Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

Strike, like his father before him, was trying to bend the traditions to save someone he cared for. And if his strategy failed, as it had done for his father before him, the results could be catastrophic.

‘‘Don’t go up against Jox and Red-Boar for me,’’ she said quietly. ‘‘Not without a backup plan.’’

‘‘And don’t you tell me how to do my job.’’ He turned away and started pulling on his pants with quick, irritated efficiency, and she could feel the darkness simmering very close to the surface. She could sense the anger that rode him, the frustration, and knew that what they’d just done had, if anything, made it worse.

Knowing he needed an assurance that she couldn’t give, she dropped down from the altar and pulled her shirt and panties back on. The two of them were close together in the small space, but the gap separating them suddenly seemed wider than ever.

She touched his arm, where his marks stood out in stark relief against his skin in the firelight. ‘‘I’m just one person, Strike. Like it or not, you’ve got a way bigger responsibility than that.’’

‘‘Tell me something I don’t know,’’ he grated out. He sounded angry, but when he spun to face her, she saw grief on his face. ‘‘Do you want to die?’’

‘‘Of course not,’’ she snapped, ‘‘but I don’t want to live four more years knowing the world is going to end because I’m still in it.’’

He looked at her long and hard before he said, ‘‘You know what? Maybe I do.’’

Then he strode from the small chamber, bare chested and pissed off. And he didn’t look back.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Strike had a good fume on as he headed to his quarters for a new shirt. Gods, it seemed impossible that he could want someone so much, and want to strangle her at the same time.

It flat-out pissed him off that in the aftermath of some pretty fantastic, earth-rocking sex, Leah had dropped into cop mode on him, looking for evidence in a situation that was governed by religion , for chrissakes.

His gut told him there had to be a way to break the connection between her and the god—or better yet, to bring Kulkulkan through to earth—without either of them dying. But instead of trusting him, she’d all but accused him of bending the rules to suit his own needs at the expense of the other Nightkeepers, or the end-time war. And if that thought came too close to some of his father’s failures, then so be it. He wasn’t going to stop thinking for himself and blindly follow some two-thousand -year-old prophecy just because he was afraid of making a mistake.

Even if it could cost the world the rest of the Nightkeepers? a small voice whispered inside him, sounding very like his mother, or what he remembered of her.

‘‘It won’t,’’ he said aloud. ‘‘I won’t let it.’’ But what if the choice wasn’t his? What if everything unfolded as had been foretold?

And there, he realized, was the crux of things. He hated feeling as if he were acting out a script that’d been written long ago, hated the idea that free will was an illusion, that no matter what he did it was going to come down to his taking up the Manikin scepter and sacrificing the thing that mattered most to him.

‘‘Fuck that,’’ he muttered under his breath, determined not to let it go down that way. But he also knew that Jox and Red-Boar would be on the side of tradition— and, damn it, logic—no matter what arguments he made.

So he went in search of his sister.

He found her in the suite they’d shared as children— two bedrooms and a main room they’d divided with a strip of masking tape. She stood in the middle of the bedroom that had once been hers, wearing the same jeans and sneakers as the night before, along with a borrowed shirt of pale blue cotton. Her dark chestnut-highlighted hair fell to her shoulders in soft waves, and her eyes were the same cobalt blue he saw in the mirror every morning.

Strike knocked on the door frame. ‘‘It’s me.’’ Then he stalled.

There hadn’t been time for an emotional reunion in the grad student’s apartment, and he hadn’t made time for one the night before. Now, in the light of day, it seemed like it was too late, like they’d already settled into the uneasy coexistence that had plagued their growing-up years. He’d been the patrilineal heir to a dead culture; she’d been an itza’at seer whose powers had just begun to awaken right before the massacre. And boy had that been shitty timing. While he’d dreamed for years of the boluntiku attack and the deaths of all their playmates and winikin , she’d been forced to relive the attack at the intersection itself, her seer’s powers showing her the deaths of their parents, the slaughter of the other magi.

Among the survivors, only Red-Boar had seen the same things, forming a bond between them. When the older Nightkeeper had disappeared into the Yucatán rain forest a few years after the massacre, he’d left Anna behind, alone with the memories. At first she’d withdrawn into herself. Then, when Jox had enrolled both of the children in public school, she’d flourished into a normal high schooler, turning her back almost gratefully on the world they’d lost.

Strike had understood even back then. But that hadn’t made it any easier when she’d left for college and they’d all known she wasn’t coming back. Only now she was back, and this time it was up to him to make sure she stayed.

She hadn’t answered his hail, just stood there in the middle of the room, staring out the double windows that showed the ball court, and far beyond that the canyon wall, with its darkened pueblo shadows. Her blue eyes were dark with memory and sorrow, and Strike wanted to go to her and tell her everything was going to be okay, that he wanted to protect her now the way he hadn’t been able to when they’d been younger.

But though he would do his damnedest to protect her—protect all of them—there was no way he could promise anything more. Not with the equinox just over a week away, and so much left to figure out. So instead of making promises he couldn’t be sure to keep, he crossed the room and stood next to her to look out the window.

And, because there really wasn’t much else to say, he said, ‘‘Welcome home, Anna.’’

A watery laugh burst out of her, and she sucked it back in as a sob. Still not looking at him, she said, ‘‘God, I hate this place. Nothing here but bad memories.’’

‘‘We’re making new ones now. We have no choice.’’

Now she did turn to him, her blue eyes wet with tears and hard with accusation. ‘‘There’s always a choice. This is America. Land of the free and home of the brave, et cetera.’’

‘‘You know better than that,’’ he said, hurting for her but at the same time feeling the kick of too-ready anger. ‘‘We are, as we have always been, a culture living within another. We live alongside America but we’re not part of it.’’ They couldn’t follow human laws while doing the things they would need to do over the next few years.

‘‘I’m part of it,’’ she said, but her voice was wistful. ‘‘I have a husband, a job I love, friends who care about me. The perfect normal life.’’ There was an edge to her voice that suggested it wasn’t as simple as that, but she continued, ‘‘I don’t want to be here. I can’t help you.’’

‘‘Yes, you can. The question is, will you? Like you said, it’s a free country. You know where the garage is. Keys are on the pegboard.’’ The prickles of anger had him aiming low. ‘‘I’m sure Jox wouldn’t begrudge you his jeep. Gods know you took more than that the last time you ran.’’

She turned to face him, glaring. ‘‘I didn’t take a damn thing that wasn’t mine to take.’’