“Hell.” Mouth breathing, Nate crouched down, fumbled with his ankle holster, and pulled out a snub-nosed nine-millimeter loaded with jade-tipped bullets.

The jade would be overkill if he met up with bad news of the human variety, but the sacred stone was one of the few things that made a dent in the underworld nasties he’d gotten to know up close and personal over the past seven months, ever since his life had swerved off Reality Road and plunged into something that bore more than a passing resemblance to the quest fantasies he wrote for a living. Or what’d used to be his living.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” he called into the cottage. “It’s Nate Blackhawk; we spoke on the phone yesterday. Are you okay?”

He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t get one.

There was a dead Christmas wreath hanging on the door, and jingle bells tinkled as he let the door swing shut at his back. The decoration was six weeks past its prime, suggesting that the old lady hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she was having trouble keeping up with her house, living alone.

The Cape Cod beachfront cottage was one level, maybe four or five rooms, tops, decorated right out of the Yankee Candle catalog, with an added dose of doilies. The place made Nate—at six-three, two hundred pounds, amber eyed, dark haired and sharp featured, wearing a black-on-black combination of Nightkeeper combat gear and don’t scare the old lady casual wear—feel seriously out of his element.

It wasn’t exactly the first place he’d look for an ancient Mayan artifact that’d been out of circulation for nearly eight decades, either, but this was where the trail had led.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” He moved across the main room to a short hallway, where the air was thicker. “Edna?”

There was a bathroom on one side, followed by a closet and a neat-as-a-pin guest room done in Early Ruffle. On the opposite side was a single door, open just enough to show a slice of pale blue carpet and the edge of a lace-topped mahogany dresser. He used his toe to nudge open the door and then stepped inside, grimacing at the sight of a sunken-cheeked woman tucked into a queen-size adjustable bed, with a lace-trimmed quilt pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were closed, her skin gray, her face oddly peaceful. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, but next to her sat a polished keepsake box Nate recognized from her description as the one that had held the small figurine she’d inherited from her grandmother, who’d gotten it from hers.

The box was open and empty, the statuette gone.

“Shit.” He felt a beat of grief for the seventy-something widow, along with a serious case of the oh, hells at the realization that the Banol Kax had known what the Nightkeepers were looking for, and had somehow gotten there first.

Or had they? he wondered, frowning at the neatly smoothed quilt, the carefully positioned body. The Banol Kax and their blood-bound human emissaries, the makol, weren’t big on subtlety; he would’ve expected her to be hacked up pretty good if they’d been the ones to steal the statuette. But if not the demons, then who had offed the old lady and taken the artifact?

Not your problem, Nate told himself. You’re just the courier. But still, he stared down at the dead woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. Less than twenty-four hours ago they’d spoken by phone about the statuette, and the things she could do with the money he’d offered for it. She’d wanted to move south, where it was warmer in winter, and go into assisted living, because her daughters had no time for her and even less inclination to get involved. Nate had figured he’d offer to help her with the move; he knew what it felt like to have nobody give a crap where you were or what you were doing. That wouldn’t be necessary now, though, because whoever had taken the statuette had taken her life with it. Like that had been necessary. A low burn tightened his gut. Bastards, he thought. What harm would it’ve done to leave her alive?

He wanted to tell her that he’d get the shitheels who’d taken away the promise of a better life, but he wasn’t sure the sweet-seeming lady would care for the idea of revenge on her behalf, so in the end he said nothing. He just nodded to her, touched the hawk medallion he wore around his neck, and made a private promise to see justice done. Then he headed back the way he’d come, mentally tracking what he’d touched, wiping as needed, because there was no sense in being stupid when the cops had his prints on file.

He’d done his time and straightened out in the years since, but still.

Once he was outside and the jingle bells were quiet in their brown-needled wreath, he reholstered the nine-millimeter and headed for his rental. A few miles out of town he stopped at a pay phone that actually worked—the things were few and far between these days—and called in an anonymous 911. As soon as he was back on the road, headed for the airport, he palmed his cell and speed-dialed the Nightkeeper’s training compound, Skywatch.

“Yes, sir,” answered his winikin, Carlos, proper as always.

Nate didn’t bother reminding his sort-of servant to do the first-name thing, because he knew it wouldn’t work. Most of the other Nightkeeper-winikin pairs were pretty informal with each other, having been together for decades. Nate, on the other hand, had lost his original winikin early on, winding up in human-style foster care instead. He’d grown up human, not having a clue about the magic in his blood until seven months earlier, when the Nightkeepers’ hereditary king, Striking-Jaguar, had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, teleported him onto the roof, and dangled him over the side in order to get his attention, then promised to tell him about his parents. That’d been shock number one. Shock number two had come when Nate showed up at Skywatch and met fellow Nightkeeper trainee Alexis Gray . . . who was a pixel-perfect image of Hera, the sex-goddess Valkyrie Nate had written into five installments of his Viking Warrior vid games over the past four years. His friends had a running joke that Nate couldn’t keep a girlfriend because he was always comparing them to Hera, and maybe there’d been some truth to that. Meeting her in the flesh, so to speak, had blown him away. Even better, Alexis had proven to be a woman of worth; he might give her grief about being a pampered princess and a goody-goody overachiever—both of which were true—but she was also tough and resourceful, and had a core of loyalty and integrity he had to admire, even if that sort of shit had never worked for him. But just because she was sexy as sin and a hell of a woman, and they’d hooked up for a few months during the worst of the hormone storms that’d come with getting their powers, didn’t mean they were foreordained to be mates. Nate didn’t believe in predestiny and crap like that . . . which was tantamount to blasphemy in his new life.

