Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Something quivered deep in Nate’s gut, but he shook his head. “There are an awful lot of ‘what-ifs’ I could pull out of my ass around here. That doesn’t mean any of them are true.”

Carlos tipped his head. “Why are you fighting this so hard?” And by this , they both knew he didn’t mean just the vision-that-wasn’t.

“We’ve had this argument before. Neither of us ever wins,” Nate said, dropping into one of the chairs, suddenly very tired of it all. He pulled on the chain that hung around his neck, withdrawing the hawk medallion from beneath his shirt.

His own personal amulet-to-be-named-at-a-later-date, the medallion was a flat metal disk etched on each side with a design that looked like the hawk bloodline glyph if he tipped it one way, a man if he tipped it another. It had been the only identifying thing he’d been wearing when he’d been dumped at Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital, aside from the words My name is Nathan Blackhawk , which had been carefully printed on his forehead in pen.

It hadn’t been until the prior year that he’d learned his abandonment had been shitty bad luck, that hi s winikin had died of injuries he’d sustained during the massacre, and hadn’t been able to get a message to any of the other survivors before he’d died. Since each winikin ’s imperative in the aftermath of a massacre was to keep his or her Nightkeeper charge alive and hidden, nobody had come looking for Nate. He’d dropped into the system, and from there to juvie, and then a short stint at Greenville for grand theft auto, before he’d straightened up and pulled it together to make himself into the successful entrepreneur he’d become.

He’d done that with the help of a social worker whose hide had proven tougher than his. Not the Nightkeepers, not the winikin , and not the gods. It’d been his choice to straighten out, his choice to succeed.

“Why don’t you ever ask about them?” Carlos asked softly, and there was an aha look in his eyes that made Nate wish he’d kept the medallion where it belonged: out of sight and mind.

“Because they didn’t make me what I am. I did that.”

“Are you so sure?”

“That’ll be all for tonight,” Nate said, his voice clipped with anger, which was pretty much how all of their convos eventually ended. But when the winikin turned and headed for the door, Nate cursed himself and said, “Carlos?”

The winikin turned and raised an eyebrow.

“Have you guys asked Alexis exactly what she saw?”

“Isabella is doing that right now,” Carlos said, but with a look that suggested he would’ve rather had anyone else in the world be doing the asking. Which Nate could understand, sort of, because if Alexis sometimes acted like an overambitious brownnose, it was largely because that was what her winikin had raised her to be.

Which, Nate realized, glancing at his laptop as Carlos left the room, was one of the fundamental differences between Alexis and Hera: Alexis had a winikin , while Hera had grown up on her own. Just like he had.

Vibrating with excess energy after a good meal and a short postmagic nap, Alexis headed for the pool an hour or so after dinner, intending to work off her frustrations. She could’ve used the gym that took up a good chunk of the lower level of the mansion, but that was where she and Nate had initially hooked up, the night after they’d each jacked into the barrier for the first time, gaining their bloodline marks and a serious case of the hornies. Which meant the gym and its ghosts were out.

Besides, she realized as she shucked out of her yoga pants and zippered hoodie and dumped them on a pool chair, baring her body in a decent one-piece, swimming a few hundred laps or so would not only wash away the nonexistent evidence of the sexual encounter she and Nate hadn’t had, it would give her an excuse for the uncharacteristic aches in her inner thighs and the hollowness in her core.

The heated pool water was warmer than the air, and steam rose softly from the surface, making her think of the barrier mists, and Nate’s insistence that nothing had happened.

“And you so need to get out of your own head,” she said aloud, then dove in cleanly. After growing up very near the Newport beaches, with friends who’d brought her along to the country clubs as their guest, she was nearly as at home in the water as on land, and quickly fell into the rhythm of laps.

The pool was located at the back of the mansion in a rectangular alcove flanked on either side by the residential and archive wings, and fronted by the big glass doors of the sunken great room. The open side looked over the ball court, with the ceiba tree and training hall off to one side, the small cottages where the Nightkeeper families used to live off to the other. In the distance, lost in the darkness, the canyon walls were studded with Pueblo ruins she’d visited only once, staying away thereafter because the place gave her the creeps.

Nightkeeper traditions were one thing. Indian burial mounds were another. Besides, the pueblo was Rabbit’s territory, and most of the Nightkeepers left the kid more or less alone, not because they didn’t like him, but because he seemed to prefer solitude.

Relieved to let her mind skip from one thought to the next, as long as none of them were dark haired and amber eyed, Alexis was on lap number twenty when she heard Izzy call her name.

A large part of her wanted to keep swimming—or maybe dive down and hold her breath for a while, and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. She just wasn’t in the mood for conversation. But duty to—and love for—the woman who’d raised her had Alexis stopping to tread water. “Hey,” she called softly to her winikin , who stood by the edge of the pool holding her robe and a towel. “You need me?”

Izzy nodded. “I thought we should talk.”

The winikin was petite and ultrafeminine, with long dark hair caught back in a French braid that was as elegant as it was practical. Wearing trim slacks and a soft button-down that was about as casual as she ever got, Izzy looked put-together and in control.

In contrast, Alexis was a scattered mess. “I know,” she said, but what she really meant was damn it .

She’d wanted to avoid this convo, at least until after she’d gotten a good night’s sleep, and preferably after she’d made the trip to New Orleans and acquired the sacred relic from the witch. Not only because they needed the artifact and the demon prophecy, but because she was hoping that spending the day alone with Nate would remind her why the two of them didn’t work as a couple, namely that he was an arrogant, detached, egotistical jerk who didn’t want any of the same things she did, didn’t believe in the things she believed.

“Come on out. You’ll shrivel.” Izzy held up the robe and towel, her voice making it more of an order than a suggestion.

Alexis sighed and obeyed her winikin , mostly because there was no point in picking a fight just to blow off some steam. Her sense of peace was gone, her hope of burning through the restless, edgy energy pretty much shot. She might as well dry off and deal with Izzy.

The very thought gave her pause. Since when did she “deal” with Izzy? The two of them were closer than most mother-daughter pairs, and had stayed good friends through the ups and downs of teenagerdom and life thereafter. They’d dealt with things together, not one against the other, even after Izzy had revealed the truth about Alexis’s parents and her role as protector and conscience, not just godmother.

But as Alexis climbed out of the pool, shivering as the crisp February air rapidly chilled the water on her skin, she realized that she and her winikin were back on opposite sides of one of their few true disagreements, a battle they’d thought had turned into a moot point months ago: the issue of Nate Blackhawk.