Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

She crooked a finger and slid him a look as she shimmied her torso in a fake shiver. ‘‘Can I have the sheet back? I’m cold.’’

‘‘Take it.’’ He tossed it in her direction, too out-of-it to decide whether she was actually cold, or sending him a green light. ‘‘I gotta pee.’’

Okay, even woozy he knew that wasn’t a great line. But by the time he’d taken care of business and splashed some cold water in the direction of his face, he’d regrouped and was ready for a second—and hopefully more memorable—assault on Mount Brunette.

‘‘Hey, babe,’’ he said as he strolled into the bedroom. ‘‘I was thinking—’’ He broke off when he saw that the bed was empty.

Bummer.

Figuring on writing it off as her loss and catching another few hours of shut-eye, Sven was headed back to the bed when he heard female voices out in the main room.

Voices, as in more than one female. Cool. He was the man.

Suddenly really, really wishing he could remember the night before—and hoping he could talk them into round two—he pulled on a pair of swim trunks and strode through the door into the main room of his beachside apartment.

And stopped dead at the sight of the girl, or rather the woman, standing in the open doorway. Sunlight spilled in behind her, gleaming on her dark, white-streaked hair and outlining her boy-slim, athletic body.

She might have been wearing shorts, a tank, and sandals instead of jeans and a work shirt, but he knew her instantly even through the fog in his brain. The gut-punch was unmistakable.

‘‘Cara?’’

She didn’t say anything, just let her gaze roam around his apartment, where surfboards and dive gear were piled atop depth charts and the odd artifact, competing for space amid what he liked to call creative clutter but suspected she would see as garbage.

The brunette—who was still wearing his sheet, for chrissake—looked at Sven, brow furrowed. ‘‘This your girlfriend or something?’’

‘‘No,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘She’s—’’ Then he broke off, because he’d never been able to figure out what to call her. She wasn’t his sister, not really. She wasn’t his friend, either, not now, anyway. She was—

‘‘I’m his little sister,’’ she said, apparently not sharing an ounce of his dislike for the term. Focusing on him, she said, ‘‘Get dressed and pack your things. We’re leaving.’’

Sven’s gut iced over. ‘‘Is something wrong with Carlos?’’

‘‘Yes and no.’’ She paused, and for a second he thought he saw a crack in the disdain she was projecting like plate armor. ‘‘Look, please don’t ask me to explain. Just pack.’’

The brunette pouted and turned to him. ‘‘Are you going to let her talk to you like that?’’

The look in Cara’s eyes said, You owe me .

And the hell of it was, he did.

Sven nodded slowly. ‘‘Yeah. I am.’’ He glanced at the brunette. ‘‘Get dressed and get out. Apparently I have a plane to catch.’’

CHAPTER SIX

‘‘Nearly half of them have confirmed.’’ Strike went down the list. ‘‘We’ve got flight info for Alexis Gray, along with Coyote-Seven and Patience Lizbet, and their winikin , one of which is a substitute, so we can shift manpower over to Nathan Blackhawk when the time comes.’’

He and Jox were sitting on lounge chairs out on the pool deck of the mansion, while the cleanup continued around them. They’d been at the training compound in New Mex for a week now, and after few days of DIY had sucked it up and used the Nightkeeper Fund to hire a couple of local crews to strip the junk and update the facilities. Granted, it would’ve been better to keep the place out of the public eye, but that just hadn’t been feasible. Besides, with the traffic they were expecting starting in the next few days, it would’ve been pretty tough to keep the place a secret for long.

So far, none of the workers had mentioned the little detail that there hadn’t been any buildings in the out-of -the-way box canyon up until a week ago, yet the place clearly dated back to the turn of the twentieth century and showed a couple decades’ worth of neglect. Either the locals didn’t know about the compound’s appear-disappear -reappear routine, or they’d decided the generous pay made up for the freak factor.

‘‘Carlos is a good man,’’ Jox said. ‘‘A good winikin . He’ll help Blackhawk adjust.’’

That had been the first bit of bad news after the initial buzz of learning about the survivors: At least one of their winikin hadn’t lived long.

Jox’s list was twenty-four years old, garnered from notes dropped to a P.O. box in Shiprock, a few hundred miles north of the compound. As per the escape protocol drilled into each winikin at maturity, they’d left basic contact information and a confirmation word, and then gone underground and found their way into regular society, focusing on the child—or children—they’d saved. They’d modernized the young Nightkeepers’ names to make mainstreaming easier—the smoke, lizard, and harvester bloodlines had become the surnames Gray, Lizbet, and Farmer for the females. Among the males, Coyote-Seven had been shortened to Sven, while Blackhawk, White-Eagle, and Stone had been common enough surnames that they’d stayed as they were.

Through the magic of Google and a private investigator named Carter, a friend of a friend of Jox’s who would cheerfully hack into the IRS database for a hefty fee, they’d found current addresses for almost all of the survivors. Unfortunately, they also learned that the winikin to the sole survivor of the hawk bloodline had succumbed to his wounds within a few days of escaping from the boluntiku . His charge had wound up in the foster system with no clue who—or what—he was. Carter had eventually turned up info indicating that Nathan Blackhawk had bounced around a bit until he wound up in Chicago, where he’d done a few years in juvie, and a few more in Greenville for grand theft auto. Since then, he seemed to have gone straight, moving to Denver and launching a small but successful computer gaming company.

And he’d ducked every one of Strike’s calls.

‘‘I’m going to have to go there in person.’’ Strike grimaced and looked around. ‘‘There’s a shitload left to be done before this place is workable.’’

They’d made some progress, granted. The kidney-shaped pool had been pumped, scrubbed, resealed, and filled, and the subcontractor had installed a new filter system and creepy-crawly pool cleaner. The pool area, a seventies-era cement deck that was pretty low on the priority list for updating, was surrounded by the mansion on three sides. The fourth side was open, with a view of the traditional ball court the Nightkeepers had used to blow off steam, and occasionally for ceremonial games. The two high parallel stone walls, with a single stone hoop set some twenty feet up on either side, had stood the test of time pretty well, as had the ‘‘real’’ ball courts in the Yucatán and Central America. Pretty much everything else in the training compound was in tough shape, though.

The plumbing, electricals, and carpets in the mansion were being gutted and redone, and they’d made the decision to tear the barn down and start over with a steel-span building, rather than trying to salvage the sagging wreck. They would use the space not for horses and mules for pack trips into the backcountry, as before, but for what Jox was dubbing Magic 101—on the theory that it’d be best to unleash the untrained magi in a fireproof space.

‘‘Go to Denver,’’ Jox said, waving him off. ‘‘Admit it—you’re dying to get away from this place. Too many memories.’’