Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Jade leaned close. “I didn’t see that before.”

The others crowded close to look. Nate didn’t know the glyph, but he knew where Lucius was pointing, all right. He muttered an oath. “Don’t tell me.”

“It makes sense,” Alexis murmured in return. “Why set booby traps if you’ve got nothing to protect?”

After Strike finished the postattack debriefing, Lucius headed back to his rooms, dogged by a nagging darkness the likes of which he hadn’t felt in weeks. He’d shot the shit out of the archive. How the fuck could he rationalize that?

He and Jade had been sitting together, dragging through the laborious chore of cross-checking the information from a set of scanned-in pages. A weird rattling sound had cut through the air, and seconds later a blond woman had popped into existence in the middle of the room, wearing combat gear and a soldier’s stone-faced expression, and toting a nasty-looking machine gun. She’d taken one look at Jade and Lucius and opened fire.

He didn’t know how he’d done what he’d done. He just knew that the moment he’d seen sweet, soft-

voiced Jade in the path of fire, a strange, luminous green had hazed his vision, and his body had gone into hyperdrive. Or maybe the world had slowed down; he didn’t know which. All he knew was that one second a line of automatic weapons fire had been walking its way across the archive toward Jade, and the next he somehow had the gun in his hands and was blasting away at the blond bitch. When the bullets finally ran out and the green haze cleared—he was a little iffy on the time line there, because he hadn’t exactly passed out, but things had sort of shifted suddenly—the room had been full of people, the door to the second archive room was open, and the Ixchel statuette was gone.

And according to Jade, he’d shot the shit out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of texts, which might’ve been scanned already, but had been irreplaceable nonetheless. “How could I have done that?”

“You know how,” Anna’s voice said from behind him.

He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his fingers around the raised scar on his palm. “You said the makol couldn’t get to me through the wards.”

After the slave-bonding ceremony, she’d told him exactly what had happened the previous fall, how he’d learned that she was hiding a codex fragment in her office, and had broken in and stolen it, influenced somehow by the Banol Kax even before he’d begun to read the transition spell. She’d described how she’d had a vision of him cutting himself and invoking the spell, and had contacted Strike and a senior mage named Red-Boar to help him. They had teleported to Lucius’s apartment and found him most of the way turned makol .

As she’d spoken, he’d known he should’ve been shocked and horrified. But his only real thought had been, Of course, how could I have forgotten all that? He didn’t remember any of it, not really. But everything she said had clicked at a gut-deep level, with a sort of cosmic “aha!” that labeled it as the truth. It explained why he sometimes saw things through a luminous green sheen, why he’d been out of sorts since last summer, and why he’d felt more like himself inside the compound, which was warded against makol magic.

At least, it was supposed to be.

“The wards went down during the parley,” Anna said. “That’s how Iago ’ported the third Xibalban, the blonde, into the archive, and how the makol got through to you just now.”

He stared down at the raised scar ridge on his palm. “Fuck me.” He closed his fingers over the scar, hiding it.

“At least I didn’t kill Jade.” That would’ve been beyond unthinkable. Of all the surprises he’d found at Skywatch, his almost instant friendship with the shy archivist was by far the nicest. If he’d hurt her

. . . “Does Strike think it’s too dangerous to keep me in the compound now?”

“He’s not sure,” she said, both of them avoiding the point that if he was too dangerous to keep in the compound then he was too dangerous to be let free and there was really only one other choice.

“What do you think?” he pressed.

She looked at him long and hard before answering. “I think we can’t afford to sacrifice any valuable allies at this point.”

He knew her use of the word “sacrifice” was no accident. Horror mixed with anger within him, yielding a deep-seated resentment much like what he’d been feeling for months now. But the wards were back in place, which meant . . . what? Were these really his feelings, or had something taken root inside him in defiance of the Nightkeepers’ shielding magic?

Oddly, the latter thought didn’t bother him nearly as much as it probably should have.

“So what now?” he asked her.

“We’re not making any hasty decisions,” she said firmly, though that wasn’t really an answer. “I’m flying back tonight, but call me if you need to. And if you start having flashes or whatnot, tell someone. Promise me you won’t try to fight dark magic on your own.”

“I won’t,” he said. But he didn’t promise.

By day two of Rabbit’s imprisonment, he’d become very familiar with the wooden rafters above his cot, and with the walls and floor of his one-room prison, which was locked and warded, not just with a spell to keep him in, but with one that blocked his magic. Which totally sucked.

He hadn’t seen another human being since Iago left. He got fed twice a day, morning and night.

He’d know it was chow time when he heard footsteps outside . . . and then the lights would go out, not in the cabin, but in his head. He’d freeze wherever he was, locked in place for a few minutes or so.

Then he’d blink back in and there’d be food and whatever in the middle of the room, and he’d hear the footsteps moving away. Other than that . . . nothing. Which meant there wasn’t much else to do but count splinters and get tangled up inside his own head.

He knew he should be trying to contact Strike and the others, knew he should be trying to find a way home, but some piece of him kept wondering whether Skywatch was really home anymore. What was to say they even wanted him back? From what he could tell by looking out the windows, the cabin was part of a ramshackle, closed-down resort. He wasn’t underground, wasn’t in a warded temple, which meant Strike should be able to lock onto him for a ’port if he wanted.

He hadn’t bothered.

That left Rabbit with a hollow ache in his gut, a burn of resentment in his heart. He’d depended on the Nightkeepers for magic and family and they’d shut him out. But someone else was offering to fill the gap. So the next time Rabbit heard the crunch of approaching footsteps, he shouted, “Don’t freeze me, okay? I want to talk to Iago.”

The world blinked out. When it blinked back in, he found himself standing just inside the door of another, larger cabin. His brain sent him three snapshots immediately: the first was of Iago, standing opposite him in gray ceremonial robes; the second was of nine stone skulls arranged in a circle, facing a pale green ceremonial bowl; and the third was the sight of Myrinne, tied to a chair in the corner. Her ankles were bound to the chair legs, her wrists trussed behind her back, and she was limp.

Unconscious, or worse.

Rage hammered through Rabbit, slapping aside any thought of family, magic, or working with Iago.

He lunged for her, shouting, “Myrinne!”

And found himself hanging in midair.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Iago said. He raised his voice and called, “Desiree? I think we’re ready for you now.”

Cursing, Rabbit twisted, finding that he could move some within the force that held him aloft. His muscles strained as he fought to get free, fought to get to Myrinne. “Let her go, you bastard!”