The Nightkeepers’ entire culture was based on fate and prophecy, but as far as Nate was concerned, destiny was just what lazy game developers pulled out of their asses when they couldn’t think of a better way to connect the dots. It was bullshit, right up there with magic swords and the ever-popular “amulet to be named at a later date” that most epic fantasy writers used at one point or another to get themselves out of a jam.

Nate was willing to believe in the Nightkeepers’ magic because he’d experienced it firsthand, and he was willing to buy into the December 21, 2012, end date because it was based in scientific fact: The Great Conjunction was coming, and in the absence of an ozone layer, the Earth would be vulnerable to the sun flares and magnetic fluxes the eggheads were predicting. He was even willing to accept that there was a powerful barrier of psi energy separating the earth and the underworld, and that it thinned during major stellar events. Based on his recent experiences, he’d even stretch credulity and buy into the threat that the barrier would come crashing down on the 2012 end date, and that it was the Nightkeepers’ job to keep the demons on their side of the barrier when that happened.

He’d seen and done enough magic of his own to buy into those things. But there was no way in hell he was going to believe that the future was already written, that he’d known what his gods-intended mate would look like years before he’d met her in the flesh, that they were destined to fall in love because fate said they should. No frigging thanks. Having spent his first twenty years locked up, first in the foster system, then in juvie and the Greenville penitentiary, he was all about freedom and free will.

Carlos, on the other hand, was all about “the thirteenth Nightkeeper prophecy” this and “the seven demon prophecies” that, and practically worshiped the idea that time was cyclical, that what had happened before would happen again. According to legend, the winikin were the descendants of the captured Sumerian warriors who had served the Nightkeepers back in ancient Egypt. When Akhenaton went monotheistic in 1300 or so B.C. and ordered his guard to off the priests of the old religion—including the Nightkeepers—the servants had managed to escape with a handful of the Nightkeepers’ children. The sole surviving adult mage, acting under the influence of the gods, had magically blood-bound the servants to their Nightkeeper lineages, creating the winikin. Or so the story went. The upshot was that the winikin were fiercely loyal to their blood-bound charges. They acted partly as the Nightkeepers’ protectors, partly as their servants, and almost always as the little nagging voices on their shoulders.

Carlos, who on the king’s request had transferred responsibility for his original Nightkeeper charge to his daughter and taken over as Nate’s winikin when the Nightkeepers had been reunited seven months earlier, was an Olympic-level nagger. Worse, he had ambitions. He was jonesing for Nate to follow in the footsteps of his father, Two-Hawk, and become an adviser to the king. The winikin just didn’t get why that wasn’t going to happen . . . i.e., because Nate had no intention of getting in any deeper than he absolutely had to. Hell, he’d volunteered to go get the statuette only because he’d needed some distance from all of the destiny shit, and a chance to get away from the stress of trying to be a Nightkeeper while running Hawk Enterprises long-distance. And he’d needed to put some serious miles between him and Alexis after the way things had ended between them.

Besides, he’d figured it’d be an easy deal: Fly out, buy the statuette off the old lady, and fly home.

That’d worked well. Not.

Nate, who kept score in his head, like any good gamer, figured that if he called the Nightkeepers’ first big fight with the Banol Kax level one of the battle, then they had more or less won their way through when they’d banded together during the previous fall’s equinox and driven the demon Zipacna back through the barrier to Xibalba, where he belonged. Which meant they were on to level two now, and the bad guys had scored the first hit when they’d snagged the demon prophecy out from under Nate’s nose.

“Edna Hopkins is dead and the statuette’s gone,” Nate told Carlos, his voice clipped. “Someone—or something—got here ahead of me.”

Which was not good news, because it meant they’d been wrong in thinking that the lack of activity at the intersection during the winter solstice had meant the Banol Kax had fallen back to regroup. The demons must’ve sent something through the barrier after all, though gods only knew how they’d done it. The sole transit point between the earth, sky, and underworld was the sacred chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, and sure as shit nothing had come through there. The Nightkeepers had been there, waiting.

Which probably meant the demons had managed to punch through the barrier and convince an evil-souled human host to undergo the makol ritual, as they had done at least twice the prior fall. The makol, who could be identified by their luminous green eyes, retained their human intelligence and free will in direct relation to their degree of evilness and willingness to be possessed. Maybe the demons had created one or more makol during the winter solstice and sent them after the statuette. But why now? And why had they left the body untouched?

