Lucius nearly killed himself trying to find the location the starscript had directed him to. Granted, he probably should’ve gotten a room in Albuquerque instead of pushing on into the darkness, but it was like something was driving him, keeping him going well past his natural reserves. He wasn’t tired, though he knew he damn well ought to be. He hadn’t been chugging caffeine, didn’t even remember the last time he’d eaten anything, yet he was fully alert, and his body felt strong, supple, and ready for action.

Excitement buzzed through him at the thought that he might be close to finally meeting Sasha, finally putting a face and body to the voice on the phone, maybe even getting answers to some of the questions that plagued him. Oddly, he wasn’t really thinking of Desiree’s challenge or the doctorate, though he’d phoned in the day before and told the Dragon Lady where he was headed. Those things—and the university—seemed far away, and inconsequential.

What mattered was the strange light coming from the thin, iridescent corona surrounding the eclipsed moon, which had turned a bloody orange-red, and his headlights, which lit a faint track that optimistically called itself a road. He hung on to the steering wheel as his rented four-wheel-drive vehicle dropped into a pothole and bounced out again, and an ominous thumping noise started coming from the undercarriage. He didn’t care, though. All he cared about was getting to the end of his journey.

Then, finally, he topped a low ridge and saw a glitter of lights below. Hitting the gas, he sent the SUV slaloming down the backside of the ridge. Ten minutes later he was driving through the open gates of what turned out to be a fricking palace, a mansion of sandstone and marble and shit that looked totally out of place in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere.

The gates swung shut behind him, sending a shiver down his spine. But that didn’t stop him from parking by the front door and climbing out of the SUV. Sasha might not be here, he cautioned himself. You’re probably setting yourself up for some mondo disappointment. But he thought not.

He’d followed Ledbetter’s directions and found an oasis. He hoped that she’d done the same.

He saw a surveillance camera tracking him as he headed up a flagged walkway, under a pillared awning supported by columns that looked like their maker had gotten stuck halfway between Intro to Ancient Egypt and Mayan Architecture for Dummies. Nightkeeper influence, he was sure of it.

The air hummed with a strange, discordant sound—something his gut told him was ancient magic. Nightkeeper magic. Logic said his gut was taking a hell of a flying leap on that one, but his gut told logic to fuck off, because deep down inside he knew he was right. He’d found the Nightkeepers. And not just proof that they’d existed in Mayan times, either. He’d frickin’ found the home base of their modern-day descendants.

Again with the logic leap. Again with the certainty.

His pulse was pounding as he lifted a hand to knock. Then, when the door swung inward, his heart quite simply stopped at the sight of the woman standing in the ornate entryway.

It wasn’t Sasha, though. It was Anna.

“Lucius,” she said on a long, sad sigh. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Holy shit, was all he could think. Shock and guilt swirled around, hammering at each other in a hell of a mental joust, as too many details that’d refused to gel in the past suddenly resolved themselves into an impossible, improbable certainty.

His boss was a goddamned Nightkeeper.

Anna could not freaking believe what she was seeing, even though the surveillance system had forewarned them of the visitor, and Strike had recognized Lucius. He’d ordered Jox to open the gates and told Anna to go meet her student and bring him inside, on the theory that it’d be better to contain the damage than try to avoid someone who’d shown up in the Nightkeepers’ sphere one too many times for coincidence.

Even forewarned, though, it was a shock for Anna to have him standing on the doorstep of Skywatch, his eyes wide and a little wild. She was also surprised, once again, to realize that he’d gained mass and muscle, and wasn’t her scrawny, geeky grad student anymore.

Which didn’t even begin to tell her what the hell she should do about him. She was exhausted from the drain of the eclipse ceremony. Her brain was spinning from the gods’ choice of a keeper, and the identity of the goddess who’d bound with Alexis. And now this.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, but she didn’t tell him to leave. It was too late for that. Stepping back, she waved him in. “Come on.”

He stood rooted, white-faced in shock, but she saw something else beneath the surprise. Resentment. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he grated.

“Because it’s none of your business.” Though that was only because Red-Boar had mind-blocked his previous experiences with the Nightkeepers and the makol. Or had he? she thought, not wondering whether Red-Boar had neglected his work, but rather whether somehow Lucius had overcome the mental blocks. Frowning, she asked, “How did you get here?”

