Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Which just sucks beyond sucking, Alexis thought as she hiked in her queen’s wake. And there she went with the blasphemy again, which probably wasn’t a good thing to be coming from a Godkeeper on one of the cardinal days. But it had already been a long day of waiting, and the silence in the tunnel was getting to her, raising the hairs at her nape and puckering goose bumps on her arms. The empty quiet, broken only by the sound of their breathing and the scuff of boots on the stone, seemed to be waiting for something. Or someone.

Then Alexis saw Leah glance from one side of the tunnel to the other, and Strike scrub a hand down the back of his neck. Which meant Alexis wasn’t the only one feeling it.

“Something’s coming,” she whispered as unease shivered through her and took up residence in her gut. “Something bad.”

“I know,” Nate said. He’d moved up close, so close that she could feel his body heat and his energy.

She didn’t reach back to him, but knowing he was there steadied her. Whether or not he was her lover or mate, he was a warrior she could count on. She only hoped he could count on her in return, hoped they all could.

The air remained tense as they worked their way deeper into the tunnel system. Soon Alexis could hear the drip of water up ahead, signaling that they were near the subterranean river that would lead them to the altar room. They took the narrow pathway beside the waterway, then turned away from the river to the sacred chamber. There was no sign of pursuit or ambush. The only thing menacing them was the heavy feeling in the air, a sense of something watching them, waiting. The grating edginess of it served only to exaggerate the hum of magic in Alexis’s blood as the stars and planets aligned, inching into position in the final thirty-minute countdown to the equinox.

Then they turned the final corner and came to the arched doorway leading into the altar room. The tunnel widened, allowing Leah to move up and walk at Strike’s side. Nate joined Alexis, and the others paired up behind them, with Michael forming the rear guard alone.

They went in with their autopistols drawn and fireball magic at the ready, but the chamber was empty. There was no sign of Iago, no sign of anything out of place. Only there was something, Alexis realized as Strike lit the ceremonial torches around the perimeter of the room and the Nightkeepers extinguished their hand lamps, letting the room fall to firelight.

In that firelight, she could see a shimmer walk all the way across the back wall behind the chac-

mool altar.

Without thinking, she reached for Nate’s hand and tugged him up beside her. “Do you see that?”

He frowned. “See what?”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Alexis turned to the others. “Does anyone else—” Anna screamed suddenly, cutting her off midquestion. The king’s sister dropped to her knees and grabbed her right forearm in pain. “Lucius, no ! Don’t do it! Don’t—” Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp and toppled over onto her side, convulsing.

“Anna!” Strike bolted to her side and dropped to his knees beside her as she writhed.

Bowing her body in an arc, she shrieked, “Nooo! Not Jox! Not the winikin ! Please! ”

Shock and horror rattled through the Nightkeepers as they realized that the makol must have fully overtaken Lucius and had somehow escaped its warded room and attacked the winikin .

Panic jolted Alexis, alongside magic and a howl of grief. She grabbed instinctively for Nate’s hand.

“Izzy!”

Strike lunged to his feet, snapping, “Join up!”

Nate pulled free of her hand and got in the king’s face. “No! You know we can’t go back.”

And the hell of it was that he was right, Alexis knew. The goddaughter inside her screamed for them to return to Skywatch immediately, yet the warrior in her knew that whatever was going on back there, it wasn’t their main battle. The more important fight was the one that reached for her even now, as the rippling curtain of light darkened and solidified along the back wall of the stone chamber, and she began to see movement behind it, the imprints of huge bodies pressing against what could only be the barrier.

Strike grated, “Stand aside, Blackhawk. You may not give a shit about anybody but yourself, but I’m not leaving them to die. Rabbit is my responsibility. Jox is mine. They all are.”

Leah moved up to stand at Strike’s side, her face pale and drawn. “We have to go,” she said.

“Skywatch can’t fall a second time.”

“The Nightkeepers are your priority, and mankind,” Nate insisted, refusing to give way. “Not the winikin or Rabbit. As much as it sucks to say it, the immediate future rests on us and what we do here today.”

Of them all, Alexis thought she might be the only one to see what it cost Nate to say that, the only one to hear the pain in his voice, see the horror in his too-controlled expression. He glanced at her, a mute plea for some backup against the furious king, and Alexis stepped up to add her voice to his.

Only her feet didn’t move at first. Then, when they did, they carried her away from the argument, toward the rippling barrier, where she saw colors and darkness battling one another for the upper hand, and achieving only a stalemate. Come, the colors seemed to say. I need your help.

“Alexis, what’s wrong?” Nate’s voice held sharp worry, but he sounded suddenly far distant, his tones wavery and indistinct.

The fabric of the universe dominated her vision, reaching out and drawing her inward. “Call your god,” she said to Strike, only it wasn’t her voice; it was the goddess speaking through her, expending enormous energy to push the message down the skyroad to earth. “The hellroad is open at the city of the clouds. The battle is there.”

Alexis’s mind was suddenly filled with an image of great, soaring mountains. Bare and snow-

covered at their tops, lush and green at their foothills, they wore thick clouds of mist halfway down, where the cold mountain winds met moist tropical air and formed rainy, cool bands of precipitation.

High conical mounds speared through the canopy, green-covered and with a hint of square-edged stone here and there. Lost pyramids rising up from the jungle floor.

Her voice shaking with the effort of the magical contact, which was draining her quickly, Alexis described the scene as best as she could. When she started to sway, she felt a strong arm loop around her waist and knew it was Nate.

“Strike needs a ground-level image to ’port,” Nate said. “We can’t zap in midair.”

His voice didn’t seem so far away now, as she leaned into his strength, his warmth, and felt her own energy drain. She was aware of Strike and Leah leaning over Anna, who had gone silent and still, aware of the awful tension in the room as the Nightkeepers awaited the decision. Skywatch or the hellmouth? The battle for home or the battle for the world?

Strike’s choice was, she realized, very like what his father must have faced in the moment the Banol Kax broke through the intersection and sent their lava creatures to kill the winikin and children back at the training compound. What had happened before was happening again.

Alexis concentrated, sending her need along the skyroad link, and was rewarded with a second, ground-level picture, one that grew dim and gray as her energy faded. Then there was a rasp and a hiss of pain, and Nate was clasping her hand in his bloodied grasp, boosting her power with his own. The image clarified, one of carved stone and a gaping skull mouth wreathed in gray-white vapor.

“It’s high in the mountains,” she said, “just below where the clouds begin. There’s a river flowing in and down, and a dark, deep tunnel.” She kept going with the description of the screaming skull and surrounding cloud forest, trying to give her king enough for the ’port link. When she ran down, when there was no more left that she could think to add, she sagged against Nate, feeling his energy as her own, his fatigue as her own.