Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

He’d had the thing for as long as he could remember. According to the records, he’d been wearing it when he’d appeared in the waiting room of the University of Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital at the age of two. He’d been wearing soiled pj’s stained with blood that wasn’t his, he’d had the words ‘‘My name is Nathan Blackhawk’’ written on his forehead in ballpoint pen, and he hadn’t spoken for nearly fourteen months thereafter. For a while, they’d thought he was mute.

He’d had night terrors regularly until his teens and then sporadically ever since—amorphous dreams of bright red-orange creatures that dripped flame and killed everything around them. The prison therapist had told him the monsters represented his mother, and his anger at her for leaving him alone, but Nate was pretty sure the monsters were just monsters. He didn’t hate his parents. He’d never met them, and if they hadn’t cared enough to keep him, then he didn’t care enough to hate them.

But that didn’t stop him from being curious about what the stranger had hinted at.

He’d thought about it for a couple of days, until the bruises had gone from red to purple, and then he’d okayed EmoPunk III —God help him—downloaded the storyboard for Viking Warrior 6: Hera’s Mate —he still wasn’t sure about the hero—and hopped a flight to New Mexico.

Odds were he’d be back in Denver tomorrow, feeling like a schmuck.

He hadn’t even called ahead, figuring on a surprise attack. Beside, the guy had left his address, sort of. The card said simply: Rt. 57, Chaco Canyon .

Now he was thinking the surprise was on him, because 57 was a damn gravel track, and they hadn’t passed a house or cross street in a good ten minutes. There was nothing outside the air-conditioned cabin of the stretch pimp-mobile besides sun, scrub brush, and more sun, with the occasional rock for variety.

‘‘Great,’’ he muttered. ‘‘This is a total waste of time.’’ He didn’t tell the driver to about-face, though. Instead, he palmed his handheld and called up a set of graphics, not of the pasty-faced hero his developers had come up with, but of Hera.

Big, blond, and angular, but with a pixie-delicate face and wide hazel eyes, capable of kicking ass equally well in swordplay and hand-to-hand, she was his queen, the cornerstone of Hawk Enterprises. The guys on his team might tease him about his imaginary girlfriend, but as far as he was concerned she was perfect. She never bitched at him for being a slob, never complained when he slept at his desk. She was always there when he wanted to see her, but disappeared with the touch of a button. Okay, she wasn’t real high on the bed-warmer scale, and he was pretty sure he’d torpedoed his last two relationships because the women hadn’t measured up to the Hera that lived in his mind, but please. He was twenty-six and in no hurry to settle.

She was out there. He didn’t know why or how he knew that, but he was sure of it. He just hadn’t met her yet.

‘‘Here’s something,’’ the driver said through the buzzed-down privacy window as he let the limo roll to a stop. ‘‘Want me to try it?’’

Off to one side, a two-lane track had been beaten into the prairie, as though a convoy had been through recently. About a half mile ahead of them, it looked like the dirt road twisted down and disappeared. ‘‘Does it head toward the canyon?’’

‘‘Seems to.’’

‘‘Then let’s go. What’s the worst that could happen?’’

‘‘We drive off the road, get stuck, try to walk back, and die miserably of dehydration and sunstroke,’’ the driver offered, but he grinned as he said it, and turned the stretch SUV down the track. ‘‘Hang on.’’

It wasn’t bad at first, but as they hit the bend in the road and it did, indeed, drop down into Chaco Canyon, Nate gave up his dignity, strapped on his seat belt, and clung to the armrests as the vehicle bounced and shuddered all the way to the bottom.

When they turned the final corner, the driver let up on the gas. ‘‘Well, hell.’’

Something twisted in Nate’s gut at the sight of the buildings scattered in a small box canyon about a quarter of a mile farther up. ‘‘I guess this is it.’’

It looked like a construction site at first, with tri-axle dumps raising big dust clouds and double crews working on high scaffolds, securing the roof of a huge steel-span building off to one side. But as they got closer he realized it was a mix of old and new buildings, some under construction, with a patch of blackened earth the size of a football field and a huge tree that seemed utterly out of place. There were other structures in the rear that he couldn’t quite make out, and the whole thing was fronted by a new-looking masonry wall that ran from one side of the box canyon to the other.

The gates were wide-open, though, and the driver rolled him right up to the front door of the main house, which was more mansion than house, three stories of pale pink-and-gray limestone, with trim that practically vibrated shiny white from a new coat of paint.

After they’d sat there for a moment, the driver looked at him. ‘‘You getting out?’’

Yes. No. He didn’t know. Shit.

Nate didn’t consider himself a weenie, but this so wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but this wasn’t it.

He took a deep breath and reminded himself he’d planted a time-delayed e-mail in the system back at work, ready to drop a mayday in a couple of hours if he didn’t delete it. ‘‘Yeah, I’m getting out.’’ He left his laptop and bags in the car, though. ‘‘Give me fifteen minutes to check out the situation and I’ll let you know if I’m staying or not.’’

Then the front door of the mansion opened and his heart stopped for a second, then started up again, hammering in his ears so loud he could barely think. ‘‘Scratch that,’’ he said, fumbling for his bags. ‘‘I’m staying.’’

Hera stood in the doorway.

Alexis held her ground as the newcomer strode toward her, his long legs eating up the distance that separated them, his eyes fixed on her. She recognized the look; ten bucks said he was going to invite her for a ride in his mine’s-bigger-than-yours chauffeur-driven dick-mobile.

Instead, he climbed the marble steps, stopped a few feet away from her, and didn’t say a word. He just looked at her.

A shimmer of awareness worked its way across her skin, sliding along her nerve endings and whispering something she couldn’t hear. She rubbed her arms, which were bare beneath a cap-sleeved T-shirt, brushing away the sensation.

Sure, he was just her type—wealthy and slick in his Armani suit and trendy, heavy-framed glasses, bigger than her by a good four inches in all directions, and no-holds -barred masculine, with his dark hair slicked back and a layer of stubble on his jaw. But that was the problem—he was just her type, and as her recent nonrelationship with Aaron the Worthless Prick proved, the men that were her type tended to be spoiled, arrogant brats who should’ve been spanked more when they were young.

And no, she wasn’t volunteering to fix that now. So she narrowed her eyes into a don’t even think it glare. ‘‘Can I help you?’’

He blinked as though that was entirely not what he’d expected her to say. Recovering, he two-fingered a card out of his pocket and held it out. ‘‘Guy teleported me onto a roof, hung me over the side, then told me to come here if I wanted to learn more.’’

‘‘No kidding?’’ She glanced at the card. ‘‘Then you’ve already seen more of the magic than I have, and I’ve already been here a few days.’’ She waved him in. ‘‘We’re in the middle of Magic 101.’’ As an afterthought, she stuck out a hand. ‘‘I’m Alexis Gray. Smoke bloodline. ’’