“Are you safe?” Carlos asked, though they both knew the question was more protocol than real concern.

“Yeah. Whoever or whatever killed her is long gone.”

“Was she sacrificed?”

“She’s intact.” Which had Nate seriously on edge. The dark magic of Xibalba was largely powered by the blood sacrifice of unwilling victims. If makol had taken the statue and killed Edna Hopkins, they would’ve taken her head and heart, too, as those were the seats of power. Yet there hadn’t been a mark on her, and she’d looked peaceful rather than terrified. Which meant . . . Hell, he didn’t know what it meant, and the discrepancy had him rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, where the hairs at his nape were doing a shimmy. “Don’t let anyone else leave the compound until I get back, okay? I have a bad feeling about this.”

Skywatch was protected by a blood ward that had been set in the 1920s by the willing sacrifice of two senior Nightkeepers, and was reinforced by regular ceremonial autolettings by the resident magi. The ward meant the training compound was impenetrable to all but the strongest of the underworld denizens. If the Nightkeepers stayed put they’d be safe from Edna Hopkins’s killer, buying them time to identify the threat and figure out how to neutralize it.

Strike and the others might be willing to follow prophecies carved in stone temples. Nate preferred legwork, strategy, and firepower.

But Carlos was silent for too long. That, combined with the tickle at the back of Nate’s neck, warned him there was a problem even before the winikin said, “Miss Alexis left last night for an estate auction in Monterey.”

Nate’s gut clenched and his voice went deadly chill. “And you’re only just telling me this now?”

“You’ve made it clear that she isn’t your concern.” There was an edge to the winikin’s voice, coming from Nate’s refusal to buy into the whole gods-given-mate thing.

Screw refusing to buy in; he was actively fighting it. He respected Alexis, and yeah, they’d clicked physically—hell, the sex had been scorching. But it’d been too much, too fast, at a time when his life had been doing a screeching one-eighty, swerving around a bit and then skidding off into a ditch. If it hadn’t been for the magic and the Nightkeepers, he and Alexis never would’ve met. If they had, odds were that they would’ve felt the spark, acknowledged it, and moved on, because it was godsdamned obvious that while they might have chemistry, they didn’t always like each other.

Hera, he understood; Alexis, not so much. But that didn’t stop his gut from locking up at the knowledge that she was outside the wards and didn’t have a clue there was a makol or something after the demon prophecies. And if the demon spawn were tracking the artifacts by piggybacking on the Nightkeepers’ investigations, whether by magic or good old-fashioned e-hacking, which was the only way the timing of Edna Hopkins’s death made any sense, then the odds were good that Alexis was going to have company very soon, if she didn’t already.

Shit. Nate hit the brakes, yanked the rental over to the side of the road, and grated, “Get Strike here. Now.”

“The king’s ability to teleport isn’t a convenience.”

“Fuck convenience. Consider this a rescue.”

In the ornate ballroom of a recently foreclosed estate on the Monterey coast, the auctioneer introduced lot two twelve, a thirteen-hundred-year-old Mayan statuette of the goddess Ixchel. Bidding started at two grand and jumped almost immediately to five. At fifty-five hundred, Alexis caught the spotter’s eye and nodded to bump the bid. Then she leaned back in her folding chair, projecting the calm of a collector.

It was a lie, of course. The only things she’d ever collected were parking tickets at the Newport Marina. She looked the part, though, in a stylish navy pin-striped pantsuit that nipped in at the waist and pulled a little across the shoulders, thanks to all the hand-to-hand training she’d gotten in recent months. Her streaky blond hair was caught back in a severe ponytail, tasteful makeup accented her blue eyes and wide mouth, and she wore secondhand designer shoes that put her well over six feet. A top-end bag sat at her feet beside a matching folio, both slightly scuffed around the edges.

Understated upscale, courtesy of eBay. Her godmother, Izzy, might’ve pushed her into finance rather than fashion, but Alexis had put her love of fabric to good use regardless, calling on it to build an image.

In her previous life as a private investment consultant, her look had been calculated to reassure her wealthy friends and clients that she belonged among them but wouldn’t compete, wouldn’t upstage. She’d played the part for so long prior to the oh, by the way, you’re a Nightkeeper revelation that it’d been second nature to dress for this gig. But as bidding on the statuette topped sixtyfive hundred and Alexis nodded to bump it to a cool seven grand, she felt a hum of power that had been missing from her old life.

I have money now, the buzz in her blood said. I deserve to be here.

It wasn’t her money, not really. But she had carte blanche with the Nightkeeper Fund, and orders not to come home empty-handed.

“Ma’am?” said a cultured, amplified voice. It was the auctioneer now, not the spotter, which meant the dabblers had dropped out and he had his two or three serious bidders on the hook. “It’s seventy-five hundred dollars to you.”

