Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

She picked up on the third ring. “Hey, hon. I was just thinking about you.”

“Hey back. I was calling to see if we’re still on for tonight.”

“Definitely,” Anna said, though for a second she couldn’t remember their having any plans. Then she thought, Right. Dinner out. Eight o’clock reservations . The drain of setting the mental blocks was making her woozy and forgetful, she thought, and scribbled down a note reminding herself to eat something.

“And you’re leaving the day after tomorrow for that guest lecture, right?”

Guilt pinched at the lie, but there was no way she could tell Dick that she was headed down to New Mexico to hook up with the brother he didn’t know about, who would then teleport her and a dozen or so other psi-powered warriors down to southern Mexico, where they were going to fight like hell to hold the line between the earth and the underworld when a bunch of heavy hitters tried to come through and precipitate the end of days.

Yeah. So not going there.

“It’s just an overnight,” she said. “I’ll be back the day after.” Assuming, of course, that she survived the fight, Iago hadn’t succeeded in opening the hellroad, and there was still a university for her to return to. And the fact that those assumptions didn’t bother her as much as they used to was just another sign of how tired she was, how strung-out and stuck inside her own jumbled-up head.

“Meet me at the car around seven thirty?”

“Will do,” Anna said. That had been another one of the therapist’s ideas, for them to commute together, given that they were both going to the same place on a daily basis. And she had to admit that it was kind of nice riding in and out with him. It gave them a chance to chat—forced them to do so—

twice a day.

“See you then. Love you.” As usual, he hung up before she could respond in kind. It used to annoy her, because it seemed like he was winning by getting the last word. These days she wondered if he did it because he was afraid she wouldn’t say the words back. He was trying. They both were.

“Love you,” she said, even though he was no longer there.

Then she hung up the phone, ignored her scribbled note about a snack, and got back to work, knowing that her life would be a thousand times better once she killed the background drone. Problem was, blocks were the sort of thing she would’ve learned after her talent ceremony, when her mother and the other itza’ats would’ve instructed her on the proper use and control of her talent. Normally she would’ve had her talent ceremony during the cardinal day right after she hit puberty. Since that had coincided with her father’s attack on the intersection, the ceremony had been postponed . . . and then never happened. She’d finally gotten her itza’at ’s mark, twenty-four years later, when Strike had dragged her back into the world she’d left behind. But the talent hadn’t come with training or enlightenment, had barely come with added power, thanks to the subconscious mental blocks her brain had thrown up to stop the nightmarish memories of the massacre, which she’d seen through the eyes of not just one, but hundreds of dying Nightkeepers.

“Focus,” she said aloud, and forced herself to concentrate on the quartz effigy that she’d set in the middle of her blotter. According to the sketchy records Jade and Lucius had been able to find, an itza’at should be able to use her crystal to form a reversible block, one that could be kept in place on a day-to-day basis and lowered for a vision quest. In theory.

In practice, she wasn’t getting very far.

Don’t be such a girl, a familiar voice whispered at the back of her mind. The sound had her shooting straight up in her chair and looking around for a ghost, though she knew that was beyond stupid. He wasn’t there, wasn’t ever there. He was nothing more than a memory, and not even a good one, at that.

“Damn it,” she muttered, hunkering down with her chin on the edge of her desk and glaring at the effigy.

Amazingly, the quartz seemed to shimmer for a second, then started to glow from within.

Excitement tightened her skin as carefully, very carefully, she sent a tendril of mental magic toward the crystal, and—

The phone rang, snapping her concentration. “Gods damn it!” she snapped, annoyed with the caller for calling, beyond annoyed with herself for forgetting yet again to forward the phone to voice mail.

Grabbing the handset, she snapped, “What?”

There was a pause; then Lucius said, “I think you should come back to Skywatch.” His voice grated, as though he were forcing each of the words.

Anna’s fingers tightened on the phone. “I’ll be there the day after tomorrow for the equinox ceremony. Is that soon enough?”

“I . . . don’t think so.” His words trailed off to hissing silence.

She understood then, and the bottom fell out of her world. Heart hammering against her ribs, she said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can. And Lucius?”

“Yes?” The word was barely a sigh.

“I’m sorry.” This time she was the one who cut the connection, then dialed the main number at Skywatch. After ordering Jox to update Strike, and for the two of them to clear Lucius’s rooms of any sharp objects and lock him the hell in, she called the airline and paid a fortune to move her tickets up two days. She snagged the last seat on a flight that left in ninety minutes, and called a taxi to pick her up.

She was in the air by seven. At nine she realized she’d stood Dick up for their date. At ten thirty, she called home to apologize, but there was no answer.

At midnight she stood with Strike and Leah, looking down at Lucius.

He lay curled on his side, clutching his bloody hand to his chest, his eyes flickering from hazel to luminous green and back, as the barrier thinned with the approaching equinox and evil struggled to gain a foothold in Skywatch.

With Lucius locked up tight and a second layer of wards cast around his rooms, both to keep him in and to keep the makol out, the royal council adjourned to the kitchen to argue about what they should do with him. By the time Jox kicked them out of the kitchen so he could work on breakfast, and they’d adjourned to the royal suite to continue the battle, Alexis had been thoroughly reminded that Nate might be damn good in bed, but he could be seriously annoying and incredibly wrong when it came to matters of state.

They sat together on a love seat in the sitting room of Strike and Leah’s suite, while the royal couple and Anna sat opposite them on a long couch. For the most part, though, the love seat wasn’t feeling much love.

As far as Alexis was concerned, there was no excuse for maintaining a makol within Skywatch; it was too great a risk. She hated to do it, but had to vote for sacrificing Lucius. Leah agreed with her, which was a little surprising, given that the detective was a non-Nightkeeper herself, and had been under a similar threat of death only months earlier. But Leah was practical, and a cop, and was pretty firm on the idea that the needs of the many outweighed those of a given individual. Strike and Nate, on the other hand, wanted to keep Lucius alive and locked up through the equinox, on the theory that if he was human three hundred and fifty or so days a year, they could stand to lock him up for the duration of each solstice and equinox. Like he was some sort of werewolf or something, and there were only four full moons a year.

Granted, Strike’s opinion was at least in part based on the fact that they didn’t know exactly what would happen to Anna if her bond-servant were sacrificed. Some of Jade’s info suggested she’d lose the slave-master’s mark on her arm in a flash of pain, similar to what the winikin experienced when a Nightkeeper member of their bound bloodline died. Other references, though, suggested that the outcome could be far worse, especially because she was an itza’at seer. One even went so far as to suggest that she would experience his death over and over and over again, regardless of whether she was awake or asleep. Since that was pretty much what Anna had been through after the massacre, Alexis saw the king’s point and sympathized with his concern for his sister. Unfortunately, since Nate agreed with the king, that left them deadlocked in a two-to-two vote, with Anna abstaining for obvious reasons and Jox maintaining that this was a matter for the magi, and a winikin shouldn’t cast the deciding vote.