Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

‘‘Oh, shit,’’ Strike said, putting two and two together and getting zero.

‘‘I’ll kill him.’’ Red-Boar held out his hand. ‘‘Let me talk to him.’’

Jox turned his back. ‘‘I’ll take care of everything. I’ll deal with it, I promise. Do you still have your ID and the AmEx I gave you for emergencies?"

‘‘Winikin.’’ Red-Boar’s voice turned deadly. ‘‘Give. Me. The. Phone.’’

‘‘Good,’’ Jox said, ignoring him. ‘‘I want you to get your ass to Logan Airport and wait for me to call you with a destination. If the cops give you any grief, tell them it’s a family emergency and have them call me. Got it?’’

When Red-Boar moved, looking as though he were going to deck Jox and take the phone, Strike stepped between them. ‘‘Don’t,’’ he said quietly. ‘‘He’s more than earned our trust.’’

‘‘Speak for yourself.’’ But Red-Boar stalked away, slammed the heels of his palms against the coral-trimmed doorway, and leaned out, breathing deeply.

‘‘Bye, kid,’’ Jox said, then added, ‘‘And hey— congratulations, sort of. Next time wait for an escort, though, okay?’’

‘‘Oh, shit ,’’ Strike said as Jox hung up the phone.

‘‘Yep,’’ Jox said grimly, losing the everything’s okay facade he’d pulled together for the teen’s sake. ‘‘You guessed it. The good news is that Rabbit’s a pyrokine.’’ He left it hanging, but there was no need to say it aloud.

The bad news is that Rabbit’s a pyrokine .

And his magic was shit-strong, or the barrier wouldn’t have reached out to him, giving him his talent without the proper ceremonies. Not only that, he was a half-blood, which automatically made his talents volatile, and not necessarily subject to the same rules as Nightkeeper magic.

Red-Boar turned back. ‘‘Did he hurt anyone else?’’

‘‘No.’’ Jox shook his head. ‘‘Thank the gods.’’

‘‘What about—’’ Strike broke off, afraid to ask.

The winikin shook his head. ‘‘It’s all gone. The cops are willing to call it an accident, but we’ll have to take a flier on the insurance. No way they’re paying out on a party gone wrong.’’

Strike tried to take it in, but on some level he was numb to the tragedy. He’d found his dream woman, only to learn that she wasn’t his at all. The barrier was open and there was an ajaw-makol on the loose. And there were more Nightkeepers. Ten of them, plus their winikin .

After that, losing their business, home, and possessions didn’t seem all that major. Then again, the garden center hadn’t been his dream. It’d been Jox’s.

‘‘Hey. I’m sorry.’’ Strike reached out to the winikin , then hesitated. They were close, but not particularly touchy-feely. ‘‘I’m really freaking sorry.’’

Jox backed away, holding up a hand. ‘‘Don’t.’’ There was something broken in his voice. ‘‘Just don’t, okay? Give me a minute.’’ He sat. Blew out a breath. ‘‘It’s stupid, really. We would’ve had to leave anyway, right? That part of our lives is over.’’

Strike sat beside him. ‘‘Doesn’t make it any easier.’’

‘‘Sacrifice.’’ Jox scrubbed his hands over his face. ‘‘It’s all about sacrifice.’’

‘‘We’ll have to find someplace to train the newbies,’’ Red-Boar said from the doorway, seemingly ignoring the fact that his kid was an untrained pyro who had torched Jox’s pride and joy. ‘‘Maybe a farmhouse. Something near some good ley lines, with no close neighbors. Maybe the Midwest. Shit.’’ He scowled. ‘‘The robes and bowls are probably trash. Altar might be salvageable if the stone didn’t crack in the heat. Spellbooks are gone. So what the fuck am I supposed to use to teach the magic to these hypothetical magi?

‘‘Having them meet us at the training compound would be a good start,’’ Jox said quietly.

Something in his voice had Strike sitting up. ‘‘The training center’s long gone.’’ When the winikin said nothing, Strike got a weird shimmy in his gut. ‘‘Isn’t it?’’

The morning after the massacre, Jox had left him and Anna down in the bunkerlike safe room beneath the archives while he’d collected the bodies and set the Great Hall ablaze as a massive funeral pyre. Then the winikin had gathered the robes and a few sacred objects, and all the spellbooks he could fit in the Jeep he was taking. Finally, he’d invoked the training compound’s self-destruct spell. Known only to a select few Nightkeepers and the royal winikin , the spell was intended to keep the magic away from human eyes. It—as Jox had explained it, anyway—basically shoved the compound into the barrier, wiping it from the earth forever.

It was the last Nightkeeper magic done before the barrier shut down. Or so Strike had always believed. Now, when the winikin stayed silent and Red-Boar glared, Strike said, ‘‘Jox?’’

‘‘The training center is still there,’’ the winikin admitted. ‘‘It’s just . . . hidden.’’

Red-Boar’s voice shook when he said, ‘‘You used a curtain spell?’’

Jox nodded. ‘‘King Scarred-Jaguar preset a disguise spell for me before he left, sort of a level below the self-destruct. Maybe he knew what was going to happen; I don’t know.’’ He paused, glancing at Strike. ‘‘You can reverse the spell. The Great Hall is gone, but the rest of the training center stands intact . . . including the archives.’’

Oh, gods in heaven. ‘‘The archives,’’ Strike repeated, his brain buzzing with shock, with possibilities. Though most of the spellbooks had been lost to the missionaries’ fires, a handful had survived. That collected wisdom, along with generations of written commentaries from various spell casters and magi, had been located in the three-room archive of the Nightkeepers’ training compound.

Apparently, it still was.

‘‘Christ.’’ Strike was having a hard time processing this. He was being offered the ultimate knowledge base, but with a serious caveat—to get it, he’d have to go back to the place that still haunted him.

It’d taken years before he could close his eyes and not see the boluntiku , not relive the deaths of his friends and their winikin . The nightmares were few and far between these days, but they were hard and dark and crippling when they came.

He looked over at Jox. ‘‘What does it . . . look like?’’ Last he’d seen it, the place had been in shambles, littered with torn clothing and the debris of violence. Six-clawed marks had marred the buildings, and the wrecked cars had been awash with blood.

‘‘Probably not so good.’’ Jox lifted a shoulder. ‘‘The curtain spell protects it from sight, but not from the elements. It’s been twenty-four years. Who knows what we’ll find when we get there?’’

Great, Strike thought. But Jox was right—they had to go. There was no turning down the lure of the archives . . . and Rabbit had fucking burned down the garden center. Hating the necessity, he nodded. ‘‘New Mexico it is.’’

They were silent a moment, each caught in memory. Finally, Strike said, ‘‘What I don’t get is why you didn’t tell us about the others sooner. Why not let us all grow up together?’’

‘‘I couldn’t risk it,’’ the winikin replied. ‘‘The younger ones never went through their first binding ceremonies, so the barrier didn’t recognize them at all. You and Anna had your first marks, though, and Red-Boar was fully bound.’’

‘‘So if the boluntiku came through the barrier again, they’d come straight for us, and once they found us, they’d be likely to kill the youngsters, too.’’ Strike nodded, his gut knotting at the memories. ‘‘But after a few years, once you knew it was safe, you could’ve said something.’’