He stared at her for a long moment, looking like the guy she’d known for going on six years now, but also looking like the man he’d become since the prior fall, harder, tougher, and far more secretive. Then, doing a bad Anthony Hopkins impression, he said, “Quid pro quo, Clarice.” He stepped past her into the entryway of Skywatch, adding over his shoulder, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Three steps inside the door, he stopped dead at the sight of Strike, who was looking big and mean.

The king scowled and said, “That’s so not how it’s going to work.”

Anna knew her brother was pissed off—not just because of Lucius’s untimely arrival, but because they had themselves a Godkeeper but weren’t really sure how the goddess of weaving and rainbows was supposed to help them, and because Nate and Alexis’s relationship was far from stable, making him fear complications. That, and they were all dragging with postmagic hangovers. They should be chowing down on foods heavy in protein and fat and then heading straight to bed, rather than dealing with an unwanted guest and the questions and dangers his arrival was sure to bring.

Which meant the king was sporting a serious ’tude. Instead of backing off, though, Lucius shot his chin out. “Who the hell are you? And where’s Sasha?”

“We’re looking for her,” Anna said, figuring there’d be time later to figure out why that’d been his first concern. She stepped between them when it looked like Strike was going to lash out first and ask questions later. “This is my brother, Strike,” she told Lucius, then paused and added, “He’s the jaguar king of the Nightkeepers.”

Lucius didn’t back down, but his color drained some. “Fuck me.”

“No, thanks.” Strike leaned in. “Get this straight. You don’t belong here. We don’t want you here. But you’re here, and that’s a big godsdamned problem for us. Given that you showed up at the tail end of the eclipse, I’m going to have to assume that some of the shit that went down last fall is breaking through, which makes you an even bigger problem.”

Lucius glowered. “Look. I don’t know—”

“Shut. Up.” Strike snapped. He was starting to sway a little, suggesting that he’d burned through all his reserves and then some in the battle to maintain the barrier’s integrity during the eclipse ceremony. Anna should know—she’d leaked him as much power as she could, but knew he’d forced himself not to take too much during the struggle. Which meant she was in way better shape than he was. Leah, on the other hand, was already asleep.

Knowing there was a good chance her brother was close to losing his temper or passing out, or both, Anna said, “We can figure this out tomorrow, after we’ve all had a chance to recharge. I’ll take responsibility for him.”

Strike turned on her. “And how do you plan to do that? You’re just as wiped as the rest of us.”

“Jox can—”

“No,” her brother said, doing the interrupting thing again—a habit of his when he’d hit the end of his energy reserves. “We’ll lock him downstairs in one of the storerooms.” When she would’ve protested, he fixed her with a look. “Be careful or I’ll decide Red-Boar was right in the first place.”

“We had a deal,” Anna reminded him. “His life for my return to the Nightkeepers.”

“Hasn’t been much of a return,” he pointed out, sounding more tired than snide. “And that was then; this is now. If he’s retained some memory of what happened, or worse, he’s regained some makol magic—because how else could he have found this place?—then the deal’s off.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I have to do what I think is best.”

Jarringly, that last statement echoed back in Anna’s brain to an argument she’d overheard between their parents, when their father had spoken of leading the Nightkeepers to battle and their mother had counseled patience.

Scarred-Jaquar had done what he’d thought was best, and look what had happened. Strike was a different sort of man, a different sort of king. But was he different enough?

“Fine,” she said, backing down, because it wasn’t really important where Lucius spent the night. The larger issue of his fate wouldn’t be decided until the next day, or maybe farther out than that. “I’ll lock him downstairs.”

“Have Jox help you,” Strike said, not saying outright that he didn’t trust her to do what she said, but pretty close to it.

“Go to bed, little brother.” She turned her back on him, because she didn’t like the dynamic that was developing, the way they kept jarring against each other over the smallest of things, never mind the bigger ones. She and Strike had been close as children, distant as teens and adults. With so long apart, she supposed it stood to reason that they wouldn’t be able to fall right into an easy accord. That didn’t stop her from feeling like there was something wrong between them, something he was keeping from her. But, knowing she wasn’t going to figure it out running on empty, she turned back and grabbed Lucius’s arm. “Come on.”

