Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

The door opened behind Iago and a tall, exotic-looking woman stepped inside, wearing a long, sleek leather coat and high boots. Her red-toned hair was pulled back from her face, and her perfectly made-

up eyes were pale hazel, nearly inhuman.

“No!” he shouted when she started toward him, screaming again when she went straight past and reached for Myrinne.

“Shut it, twerp,” Desiree said. Reaching inside her coat, she produced the ceremonial knife Iago had taken from Rabbit back in New Orleans. “Head and heart, or just bleed her out?” she asked Iago with zero emotion, like she was talking about squashing a bug.

“Head and heart.” Iago nudged one of the carved skulls more precisely into alignment along the ceremonial circle. “We’ll need all the juice we can get.” He fixed Rabbit with a look. “Unless you’re interested in doing some magic?” He gestured at the green bowl in the center of the circle, which had taken on a faint glow. “This is the bowl of Cabrakan, the earthquake god, and I have need of his services.”

“Fuck you!” Rabbit lashed out at him, threw fire, then screamed when the flames bounced off the field surrounding him, burning his clothes and skin. Twisting against the invisible bonds, he howled as Desiree licked the edge of the knife, blooding herself.

Then Iago snapped his fingers and Myrinne awakened.

She blinked a few times, then tugged halfheartedly against the bonds like she already knew they were there. Then she saw Desiree and her eyes went wide and scared. Pulling harder, yanking at the ropes, she strained away from Desiree and the knife. She managed to skid her chair a few inches across the floor, then bumped into a wall. “Don’t,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Please don’t.”

But the cool-eyed woman advanced, taking it slow, drawing out the suspense—and the pleasure.

“For gods’ sake, listen to her,” Rabbit shouted. “Don’t do this!”

Myrinne’s head whipped around and she focused on him, her mouth dropping open in surprise, her eyes lighting with hope, then fear when she saw him hanging in midair. “Help me!” she screamed, straining toward him, her eyes glazed with terror. “Rabbit, help me!”

She’d remembered his name. That wasn’t the most important thing just then, not by a long shot, but it mattered.

“No!” he shouted when Desiree lifted the blade and cut Myrinne’s shirt away, then sliced her bra and parted the clothing to bare her torso for the first cut, the most important one. The magic worked best if the cut was a single slice just below the ribs, tracing their line and cutting through the diaphragm so the victim couldn’t breathe, so she’d already be dying even as she watched her beating heart be torn from her chest.

Rabbit felt something rip inside him, as though it were his heart being cut out. “Okay!” he screamed as the ceremonial knife began its descent. “Okay, I’ll do it. Whatever you want, I’ll do it!”

“Hold,” Iago rapped out.

Desiree didn’t respond right away, taking a moment to carve a shallow slice in Myrinne’s flesh, tracing a line where the real cut would’ve gone.

Iago snapped, “Damn it, woman, I said hold !”

Myrinne was sobbing—broken, hollow sounds that reached inside Rabbit and twisted his soul.

Blood tracked down her belly, flirted with her tattooed navel, and soaked into the waistband of her jeans, flowing more with each sob.

Iago flicked his fingers, and the field surrounding Rabbit disappeared. Gravity took over and he fell with a shout, splatting inelegantly on the floorboards, face-first. He lay there for a second, gasping for breath, then struggled to his feet and stood, swaying. “Son of a bitch.”

He wanted to rage, wanted to puke, wanted to wake up and be back at Skywatch and have it all be a bad dream. But it was far too real as Iago waved him into the center of the room.

The moment he crossed the skull-drawn circle, fire roared to life in the carved skulls, shooting several feet into the air and heating Rabbit’s already scorched skin, making him want to scream with the pain, with the power. The magic was inside him, called by anger, beating at him, begging to be set free. But alongside the familiar Nightkeeper fire was another power, a quiver at the edge of his senses that tempted him, telling him that all he had to do was let it inside and he would rule, he would command.

Myrinne shouted his name on a broken sob, but he hardly heard her, could hardly hear anything but Iago’s voice as the mage began to chant, starting down low and bringing it up, calling the strange magic in words Rabbit didn’t understand but somehow did, as though they were cousin to the old language he knew.

“Here.” Desiree held out the carved obsidian knife Iago had stolen from him in New Orleans. “You know what to do.”

And he did, though he couldn’t have said how, only that the compulsion ran through his veins like liquid fire as he bared both forearms and began the ritual.

Rabbit had started the day a Nightkeeper. He would end it something else entirely.

The ATM cave site looked the same as it had weeks earlier. The vegetation was still vibrantly green, the parrots and howler monkeys were still doing their thing high above, and the pool outside the cave still flowed slowly, collecting in a swirl and then moving on, deeper into the ceremonial cave system.

Nothing was different. Yet to Alexis, everything was different.

She felt strange inside her own skin, as though her bones had shifted and realigned while she’d slept. Nate was different too. He seemed bigger and tougher, staying close behind as they worked their way down to the pool, shouldered their knapsacks, and started to wade, then swim. The routine was the same, but the man had changed.

He wore an eccentric now.

Her surprise that the king had offered him a second adviser’s position had been nothing compared to her shock when Nate had actually accepted. He hadn’t looked nearly as thrilled as his winikin , but still. He’d accepted, and wore the eccentric beneath his shirt and Kevlar, next to his medallion.

It shouldn’t have made a difference that the position put them back on par, that it gave him equal weight in the adviser’s council. But it mattered, and if that made her the small-minded, position-

loving snob he’d called her on more than one occasion, then she owned it. The promotion—or maybe something else?—had him carrying himself bigger, and had his power revving just below the surface, so it sparked along her nerve endings, reminding her that she might not need sex with him to touch the goddess’s magic, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t enjoyed the sex, didn’t think about it. Didn’t dream about it.

“That’s different,” he said from behind her, startling her.

For a second she thought he was talking about her dreams, which had stopped feeling like they were happening to other people, becoming just the two of them, alone together as they were now. Then she glanced back and saw him treading water and looking up to where the cave roof arched overhead. A huge crack ran with width of the cave, and several raw stumps showed where stalactites had broken loose and fallen.

She surveyed the damage. “Looks like it’s holding well enough.”

He nodded, but stayed pensive. “Hope nothing collapsed farther in.”

“We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Let’s keep going.” Like there had ever been a question of turning back. If there was any hope that their ancestors had hidden a library beyond the submerged tunnels, then they needed to go after it, no matter what. The Nightkeepers were struggling too much, needed the knowledge too badly.

They worked their way onto dry land and continued onward from arcade to arcade, past the sacrificial relics and skeletons to where the realm of the modern researchers ended and that of the Nightkeepers began. They rearranged their packs, and donned their headlamps and masks, acting in tandem even though the air jarred with faint tension between them, partners slightly out of step with each other. Once Alexis was ready, she gave a quick thumbs-up and jumped in first, with Nate splashing down behind her a moment later.