Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

Unfortunately, she didn’t have much more in the success department there, either.

She was a bust in Magic 101, showing zero power, which was both a relief and a disappointment—a relief because she wasn’t sure she wanted to play the magic game when it seemed like a good way of getting dead, but a disappointment because she really, really wanted to fry Zipacna’s ass. Then she found out the deal with the MAC-10s: The bullets were tipped with jade, which was apparently anathema to the denizens of the nine-layered hell called Xibalba. They were the Nightkeepers’ silver bullets.

And they were a way for her to fight Zipacna.

According to Jox—who had no use for her but proved to be a bit of a weapons junkie—the jade-tips wouldn’t kill a makol because its human aspect would protect it from the jade while its magic protected it from getting dead right away. But the jade-tips would sure as hell slow it down long enough for her to do the head-and-heart thing and recite a simple banishment spell. Jox said he wasn’t sure whether the banishment spell would work for a human—and of course he said the ‘‘human’’ part with a superior lip curl. That meant maybe the makol would vaporize . . . and maybe it’d sit its headless ass up and make a grab for her.

She had a feeling the winikin was hoping for the latter. But who the hell cared? At least she had a weapon with some hope of success. All she had to do was track down Zipacna, who might or might not be traveling with a hundred or so of his freak-show disciples.

That turned out to be easier said than done.

She leaned on the Nightkeeper’s private eye, Carter, and called in all her markers and then some. She tracked the 2012ers from Miami to the Keys and lost them when they hit the water, headed south. A week later, she picked them back up in south Texas, near the border. Once she had the location, she forced Strike and Red-Boar to take her along on the teleport recon by refusing to give up the location—and the relevant photographs— until they agreed.

They got there half a day too late. Zipacna and his freaks were gone.

Then the same thing happened in Fort Worth, and again in Philly, of all places. Then LA. Each time they were a fraction too late, sometimes a day, sometimes just a few hours, as if the bastard had known they were coming.

‘‘He’s got a seer,’’ Strike said at one point. ‘‘It’s the only explanation.’’

The knowledge hurt him doubly, she knew—once because they couldn’t catch the ajaw-makol , and a second time because it drove home the continued separation between him and his sister, Anna—a rift Leah had learned of when she’d come across him one day, sitting at the kitchen table with the mail open in front of him and his head in his hands. Eventually he’d revealed that he’d given Anna a text for translation and she’d sent it back, refusing to get involved. Which left them with no seer, and no translator the Nightkeepers could trust.

With so much of their magic lost over the years—to time, to persecution—they couldn’t afford to waste any of their assets. But instead of zapping to UT Austin and dragging his sister’s butt back to the compound, Strike had withdrawn completely, giving Jox and Red-Boar control of Magic 101 and spending most of his time locked in the archives. When he did come out in public, he was snarly at best, churlish at worst. Even Red-Boar started giving him a wide berth, which was saying something.

As days turned to weeks, Strike’s absence meant that Leah didn’t have to work so hard at avoiding him, and she could spend as much time as she wanted on the firing range at the back of the compound, perfecting her aim with the jade-tips without his figuring out what she planned to do. But it also meant that the buzz of desire became an ache of loneliness. And she wasn’t the only one missing him, either. The trainees, whom she’d gotten to know little by little, were starting to fall apart . . . and she was the only one who seemed to see it.

Granted, on the surface everything looked pretty good. Patience and Brandt were the perfect couple, and their twins didn’t seem to miss not having other kids around. The boys played with each other under the watchful eyes of the winikin , or tagged after Rabbit, who had the rep of a delinquent but seemed to get a kick out of the twins. Of the others, Alexis and Nate were a couple, though they didn’t spend much time together outside of the bedroom, and Michael and Jade’s romance had fizzled out around the one-month mark, right about the time he discovered a knack for casting force fields. Sven was . . . well, he was Sven. He hung loose, seeming even more chilled out after his young winikin went back to college. Even Red-Boar, whom Leah tagged as living on the manic-depressive side of life, seemed to have settled into the teaching role pretty well.

But beneath the surface, she didn’t like how Rabbit spent so much time alone, and how the others treated him differently, not because he was younger, but because he was half-human, and didn’t have his mark. She didn’t like seeing Patience and Brandt with their heads together, shutting out the rest of the world—and not in a we’re deeply in love way, but in a we’re making plans that don’t include you way. She didn’t like that Nate spent a big chunk of his time on the computer, trading e-mails with his business partners and working on something about a Viking sex goddess, or that Michael got a dozen cell calls a day and always took them behind closed doors.

They trained hard; she’d give them that, though it wasn’t like Jox or Red-Boar would’ve tolerated anything less. In the mornings Jox did a sort of Nightkeepers for Dummies, which was a blinding speed-sampling of their history, starting with Atlantis—and boy, had that made Leah’s cop side cringe—and running through to the present, along with a short version of the Popol Vuh creation myth and a dizzying number of prophecies, some coming from the earliest Nightkeepers, others supposedly from the gods themselves.

In the afternoons, the trainees met up with Red-Boar in the steel-sided training building, which was almost always either too hot or too cold. There, they worked on basic barrier spells like shielding and wielding fire. Of the trainees, only Rabbit could reliably make fire, and Michael showed a talent for shields. Patience got pretty good at the invisibility thing—which was the freakiest by far, in Leah’s opinion—and even figured out that she could occasionally throw her talent to distant objects or people, especially if her husband was boosting her with his power. Which was all well and good, but Leah didn’t see how most of the things they were doing—with the exception of Jox’s late-afternoon lessons on the firing range—were preparing them to fight.

Worse, she was pretty sure the others felt the same way. They were taking their classes, finishing their home-work, and otherwise doing their own things. And that was not a good recipe for teamwork.

Maybe she noticed it because she was an outsider, maybe because Connie had exposed the members of the MDPD to a wide range of touchy-feely exercises designed to build their team spirit. Or whatever. But while the cops had universally mocked Connie’s team-building crapola, as far as Leah could tell, the MDPD had been one big, happy, tolerant family compared to the Nightkeepers. And that was bad. They—and that would be the whole-wide-world ‘‘they’’—needed the magi working together, or very bad things were going to happen. Leah believed that, even if she didn’t totally understand it.

A week before the Venus conjunction, she decided she’d had enough of the bullshit, enough of Strike locking himself away and pretending Jox and Red-Boar were a fine substitute for leadership.