She glanced up at the projection screen at the front of the room. It showed a magnification of the statuette, which rested near the auctioneer’s elbow, top-lit on a nest of black cloth. Described in the auction catalog as “a statuette of Ixchel, Mayan goddess of rainbows and fertility, carved from chert, circa A.D. 1100; love poem inscribed in hieroglyphs on base,” the statuette was lovely. The waxy, pale green stone had been carved with deceptive simplicity into the shape of a woman with a large nose and flattened forehead, her conical skull crowned with a rainbow of hair that fell forward as she tipped her head into her hands in repose, or perhaps tears. She sat upon a stone, or maybe an overturned bowl or basket, and that was where the glyphs were carved, curved and fluid and gorgeous like all Mayan writing, which was as much art as a form of communication.

Love poem, Alexis thought with an inner snort. Not. Or rather, it was eau-de-Hallmark read one way, but according to Jade, the Nightkeepers’ archivist, if they held the statuette at the proper angle under starlight, a second layer of glyphwork would spell out the first of the seven demon prophecies they needed to combat the Banol Kax. Starscript, which was less about magic and more about the refractive angles and wavelengths of starlight, was apparently one of the tricks the ancestral Nightkeepers had used to bury their spells and prophecies within the carved writings of the ancient Maya, again according to Jade. And since Jade was the one who’d gotten the message from her nahwal ancestor during the winter solstice ritual, warning that the demon prophecies must be found, Alexis was inclined to believe her. The nahwal had said that the first prophecy would be triggered during the upcoming spring equinox, just over six weeks away . . . which meant it was pretty godsdamned critical that Alexis didn’t let some collector type outbid her on the Ixchel statuette.

Aware that the auctioneer was waiting for her answer, she said, “Ten thousand dollars.” As she’d hoped, the advance jumped the bid past fair market value by enough to make her remaining opponent shake his head and drop out. The auctioneer pronounced it a done deal, and she felt a flare of success as she flashed her bidder number, knowing there would be no problem with the money.

The Nightkeeper Fund, which had—ironically—been seeded in the late eighteen hundreds with the proceeds from her five-times-great-grandparents’ generation unwisely selling off the very Mayan artifacts the modern Nightkeepers were scrambling to recover now, had been intended to fund an army of hundreds as the 2012 end date approached. That, however, was before the current king’s father had led his warrior-priests in an ill-fated battle against the demons. Only a few of the youngest Nightkeepers had survived, hidden and raised in secret by their winikin until seven months earlier, when the intersection connecting the earth, sky, and underworld had reactivated from its two-decade dormancy, and the old king’s son, Strike, had recalled his warriors.

Yeah, that had been a shocker. Alexis, dear, you’re a magic user, Izzy had pretty much said. I’m not your godmother; I’m your winikin, and we need to leave tonight for your bloodline ceremony and training. And, oh, by the way, you and the other Nightkeepers have a little over four years to save the world.

According to the thirteenth prophecy, Strike’s refusal to sacrifice Leah, the human who had become his mate and queen, meant that the countdown to the end—time had now begun in earnest. Jade’s research indicated that they’d passed into the four-year cycle ruled by the demon prophecies, which predicted that seven minions of the demon Camazotz would come through the intersection one at a time, each on a cardinal day, and attack. If they succeeded, the barrier would tear and the Banol Kax would be freed onto the earth . . . which had the Nightkeepers hustling to find the seven artifacts inscribed with starscript clues on how to avoid the fulfillment of the prophecies.

Make that six artifacts, Alexis thought, grinning. Because I just bagged Ixchel.

“Excuse me, please,” she murmured, and rose, snagging her folio and bag off the floor. She stepped out into the aisle while the auction house employees whisked her statuette off the podium and set up the next lot, and the auctioneer launched into his spiel. When she reached the temporary office that’d been set up in the hallway outside the big estate’s ballroom, she unzipped her folio and enjoyed how the staffer’s eyes got big at the sight of the neatly stacked and banded cash. She handed over her bidder’s number. “What’s the total damage?”

“One moment please,” he said, but his eyes were still glued to the cash.

The two items she’d bought with the Nightkeepers’ money—the statuette and a death mask that had been an earlier impulse buy—wouldn’t be the biggest deals of the day by far, but she’d bet they’d be among only a few handled in paper money. Granted, she could’ve done the remote transfer thing, too, but she quite simply loved the feel of the green stuff. And no, it wasn’t because she’d been deprived or picked on as a child, as someone back at Skywatch had unkindly suggested. Nor was it a reaction to the idea that the world was four years away from a serious crisis of being, as that same someone had offered, or a rejection of destiny or some such garbage.

She just loved money. She loved the feel and smell of it. She loved what it could buy—not just the things, but the respect. The power. It wasn’t actually until she’d been at Skywatch for a few weeks that she’d realized that the money thing was simple biology. The Nightkeepers were bigger, stronger, and more graceful than average humans, pumped with charisma and loaded with talent. At least, most of them were. Alexis had somehow gotten the bigger-and-stronger part without the other stuff, particularly the grace, which meant she tended more toward the clumsy side of life. She’d worked long and hard to camouflage the klutz factor, and most days managed to control her freakishly long limbs. That effort, however, left her seriously low on charisma, and so far she was average in the magical talent department, as well.

