Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

It played the same role on Leah’s plaque, along with the words below it, which spelled out the motto the ex-cop had given them. Written in modern Mayan, it spelled out the three cardinal tenets the modern Nightkeepers had vowed to live: TO FIGHT. TO PROTECT. TO FORGIVE.

Except that Anna wanted to do none of those things. She just wanted to be left alone.

Sighing at the thought, and at the self-pity that had turned into too familiar a friend of late, she stopped herself from ringing the doorbell and pushed open the front door instead. She drew breath to shout a hello, knowing that Strike and Jox were expecting her, because she’d called from the road.

The greeting died in her throat when a ghost stepped into the front hallway, one that had traveled in time.

She knew his fierce eyes from her childhood, the slashing blade of his nose, and the high cheekbones. She knew the shape of his skull where he’d shaved his hair close, leaving faint bristles behind. He was slightly taller than she, and lean-hipped with youth beneath worn jeans, broad through the shoulders like all Nightkeeper males, with muscles to match the warrior’s mark he wore on his inner forearm, along with his bloodline and talent glyphs.

“Red-Boar,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure the words actually came out aloud. But did it really matter? Fantasy, figment, or spirit—surely it could read her mind?

“Hey, Anna,” the apparition said, only the voice was wrong. And then the ghost shifted from one foot to the other and slipped something into his pocket, and the air around him changed and she saw that it wasn’t the father at all. It was the son.

“Rabbit.” This time her voice had sound and shape, leaving her lungs in a rush. “You’ve grown.” It wasn’t just the size of him, either. His face was different than it’d been in the fall, which was the last time she’d seen him, because she’d made an excuse to skip the winter solstice ritual.

He half turned, and jerked his head in the direction of the great room. “Strike’s in there.”

“Thanks.” She was seriously unnerved by how much he looked like the young man his father had been, back when she was a girl and the Nightkeepers had numbered into the hundreds. She moved to pass the teen, then stopped when she saw the rough patch of a partly healed burn that twisted its way across the side of his neck, then down beneath the undershirt. She sucked in a breath. “What happened to your neck?”

He raised a hand reflexively to touch the spot. “Long story.”

Standing near him, she caught a strange smell. It was the odor of smoke and blood, but it wasn’t that of incense and ritual sacrifice. More like a house fire, though there was no sign of damage aside from the scar, which would fade in time, courtesy of their healing magic. “I can make time,” she said.

“I’d like to hear it.”

She hadn’t known Rabbit well as a little boy. She’d been in full-on teenage rebellion mode right about the time Red-Boar had reappeared in her, Strike’s, and Jox’s lives, towing a toddler he’d refused to give a proper name or bloodline ritual. She’d been reeling from the horrifying loss of her parents—

and her entire world structure—and she hadn’t made it easy for anyone to like her, never mind love her. Not long after Red-Boar’s return, she’d taken off for college. After thoroughly embarrassing herself, of course, but Rabbit didn’t ever need to know that she’d once propositioned his father.

Still, the history was there. The link was there.

“Why do you care?” Whereas Rabbit had been in perma-sullen mode the previous fall, now there was an actual edge of curiosity in the question.

“Because we’re both on the outside looking in.”

He seemed to consider that for a few seconds, then nodded. “Fair enough.” He didn’t say yes or no and she didn’t press, but as she followed him into the great room she felt a little less alone than she had only moments earlier.

When she reached the main room of the mansion, she found the rest of the Nightkeepers and the winikin waiting for her, taking up the sectional sofa and a bunch of chairs, with the remainder sitting at the bar near the kitchen, or sprawled on the floor. All twenty of them. Back before the massacre, the entire complement of Nightkeepers and winikin wouldn’t have fit in the mansion, never mind the great room. There were so few of them now. Too few.

“Anna.” Her brother rose to his feet and crossed to her, arms outstretched. “Welcome home.”

She returned Strike’s hug and didn’t correct the home thing, mostly because that’d been the upshot of her soul-searching road trip: She didn’t know where home was anymore. She’d thought it was with Dick, had wanted it to be, or thought she did. But how badly could she want it if learning the ID of his mistress had sent her running? The affair was over and done with, and they’d been making efforts to rekindle the romance in their marriage. She should’ve stayed and either talked it out with him or found a way to let the past stay in the past.

But everything that’s happened before will happen again, her suspicions put in, using the Nightkeepers writs to give form to her fears. He’d been unfaithful at least once before; what was to say he wouldn’t do it again? Worse, her gut told her that Desiree was after her because he’d given her reason to think their affair still had a chance. How could she reconcile all that?

She couldn’t, which was why she’d come to Skywatch. And, she realized as she leaned into the solid bulk of her brother, who had grown even larger with the responsibilities of being a mated man, and a king, she’d needed her family, such as it was. “Hey, baby brother,” she said, pressing her cheek to his.

“What’d I miss?”

There was a snort from up on the bar stools, where the winikin were sitting, overseeing their charges. “What didn’t you miss?” parried Jox, the man who’d been as much of a father to her as her real father had been even before the massacre.

Moving slowly, feeling the ache of too much thinking and driving, Anna disengaged from Strike and crossed the room to hug the royal winikin . She sketched a wave at Leah and hitched herself up on the bar behind Jox, so she was sitting with the winikin rather than the magi. She smiled at the others, who all looked pretty much the same as when she’d seen them last—young and big and gorgeous, and just starting to come into their powers. “Am I interrupting?”

“We were actually waiting for you,” Strike said. “Command performance.” He handed her a sheet of paper marked with a string of hand-drawn glyphs.

She frowned at the copied inscription. “What’s this?”

“The starscript off the Ixchel statuette. We had good starlight last night, and figured this’d save time, given that you didn’t wind up getting an earlier flight.”

“Long story,” she said, echoing Rabbit’s earlier words to her. “Okay. Give me”— an hour , she started to say, but even before she could finish the thought, the glyphs were rearranging themselves in her brain, forming pictures first, then words.

She didn’t know if it was a vision or something else, but the crimson power of the royal jaguar bloodline flowed through her, sweeping her up and carrying her along. Her vision washed red, then gold, and when the mists cleared she could read the inscription as though it were written in English, plain as day.

“Anna,” Strike said, crossing to her to grab her shoulder and give her a shake. “What’s wrong?”

She batted him away. “Nothing. It’s just . . . Nothing.” She let the paper drop, because the words were burned in her brain. “To paraphrase, it reads: The first son of Camazotz succeeds unless the Volatile—” She broke off.