Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

He dropped down along the rock wall to where the dark shadow of a tunnel led away. When he reached the tunnel mouth he glanced back at her. She gave him a thumbs-up, though her stomach churned. He nodded, slipped into the tunnel, and started swimming.

Alexis stayed right behind him, trying not to stir up too much silt as she swam, but feeling seriously awkward with all the stuff she was holding. At about the one-minute mark she took a hit off the pony bottle and let her exhaled bubbles trail behind her. She told herself not to use too much of the air too fast. Then, moments later, Nate’s light curved upward and disappeared as the tunnel ended.

Following, she saw him break the surface of an air pocket. In the water all around her, stalagmites thrust upward. Before she’d even surfaced, she knew they were in the right place, and the knowledge twisted her heart with lust, with regret at knowing the dream wouldn’t be repeated. Why couldn’t real-

life stuff be as simple as it was in her fantasies?

Knowing there was no answer for that one, she kicked upward and broke through to take a deep breath. The air was okay, though it smelled of age and stale copan incense.

The long, narrow chamber was just as she’d remembered it, just as she’d described it: the crowd scenes carved on the parallel walls and the short side behind them, the flying serpent and the rainbows overhead, and the limestone pillars marching up to the carved throne at the far end. The torches were dead where they’d been lit before, but everything else was the same, even the way the water went clearer and warmer as they swam toward the throne.

“It’s beautiful,” Nate said, his voice rasping a little as he drew close to the V-shaped stalagmites where the two of them had made love in her vision. He touched one of them in passing, and she felt a phantom caress glide across her skin, as though he’d touched her, not the stone. Then he was past the spot and climbing up on the platform. Once he was up on the ledge, he turned back and reached down to help her.

Alexis stared at his hand, then up at him, and saw nothing. No memory, not even a hint of heat. He didn’t remember.

Swallowing back a ball of tears that came out of nowhere, she put her hand in his and let him pull her up. They didn’t speak as they ditched their knapsacks and pony bottles in a pile, then pulled out the flashlights, which were strong enough to illuminate the entire arcade. The artificial light seemed cold and wrong when Alexis’s memory said it should’ve been torchlight, magic, and the twining colors of love. But maybe this was better. In the harsher light she’d be less tempted to confuse the vision with reality.

In the vision there had been love. In reality there was a job to do.

She waved Nate toward the altar. “Stand over there, facing me.”

He moved as she directed, but said, “Why?”

“Because that was where your father was standing.” The words were out before she thought how he might take them, given that he was just beginning to even admit that he’d had parents who’d lived and breathed back at Skywatch, and had been a part of the life he was living now.

But Nate said nothing. He simply took his place, stone-faced.

“Gray-Smoke was standing here.” Alexis moved to her mother’s place, but felt nothing. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to feel—some sort of resonance, maybe, or an echo of bloodline power.

Instead she was aware only of the press of stone against the bottoms of her feet and the damnable pull that kindled whenever she was near Nate, a combination of chemistry and the goddess’s power. “I wish I’d heard the spell they were using,” she said, then frowned. “Which brings up the question of why they were here in the first place.” She’d been trying to figure that one out since her latest dream, and hadn’t gotten anywhere. “I asked Izzy, but she couldn’t even be sure when they went off together.”

She looked around. “Why here?”

It was more of a rhetorical question than anything, given that Nate was the antihistory buff. But he surprised her by saying, “They were trying to work a spell that would tell them whether or not Scarred-Jaguar’s visions were real, and whether the gods truly meant for them to attack the intersection during the summer solstice of ’eighty-four.”

For a second Alexis just stared at him. “How do you know that?”

“Carlos told me back when I first arrived, before he gave up trying to spoon-feed me the history.”

Alexis tipped her head, considering. “What did he say exactly?”

“I was trying to ignore him, remember?” When she just waited him out, he lifted a shoulder. “He said the two of them went away for a few days right before the summer solstice. Said they were going to get proof, one way or the other. When they came back they were barely speaking to each other, acting really weird. They said the augury spell they tried didn’t work.”

“Or maybe it did, but it didn’t answer the question they thought they were asking.”

“None of which is really relevant at the moment,” he pointed out. “We’re here to get the statuette.

In your vision, where was it?”

She stared at him for a long moment, trying to decide whether it’d be worth having the fight, and in the end deciding probably not, because she’d never get him to admit that studying the past informed the present. Letting out a long breath, she said, “Here.” She turned and touched one of the limestone columns, a rainbow carved between two snakes. “It is—or was—behind here.” But there was no seam in the carved stone, no pressure pad to open a hidden compartment.

“Blood,” Nate said succinctly, and handed over his own knife.

The haft was warm from his body heat, the feel of it far more intimate than it should’ve been. She nicked her palm, pressed it to the carved column, and whispered, “Pasaj och.” Open sesame.

She jerked her hand back, shocked when, just that easily, the stone puffed to vapor beneath her hand, revealing the alcove she’d seen in her vision . . . and the carving that would complete the statuette of Ixchel. Holding her breath, halfway afraid it too would puff to mist when she touched it, she reached into the hidden niche and grasped the stone fragment, which looked to be another chunk of the basket the carved goddess sat atop.

She exhaled a sigh of relief when it stayed solid, heavy and warm in her hand.

“Got it?” Nate asked, his voice suddenly sounding too loud in the echoing chamber.

“Got it, thank the gods.” She withdrew the carving. The moment it was clear of the alcove, the stone pillar puffed back into existence and went solid. “Whoa.” She touched the spot and felt stone where an empty space had been only seconds earlier. “That was pretty cool.”

“Agreed.” Nate dug into his knapsack and held out a T-shirt and a padded, collapsible cooler about the size of a six-pack. When she raised an eyebrow, he lifted a shoulder. “Figured we’d need something to protect it for the trip back.”

The small gesture shouldn’t have touched her. Because it did, she avoided meeting his eyes as she wrapped the carving in his shirt and tucked it inside the cooler, which she zipped up and held out to him. “You want to carry it?”

“Sure.” Their fingers brushed as he took the cooler, sending a frisson of heat up her arm. From the sudden lock of his eyes on hers, she knew he’d felt it too. The sensual buzz between them kicked up a notch, and they both stood there, each, she suspected, waiting for the other to make the first move either toward or away.

Sudden urgency beat within her. She wanted him, wanted to take him inside her, wanted to couple with him in the water, braced against the limestone pillars while the slap of wetness and flesh drove them both higher, drove them beyond reason. But the man in her vision wasn’t the one who stood opposite her now. The man in the vision had wanted her for herself. In reality, Nate didn’t know what he wanted, except his freedom from everything and everyone . . . which was incompatible with her concept of family, never mind their responsibilities to the Nightkeepers.