Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

He cursed aloud, feeling raw from the fight with Alexis, and guilty that he’d called Hera’s name in the moment of orgasm. Worse, he wasn’t sure which one of them he’d betrayed. Which was just fucked-up beyond words, and made him think he should maybe have a chat with Jade, who’d been a therapist of some sort back in the real world.

At the thought of Jade, he wondered what she’d say if Alexis wound up taking Michael as her lover.

Jade and Michael had been together in the months between the bloodline and talent ceremonies, in much the same way as Nate and Alexis had been. Actually, Jade and Michael had been more open about their relationship, more prone to public displays of affection until they’d gone their separate ways. They seemed to get along well enough in the aftermath, but the Nightkeepers were a small fighting unit, and their quarters were close. What would happen if the singles started trading partners?

Nate tried to imagine it, and just got more pissed off.

Torturing himself, poking at the raw spot, he tried to imagine what it’d be like if Michael turned Alexis down—hard to imagine, but what if?—and she hooked up with Sven. The youngest of the male Nightkeepers, Sven came off more like a college party animal than a warrior. He’d been a little more serious about his training since the equinox battle, and his rank within the Nightkeepers would undoubtedly shift now that he had the translocator’s talent mark. The rank might matter to Alexis, as might her desire not to mess with the dynamic between Jade and Michael. Still, though, Nate couldn’t see her being attracted to Sven’s surfer-dude ’tude or the relatively low rank of the coyote bloodline.

“So probably not Sven,” Nate said aloud, feeling something loosen in his chest, only to have it tighten back up when his thoughts circled back to Michael, whom he could picture all too easily being to Alexis’s taste, not the least because he and Nate resembled each other: They were both tall and dark, both stylish in their own ways, and both came off as wealthy. In Michael’s case, though, Nate suspected the money was only surface-deep. More, he had a feeling that a background check that went a level or two further than the one Jox had done on each of them might turn up something seriously dark and dangerous, something that Alexis belonged nowhere near. Nate didn’t have any evidence to back up his hunch, though. It was just a guess, based on a couple of overheard snatches of the telephone convos Michael invariably took in his private rooms, and the fact that of all of them, Michael had shown the least desire to leave the compound and return to the real world they’d left behind.

I should have Carter look into him, Nate thought, then cursed himself for the impulse. Michael was a Nightkeeper, a teammate. He deserved better.

They all did.

Realizing he wasn’t any closer to sleep than he’d been when he lay down—in fact, feeling even more alert and awake now that he’d worked himself into a mental lather—Nate groaned and swung himself out of bed. Dragging a T-shirt on over a pair of gym shorts, he figured he’d head downstairs for a workout, hoping to exhaust himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the same plan he’d had the evening after the bloodline ceremony, when he’d gone to the gym hoping to tire himself past the perma-boner he’d acquired with his first link to the magic. Instead Alexis had come looking for him, and they’d become lovers.

And that so wasn’t what he wanted to be thinking about right now.

Cursing himself, he headed out of his suite and down the residential hall, toward the stairs leading to the basement. He was halfway there when a scream split the air.

Alexis! He knew it was her, knew it in his gut, and was running for her door before the sound died off.

Images flashed in his head—not visions, but a mix of the things he’d seen and the ones he feared: scenes of Iago grabbing her and ’porting her someplace he couldn’t follow; scenes of her lying limp, bleeding out from sacrificial cuts in a long, rectangular chamber he didn’t recognize, one that his brain must’ve conjured to fill the need for a dark and creepy setting.

He hit her door at a run, twisting the knob and using his shoulder, slamming the panel inward with such force that it banged against the inner wall hard enough to break the stopper and dent the drywall.

He didn’t care about the door, didn’t care about the growing clamor of voices out in the hallway as the others responded to the commotion.

“Alexis!” He pushed through into her bedroom, slapping at the light switch on the way through, his heart in his throat with a half-recognized conviction that she’d be gone, her bed empty.

But she was there, sitting bolt upright in bed with the sheet clutched just above her nightshirt-

covered breasts. Her skin was pasty pale, her eyes glazed, seeing nothing. His initial spurt of relief at seeing her there in one piece fled quickly when he realized she wasn’t tracking, hadn’t noticed his arrival.

His first impulse was to grab and shake her, but the memory of being drawn into her link with the Ixchel statuette had him staying clear and raising his voice. “Alexis, snap out of it!”

She didn’t even blink.

Others were starting to come into the room now: Strike and Leah first, followed by Jox and Izzy, and then Michael, whom Nate really didn’t want to see just then. Nate forced himself to block them out, though, as he reached out and gripped Alexis’s wrist. When he wasn’t immediately sucked into the barrier, he said, “Come on, Lexie,” deliberately using the intimate nickname. He was partly hoping she’d hear it and know who was calling her back, partly wanting Michael to hear it and know Alexis was his, even though Nate knew the territorial urge marked him as a complete shit. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

That was so wrong it wasn’t even funny, because he was rapidly learning there was no such thing as

“just a dream” in the Nightkeepers’ world. Which was probably why he never dreamed. His subconscious wouldn’t let him.

The lie worked, though. Somehow it worked. Alexis stirred, and her pulse cranked up beneath his touch. She blinked and focused on him, then looked past him to where most of the resident Nightkeepers and winikin were crammed in her bedroom, expressions ranging from what the hell? to oh, shit .

Bright spots of embarrassment stained her cheeks. “I screamed, didn’t I?” When she closed her eyes for a second, Nate saw the pain she was trying to hide.

“What did you see?” he asked quietly, aware that he was still holding on to her wrist, and she’d curled her hand around to grip his forearm, linking them palm-to-mark.

When she hesitated, Leah said, “Would you like us to leave?”

“No,” Alexis said, too quickly. Her blush went darker and she pulled away from Nate, scooting higher up in her bed so there was a sizable gap between them. “No, you should all stay and hear this.”

It stung that she didn’t want to be alone with him, didn’t want to lean on him, but that was what he’d wanted, right? He didn’t get to bitch about getting his way.

“The dream?” Strike prompted, his eyes intent on her, no doubt because of all of them, he was the biggest believer in dreams and their portents.

“I saw . . .” She shuddered and looked at Nate, then away, staring out the window and the gathering dawn when she said, “I saw Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk; I’m sure of it this time.”

The logical part of Nate would’ve asked, “This time?” because he hadn’t known she’d seen their parents before this. But the other part of him, the closed-off, judgmental part, had already turned away, blocking off acknowledgment of the past. He didn’t care what his father had done, who he’d been. The circumstances had been beyond his parents’ control, granted, but that didn’t change the fact that they’d been nothing more to him than DNA donors.