Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Godkeeper mated blood link during the winter solstice, they hadn’t been able to call the plumed snake god, Kulkulkan, and had commanded only a fraction of the god’s powers. In addition to—or perhaps because of—that failure, no god had sought to come through the barrier, even though the Nightkeepers had enacted the transition ritual in the sacred chamber. They had offered up Patience as a potential Godkeeper on the theory that she was already mated to a Nightkeeper, forming the strong bond required to support the powers of a Godkeeper. But that hadn’t worked, leaving them scrambling to find the demon prophecies in the hopes that the starscript writings would give them the information and spells they would need to keep Camazotz’s minions in hell, where they belonged.

While they waited for the king, Nate gnawed on his pizza and looked around the room, and he felt the stir of unease that’d become all too familiar in recent weeks. Only a few days earlier he’d finally been able to identify the problem: The Nightkeepers were stagnating.

They had fallen into their patterns so quickly—too quickly. Jade—quiet and pretty, with dark hair and green eyes, an ex-therapist who’d turned out to be their resident bookworm—spent her time in the archives, cataloging the huge volume of material collected by their ancestors, only a small fraction of which was actually proving useful. Michael and Sven were clearly marking time, though Nate had no clue what either of them was waiting for. The two absent Nightkeepers, dark-haired, businesslike Brandt and his pretty blond wife, Patience, were pretending for their kids’ sake that they were a normal family. Nate was running his company by remote while trying to figure out how to juggle the next four years of his life . . . and Alexis was transplanting her rarified Newport existence to the compound piece by piece, while doing her damnedest to keep a 5.0 GPA in a world that wasn’t keeping score the way she wanted it to.

That was largely her winikin ’s influence, he figured. Izzy was a formidable woman in a tiny package, and he could easily picture her pushing Alexis throughout her life. He’d seen it himself—the unsubtle mentions of the power of the smoke bloodline and the importance of royal advisers, along with a few equally unsubtle mentions of the hawk bloodline and its unsuitability, whatever that meant.

Nate hadn’t asked, hadn’t cared. As far as he was concerned, the past didn’t matter worth shit.

History didn’t automatically repeat itself, and he damn well got to choose his own path. Which meant no patterns, no stagnation. It was time to shake things up a little, he thought. But just then Alexis stepped through the residential hallway door, drawing his attention whether he liked it or not. She carried the heavy-looking, battle-scarred metal suitcase with ease, moving with the grace of a fighter as she set the case on an end table near the big sofa in the center of the room.

She’d cleaned up and changed into at-home jeans and a soft blue-gray shirt almost the same color as her eyes. Her multitoned golden hair spilled to her shoulders in waves that made him remember how the strands had felt between his fingers and against his skin, and that flash of sensory memory had his body hardening. He would’ve cursed out loud at the involuntary reaction, but forced himself to stifle the response. He couldn’t afford to let her know—to let any of them know—that he still wanted her, no matter how badly matched they might be. She’d bought into the Nightkeeper ways so deeply that he suspected that a large part of her desire for him came from the portents that they were meant for each other rather than from actual volition. Or maybe lust and fate were all mixed up inside her, some of it real, some of it created by the situation.

Regardless, he wanted nothing to do with a relationship built on destiny and bullshit, and she believed too deeply for it to be anything else. So why the hell couldn’t he get her out of his head?

Even now, five months after they’d stopped sleeping together, he still woke thinking of her, tasting her on his lips, and feeling vague surprise when he rolled over and she wasn’t there.

Blame it on Hera, he thought, and looked away from Alexis as Strike appeared from the direction of the royal quarters.

“Everybody here?” the Nightkeepers’ king asked as he scanned the bodies crowded into the sunken central room of the big mansion.

Leah was at his side. With her white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and covered with a ball cap, wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt, she looked like what she was: a normal, attractive woman in her early thirties. The glyphs on her inner right forearm, though, marked her as more than that. Far more.

She wore the flying serpent, the royal ju and the jun tan “beloved” glyph, marking her in turn as a Godkeeper, a queen, and a mated woman. The glyphs were three of the most powerful symbols in the Nightkeepers’ arsenal, and by rights they shouldn’t have appeared on a human’s arm.

Then again, the crimson mark on the arm of the big redheaded guy who’d gone after Alexis suggested the Nightkeepers didn’t know everything there was to know about the forearm marks and their significance. The magi simply didn’t have nearly enough information. As usual, Nate thought, frowning at Alexis, who pointedly ignored him.

When the king saw that the Nightkeepers were all there, he nodded. “Good. Okay, here’s the deal. . .

.”

He quickly outlined what Nate had seen in the old lady’s cottage, then described the attack on Alexis, ending with, “The way I see it, we’ve got a bunch of different issues here. We’ve got to figure out who this guy is and what he’s planning. Is he working alone? He doesn’t have the eyes of a makol , but what else could he be?”

“Maybe a leftover from Survivor2012?” Leah suggested, naming the makol -controlled human cult that had killed her brother, and had almost killed her in the search for more power, more control over the end-time.

“Maybe,” Strike said, “or maybe we’re dealing with something new.” He waved for Leah to continue. The ex-cop was hell on wheels both as an investigator and in terms of the cat herding required to keep the Nightkeepers more or less united as a fighting force when they hadn’t been raised and trained together, as they would have been had circumstances been different.

Although Strike and Leah weren’t married or even engaged in the traditional human sense, the gods had marked her as both Strike’s mate and the Nightkeepers’ queen. In his less charitable moments, Nate had wondered if that was the gods’ way of fulfilling their own prophecies by telling the two they were mated, whether they liked it or not. Granted, Strike had gone against the prophecies themselves to save her, and the love between them was pretty damn obvious just seeing them together. Nate just didn’t think the gods had the right to automatically translate that to a pair bond and an insta-queen, whether or not Leah was good at the job. It wasn’t like she’d really been given a choice in the matter.

“In terms of immediate goals,” Leah said, her voice cop-cool, “we need to recover the missing statue and get to the other five artifacts ahead of our competition, whatever he is.” She looked over at Jade. “Any more luck tracking the remaining pieces?”

The pretty, dark-haired archivist nodded. “I’ve got one more nailed down, and am chasing rumors on two others. The one I’m sure about is in New Orleans. We’ve got a meeting set up for tomorrow, and a verbal agreement that the current owner will ‘discuss’ a purchase with us. I think Alexis should go, since she’s our best negotiator.” Jade paused, glancing at Alexis. “Be warned: The owner calls herself Mistress Truth and runs a fortune-telling-slash-occult shop in the French Quarter. She thinks she’s got mad skills, and leans heavily on the woo-woo side of life.”