He let her lead him through the first floor and down to the lower level of the main house, which held the gym on one side and a series of storerooms on the other. At the bottom of the stairs, he dug in his heels and pulled away from her, his expression accusatory. “Okay, Anna. Start talking.”

Running pretty close to the edge of her own temper and energy reserves, she said, “I don’t have to. You’re the one who’s trespassing.”

“And you’re about to imprison me. Who’s breaking more laws, d’ya think?”

Refusing to go there, she said, “How did you find me?”

He hesitated, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “I wasn’t looking for you. I was looking for Sasha Ledbetter. Are you sure she’s not here?”

“Positive. Why would you think she would be? And again, how the hell did you find Skywatch?” Then she paused, thinking it through. “You followed Ambrose’s trail to the haunted temple, didn’t you?”

Just prior to the equinox battle, Anna and Red-Boar had tracked Ambrose Ledbetter to a sacred clearing, where they’d found him buried in a shallow grave. He’d been killed and ritually beheaded. At first they’d thought the makol had killed the Mayan researcher for the blood-power of the sacrifice, and to keep the Nightkeepers from asking him about the Godkeeper ritual. However, once Anna and Red-Boar had dug up the older man’s remains to move him to a more appropriate burial site, they’d seen that his right forearm had been a knotted mass of scar tissue, as though the skin had been burned or cut away . . . exactly where a Nightkeeper’s marks would’ve been.

Originally, they’d surmised that he might have been a Nightkeeper who’d been disgraced and cast out before the Solstice Massacre, somehow without Jox or Red-Boar knowing about it. With Iago’s arrival on-scene, however, it seemed more likely that Ledbetter had been a Xibalban, perhaps one who’d seen the light and defected as the end-time drew near.

Maybe.

The PI, Carter, had been unable to learn much about Ledbetter beyond the common-knowledge stuff available through his university, and the fact that he had a daughter—or maybe a goddaughter, depending on the source of the info—named Sasha. Anna had tried to contact the young woman right after the fall equinox, got one missed return phone call, and then the girl had effectively dropped out of sight. Strike hadn’t even been able to lock onto her for a ’port. The Nightkeepers had assumed she’d been killed too, and had turned their focus to other matters.

Now Anna wondered if they’d been too hasty on that one.

Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw the temple.” His eyes changed. “Those were your bootprints just inside the door, weren’t they? The ones that disappeared into the pitfall?” His eyes sharpened, went feral. “What was down there?”

“Nothing good,” she said faintly. After reburying Ledbetter’s headless corpse at the edge of the forest, she and Red-Boar had split up to look for the Nightkeeper temple they suspected Ledbetter had discovered. In finding it, Anna had been . . . she still didn’t know how to describe it, though “partially possessed” was probably close enough . . . by a nahwal, which never should’ve been able to exist on the earth outside of its normal barrier milieu. Under its influence, she’d cut her wrists in sacrifice, nearly bleeding out before Red-Boar had managed to carry her into satellite phone range and call for help. Since then, none of the Nightkeepers had been back to the ruin, which they’d taken to calling the haunted temple because of the nahwal’s odd behavior. Without access to Red-Boar’s mind-bending skills, which he’d used to pull her back when the nahwal tried to drag her into the barrier for good, Strike had decided there was too much of a risk. Anna had been scared enough of the place not to argue, but if Lucius had been there, if he’d seen something she and Red-Boar had missed . . .

“I found Ledbetter’s head,” Lucius answered, his voice going ragged. “And the address of this place, written in starscript. There were signs of a struggle, footprints that didn’t add up.” He swallowed hard. “I hoped Sasha read the ’script and came here. Since she didn’t, and since nobody’s seen her since she went south . . .”

When he trailed off, Anna finished, “Either the Xibalbans grabbed her from the haunted temple, or she’s dead. Or both.”

“Xibalbans?”

“I’ll tell you later.” Maybe. “What else did you see in the temple?”

He glanced along the basement hallway. “You going to lock me up?”

“I have no choice.”

“Then I didn’t see anything.”

“Bullshit.”

He raised an eyebrow, and something faintly malevolent glittered in the depths of his eyes, which were greener than she remembered. “Prove it.”

Frustration slapped at her. “Damn it, Lucius.” She was too tired to deal with this now, too drained.

