Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

She wasn’t in the mood for the chatter—hadn’t been for a while, which was why she’d jumped at the chance to fly from New Mex out to the California coast for the auction. The quick trip had given her a chance to breathe air she wasn’t sharing with the same group of Nightkeepers and winikin she’d been cheek-by-jowl with for the past half year. She wasn’t the only one feeling it, either. Tensions were running high, thanks to the lack of both privacy and enemy activity.

Besides, she could guarantee the messages on her cell were nothing critical, because she wasn’t in line for the important stuff yet. Strike had his advisers—Leah and the royal winikin , Jox—and the three of them handled the heavy lifting, with the lower-impact jobs delegated to the newly inducted Nightkeepers.

For now, anyway. Alexis had her sights set higher. Her mother, Gray-Smoke, had been one of King Scarred-Jaguar’s most trusted advisers, holding political power equaled only by that of her adversarial coadviser, Two-Hawk. That pretty much figured, because Two-Hawk’s son was Alexis’s own personal nemesis, i.e., the someone who’d been seriously pissing her off over the past few months, ever since he’d dumped her on her ass right after the talent ceremony, with no explanation given beyond the old standard: It’s not you, it’s me.

Damn him.

“Ma’am? You’re all set.” The staffer held out her paperwork. “I have a couple of messages for you too. She said it was important.”

“Thanks.” Alexis took the slips, glanced at them, and tucked them into her pocket. Just Izzy mother-

henning her. The winikin would’ve gotten the text message by now, so they were square.

A grizzled, heavyset security guard set a metal case on the table and flipped it open so she could see the statuette nestled inside a shockproof foam bed, alongside the Mayan death mask she’d bought earlier. At her nod, the guard shut the case and slid it across the table to her, rumbling in a basso profundo voice, “Dial the numbers to what you want, and hit this button.” He pointed to an inset red dot. “That’ll set your combination. If you don’t want to bother, just leave it all zeros and it’ll act like a suitcase. Got it?”

“Got it.” A whim had her dialing in a date and hitting the red button. There was something satisfying about hearing the locks click.

Hefting the case, she gave the guard a friendly nod and headed out, mission accomplished. When she stepped through the front door of the estate, she found herself under the clear blue sky of a perfect February day in Nor Cal. The warm yellow sun and crisp, faintly salty air made her wish she’d opted for the convertible when she’d rented her car. But it’d been drizzling when she landed, so she’d treated herself to a sporty silver BMW that hugged the road like a lover. Convertible or not, the silver roadster ought to be automotive muscle enough to entertain her on the way back to LAX.

Sure enough, once she was on the road with the metal case in the passenger seat beside her, the feel of engine power and smooth leather lightened her mood, sending a victory dance through her soul. She had the statuette, and she wasn’t technically due back at Skywatch for another day. There was a sense of freedom in the thought, one that had her cranking the radio to something loud and edgy with a heavy backbeat as she pulled onto the narrow shoreline drive that led away from the lavish private estate that was being sold off, piece by piece, to settle the owner’s debts.

Alexis had thought it a stroke of luck that the sale had come up just as they’d started tracking down the lost artifacts, but Izzy had reminded her that there wasn’t much in the way of actual coincidence in the world. Most of what people thought of as happy accidents was really the will of the gods.

As she sent the BMW whipping around a low-g curve that dropped off to the right in a steep embankment and a million-dollar view of the Nor Cal coast, the thought of fate and the gods brought a quiver of unease, a sense that she’d already failed.

“If it was that easy to buck destiny it wouldn’t be destiny,” she told herself. Which was true, but still, it was hard not to feel like she’d gotten it wrong in the relationship department. Again.

The day Izzy had revealed her true heritage, Alexis had gotten a mental flash of an image: an etching of a fierce bird of prey. Then, just under a week later, she’d seen it again—on the medallion worn by Nate Blackhawk. No way that could be a coincidence. Neither could the fact that they’d immediately clicked . . . on the physical level, anyway. They’d danced around each other for the first couple of weeks, but once they’d gone through the bloodline ceremony and gotten their first forearm marks and their initial connections to the barrier, the overwhelming hormonal fluxes and enhanced sex drive that came with the magic had overridden their reservations and they’d become lovers. They’d done very, very well together sexually . . . but not so much outside the bedroom, where they’d clashed on almost every level. He was closed and difficult to read, and seemed to spend most of his time trying to prove that the gods didn’t control him, that he was free to make his own choices. In the end, she hadn’t been strong enough to hold them together—hadn’t been sure she’d wanted to, despite the omens that said they were meant for each other, and the knowledge that the magic of a mated Nightkeeper pair was ten times that of either mage alone.

It’d helped that Izzy didn’t like him either. Since the winikin both guided and protected the Nightkeepers, Izzy’s relief at the breakup had helped ease the sting . . . particularly since Izzy was the one who was always pushing Alexis to do her best, be her best, and live up to her mother’s memory.

Gray-Smoke had been a legend in her own time, a powerful mage and adviser to the king. As far as Izzy was concerned, Alexis could be nothing less.

“Unfortunately, that’s proving easier said than done,” Alexis muttered.

Torturing herself, she shoved her sleeve up to her elbow, baring her right forearm, where each of the Nightkeepers and winikin was marked with Mayan glyphs that denoted status and power. The black marks looked like tattoos but were actually magic, appearing fully formed during special ceremonies in which a Nightkeeper went from child to trainee, from trainee to mage. Alexis wore two marks: the curling anthropomorphic b’utz glyph representing the smoke bloodline, and the three stacked blobs of the warrior’s talent mark, which had given her increased reflexes and strength, along with the ability to call up shields and fireballs, though not very effectively as yet. And that was it. Two marks, smoke and warrior. She hadn’t gotten an additional talent during the second ceremony. Granted, only about a third of Nightkeepers got a talent mark, and talents could sometimes appear after the formal ceremony, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to accept that so far she was a dud in the magic department.

“Damn it,” she muttered, shoving down her sleeve and hitting the gas too hard going into the next curve, which was a blind turn arcing along a sheer drop leading down to Monterey Bay. Easing off and cursing herself for getting all tangled up when she was supposed to be enjoying the day away and a job well-done, she nursed the car around the corner—

And drove straight into a wall of fire.

She screamed and cranked the wheel as flames lashed at the car, slapping in through the open windows and searing the air around her. Worse was the power that crackled along her skin, feeling dark and twisted.

Ambush!

Her warrior’s instincts fired up; she fought the urge to slam on the brakes and hit the gas instead, hoping to punch through the fire, but it was already too late. The car cut loose and slid sideways, losing traction when all four tires blew. Heart pounding, she wrestled with the wheel and forced herself not to inhale. Smoke burned her eyes and throat and the exposed skin at her wrists and face.