Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

She was silent for a moment, then settled against him a little and said simply, “I’m here because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Nate would’ve said something glib in response, but the words jammed in his throat, backing up against the realization that the same was true of him.

Before, he’d resented the demands of a bloodline responsibility he’d never asked for, never sought.

He’d wanted to be back in Denver, working the life he’d built for himself, the one that played by familiar rules, with familiar people. The life he was good at. Somewhere along the line, though, that’d changed. Denver seemed far away. He knew he could be there in a few hours, faster if he asked Strike for a ’port. But the city—and the life he’d lived there—had dimmed in his brain, his new life as a Nightkeeper seeming so much more important now.

Granted it was more important on a save-the-world scale. But now even on a smaller, more personal scale, he realized that he didn’t want to be back in the city. He wanted to be where he was: in his parents’ homey, outdated bungalow with the woman he’d never managed to convince himself to leave all the way. Which, in all honesty, wasn’t fair to either of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the apology coming out of nowhere, from deep inside him.

Nonsequitur though it might be, she seemed to get it, shaking her head. “Don’t be. We move forward. Everything that happens from here on out, whether good or bad, is new. It’s just you and me, guy and girl. Humans, for what it’s worth.”

Which was so not like her usual rhetoric that he drew back. “What happened to the whole ‘time is cyclical, what has happened before, blah, blah’?”

She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “We’re not our parents. We were raised human. I think we’ve got the right to claim something for our own, don’t you? Well, I claim this, for as long as it lasts.”

He saw the truth of it in her eyes, and tasted it on her lips when he dropped his head for a second kiss, this one longer and moister, and bringing more heat to the moment. When it ended, he glanced out the window to where stars shone over the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon. “I can promise you until morning, at least.”

He’d meant it partly as a joke, but her eyes were serious when she said, “That’ll do for starters.”

Using their joined hands to tug him along, she urged him in the direction of the bedroom, then stalled.

“Um. Will this be too weird for you?”

“You don’t want to do it in my parents’ bed? What are we, sixteen?” The laughter felt good, as did the rush of heat and joy as he reversed their positions, with him urging her along. “Don’t worry.

Carlos made some changes once I started hanging out here. That includes the mattresses and bedding.”

Along with a few personal items he didn’t bother mentioning, because, having made the decision, he was done talking.

He got her inside the bedroom and left the lights off, so the space was softly lit by the illumination coming through the door from the main room. The bedroom was sparsely furnished and decorated, as were the other rooms, but with the same few deft touches of character and magic. Another of his father’s paintings hung over the bed, this one of a green sea and an achingly blue sky, a helicopter’s-

eye view approaching a verdant island of sand and trees, and a limestone cliff with a Mayan ruin at the top. The domed silhouette marked it as one of the ancient celestial observatories, where Nightkeepers and Daykeepers alike had tracked the movements of the stars and used them to tell the future and the past.

A shimmer of that same mysticism walked across Nate’s skin as he stripped his shirt over his head in one yank, then tossed the garment aside and took Alexis in his arms and kissed her, letting his body tell her what he didn’t always get right with words.

In response, she pressed her hands to his chest, touching his medallion, which grew warm with their body heat as she leaned into the kiss, opening to him. And as the night waned and became a new day, he took her to bed and they became, perhaps for the first time, lovers.

It wasn’t until Anna had been back in the glyph lab for a few days following her quick trip to Skywatch that she finally admitted, to herself at least, that the balancing act wasn’t working. Not the way she was trying to pull it off, anyway.

It’d taken some serious crystal magic to jump-start her itza’at powers and get a peek inside Iago’s cesspool of a brain. She didn’t regret the magic, but she sure as hell could’ve done without the aftereffects, namely the fact that she’d been unable to close the lid on the visions once she’d called them. Granted, she’d known that could be the outcome. She just hadn’t known how much being a full-

fledged visionary would suck. Even now, sitting at her office desk, she was bombarded with flashes and fragments, images of things that might have happened or might yet happen, made worse by the very nature of her work because she was surrounded by artifacts that resonated with her power, showing her things she didn’t need or want to see.

How did it help anybody for her to know that the tiny chac-mool figurine she used as a paperweight had been carved by a wizened old man with two front teeth? Or that the painted bark strip that hung on her wall in a museum-quality frame was a clever fake? She already knew it was a fake; it wouldn’t have been on her wall otherwise, for chrissake.

Worse, those pointless little details existed as a background drone to larger flashes and full-fledged visions, emotionally charged moments that would—or already had—happened to the people she interacted with every day. It was exhausting to be lecturing on the celestial significance of the four staircases of the pyramid at Chichén Itzá, and suddenly learn—in excruciating detail—that the guy third from the left in the front row had started the day on the receiving end of a world-class blow job.

It drove her crazy to get the change from her take-out lunch purchase and know that her cashier was about a week away from getting his heart broken, though it was a relief not to see anything worse in his future. Because that was the really sucky thing about being an itza’at seer. No matter what the seer did or said, the future visions always came true. Always.

It was one of the numerous reasons she hadn’t wanted the sight, had tried to fight it for as long as she had. If she couldn’t use the damn talent as a tool to make things better, why put up with it? If she could’ve had someone get inside her skull and rip the magic out of her cortex—or wherever the hell it lurked—she would’ve. Since that wasn’t an option, she did the next best thing: She worked on rebuilding the mental blocks, piece by agonizing piece.

She was slumped down at her desk, staring at the yellow quartz effigy that had belonged to her mother, and generations of itza’ats before her, doing exactly that, when the phone rang. It wasn’t much in the way of an interruption, though. She was tired and heartsore, worried about Lucius, stressed about the upcoming equinox, and hating that so much of her normal life had become a series of lies designed to cover up her life as a Nightkeeper.

Glancing at the caller ID, she found a small smile at seeing it was Dick. The pleasure was bittersweet, though; they’d taken a few days away together, had even flown the brightly colored kites she’d bought as a surprise. It had been lovely and romantic, and vaguely awkward. The therapist had said that the more they acted as though the love were there, the more actual love would follow. And maybe there was something to that, because ever since their getaway it’d felt less and less like an act and more like the real thing.