Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Personally, Nate thought they should’ve gone south anyway, given that he and Alexis were supposed to enact the three-question spell. Strike was banking on her Godkeeper powers to fuel the spell, but Nate couldn’t see how it would’ve hurt for them to stack the deck even further by invoking the spell at the intersection. Not that anyone had asked his opinion, least of all Alexis, whom he’d seen less and less frequently as her duties increased.

He hadn’t even realized how much time they’d spent together—or actively avoiding each other—

until it wasn’t happening anymore. He missed the contact, missed the arguments. And yeah, he knew it made him a prick, but it wasn’t until she wasn’t around all the time that he realized how much he’d enjoyed having her around. Which made zero sense, given that he’d spent the past six months trying to drive her away, but there it was. He would’ve liked to talk to her about the things he was learning from Carlos about his bloodline, about his family. He wanted to hash over the inconsistencies he was seeing in some of the prophecies, and get Alexis’s take on the Iago situation. But instead he held himself away, figuring he’d muddied those waters for far too long, and she deserved some space.

Whether or not there was distance between them, though, he knew the moment she came through the doorway into the sacred room. He could feel her energy on his skin and hear the hum in the air change in pitch, singing a high, sweet note.

She was wearing the black robes of a Nightkeeper warrior-priest, a long ceremonial regalia worked with stingray spines and shells, with pointed sleeves and a long hood. They were all wearing the robes over combat clothes, except for Jade, who wore scribe’s gray and minimal weapons, and Strike, Leah, and Anna, who wore royal red robes over full combat gear.

But although Alexis was dressed like the others, Nate knew where she was every instant, even with her hood covering her streaky blond hair, and her back to him. He recognized the way she carried herself, the way the air seemed to shimmer in rainbows around her. And as she turned and glanced at him, he recognized the way his blood heated with the attraction he’d never managed to outrun or ignore.

She looked strong and tough, her movements graceful, as though she’d finally stopped wishing to be small and delicate and finally embraced the fact that she was an athlete, a warrior. Her high cheekbones stood out sharply, suggesting that she’d lost weight when he hadn’t been watching, or maybe the magic and responsibility had burned away the last of the human softness, leaving the Valkyrie behind.

“Nate,” she said finally, nodding and moving toward him, because one of them had to do something besides stare across the room.

“You look good,” he said, forcing himself not to reach out to her, because he’d given up that right rather than get into something he hadn’t been ready to deal with, might not ever be. Nightkeeper sex wasn’t about love; it was about power and necessity, and he’d played that game too many times already.

“You too,” she said, though he had a feeling the return compliment was a formality. He was pretty sure he looked like shit. He’d been eating too little, working out too much, and working on VW6 long into the nights, hunkered down in his parents’ cottage, typing furiously.

The rest of the story had finally started coming together when he’d realized the source of his block.

Hera hadn’t totally clicked with any of the mates they’d sketched out for her—even Nameless—

because she hadn’t needed anything from them. Things hadn’t started to flow until he’d hit on the idea of giving her a childhood trauma that had driven her to fight. Once she had that small chink in her armor, covering a larger vulnerability, he’d been able to bring the story line forward, which was why he’d been up way too late, way too many nights lately.

That and the realization that as Hera was becoming vulnerable, Alexis was growing into herself, becoming the woman she’d always wanted to be . . . and he wasn’t part of that change.

“Alexis,” he began, then stalled because he didn’t know what the hell he wanted to say. The things he wanted were all tangled up in his brain with the stuff he knew were supposed to happen according to the gods, and that was crammed against things he knew didn’t work for him, couldn’t ever work.

Her lips turned up at the corners in a small smile that was more acknowledgment than emotion.

“Yeah. I know.”

“Okay, gang, let’s do this,” Strike said, breaking up their nonconversation, which was both frustrating and a relief.

At the king’s gesture, the Nightkeepers took their positions, forming a circle within the circular room, with Strike and Leah standing with their backs to the chac-mool . Because they were going to be enacting the three-question spell, Nate and Alexis stood outside the circle, one on each side of the altar.

With them outside the circle, Red-Boar dead and Rabbit still missing, the Nightkeepers’ circle seemed very small.

“Ready?” Nate said, and Alexis nodded. She pulled her ceremonial knife and used it to blood her palm, then hesitated and held the knife out to him.

The act of using her knife to carve a bloody furrow in his palm seemed very intimate, and he held her eyes as he returned the knife and they joined hands over the altar. The background hum of magic sparked at the contact, jolting through him and lighting him up, sending his power higher than it’d ever been before, even when linked to the king. Gods, he thought, then amended it to, Goddess .

Because that was what he was feeling: Ixchel’s power. Alexis’s power.

“You remember the spell?” Alexis said quietly.

Nate nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”

They drew strength from the altar, and from the ashes of ten generations of Nightkeeper magi mixed into the mortar beneath the carved stone. They drew strength from each other, though he feared it wouldn’t be enough. Too much divided them, when the Godkeeper’s magic relied on the catalyst of her Nightkeeper mate.

Leaning on the magic they made together, and the humming pool of energy created by their uplinked teammates, they locked eyes and said in unison: “Pasaj och.”

They blinked into the barrier on a flash of gold and rainbows, with none of the lurching, rushing sensation Nate was used to. One second he was in the sacred room at Skywatch; the next he was in the barrier, standing facing Alexis, their hands linked. They stood on a flat, faintly spongy surface that they couldn’t see because gray-green mist swirled to their knees. The sky was the same gray-green, and the horizon—if there were such a thing in the barrier—was lost in the gray-green monotony of it all. Their entry to the barrier had been far smoother than ever before; before there had been a jolt, a rush, and a churn of nausea. But the barrier itself was the same as before.

“Wow. That was pretty painless,” Alexis said, mirroring his thoughts. She dropped his hands and looked around, as if to verify that they were really in the barrier.

“Thanks to the king’s adviser.” Nate faked a bow in her direction.

“Thanks to the goddess, you mean.”

It’s all you, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he said, “Stage two?”

She nodded. “Stage two.”

The three-question spell required petitioners to jack into the barrier, which meant that their physical bodies remained on earth—in this case, in the sacred chamber of Skywatch—while their incorporeal forms—their souls, for lack of a better term, though it made Nate cringe—entered the in-between gray-greenness of the barrier. Once there, the three-question petitioners had to perform a second bloodletting and another spell. Then, if Nate and Alexis had done everything right and had the magical chops to call the ancestor despite it not being a cardinal day, the three-question nahwal would appear.