I’m in love with you. The words rocketed around in his brain, bouncing off one another without making any real sense. Not just because he hadn’t expected to hear them from her, though he hadn’t, and not because he’d never realized she’d been headed in that direction, even though that was true too . . . but because he hadn’t heard those words strung together with that meaning and tossed in his direction before.

Not ever.

He had every reason now to believe that his parents had loved him, and no doubt they’d told his infant self so repeatedly. But he had no memory of those times, didn’t remember even a hint of his parents. His earliest memories were of foster homes stuffed with too many kids, run by adults who’d spent the foster stipends on themselves and left the kids to fend. Sure, there had been one or two good families, ones he would’ve stayed with if given the choice. But he’d been moved along instead, and the opportunities for “I love you” had dwindled with the years. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d heard in juvie, wasn’t the sort of thing he’d wanted to hear in prison, where he’d learned more than he’d ever wanted to know about sex as a commodity. Since then he’d had a string of relationships, again growing fewer and farther between as the years went on and he’d poured himself into the business . . . and his obsession with his fantasy woman, Hera, who was nothing more than a two-dimensional, watered-down version of Alexis herself, whose face fell progressively as he just stood there, staring, vapor-locked by her declaration.

Then she smiled, only it was one of acceptance rather than hope. “Yeah. That’s about what I figured. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She turned and started walking, and he was so jammed up in his own head that she was most of the way to the residential wing before he unglued his feet from the damn floor and went after her. He caught her arm. “Alexis, wait.”

She turned back and fisted her hands on her hips, and though there was hurt and resignation in her eyes, he didn’t see any tears, which made him feel both better and worse at the same time: better because he didn’t think he could’ve handled it if she cried; worse because it meant she’d expected exactly the reaction he’d given her.

“It’s okay, Nate. My feelings, my problem.” There were tears in her voice, though, which made him feel like crap.

“They’re not a problem,” he said, because that was the gods’ honest truth. “I just . . . I need time to process. I’ve never . . .” He fumbled the delivery, not sure he wanted her to know that the whole love thing was something he understood in theory, but not in practice or reality.

“Like I said, it’s okay. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to hit my rooms and unwind. It’s been a hell of a day.”

“Understatement of the year,” he said faintly, still not sure what he was supposed to do or say. He knew he’d blown the moment, but didn’t know how badly; knew he wanted to do better, but wasn’t sure how. “I just . . . I wasn’t thinking about love or forever. Once we took the gods and destiny and prophecy and all that shit out of the equation, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it, you know? We’re here for another four years, and either the world’s going to go on after that or it’s not. Either we’re going to have a future or we’re not, you know?”

She swallowed, then nodded. “Yeah, I do know. Thing is, I’ve spent too long living in limbo, waiting to figure out who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“And you’ve got that figured out now?” He wasn’t asking to be funny, either.

That got a crooked smile out of her. “Some of it, anyway. And loving you is one of the things I’ve figured out. I didn’t mean for it to happen, didn’t want it to. But I woke up next to you this morning and realized I was exactly where I wanted to be, despite everything. I want to be with you, live with you, combine my life with yours. I want to rip out that gods-awful carpet in the cottage and lay down polished oak, and sneak some smoke motifs in among the hawks. I want to wear your jun tan on my arm, and I want you to wear mine. I want us to fight over what Strike and Leah should and shouldn’t do, and leave all that shit at the door, so it’s just the two of us when we’re at home, no gods, no destiny, no prophecy, just a man and a woman in love.” She paused, looking at him, her grin going even more crooked. “And the thought of that scares the living shit out of you.”

“Yeah,” he said, because it did—not just because of what she’d said, but because he could picture a whole bunch of it, and that brought nothing but panic. He didn’t know how to love her, how to be her mate. He didn’t even know if he wanted to do either of those things. He’d been so certain he was going to buck prophecy that he hadn’t even gone there. “I wish I could give you what you want,” he said finally, knowing that was about as lame as it got. “But I can’t say the words when I don’t know what I’m feeling.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “it’s like I said before: I might not like what you say some of the time—hell, lots of the time—but I know you only say what you’re thinking. In this case, I’d rather hear the truth than have you knee-jerk an ‘I love you’ when what you really mean is, ‘I want us to keep sleeping together.’ So thanks for the honesty, at least.”

“If . . .” He faltered, not sure what he wanted to say, but knowing it couldn’t be good for them to part like this almost exactly forty-eight hours before the vernal equinox, when she and her magic were supposed to play a major role in their very survival. He finally said, “You know I’ll do anything I can to protect you, right? And I mean anything.”

Her smile went sad. “I know. But the thing is, you’ve already proved your point. The gods—or destiny, or whatever—might control some of what’s going on around us, but they don’t control us as people. They don’t control our hearts. I fell for you because of the man you are, not the one you should’ve been. And if the very things that made you who you are mean that you can’t love, or don’t know how to love, or need more time, or just plain don’t love me, then that’s just my bad timing.” She lifted a shoulder, though there were tears in her eyes now, and her voice broke a little when she said, “Another lifetime, maybe.”

She reached up on her tiptoes and touched her lips to his in a kiss that tasted of farewell. And this time when she walked away, he didn’t go after her. He stood there looking after her long after the door to her suite closed quietly behind her, leaving him alone.

And later, when he lay in bed, equally alone, he stared up at the picture of the sea and sky, and realized for the first time that none of his father’s paintings had any people in them.

Alexis had meant to go straight to bed, but once she was inside her suite she found herself prowling the small space, unable to settle. She was tempted to go find Izzy and invite her for a drink, which used to be her normal routine when she was involved in a relationship implosion, whether as the dumper or dumpee. This was different, though. This was the first time she’d gone all the way to “I love you.”

