Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Without their bloodline marks and that connection to the barrier, they were essentially invisible to the Banol Kax . They’d be safer away than they were at Skywatch; that much was clear. What wasn’t clear was why Jox was so upset. He should be happy it was a couple of winikin taking them, not a pair of full-bloods taking off and diluting their fighting force. Besides, Hannah and Woody were a couple; they’d give the kids as close to a normal family setup as possible, under the circumstances. But when Rabbit looked, he saw that Jox was gone, like he hadn’t been able to sit there and listen to Strike after the king had made his call.

What was up with that?

“The rest of us will stay here and shore up the defenses,” Strike continued, and Rabbit returned his attention to the meeting.

“Why not go after Iago?” Sven demanded. “We’ve got two gods on our side now. We should be able to kick his ass, especially if we do it on the next ceremony day, the Seville at Opposition or whatever.”

“Saturn at Opposition,” Strike gritted, glaring at Sven. “And you seem to be forgetting that we don’t have a clue how Iago’s powers work. So far we’ve seen him teleport and mind-bend, and his mind-

bending worked effectively on a Nightkeeper, which is highly unusual.” He glanced at Rabbit. He didn’t say, Rabbit’s just a half-blood, though, which might explain his susceptibility. But he thought it.

Rabbit knew that for sure. The king continued, “Besides, we don’t have a clue about the Xibalbans’ strength yet. There could be just the two of them; there could be hundreds. We don’t know nearly enough about them yet to think about going after them.”

“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him to come after us?” Sven asked, sounding annoyed.

“What happened to the best defense being a good offense?”

“Offense doesn’t always mean going after the other side,” Strike said evenly. “Sometimes it means making the enemy do what you want, thinking it’s their idea.”

Nate narrowed his eyes, one of which was nearly swollen shut already and rapidly darkening to a bruise. “You want Iago to come here. Why?”

“Because we don’t have a clue what we’re up against,” Strike answered. “We need to know what the Order of Xibalba intends to do between now and the end-time; we need to get an idea of their numbers and their magic; and quite frankly, I’d like to convince them that they don’t have to like us, but that we’re all better off if we live through to New Year’s Day, 2013.”

“And if their idea of a workable negotiation rests on our absence from the earth?” Nate pushed.

“Then at least we’ll learn something about the enemy.” Strike glanced at Anna. “Given that our location has almost certainly been compromised, I say we plan to use the potential security breach rather than whining about it.”

“And Lucius?” Anna asked quietly.

“He stays locked up for now.” Which wasn’t really an answer. It was only a delay.

The meeting broke up soon after that. It was about time, as far as Rabbit was concerned, because everything they’d spent the past forty minutes going over seemed like it could be pretty much summed up as, “The king’s going to do what he wants.” Hello, history repeating itself. Strike’s father had ignored his advisers and led the Nightkeepers to their deaths. What if Strike was in the process of doing the same? Was loyalty defined as going along with the flow, or, if it didn’t seem like the flow was heading the right way, doing something to change it?

Rabbit wasn’t sure, but he knew he didn’t like the way things were headed, and he had an idea that might help shed some light. Waiting until he saw that Jade was deep in convo with Strike and Anna, he made tracks for the archive.

On the first floor, tucked around a corner and down a short hall, the three-room library held the collected knowledge of generations of Nightkeepers, as well as just about everything that’d ever been written by outsiders regarding the Mayan end-time prophecy and the Great Conjunction. Jade was almost finished organizing and computerizing all of it, but the system wasn’t online yet. That was too bad, because Rabbit was pretty sure he could’ve hacked past the basic passwords she was using to protect the spells Strike had decreed off-limits without special authorization, namely his. Since the database wasn’t finished yet, if Rabbit wanted one of those spells he was going to have to get his hands on the actual books, which were locked in the second of the three rooms. Lucky for him, locks weren’t much of a challenge these days. His powers were growing faster even than he was letting on to the others, making it no strain when he slapped a palm on the door and concentrated and felt the tumblers fall into place.

As he pushed through the door into the second room of the archive, where the older books and a handful of nonperishable artifacts were kept, he told himself this was the right thing to do. It was his fault Iago had gotten the knife in New Orleans, so he owed it to Strike and the others to figure out how to get it back. And he owed it to Myrinne to make sure she was safe, because he knew what it was like when nobody gave a shit.

“Okay,” he said to the rows of neatly shelved books in the librarylike room. “Will the three-

question spell please step forward?”

He found the book he was looking for almost right away, recognizing the binding from last fall, when Strike and Leah had used the spell to figure out why she, a human, had sporadic power.

Technically the spell was supposed to work only on the cardinal days, the equinoxes and solstices, but Rabbit was betting he could make it work for Saturn at Opposition. He was positive he could call the three-question nahwal , the spirit guide who would answer three questions per person per lifetime.

Granted, the nahwal wasn’t strictly bound to answer the questions in a way that made immediate sense, but it’d be better than nothing, right?

Strike and Leah had already burned their questions, and the theory was that the rest of the Nightkeepers were supposed to save their questions for stuff that would be important to all of them, mostly dealing with the end-time. But Rabbit was so not into socialism. As far as he was concerned, it was his life, his questions.

He was a half-blood, after all. He might as well live down to expectations.

Two days later Alexis was in the weapons shed located between the ball court and the firing range at the back of the compound, prepping for the Belize trip by loading her weapons belt with spare clips of jade-tipped bullets, when she heard the scuff of a footstep in the gritty, wind-blown sand outside.

She turned, tensing. “Hello?”

Nate appeared in the doorway, his big body blocking the gap and his energy filling the small shed.

He looked darker, rougher, and more dangerous than usual, the bruises on his face having gone from raw red to dark. Sensual awareness prickled across Alexis’s skin, shimmering inward to gather in her core and at the back of her brain, where the connection to Ixchel awoke at his proximity. He’s the one, the goddess seemed to be saying.

Well, guess what? The goddess was wrong. He wasn’t the one. He was an ass.

Alexis couldn’t believe he and Michael had beaten each other up, couldn’t believe neither of them would tell her why, though guessing was easy: She was the only thing that’d changed between the men. She wasn’t flattered, either, though Anna and Jade seemed to think she ought to be. No, she was seriously annoyed. She figured it was safe to assume that Nate had gone after Michael, who’d fought back in self-defense. And that scenario was just asinine, because Nate was the one who kept distancing himself from their nonrelationship. He didn’t have any right to be pissed at Michael. Not that either of them would talk about it, of course; they were sticking together in some sort of Neanderthal code of ethics that just made her more annoyed.