Without being told, he headed for the first of the doors on the right, then paused and looked back. “This one?”

“Two down,” Anna answered, knowing there really wasn’t much more to say. She followed him to the storeroom, which Strike had outfitted as a holding cell back when he’d planned to imprison Leah rather than letting her sacrifice herself. Her incarceration had lasted approximately five minutes, until Rabbit had let her out and Red-Boar had lured her to the Chaco Canyon ruins, where he’d tried to gun her down in cold blood, thinking to save Strike from repeating his father’s mistake by choosing love over duty and dooming them all. In the end, though, Red-Boar had died for loyalty and love of his king. That sacrifice had washed away all the other sins.

And why do you keep thinking of Red-Boar? Anna asked herself with a stab of guilt. She’d called her husband from the road and made some excuse about her meeting being moved up a couple of days, and hadn’t talked to him since. In the meantime, her heartache had eased some and logic had returned. They’d dealt with the affair already, and were working to move past it. And there was nothing concrete to suggest he’d encouraged Desiree. There was no reason for her to be thinking of another man. Especially one who was not only dead, but had been an asshole when he was alive. He’d had his reasons, but still. . . . She made a mental note to call Dick when she woke up the next morning. Maybe they could plan to take some time away when she got back.

“It’s not as bad as I expected.” Lucius shrugged at the accommodations. “No worse than fieldwork.”

Tearing her thoughts from Dick and Red-Boar, Anna looked at Lucius and saw a stranger. Feeling fatigue drag, she said, “I’ll come for you in the morning.”

“Yeah.” He turned away, and didn’t look back as she shut and padlocked the door and set the key on a shelf nearby. Then, just to be on the safe side, she set a magical ward that a human could pass through, but which would stop a magical creature in its tracks.

In theory.

Lucius heard the key turn in the lock and knew he should feel trapped, knew he should be freaking right the hell out. Hello, mental overload. The Nightkeepers not only had existed, they still did, and Anna was one of them. He had his proof, had his doctorate, if he still wanted to play Desiree’s game. But there was more here than just that, wasn’t there? The convo out in the entryway suggested that the other Nightkeepers already knew about him somehow, that Anna had bargained for his life. How, exactly, had he missed that?

At the same time, though, that part of his mental process seemed dull and foggy, less important than the building burn of anger that rode low in his gut, telling him that she’d lied to him, that she’d made a fool of him. That she needed to be punished.

At the thought, the single light in the small room flickered.

Great. Lucius scowled up at the fluorescent tube. Just what I need, wonky wiring. Or maybe that was the idea. Maybe there’d be an “accidental” electrical fire in his cell, taking care of him while retaining some sort of plausible deniability if Anna complained to her brother about his death.

Not that she’d be likely to, he thought. The anger built, sparking heat into his veins as he paced the small room, past a narrow cot and a bucket that served as the so-called amenities. Anna had enjoyed being around him back when he’d been a student, a newbie. The more he’d learned, though, the more he’d questioned her conviction that the Nightkeepers were a myth, the less she’d wanted to be around him and the more she’d tried to narrow his research focus, directing it away from the Nightkeepers. Even now, understanding why she’d insisted he leave the issue of the Nightkeepers alone, he couldn’t forgive how she’d pulled away from him when he’d started questioning her translations and interpretations. More than ever, he was convinced that she’d altered his files, removing the vital screaming-skull glyph and weakening his thesis work.

Rage washed over and through him, hammering in his skull like pain. Like pleasure.

“Damn it!” Lucius dropped to sit at the edge of the low camping cot, which gave a rickety squeak under his weight. He dug his fingers through his hair, rubbing at his scalp, which had tightened with the beginnings of a headache at best, one of his very rare migraines at the worst. And it wasn’t like he had any way to ask for an aspirin.

His head spun and nausea churned, and he saw a flash of green, strange and luminous. It cleared when he blinked, but the afterimage stayed burned on his retinas for several seconds.

Deep inside, a small voice asked, What the hell is happening to me? He didn’t feel like himself, didn’t know where the anger was coming from, the pain. He should’ve been psyched to have found the Nightkeepers. And now that he understood what Anna had been wrestling with, he should’ve been relieved to know why she’d been strange around him lately. He should’ve been sympathetic, maybe even excited that they could move to a new level of trust now that he knew.

