Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Even now, understanding why she’d insisted he leave the issue of the Nightkeepers alone, he couldn’t forgive how she’d pulled away from him when he’d started questioning her translations and interpretations. More than ever, he was convinced that she’d altered his files, removing the vital screaming-skull glyph and weakening his thesis work.

Rage washed over and through him, hammering in his skull like pain. Like pleasure.

“Damn it!” Lucius dropped to sit at the edge of the low camping cot, which gave a rickety squeak under his weight. He dug his fingers through his hair, rubbing at his scalp, which had tightened with the beginnings of a headache at best, one of his very rare migraines at the worst. And it wasn’t like he had any way to ask for an aspirin.

His head spun and nausea churned, and he saw a flash of green, strange and luminous. It cleared when he blinked, but the afterimage stayed burned on his retinas for several seconds.

Deep inside, a small voice asked, What the hell is happening to me? He didn’t feel like himself, didn’t know where the anger was coming from, the pain. He should’ve been psyched to have found the Nightkeepers. And now that he understood what Anna had been wrestling with, he should’ve been relieved to know why she’d been strange around him lately. He should’ve been sympathetic, maybe even excited that they could move to a new level of trust now that he knew.

Instead, he wanted to snap and tear at her, wanted to hurt her. And that was so not him.

Curling onto his side, he moaned low in his throat, crossed his arms over his abdomen, and wrapped himself in a self-hug, feeling alone and angry. Out of control. The pounding in his head gripped him, took him over. He slapped for the light switch and plunged the room into darkness, which was a blessed relief.

The surface beneath him spun and dipped, and he longed for unconsciousness, reached for it when it came. But as he dropped off, a fragment of thought that felt more like his own than any of the others swirling in his head warned him that he’d forgotten something important, something that he needed to tell Anna immediately. But the thought, and the compulsion, slipped away as the green-tinged darkness rose up and claimed him.

Alexis was flat-out exhausted by the time the eclipse night edged toward the next day’s dawn. She’d eaten and showered, and knew she should sleep for half a day or so, allowing her body to recharge from the magic and get accustomed to the conduit she could feel at the back of her brain, granting her access to the goddess Ixchel. But it was that last bit that kept her awake.

She was a Godkeeper; how crazy was that?

She tried not to think of the look on Strike’s face when he’d learned that she, not Patience, had become the Godkeeper, with Nate as her mate, and that the goddess Ixchel had gained a foothold on earth. He’d been pleased, sure, but not overjoyed. She’d wanted—needed—the king’s approval, and hadn’t really gotten it. Which was why she couldn’t sleep.

Or so she told herself. But when the knock came, she knew exactly who stood outside her door, and the true reason she was still awake.

Wearing her robe, her hair still wet from the shower, she rose and crossed the sitting area of her three-room suite to answer. Her suite had the same layout as those of all the other single Nightkeepers, aside from Rabbit, who lived in his father’s cottage. Her place was the nicest of all of them, though.

She’d redone it right after Nate dumped her, in part because there had been too many memories of the two of them together in the room, which they’d used almost exclusively. He’d never invited her to his suite, and had ducked the issue when she’d asked. She was proud of how her space looked now, all vibrant colors and lush fabrics, and suffered a small twinge of nerves as she waved Nate through, and a larger flash of irritation at the part of herself that cared what he thought.

When she opened the door, though, nothing much else mattered except the sight of him. He’d showered, too; she could smell a hint of soap and moisture, with the rich undertones of arousal and magic. He was wearing dark pants and a dark button-down shirt undone at the throat to show the glint of his chain, with dress shoes, their laces tied in perfect knots though it was nearly dawn and they were both still up from the night before. On another man the outfit might’ve looked stiff and formal. On Nate it looked like what it was: the uniform of a wealthy self-made man who was comfortable with himself and in control of his environment. He’d traded his designer glasses for laser surgery a few months earlier, for the benefit of fighting, so when his eyes met hers they were unshielded by dark frames or glass, though his expression remained as inscrutable as ever.

In that moment, standing at her door, he looked less like the mage and warrior he’d become, and more like the successful businessman who’d shown up at Skywatch in a stretch SUV the prior summer. He looked like the men she’d dated all her life, only more so. And she’d sworn off those men, hadn’t she?

Rhetorical question, she thought. You’re a Godkeeper now. And the gods had chosen Nate for her shieldmate.

Nerves pulsing beneath her skin, she stepped back from the doorway, nodding for him to follow.

“Come on in.”

He took a quick, dark look around the cream-and-teal upholstery and Bokhara rug, and curled his lip. “You’ve got expensive taste, princess.” His edgy energy rode the air between them, warning that he’d come for a fight.

Stung, and pissed because it wasn’t like she’d chosen the new direction their lives had swerved over to either, she jerked up her chin and glared at him. “It’s not your money, so why do you care?”

Reaching out, he pushed the door shut, closing them in together. Suddenly he was very near her, his energy surrounding her, angry, sexual, and very, very male, tempting her to reach out and touch.

“No,” she said aloud, surprising herself. Surprising them both. She stepped back, putting a distance between them that seemed much wider than the few feet she’d created.

He went very still. “No to what?”

“To this.” She pointed from him to her and back. “To us. I don’t want it to be like this.”

His brows furrowed, his eyes darkening with irritation. “This from the original author of the company line? What happened to ‘we need to do this for the Nightkeepers and mankind’ and all that crap? Was that just—”

“Stop it,” she interrupted sharply. “Don’t you dare.”

There was silence between them for a few heartbeats, and then he spread his hands in a thoroughly masculine gesture of I’m clueless . “You’re going to have to help me here. This isn’t what I want or how I wanted it, but I’m willing to try if you are.”

And if that wasn’t the least romantic statement ever, she didn’t know what was. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Sex between Nightkeepers wasn’t always about romance; sometimes it was strict necessity. The thing was, she wasn’t just a Nightkeeper. She’d been raised in the human world, and had human values too. And one of those values included not having sex with a man who shouted the wrong name when he came. Which, when she’d played it back in her head, she realized Nate had done in the sacred chamber. “Who is Hera?”

He stilled. “Where did you hear that name?”

His tone was all the confirmation Alexis needed. She closed her eyes on a slap of pain, of shame.

Goddamn it. She’d been the other woman and she hadn’t even known. She forced herself to meet his eyes, and kept her voice level when she said, “From you . . . in the moment, so to speak.”