Sensing that she was being watched, she turned and glanced toward the kitchen area, and found Jox standing there. “Well,” she said on a sigh, “what now?”
She wasn’t entirely sure if she was asking about the next step she should take as an adviser or the next step—if any—she should take with Nate, with the goddess, with the magic. She figured she’d let the winikin pick; she was open to suggestions at this point.
“Now we wait,” he said, giving a vague answer to her vague question.
“Yeah,” she said, dipping her head in a nod. “We wait. We watch. We do the best we can.”
So the Nightkeepers and winikin waited, watched, and did the best they could. They waited until Leah and Strike came back, drooping with fatigue and defeat. They waited for Rabbit to contact them, growing more concerned as the days passed without any word from the teen, without Strike being able to connect to him with a teleport thread. And they waited as the hours and days passed, Saturn moved into opposition, and the barrier thinned. And as they waited, they did their best. Strike and Leah continued to search for the altar stone, only to be frustrated each time it seemed they were getting close. They had zero luck tracking down Iago, and there was still no sign of Sasha Ledbetter. Alexis practiced her magic, honing her shield and fireball spells, both of which glowed with rainbows. And she sat long into the nights with Strike, Leah, and Jox, arguing the options, until they finally settled on a calculated risk for the Saturn at Opposition ceremony.
Alexis, with Nate as her power boost, would travel into the barrier and attempt to work the three-
question spell. That seemed like their only option for gaining the information they needed about the Volatile and Ixchel’s defense against the first demon prophecy.
If they were lucky, the spell would work even though the opposition wasn’t a cardinal day.
Back in New Orleans, far away from Skywatch, both in miles and in his head, Rabbit hunkered in a narrow doorway that smelled of old smoke. He scanned the street using all his senses—physical and otherwise—to make sure the coast was clear, then slipped through a wrought-iron gate that led to a series of interconnected courtyards that would bring him to the rear entrance of Mistress Truth’s tea shop.
He’d been living there the past couple of days, ever since he’d bolted from the MFA and dumped his phone. With five hundred dollars cash in his pocket and a valid ID, it hadn’t been difficult for him to upgrade his wardrobe and hop on an Amtrak headed south. With his telekine powers, it also hadn’t been hard to bust into the tea shop and make himself at home, hoping Myrinne would check back. He was more or less safe and comfortable, and off the grid. The thing that sucked, though, was how much he missed being a part of something.
It wasn’t that he missed Skywatch so much—it was a pretty cool place, but it was just a place. As for the people . . . well, he’d never spent much time away from Strike or Jox before, but they were both busy with their own stuff now, and besides, the compound was so big, he’d been able to go days without seeing them if he wanted to. He’d been living in his old man’s cottage for the past few months, had gotten used to being alone. But after a couple of days of traveling, then shacking up in the tea shop, he’d realized that “alone” was a pretty relative thing back at Skywatch, where there was always somebody nearby, always something going on. In the tea shop he was totally solo. Granted, the streets of the French Quarter never actually quieted all the way down . . . but still, it wasn’t the same as being back in the training compound. He found he loved the isolation during the day, when he could ghost around the neighborhood looking for Myrinne, or just spend a few hours poking through the witch’s stuff. Most of it was crap, of course, but he’d gotten a power buzz off a few things, and had set them aside to fiddle with.
At night, though, things went quiet and his mind got very loud as it replayed what’d happened back at the museum. Brandt’s anger had stuck with him, along with the knowledge that Patience had gotten hurt because he’d been fiddling with his text messages. Rabbit had bought a new phone and called the investigator, Juarez, to do some checking on the museum break-in, so he knew the others had gotten away from the museum. But the fact that Strike hadn’t locked onto him for a ’port pretty much summed up where the Nightkeepers stood: You’ve fucked up enough times, kid. Good riddance.
Which meant he was on his own, at least until he found Myrinne. She’d checked out of the shelter Juarez had tracked her to, and vanished. The PI had told him to stay put, that he was on the case, but as the days passed, the stars aligned, and the barrier thinned, and Juarez kept telling him he’d have better news the next day, Rabbit knew what he had to do.
Screw the PI. He could find Myrinne himself . . . with a little help from the three-question nahwal .
The Nightkeepers were a somber group as they prepared for the Saturn at Opposition ceremony.
And why not? Nate thought, frustrated. The score was Iago three, Nightkeepers one. Hell, for all they knew, the Xibalban had Kulkulkan’s altar stone, along with the last two artifacts, a knife and bowl that Jade hadn’t yet managed to track down, even with Lucius’s help. The grad student was proving useful in other areas, though. His translation of the Ixchel poem hadn’t added much to what they already knew—it was a love poem, and although it mentioned rainbows, there didn’t seem to be any clues hidden within the text. That was assuming Lucius had the translation right, but Anna swore by him, so who was Nate to argue?
Lucius had been locked in the storeroom for the duration of the opposition ceremony, lest his connection to the makol reactivate when the barrier thinned. Nate felt bad for the guy; lockup was no fun, regardless of the situation. And although the slave bond had been a matter of necessity, Nate didn’t feel good about the royal council’s decision on that one, either. Then again, as far as Nate was concerned, the council could use an outside opinion. Leah might’ve started out as an antiestablishment type, but since being mated to Strike she’d been assimilated, Borg-like, into the Nightkeeper mind-set.
Jox was an establishment guy all the way, Alexis was good at improving ideas that were already out there but wasn’t an outside-the-box thinker, and Strike . . . well, as Carlos said, their king was his father’s son—a stubborn dreamer with huge sense of duty and a heart that could send him in the wrong direction with the best of intentions.
Not that Nate was planning on volunteering to sit in on the debates and act as the voice of reason.
Or rebellion, he thought, knowing he would be the maverick in the group, the one to counter all the history-steeped decisions.
Which so wasn’t what he should’ve been thinking about as he followed the others into the sacred room at Skywatch. Focus, dipshit, he told himself. He and Alexis were about to try pulling some serious magic on a non-cardinal day. He needed to get his head in the game.
The sacred chamber at Skywatch was a circular room located at the end of one of the mansion wings, decorated with intricately carved walls and a chac-mool altar like the one in the sacred tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá. Unlike the sacred chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, though, it was open to the stars and moon, which glowed through a glass-paneled ceiling. Where the cardinal-day ceremonies of the equinoxes and solstices were conducted down in the Yucatán, along with those celebrating high-magic events like an eclipse, the lesser ceremonies like Saturn at Opposition were held in-house at Skywatch.
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