Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Seeing that Nate was staring at him, Rabbit stopped dead, shoved his hands in his pockets, and scowled. “What’s your problem?”

Having learned it was safer to ignore the kid’s ’tude when possible, Nate said, “You hear about the meeting yet?”

“I was out at the—” The kid broke off and shrugged. “No. So?”

In other words, he’d sneaked out to the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon again. Nobody knew exactly what he did up in the sprawling collection of rooms, kivas, and burial chambers, but most of the residents of Skywatch gave Rabbit a wide berth anyway. He wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.

“Confab in the big room, five minutes,” Nate said. “You want to help me round up the others?”

For a second Rabbit looked as if he were going to tell Nate to go to hell. But surprisingly, he nodded. “I’ll check the firing range; you hit the rec area and the training hall.”

He was gone before Nate could ask. Not that he was going to—he didn’t really want to know what was going on in Rabbit’s head. Always one to walk on the moody, broody side of life, the kid had gotten even stranger in the months since his father had died during the equinox battle. It wasn’t like father and son had gotten along all that well, either—they’d struck sparks off each other like nobody’s business, and as far as Nate could tell, Red-Boar’d pretty much hated the kid’s guts.

Then again, who was he to criticize a father-son relationship? Nate thought as he headed for the rec room, which was located past the kitchen and down a short hall toward the forty-car garage. It wasn’t like he had any experience in the area. Besides, he wasn’t part of the whole Nightkeepers-as-family movement that Strike, Leah, and the winikin —and Alexis, to a degree—kept harping on. As far as he was concerned, the current residents of Skywatch were nothing more than twenty or so people who’d grown up separately, weren’t related by blood, and had their own lives outside of the whole Nightkeeper thing. They might be a team out of necessity when it came to the end-time stuff, sure, but that didn’t make them inseparable, didn’t make them a family. If Rabbit wanted to march to his own backbeat, Nate wasn’t going to get in his way. He understood privacy and the need for freedom.

Sticking his head through the door of the room they called entertainment central, he saw two of his teammates locked in simulated battle, courtesy of the top-of-the line gaming console Jox had installed a few months earlier. “Hey, you two,” Nate said. “Meeting in the main room, two minutes.”

“Give us ten,” Coyote-Seven said without turning around, his attention glued to the TV, his fingers flying over a gaming console as he navigated his way through the third level of EmoPunk II .

Lanky and athletic, with his bloodline and so-far unidentified talent marks bared by a sleeveless black tee, and his long blond hair caught back in a stubby ponytail, Sven was their resident burnout, taking nothing and nobody seriously. As Nate watched, Sven’s computer-generated character took out a pair of overinked street thugs with a series of ninja chops and a kick in the ’nads that had all three of the flesh-and-blooders in the room wincing.

The computerized image shifted as Sven sent his character inside a nearby warehouse. It was dark inside, but a busted-out window in the back let in a ray of light to shine on a guy wearing a medallion that wouldn’t figure in until level five, when it’d be vital. Nate wasn’t sure if the other two knew that, but he did, because he’d helped write the game.

“Gotta get me some of that.” Sven sent his character in a headlong charge for the medallion, missed seeing the bad guy in the shadows, and was dead two seconds later. “Shit!”

“Sucker.” Sitting beside Sven, Michael Stone worked his gaming console with the finesse of a pro.

His strategizing wasn’t bad, either, Nate thought. Michael had let Sven charge in blindly and distract the bad guys while he sneaked around and lifted the medallion, then boogied out the back like a good little thief.

Dark and intense and a shade too slick in Nate’s opinion, Michael spoke infrequently, but when he did, his words were exactly right, as though he calculated each sentence, polished each syllable to perfection. His dark eyes held secrets, and when his phone chirped—which it did frequently—he took the calls in private, often well into the night.

The two Nightkeepers in the rec room were diametric opposites: Michael had hidden depths; Sven had no depth whatsoever. Yet somehow they’d become best buds over the past few months, seeming content to shut themselves up in Skywatch while the others tried to find a workable balance between the magi they were supposed to become and the people they’d been before the Nightkeepers’ magical barrier reactivated.

“Let’s go,” Nate said, his voice going sharp when neither of the other guys looked away from the TV screen. “We’ve got a problem. You can rot your brains later.” Just because Hawk Enterprises produced the EmoPunk games didn’t mean he thought they were any good.

Nate had kept the connection to the video games on the down-low—not because he minded them knowing about the EP s, but because he didn’t want any of them stumbling onto his connection to the Viking Warrior games.

Or, more accurately, Alexis’s connection to them and, through them, to him.

It was bad enough that she’d admitted to having envisioned his medallion a few times in the weeks before they’d met. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he’d created her spitting image more than four years ago, and that his buddies had joked that he was saving himself for Hera.

Yeah. So not going there.

“We can’t stop now. He’s on a roll,” Sven protested. Michael didn’t say anything, just kept playing.

Annoyed, Nate reached down and killed the power strip just inside the door, flatlining everything.

When Sven yelped, Nate growled, “Cut the shit. What’re you trying to do, oust Rabbit as the local juvenile delinquent?”

Sven sneered. “Takes one to know one. At least I haven’t done time.”

But Michael elbowed him hard. “Shut it.” He tossed the console aside and rose, squaring off opposite Nate, his dark eyes assessing. “Thought you were going after one of the statues?”

“Found a body instead. Then it got weird.”

Ignoring Michael’s raised brow and Sven’s “No way!” Nate turned and headed for the main room, figuring that’d get them moving.

He was right. Michael and Sven trailed after him and joined the growing group in the sunken main room of the mansion. By the time Nate had scored some leftover homemade pizza from the kitchen, which was on the other side of a breakfast bar separating it from the main room, the residents of Skywatch had gathered for the meeting.

Of the eleven Nightkeepers who’d fought together during the equinox battle, Red-Boar was dead, Brandt and Patience White-Eagle were off dealing with the sale of their house in Philly, and Strike’s sister, Anna, had returned home to the “real” world, refusing to fully commit to a life she’d rejected years ago. That left seven Nightkeepers at Skywatch, along with seven winikin , plus the twin White-

Eagle toddlers, Harry and Braden, and Strike’s mate, Leah, who was fully human, yet a Godkeeper at the same time.

Which, as far as Nate was concerned, went to prove that the prophecies didn’t always get it right.

The legends said the Godkeepers would arise at the end of the age, when the Nightkeepers needed them to guard the barrier. So far, though, only the one god had made it through the barrier to possess a female, and it’d bound with Leah, in a process that had nearly cost the ex-cop her life and resulted in an incomplete possession. Even when Strike and Leah had attempted to form a Nightkeeper-