Ergo, the cash. She liked living as large as possible. So sue her.

“It’s going to take a minute,” the staffer said. “The computer’s being glitchy today.”

“No rush.” She flipped the folio shut and turned away, figuring she’d use the brief delay to check in—which consisted of powering up her PDA, shooting off a quick text message to Izzy reporting that she had the statue and was headed back to Skywatch, and then powering off the unit without checking her backlogged messages.

She wasn’t in the mood for the chatter—hadn’t been for a while, which was why she’d jumped at the chance to fly from New Mex out to the California coast for the auction. The quick trip had given her a chance to breathe air she wasn’t sharing with the same group of Nightkeepers and winikin she’d been cheek-by-jowl with for the past half year. She wasn’t the only one feeling it, either. Tensions were running high, thanks to the lack of both privacy and enemy activity.

Besides, she could guarantee the messages on her cell were nothing critical, because she wasn’t in line for the important stuff yet. Strike had his advisers—Leah and the royal winikin, Jox—and the three of them handled the heavy lifting, with the lower-impact jobs delegated to the newly inducted Nightkeepers.

For now, anyway. Alexis had her sights set higher. Her mother, Gray-Smoke, had been one of King Scarred-Jaguar’s most trusted advisers, holding political power equaled only by that of her adversarial coadviser, Two-Hawk. That pretty much figured, because Two-Hawk’s son was Alexis’s own personal nemesis, i.e., the someone who’d been seriously pissing her off over the past few months, ever since he’d dumped her on her ass right after the talent ceremony, with no explanation given beyond the old standard: It’s not you, it’s me.

“Ma’am? You’re all set.” The staffer held out her paperwork. “I have a couple of messages for you too. She said it was important.”

“Thanks.” Alexis took the slips, glanced at them, and tucked them into her pocket. Just Izzy mother-henning her. The winikin would’ve gotten the text message by now, so they were square.

A grizzled, heavyset security guard set a metal case on the table and flipped it open so she could see the statuette nestled inside a shockproof foam bed, alongside the Mayan death mask she’d bought earlier. At her nod, the guard shut the case and slid it across the table to her, rumbling in a basso profundo voice, “Dial the numbers to what you want, and hit this button.” He pointed to an inset red dot. “That’ll set your combination. If you don’t want to bother, just leave it all zeros and it’ll act like a suitcase. Got it?”

“Got it.” A whim had her dialing in a date and hitting the red button. There was something satisfying about hearing the locks click.

Hefting the case, she gave the guard a friendly nod and headed out, mission accomplished. When she stepped through the front door of the estate, she found herself under the clear blue sky of a perfect February day in Nor Cal. The warm yellow sun and crisp, faintly salty air made her wish she’d opted for the convertible when she’d rented her car. But it’d been drizzling when she landed, so she’d treated herself to a sporty silver BMW that hugged the road like a lover. Convertible or not, the silver roadster ought to be automotive muscle enough to entertain her on the way back to LAX.

Sure enough, once she was on the road with the metal case in the passenger seat beside her, the feel of engine power and smooth leather lightened her mood, sending a victory dance through her soul. She had the statuette, and she wasn’t technically due back at Skywatch for another day. There was a sense of freedom in the thought, one that had her cranking the radio to something loud and edgy with a heavy backbeat as she pulled onto the narrow shoreline drive that led away from the lavish private estate that was being sold off, piece by piece, to settle the owner’s debts.

Alexis had thought it a stroke of luck that the sale had come up just as they’d started tracking down the lost artifacts, but Izzy had reminded her that there wasn’t much in the way of actual coincidence in the world. Most of what people thought of as happy accidents was really the will of the gods.

As she sent the BMW whipping around a low-g curve that dropped off to the right in a steep embankment and a million-dollar view of the Nor Cal coast, the thought of fate and the gods brought a quiver of unease, a sense that she’d already failed.

“If it was that easy to buck destiny it wouldn’t be destiny,” she told herself. Which was true, but still, it was hard not to feel like she’d gotten it wrong in the relationship department. Again.

The day Izzy had revealed her true heritage, Alexis had gotten a mental flash of an image: an etching of a fierce bird of prey. Then, just under a week later, she’d seen it again—on the medallion worn by Nate Blackhawk. No way that could be a coincidence. Neither could the fact that they’d immediately clicked . . . on the physical level, anyway. They’d danced around each other for the first couple of weeks, but once they’d gone through the bloodline ceremony and gotten their first forearm marks and their initial connections to the barrier, the overwhelming hormonal fluxes and enhanced sex drive that came with the magic had overridden their reservations and they’d become lovers. They’d done very, very well together sexually . . . but not so much outside the bedroom, where they’d clashed on almost every level. He was closed and difficult to read, and seemed to spend most of his time trying to prove that the gods didn’t control him, that he was free to make his own choices. In the end, she hadn’t been strong enough to hold them together—hadn’t been sure she’d wanted to, despite the omens that said they were meant for each other, and the knowledge that the magic of a mated Nightkeeper pair was ten times that of either mage alone.