Instead, he wanted to snap and tear at her, wanted to hurt her. And that was so not him.

Curling onto his side, he moaned low in his throat, crossed his arms over his abdomen, and wrapped himself in a self-hug, feeling alone and angry. Out of control. The pounding in his head gripped him, took him over. He slapped for the light switch and plunged the room into darkness, which was a blessed relief.

The surface beneath him spun and dipped, and he longed for unconsciousness, reached for it when it came. But as he dropped off, a fragment of thought that felt more like his own than any of the others swirling in his head warned him that he’d forgotten something important, something that he needed to tell Anna immediately. But the thought, and the compulsion, slipped away as the green-tinged darkness rose up and claimed him.

Alexis was flat-out exhausted by the time the eclipse night edged toward the next day’s dawn. She’d eaten and showered, and knew she should sleep for half a day or so, allowing her body to recharge from the magic and get accustomed to the conduit she could feel at the back of her brain, granting her access to the goddess Ixchel. But it was that last bit that kept her awake.

She was a Godkeeper; how crazy was that?

She tried not to think of the look on Strike’s face when he’d learned that she, not Patience, had become the Godkeeper, with Nate as her mate, and that the goddess Ixchel had gained a foothold on earth. He’d been pleased, sure, but not overjoyed. She’d wanted—needed—the king’s approval, and hadn’t really gotten it. Which was why she couldn’t sleep.

Or so she told herself. But when the knock came, she knew exactly who stood outside her door, and the true reason she was still awake.

Wearing her robe, her hair still wet from the shower, she rose and crossed the sitting area of her three-room suite to answer. Her suite had the same layout as those of all the other single Nightkeepers, aside from Rabbit, who lived in his father’s cottage. Her place was the nicest of all of them, though. She’d redone it right after Nate dumped her, in part because there had been too many memories of the two of them together in the room, which they’d used almost exclusively. He’d never invited her to his suite, and had ducked the issue when she’d asked. She was proud of how her space looked now, all vibrant colors and lush fabrics, and suffered a small twinge of nerves as she waved Nate through, and a larger flash of irritation at the part of herself that cared what he thought.

When she opened the door, though, nothing much else mattered except the sight of him. He’d showered, too; she could smell a hint of soap and moisture, with the rich undertones of arousal and magic. He was wearing dark pants and a dark button-down shirt undone at the throat to show the glint of his chain, with dress shoes, their laces tied in perfect knots though it was nearly dawn and they were both still up from the night before. On another man the outfit might’ve looked stiff and formal. On Nate it looked like what it was: the uniform of a wealthy self-made man who was comfortable with himself and in control of his environment. He’d traded his designer glasses for laser surgery a few months earlier, for the benefit of fighting, so when his eyes met hers they were unshielded by dark frames or glass, though his expression remained as inscrutable as ever.

In that moment, standing at her door, he looked less like the mage and warrior he’d become, and more like the successful businessman who’d shown up at Skywatch in a stretch SUV the prior summer. He looked like the men she’d dated all her life, only more so. And she’d sworn off those men, hadn’t she?

Rhetorical question, she thought. You’re a Godkeeper now. And the gods had chosen Nate for her shieldmate.

Nerves pulsing beneath her skin, she stepped back from the doorway, nodding for him to follow. “Come on in.”

He took a quick, dark look around the cream-and-teal upholstery and Bokhara rug, and curled his lip. “You’ve got expensive taste, princess.” His edgy energy rode the air between them, warning that he’d come for a fight.

Stung, and pissed because it wasn’t like she’d chosen the new direction their lives had swerved over to either, she jerked up her chin and glared at him. “It’s not your money, so why do you care?”

Reaching out, he pushed the door shut, closing them in together. Suddenly he was very near her, his energy surrounding her, angry, sexual, and very, very male, tempting her to reach out and touch.

“No,” she said aloud, surprising herself. Surprising them both. She stepped back, putting a distance between them that seemed much wider than the few feet she’d created.

He went very still. “No to what?”

“To this.” She pointed from him to her and back. “To us. I don’t want it to be like this.”

His brows furrowed, his eyes darkening with irritation. “This from the original author of the company line? What happened to ‘we need to do this for the Nightkeepers and mankind’ and all that crap? Was that just—”

“Stop it,” she interrupted sharply. “Don’t you dare.”

