hard ridge in his jeans. And it wasn’t just the total turn-on of wearing their matching marks, the beloved marks.

It was her. Leah. His woman. His love. There were no guards between them, no barriers. There were only the two of them.

‘‘I love you,’’ he said when they came up for air.

‘‘That’s convenient, ’cause I love you back.’’ With a lithe twist, she slipped out from underneath him and came up with her fingers wrapped around his belt. Tugged him toward the solarium. ‘‘Come on. Jox finally gave up and moved a bed out under the stars. We’ve got a box spring and everything.’’

‘‘No shit?’’ Strike laughed. ‘‘There might be some romance in the old guy’s soul after all.’’ But he pulled her farther down the short hall. ‘‘I’ve got a better idea.’’

The torches came up when he opened the door to the small ritual chamber, and the air smelled of
copan
even though he hadn’t burned any. Leah flowed past him, shedding clothes as she went, so she was naked by the time she turned and hiked herself up on the
chac-mool
, put one foot up onto the poor guy’s head, and crooked a finger at Strike. ‘‘I like your thinking.’’

He went to her, putting his feet in the red outlines on the ceremonial mat, and fitting the rest of his body exactly where it was meant to be—up against his woman. His queen. And when they kissed and the torches dimmed, and he glanced into the obsidian mirror behind the altar, he saw only the strong, delicate curve of Leah’s spine, and her face in half profile as she turned it into his neck and breathed him in.

The ghosts, and the past, were gone, leaving them to live the future yet unwritten.

Together.

Read on for a sneak preview of book two in the Final Prophecy series:
DAWNKEEPERS

Bidding on the thirteen-hundred-year-old Mayan statuette started at two grand and jumped almost immediately to five. At fifty-five hundred, Alexis caught the spotter’s eye and nodded, then leaned back in her folding chair, projecting the calm of a collector.

It was a lie, of course. The only things she’d ever collected were parking tickets at the Newport marina. She looked the part, though, in a stylish navy pinstripe pantsuit that nipped in at the waist and pulled a little across the shoulders, thanks to all the hand-to-hand combat training she’d gotten in recent months. Her streaky blond hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, and she wore secondhand designer shoes that put her well over six feet. A top-end bag sat at her feet beside a matching folio, both slightly scuffed around the edges.

Understated upscale, courtesy of eBay.

In her previous life as a private investment consultant, the look had been calculated to reassure her wealthy friends and clients that she belonged among them but wouldn’t compete, wouldn’t upstage. She’d played the part for so long prior to last year’s
Oh, by the way, you’re a Nightkeeper
revelation that it’d been second nature to dress for this gig. But as bidding on the statuette topped sixty-five hundred and Alexis nodded to bump it to a cool seven grand, she felt a hum of power that had been missing from her old life.

I have money now,
the buzz in her blood said.
I deserve to be here
.

It wasn’t her money, not really. But she had carte blanche with the Nightkeeper Fund, and orders not to come home empty-handed.

‘‘Ma’am?’’ said a cultured, amplified voice. It was the auctioneer now, not the spotter, which meant the dabblers had dropped out and he had his two or three serious bidders. ‘‘It’s seventy-five hundred dollars to you.’’

She glanced up at the projection screen at the front of the room. It showed a magnification of the statuette, which rested near the auctioneer’s elbow, top-lit on a nest of black cloth.

Described in the auction catalog as ‘‘a statuette of Ixchel, Mayan goddess of rainbows and fertility, carved from chert, c. AD 1100, love poem inscribed in hieroglyphs on base,’’ the statuette was made of pale green stone that’d been carved with deceptive simplicity into the shape of a woman with a large nose and flattened forehead, her conical skull crowned with a rainbow of hair, and her large hands cupping the swell of her pregnant belly. She sat upon a stone, or maybe an overturned bowl or basket, and that was where the hieroglyphs were carved, curved and fluid and gorgeous like all Mayan writing, which was as much an art as a form of communication.

Love poem,
Alexis thought with an inner snort.
Not
. Or rather, it was eau-de-Hallmark read one way, but according to Jade’s research back at Skywatch, if they held the statuette at the proper angle under starlight, a new set of glyphs would show up, spelling out one of the demon prophecies.

Aware that the auctioneer was waiting on her, Alexis said, ‘‘Ten thousand dollars.’’ As she’d hoped, the advance jumped the bid past fair market value by enough to make her remaining opponent shake his head and drop out. The auctioneer pronounced it a done deal and she felt a flare of success as she flashed her bidder number, knowing there would be no problem with the money.

The Nightkeeper Fund, which had—ironically—been seeded in the eighteen hundreds with the proceeds from her five-times-great-grandparents’ generation of Nightkeepers unwisely selling off the very Mayan artifacts they were scrambling to recover now, had been intended to fund an army of hundreds as the 2012 end date approached. That, however, was before the current king’s father had led his warrior-priests into an ill-fated battle with the demons and wiped out most of their culture. Only a few of the youngest Nightkeepers had survived, hidden and raised in secret by their
winikin
until seven months earlier, when the intersection connecting the earth, sky and underworld had reactivated from its two-decade dormancy, and the king’s son, Strike, had recalled his people.

Yeah, that had been a shocker.
Alexis, dear, you’re a magic-user
, Izzy had pretty much said.
I’m not your godmother, I’m your
winikin
, and we need to leave tonight for your bloodline ceremony and training. And, oh, by the way, you and the other Nightkeepers have a little over four years to save the world
.

According to the thirteenth prophecy, since Strike had refused to sacrifice the human woman who became his queen, the countdown to the end-time had begun in earnest. Info from their archivist, Jade, indicated that they’d passed into the four-year cycle during which seven of the
Banol Kax
would come through the intersection one at a time, each on a cardinal day, and seek to perform a task described in the ancient Mayan legends. If the task was fulfilled, the demon would return to the underworld, Xibalba, and the barrier between the worlds would thin to a degree determined by the demon’s power. If the task was blocked, however, the demon would be destroyed and the barrier would strengthen by the same amount. That was what had the Nightkeepers hustling to find the seven statuettes that were supposedly inscribed with star-script prophecies that apparently explained how to defeat each of the demons.

Make that six statuettes,
Alexis thought, grinning.
Because I just bagged Ixchel
.

‘‘Excuse me, please,’’ she murmured, and rose, snagging her folio and bag off the floor.

She stepped out into the aisle while the discreet auction house employees whisked her statuette off the podium and set up the next lot, and the auctioneer launched into his spiel. When she reached the temporary office the auction house had set up in the hallway outside the big estate’s ballroom, she unzipped the folio and watched the cashier’s eyes get big at the sight of the neatly stacked and banded bills.

She handed over her bidder’s number. ‘‘What’s the total damage?’’

‘‘Let me check,’’ he said, but his eyes were still glued to the cash.

The two items she’d bought—the statuette and a Mayan death mask that had been an earlier impulse buy—wouldn’t be the biggest deals of the day by far, but she’d bet they’d be among only a few handled in paper money. Granted, she could’ve done the remote transfer thing, too, but she quite simply loved the green stuff. She loved the feel and smell of cash, loved what it could buy—not just the things, but the respect. The power.

And no, it wasn’t because she’d been deprived or picked on as a child, as
someone
back at Skywatch had unkindly suggested. Nor was it a reaction to the idea that the world was four years away from a serious crisis of being, as that same someone had offered, or a rejection of destiny or some such claptrap. In fact, she’d decided it was simple biology.