It’d helped that Izzy didn’t like him either. Since the winikin both guided and protected the Nightkeepers, Izzy’s relief at the breakup had helped ease the sting . . . particularly since Izzy was the one who was always pushing Alexis to do her best, be her best, and live up to her mother’s memory. Gray-Smoke had been a legend in her own time, a powerful mage and adviser to the king. As far as Izzy was concerned, Alexis could be nothing less.

“Unfortunately, that’s proving easier said than done,” Alexis muttered.

Torturing herself, she shoved her sleeve up to her elbow, baring her right forearm, where each of the Nightkeepers and winikin was marked with Mayan glyphs that denoted status and power. The black marks looked like tattoos but were actually magic, appearing fully formed during special ceremonies in which a Nightkeeper went from child to trainee, from trainee to mage. Alexis wore two marks: the curling anthropomorphic b’utz glyph representing the smoke bloodline, and the three stacked blobs of the warrior’s talent mark, which had given her increased reflexes and strength, along with the ability to call up shields and fireballs, though not very effectively as yet. And that was it. Two marks, smoke and warrior. She hadn’t gotten an additional talent during the second ceremony. Granted, only about a third of Nightkeepers got a talent mark, and talents could sometimes appear after the formal ceremony, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to accept that so far she was a dud in the magic department.

“Damn it,” she muttered, shoving down her sleeve and hitting the gas too hard going into the next curve, which was a blind turn arcing along a sheer drop leading down to Monterey Bay. Easing off and cursing herself for getting all tangled up when she was supposed to be enjoying the day away and a job well-done, she nursed the car around the corner—

And drove straight into a wall of fire.

She screamed and cranked the wheel as flames lashed at the car, slapping in through the open windows and searing the air around her. Worse was the power that crackled along her skin, feeling dark and twisted.

Her warrior’s instincts fired up; she fought the urge to slam on the brakes and hit the gas instead, hoping to punch through the fire, but it was already too late. The car cut loose and slid sideways, losing traction when all four tires blew. Heart pounding, she wrestled with the wheel and forced herself not to inhale. Smoke burned her eyes and throat and the exposed skin at her wrists and face. Then she was through the fire and back on the open road, but it was too late to steer, too late to correct, if she even could have without rubber on her rims.

The BMW was doing nearly sixty when it hit the guardrail and flipped. Alexis went weightless for a few seconds; then the vehicle crashed down on the other side of the guardrail, cartwheeling, tumbling down a steep, rocky embankment toward a thirty-foot drop-off and the ocean below.

She cried out in pain and terror as the seat belt dug into her chest and thighs. The windshield spiderwebbed, the air bag detonated with a whumpf, and the OnStar did its thing, sending a distress call as the car started coming apart around her. Another flip and bang, and the driver’s-side door tore off, and then the vehicle was right-side up, sliding toward the edge of the precipice.

Body moving before her brain had caught up with her magic-honed warrior’s instincts, Alexis yanked off her belt, grabbed the metal case, and threw herself out the open door. She hit hard and rolled in a tangle of arms and legs, unable to protect herself without letting go of the case, which she wasn’t about to do. Sharp stones scratched at her, tearing her clothes and ripping shallow gouges in her scalded skin, but she clamped her teeth on the howl of pain and dug in her heels to stop the slide.

The BMW went over the edge, and the world went silent for a few seconds. Then the car hit bottom with a splashing crash, which would’ve been the last thing she heard if she’d still been in the vehicle.

Relief flared alongside the fear of what might happen next. Alexis lunged up and scrambled for the scant cover offered by a small pile of boulders near the edge of the embankment. She crouched down behind the rocks, heart hammering in her chest as she pressed herself against the warm stone and breathed through her mouth, panting like a dog that was damn glad to be alive.

Where the hell had the fire magic come from? Where were her attackers now? Her brain spun while her warrior’s talent buffered the fear a little, dampening the panic so she could think. The firewall had been magic, but not Nightkeeper magic. It’d scraped along her skin rather than humming, sounding discordant and wrong, and tasting faintly of salt and rot. She’d really experienced the magic of the Banol Kax only once before, during the equinox battle the previous fall, and she didn’t think it’d felt the same. But if it wasn’t demon magic, then what?

“Hope shield magic works against whatever the hell it is,” she muttered under her breath, and threw up the strongest shield she could muster: a six-inch-thick invisible force field that would repel projectiles and fireballs, and hopefully whatever else her attackers could throw at her. In the process, though, she’d be using up a ton of energy. That was the problem with having puny magic: Even the simplest spells kicked her ass.

Already feeling the power drain of shield magic, she eased around her boulder screen, took a look . . . and didn’t see a damn thing. The roadway was clear; the fire was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place; and there was no sign of whoever had set the trap for her. There were only her skid marks, a caved-in section of guardrail, and the unholy mess the BMW had made on its way down the slope and over the cliff.