There was silence between them for a few heartbeats, and then he spread his hands in a thoroughly masculine gesture of I’m clueless. “You’re going to have to help me here. This isn’t what I want or how I wanted it, but I’m willing to try if you are.”

And if that wasn’t the least romantic statement ever, she didn’t know what was. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Sex between Nightkeepers wasn’t always about romance; sometimes it was strict necessity. The thing was, she wasn’t just a Nightkeeper. She’d been raised in the human world, and had human values too. And one of those values included not having sex with a man who shouted the wrong name when he came. Which, when she’d played it back in her head, she realized Nate had done in the sacred chamber. “Who is Hera?”

He stilled. “Where did you hear that name?”

His tone was all the confirmation Alexis needed. She closed her eyes on a slap of pain, of shame. Goddamn it. She’d been the other woman and she hadn’t even known. She forced herself to meet his eyes, and kept her voice level when she said, “From you . . . in the moment, so to speak.”

Now it was his turn to wince, only he didn’t. He just kept looking at her as though weighing a major decision. After a long moment, he held out his hand to her. “Come with me.”

The action pulled back his sleeve to reveal his marks, both old and new. If it hadn’t been for the rainbow mark, she might’ve kicked him out. Hell, if there’d been a MAC-10 handy, she might’ve shot him. That was how furious she was over his deception, how disgusted she was to discover that she hadn’t just repeated old patterns by falling for a wealthy, too-slick charmer who hadn’t fallen as hard or far; she’d dropped right back into the familiar rut of falling for the cheater, damn him.

But the rainbow glyph reminded her that this wasn’t just about her heart or her anger. It was about the Nightkeepers too, and the goddess. It was about the end-time war and the new part she was apparently destined to play.

“Shit.” She scowled at him. “Fine.” She didn’t take his hand, instead marching past him with her chin up and the burn of tears in her eyes.

The hallway was deserted; all the others were undoubtedly sleeping off the magic. Hell, she should be, and so should Nate. But she had a feeling that the restless, overtired energy that had kept her awake until his arrival was driving him, as well. She could feel the power of him at her back as he followed her the short distance to his suite.

She paused at the door, turning and raising an eyebrow. “You sure about this? Big step for you, inviting me back to your place.”

Before, when they’d been together, she’d figured he’d kept her out of his space because he was a private sort of guy, and because the communal living at Skywatch made him want to guard a space that was his alone. Now, knowing there was someone else, she had a sneaking suspicion she knew what she’d find in his rooms: pictures and mementos, evidence of his other life.

Been there, done that, hadn’t meant to ever do it again. Then again, the writs said that what had happened before would happen again. She just hated proving it this way.

Reaching past her without a word, Nate opened the door and let it swing wide. He nudged her. “Go on. You asked.”

Yeah, she had. So she headed into his suite, braced for pictures of him with another woman, the trappings of a man she didn’t know, the private life he hadn’t yet managed to leave behind.

Instead she got bachelor quarters.

The walls were still the stark white all the residential rooms had been painted after the renovations necessitated by the destruction of the Solstice Massacre and the decay from the compound’s having sat empty for twenty-four years. The rug was the same neutral beige the contractors had laid down, and there wasn’t much in the way of furnishings in the main room aside from a couple of big chairs that offered far more in the way of comfort than style. A gigantic flat-screen TV took up one wall, and wire racks on either side were crammed with electronics. More electronics, a laptop, and a jumble of notes took up the low coffee table that was the only other piece of furniture in the room.

There was no artwork or pictures, nothing personal about the room. There was nothing that spoke of the Nightkeepers, either, she realized, which fit with his personality but gave her a weird shimmy in her stomach when she realized just how detached he’d remained from it all. Sure, she was pretty heavy into the symbolism, but even total-slacker Sven had put up a couple of framed coyote posters and bought a hand-loomed Navajo throw with a repeating coyote-and-cactus motif. Nate’s sitting room, though, didn’t have a hawk in sight, as though he were trying to cut himself off from the bloodline, from his Nightkeeper identity.

She’d known he didn’t want to be there, not really, but she figured he’d been working through it. Now she realized that wasn’t the case at all. He hadn’t even moved in, really; he was just marking time.