It looked for all the world like the driver had simply lost control and gone over the edge—Alexis decided to think of it that way, as “the driver,” rather than dealing with the fact that she’d been in the car that’d made those marks, that she’d nearly gone over the cliff trying to get free of a firewall that hadn’t left even a smudge on the street. But it’d been real, she knew, just as she knew her attacker was out there, waiting.

Figuring it’d be stupid to drain herself further, she dropped the shield and hunkered back down behind the rock. She needed a plan.

Calling for help wasn’t an option—her cell phone had gone over with the car, she wasn’t a natural telepath, and she didn’t have a strong enough connection with any of the other Nightkeepers to get through to Skywatch via blood magic. The OnStar signal would’ve called in the local law, but she wasn’t betting on their being in time for whatever happened next. Which meant she was on her own. Worse, her head was seriously spinning from the drain of the barrier spell, and her fireballs were for shit.

Closing her eyes, she tried to remember what she’d seen in the last few seconds before she’d whipped around the corner and driven into the flames. There’d been nothing on the right side of the road but the cliff and the bay beyond, but she was pretty sure she remembered seeing a house just before things went to hell. Could she make it there and take shelter? Would she be any safer if she did? Who the hell knew, but making a run for it had to be better than huddling behind a couple of rocks, especially when power crinkled across her skin, warning that her attacker was gearing up for stage two.

“You’re not getting Ixchel,” she muttered under her breath, holding the suitcase close to her chest as she tried to slow her rocketing heartbeat and call on all the training she’d done recently, the sprints and balance exercises. She took a few quick breaths, managed not to throw up, and got herself in a defensive crouch. Then, casting up the best shield spell she could manage, she scrambled out from behind the rocks and bolted for the road, aiming for the house on the other side of the blind corner.

Behind her power surged, and the rocks that had formed her hiding spot suddenly exploded beneath the force of a smoky brown fireball.

Screaming, Alexis ran for her life. Her feet skidded on rocks and bits of broken glass, and her ankle turned as one of her too-high heels broke off. Cursing, sobbing, she hurled herself up the embankment and scrambled over the guardrail, kicking off her shoes once she was on the pavement. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and adrenaline spurred her on, pushing her past the pain when she stepped on another chunk of glass and it bit deep into the ball of her foot.

Blood flowed, bringing power. She felt the barrier magic reach out and grab hold of her, bolstering her failing strength as she put her head down and hauled ass.

She was halfway there when muddy brown smoke detonated in the middle of the street. Power rattled from the midst of the explosion, and a big man materialized in her path. He was as big as any of the Nightkeeper males, with slicked-back chestnut hair, green eyes, and broad features, wearing dark combat clothes and a weapons belt that looked all too familiar, loaded with a ceremonial knife and an autopistol.

Alexis skidded to a stop, freezing in disbelief at the sight of his bare forearm, where he wore an unfamiliar quatrefoil glyph, done in bloodred rather than Nightkeeper black.

“What are you?” she whispered, fear and confusion jamming her throat and almost robbing her of speech.

“I’m what your kind wish you could be.” His mouth tipped up at the corners, and he held out his hand. “Give me the statuette.”

“Like hell!” She pulled away, but wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t sure if he’d ’ported or just moved incredibly fast, but one second she had the suitcase, and the next she was flying three feet through the air, and he was holding on to the case.

Alexis didn’t think; she reacted, scrambling up with a cry that came from the warrior within her. She lunged, grabbed the big guy’s knife off his belt before he knew what was happening, and plunged the weapon into the bastard’s hand. He cursed bitterly and let go of the case, and Alexis grabbed the thing and ran like hell.

The enemy mage roared a curse, pulled his machine pistol, and let loose. Gunfire chattered, though most of the bullets bounced off Alexis’s shield spell. At least one got through, though. It plowed into her shoulder and hurt like hell.

She screamed as pain washed her vision red, then screamed again when the rattle of dark magic surrounded her and yanked her off her feet. Pressure vised her from all sides and bound her motionless in midair, suspended on an oily brown cloud. Energy roared through her, along with the peculiar sliding sensation of teleport magic as he prepared to take her somewhere she positively didn’t want to go. She poured everything she had into her shield, hoping it’d make her too bulky to transport or something. The rattle changed in pitch, dipping slightly, and the pressure eased.

Screaming, Alexis tore free of the brown mist. She tumbled to the ground, still clutching the suitcase in fingers gone numb from the death grip she had on the thing. Rolling as she hit, she scrambled up and started backing away as fast as she could, throwing the last of her strength into the shield spell.

The enemy mage fired again, burning through his first clip and slapping a second home, then resuming fire, his face set in anger and determination. Jade-tipped bullets pelted the invisible shield, deflecting no more than a foot from Alexis’s face, but she couldn’t flee and hold the magic at the same time, not now. Her power was too drained, her strength too low. Holding the metal case in front of her as a pitiful defense when her magic flickered and threatened to die, she crouched down, trying to make herself as small a target as possible, trying to minimize the shield’s dimensions and eke it out a few minutes longer.