Turning to look at him, she found him standing just inside the door, which he’d shut at his back. His eyes were dark and hooded; his expression gave nothing away. She raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to show me something?” Glancing at the closed bedroom door, she added, “If it’s in there, the answer is no.”

“Really?” He sounded only mildly interested, but his body was strung tight with tension. “Could’ve fooled me a few hours ago.” He crossed to her, predator-quiet, getting inside her space and leaning close, so she could feel his body heat and the promise of the power they could create together.

She steeled herself to push him away when she wanted to grab him and drag him close. But instead of reaching for her, he moved past her, snagging a remote control off the coffee table and using it to turn on the TV.

The entire wall lit, going blue for a second, then flashing to the static intro screen of a gaming console. He leaned down and hit a couple of buttons on the laptop, and a new graphic popped up: a decent-looking intro screen to what she guessed was a computer game. She didn’t know much about gaming, but this one had a front panel that showed a dragon-prowed Viking ship, its occupants locked in battle with a variety of mythological creatures. A storm slashed across the scene, blurring the details, and the title read: Viking Warrior 5: Odin’s Return.

She glanced at Nate. “One of yours?”

He looked surprised. “You knew?”

“I know you own Hawk Enterprises, which develops computer games for a couple of larger distributors.” She also knew his approximate net worth, and the location of the condo he used every other weekend when he returned to Denver for “business” she now suspected was named Hera.

He looked more amused than upset. “You did a background check.”

“Jox already had the basics.” She didn’t mention that Izzy had brought her the info behind the royal winikin’s back. Izzy had wanted Alexis to know about Nate’s criminal record, had wanted to stress that the members of the hawk bloodline weren’t realiable—that Nate wasn’t a proper match. To the winikin’s annoyance, Alexis had been more interested in his life outside the Nightkeepers, and what kept drawing him back to Denver. The file hadn’t contained that info. Now she was halfway wishing she’d hired someone to do a deeper check, one that’d included known associates.

He frowned. “If you already knew, then why did you ask who Hera is?”

“The info didn’t mention a girlfriend.” The last word stuck in her throat.

“That’s because she’s not exactly a girlfriend.” Hesitating only briefly, he tapped another key, skipped over what looked like an animated introduction to the game, complete with lots of blood and guts, and fast-forwarded through a scrolling legend of the A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, blah, blah variety. When he stopped fast-forwarding, the screen showed a computer-generated image of a stacked, Valkyrie-big woman wearing what amounted to a leather-and-metal bikini that left zero to the imagination. “This is Hera.”

It took a moment for the surprise to penetrate, another for Alexis to look past the horned helmet and see the resemblance.

Then she froze, because it was way more than a resemblance.

She could’ve been looking into a computerized mirror, one that reflected her physical appearance exactly down to the pixel, then added an edge of the go to hell confidence she’d always wanted and never quite managed to project. The woman in the faux Viking costume could’ve been Alexis’s twin. Or rather, she could’ve been the woman in the dream-visions, the one who was a better version of the real Alexis.

Shock flared through her. “Who modeled for this?”

Did she have a twin? Excitement spiked at the thought, because the Nightkeepers revered the twin bond. But that excitement drained quickly in the face of knowing that a twin wasn’t something Izzy would’ve kept secret. But if not a twin, then what?

“There was no other model,” Nate said grimly.

Alexis went very still. “You based this on me?”

“Nope. The first VW game came out four years ago.” He grimaced, looking partly proud, partly uncomfortable. “For what it’s worth, Hera has a huge following. Mostly of the under-twenty gamer variety, but still.”

“I don’t get it,” she said numbly, but she was very afraid she did. Afraid . . . and rapidly getting angry at the realization that he’d known her long before he’d met her, and had hidden the connection. Narrowing her eyes she said, “How in the bloody blazes of hell can you design something like this years before you met me, yet not believe in destiny?”

“I never said I didn’t believe it, just that I wasn’t going to roll over for it.”

She waited for more. Didn’t get it. Fisting her hand on her hips, she prompted, “And?”

He exhaled a long, frustrated breath. “Look, do you think I’m comfortable with this? Trust me, the answer is a big old ‘not.’ Hera is . . . she’s a fantasy, an amalgam of all the stuff that tests high in market research, along with a few of my own preferences. She was living inside my head years before I started working on the first VW game, and she’s been with me on a daily basis ever since. She’s got a fan club, for chrissake.”

Alexis didn’t like the way he was talking about this computer construct as if she were a real woman, and suspected she was seriously going to hate where this was going. “Tell me about her,” she said carefully.

Not looking at her, he said, “She’s brash and bossy, she’s a top fighter, she can do low-level magic . . . and she’s big and loud and scary, and pretty much guaranteed to rip the balls off of any guy who gets in her way.” He glanced at Alexis now, and she couldn’t read the emotion in his eyes when he said, “She looks like you, or you look like her; I’m not sure which is more accurate. The first time I saw you, when I came looking for Strike and you opened the front door, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

“That was why you fainted?” She’d always wondered about that, why a big, tough guy like him had done the eye-roll-and-drop thing about thirty seconds after he’d stepped through the front door of Skywatch.

“That was dehydration,” he said, sticking to the story he’d maintained ever since the incident. But something in his voice suggested there had been a good bit of shock in the mix, as well.

Alexis just stared at the TV screen, which was so big that her—or, rather, Hera’s—image was nearly life-size. “You can create something like this, years before we met, and still deny that we’re supposed to be mated?”

“Just because Strike saw Leah in a dream doesn’t mean we’re meant to be together,” he said quietly, answering the question she hadn’t asked.

She told herself not to ask, but it came out anyway. “Why not? We’re good in bed. Am I really so awful outside of it?”

He exhaled a long, slow breath. “That’s not what this is about.”

Which didn’t answer her question in the slightest. “Then what is it about?”

He was staring at Hera when he said, “I don’t do well with the idea of sex as a commodity.”

Everything inside her went still. “I don’t remember offering to pay you.”

“But you’d be trading sex for power. We both would be.” Something in his eyes said he wasn’t talking solely about Nightkeeper magic, and the idea unnerved her.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say, because it was both true and untrue. For her, the sex was a joy and a revelation, but yeah, it was also a means to an end. And when she looked at it that way, she got a strange, squirrelly feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Besides,” Nate continued, “I don’t do well being told what to do.” His expression, and the locked-tight rigor of his muscles, suggested there was more to it than even that, but she wasn’t sure she had the strength to keep fighting him right now.

“That’s an understatement.” Her voice came out a little choked as the held-off exhaustion started to hit. She was suddenly tired and sore, and so depressed she could barely think straight, never mind getting the rest of the story out of Nate, and trying to understand where he was coming from, and where they could go from there. Besides, why bother? she thought, realizing she’d made her decision without being aware of it. She was done trying to make it work with him, done trying to meet the gods halfway. Nate didn’t want her, plain and simple. Or rather, he wanted her body, but not much else about her, and she was finished trying to fight that fight.

“For what it’s worth,” he said softly, “I’m sorry. I wish it could be different.”

“Me too.” To her mortification, the words came out choked with tears. She spun on her heel and headed for the door.

“Alexis, wait.”

She stopped, but didn’t turn back. “What.” It wasn’t really a question.

“What are you going to do?”

She swallowed hard, knowing what she had to do, and hating it. “You don’t want to work within the prophecies? Fine, then neither will I. I’ll find myself another protector. That’ll let you off the hook.”

“Who?” His eyes were dark and angry, but he didn’t seem at all surprised, which meant that he’d been thinking about it, too, about how, if she took another one of the guys as a lover, she might be able to transfer the protector’s bond. Maybe.

The fact that he’d already gone there in his planning was an added blow, but she didn’t let him see it, saying only, “Well, my choices seem limited to Sven and Michael, don’t they? Izzy approves of the stone bloodline, so I guess I’ll start with Michael and see what happens.”

Figuring that was as good an exit line as she was likely to get, she slipped through the door, closing it behind her and hoping he wouldn’t follow, because she was too tired to argue anymore.

She headed back to her suite, knowing she couldn’t do a damn thing until she got some sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough to choose her new lover, she thought, and tried not to let the idea echo hollowly in her heart as she shucked off her clothes and dropped into bed naked. Soon she was asleep.

And in sleeping, she dreamed of Nate, the man who wore the matching mark that proclaimed him as hers, but wouldn’t let himself be caged.