Help! she shouted as loud as she could along her connection to the barrier, hoping somebody—anybody, another Nightkeeper, the gods, it didn’t matter—would hear. Please help me!

Blood trickled down her arm, but even with that sacrifice, the shield magic flickered. A bullet smacked into the edge of the case and ricocheted away; another bounced off the asphalt road a few inches from her bare, bloodied foot. Her eyes filmed with tears of desperation, of anger that this was how it would end.

She hadn’t done so many of the things she’d meant to—hadn’t come into her full powers as a Nightkeeper or proved herself to her king. She hadn’t shown up any of her old “friends” back in Newport, or outgrown the need to do so, and she hadn’t figured out why she sometimes awoke with tears in her eyes, hearing the echoes of a voice she knew belonged to the mother she’d never met. But it wasn’t any of those things she saw in her mind’s eye when the shield winked out of existence and the dark mage unleashed his final salvo. It was the glint of a hawk medallion, one she’d known long before she knew who wore it or what it meant. A wash of desire raced through her, the remembered echo of something that hadn’t turned out the way it should’ve. As she braced herself for the burn of bullet strikes, his name whispered in her heart.

Red-gold light suddenly detonated nuclear-bright, and a shock wave of displaced air knocked her back. The incoming bullets scattered in the blast, and two familiar figures slammed to the ground in front of her.

Nate Blackhawk, with the king at his side.

Both clad in black-on-black combat gear, tall and dark, and larger than life like all full-blooded Nightkeeper males, Nate and Strike should’ve looked similar, but didn’t.

Strike was solid and stalwart, with a close-clipped jawline beard and shoulder-length hair tied back at his nape. Cobalt blue eyes steely, square jaw set, he stepped forward and threw a shield spell around her attacker, his god-boosted powers cutting through the rattle of twisted magic and startling a cry out of the enemy mage. Fighting magic with magic, the Nightkeepers’ king looked like something out of a legend, a man of another age transplanted into the twenty-first century to battle the final evil.

Nate, in contrast, was wholly a man of the day, with short-cut black hair accentuating his strange, amber-colored eyes and aquiline nose. Instead of the black T-shirt most of the others wore under the thin layer of body armor, he wore a black button-down of fine cotton, open at the throat to show the glint of his gold medallion. The combination probably should have looked odd, but on him it looked exactly right, the melding of a successful businessman and a Nightkeeper mage.

Expression thunderous, he crossed to Alexis and threw a thick shield around them both. His magic was stronger than hers, damn him, and the shield muted the sounds of fighting as the king fireballed the enemy mage, who blocked the attack.

Nate glared down at her. “Do you still have the statuette?”

It took a second for the question to penetrate the relief, another for her irritation to rise to match his. She scowled and struggled to her bare, bleeding feet and waved the suitcase at him. “It’s in here. And I’m fine; thanks for asking.”

“Don’t start.” He snagged the case from her, got her by her uninjured arm, and hustled her to the king as dark magic rattled, signaling that the enemy mage was gearing up for transpo.

The muddy brown mist gathered, enshrouding the chestnut-haired man. The last thing Alexis saw was his startlingly clear emerald eyes, locked on her. She heard the echo of his words on a thread of magic. See you soon. . . .

Then he was gone.

Sirens wailed in the near distance as the mist cleared, leaving the three Nightkeepers standing in the middle of the shoreline drive, near the mangled guardrail and a spray of broken glass.

Strike glanced at Alexis. “You okay?”

She nodded, suddenly unable to trust herself to speak. In the aftermath of the fight, her warrior’s bravery snapped out of existence like it’d never been, and she had to lock her muscles to keep from trembling.

“We should go,” Nate said. “We’ll have company in a minute.” He nudged her closer to the king, whose teleport talent allowed him to ’port himself, along with anyone linked to him through touch, as long as he had enough power to draw from.

Nate and Strike clasped hands. Power leaped at the contact, and the hum gained in pitch as Nate boosted the king’s magic, helping power a three-way teleport.

As Strike closed his eyes to find their way home and lock onto their destination, Nate glanced at the crumpled guardrail, then down at Alexis, his expression fierce. “Let me guess—that wasn’t a Hyundai, and you put it on the AmEx.” He paused. “Jox is going to be pissed, you know.”

That surprised a bubble of laughter out of her, one that threatened to turn into a sob. The golden light powered up and the hum changed its note as Strike found the way home. The transport magic built, crowding them closer together. She found herself standing too near Nate, their bodies touching in too many places, reminding her of what they’d had, what they’d lost. That memory, and the relief of being safe, was enough to unlock the words she wouldn’t have said otherwise: “Thanks. I owe you one.”

He looked away, jaw locked, and as the teleport swept them up, the last thing she heard was his clipped response: “Don’t kid yourself. I came for the statuette.”