“Go find Izzy,” she told herself. “She’ll talk you out of it.” But that was the problem, really, because she knew the winikin would try to do exactly that. Alexis, though, wasn’t in the mood to be talked out of loving Nate. She wanted to wallow in it, revel in it, and curse him for being an emotionally stunted asshat, who also happened to be gorgeous, intelligent, more or less rational, a strong counterweight to her opinions on the royal council, and an increasingly powerful mage of the sort she wanted at her back during a fight.

Oh, yeah, and he was great in bed. But still, an asshat. So instead of calling Izzy, she hit the minifridge for the split of decent champagne she’d bummed from Jox and stuck there on the off chance Nate surprised her and they had something to celebrate. “Face it,” she told herself as she tore the foil, undid the cage, and popped the cork, “you didn’t think you’d be celebrating. This is ‘drown your sorrows’ bubbly.”

Not only that, it wouldn’t hurt to anesthetize her growing fear of what was going to happen at the equinox. Up until this point she’d managed to mostly push thoughts of Camazotz to the back of her mind. Now, though, with the clock ticking down and the two prophecies combining to warn her against the Volatile while at the same time urging her to find him, she was stumped . . . and scared.

Figuring that if she were going to drown her sorrows, she might as well do it right, she booted up her laptop and jacked it into some sort of easy listening station, heavy on the instrumentals, and drew a bath and added some bubbles. She swapped out her clothes for her good robe, pinned her hair up atop her head, and took the bottle with her into the bathroom.

Within a half an hour, the champagne and bubbles had eased the physical aches, if not the ones inside. She let her head fall back on the edge of the tub, thinking as she sometimes did of who might’ve lived in her suite before the massacre, and whether she—or he—had ever done what she was doing at that moment: soaking away a shitty day and wishing the future could be something other than what was written.

Thinking that, she drifted off to sleep . . . and dreamed of a dark-haired warrior with a hawk’s medallion and the power to make her heart and mind soar.

Anna was up early the day before the vernal equinox. Okay, in reality she hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time the night before, so the concept of being “up” was pretty relative. The equinox was still more than twenty-four hours away, but as she lay in her bedroom at Skywatch beneath a sheet and light blanket, she could feel the power buzzing beneath her skin, feel the visions trying to break through. Yet more than anything she wanted to pull the covers over her head and wait until it was all over. Or better yet, go home and pretend that she was nothing more than human, that the marks on her arm were just tattoos, the yellow quartz pendant just a piece of costume jewelry. She missed her bed, missed her home and her husband. She didn’t want to be where she was, didn’t want to be who she was.

Groaning aloud at the self-pity, she tossed the covers off her face and said sternly, “Get up. Stop being such a girl.”

In her mind, the exhortation echoed in Red-Boar’s voice. The older Nightkeeper had wanted her to be as strong as Strike, if not stronger, wanted her to care as much as her brother did, wanted her to turn away from the modern things she craved and focus on tradition and duty. Don’t be such a girl, he would snarl. Do it again. And though they’d been only pretending to work the spells because the barrier had been offline and there was no knowing whether it would ever come back to life, she’d done as he’d said, and had tried harder and harder to be a good Nightkeeper . . . until the day she’d left for college and hadn’t looked back. Only now she was back, and it wasn’t clear that she was being all that helpful. She’d endangered Skywatch and the Nightkeepers by insisting on keeping Lucius alive even though he was a clear threat. Hell, she’d barely even managed to help during the meeting with Iago, getting a single useful detail out of him when there had been so much more to gather, if only she’d known how. But that was a job for a mind-bender like Red-Boar. Or his son.

It was the thought of Rabbit that finally drove her out of bed. He, like the rest of them, hadn’t asked to be born into this mess. What was more, he’d started off at a serious disadvantage, child to a single parent who’d denied him a true Nightkeeper name and refused to accept him into the bloodline until almost too late. Strike and Jox had done their best with the kid, but they’d walked a fine line, trying to help without alienating Red-Boar, who had been antisocial at his best, pathological at his worst.

Then there was Rabbit’s magic, which both awed and scared Anna—a sentiment shared by most of the Nightkeepers and all of the winikin. It might not be fair, but there it was: his magic didn’t play by the rules and neither did he. Was it any wonder most of them had tried not to get too close? That doesn’t make it right, her conscience nudged; he’s just a kid. He was the same age as most of the freshman undergrads in her intro lectures. And he needed help.

Moving slowly, feeling sore all over though there was no reason for it, she dragged on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved pullover and headed for the kitchen.

Izzy met her in the main room, handed her a mug of coffee—cream, no sugar—and aimed her for the stairs that led to the lower level. “Jox says you’re to go down right away.”

“Great,” Anna muttered into her coffee. “I’ve been dressed for, like, three minutes and I’m already late.” But she headed downstairs. She hesitated outside Lucius’s warded door, but then kept going to the adjoining rooms where they’d locked Rabbit and his friend—girlfriend?—the previous night.

Seeing the gold-red shimmer of wards across the doorway and not in the mood for magic, she raised her voice. “Knock, knock? Izzy said you were waiting for me.”

A muffled voice called, “Just a sec.” Magic hummed just behind her jawbone, the red-gold shimmer cut out, and Nate opened the door. “Come on in.”

After what Izzy had said up in the kitchen, Anna was expecting to be the last one there. She hadn’t, however, anticipated how much it would bother her to see Strike, Leah, Jox, Nate, and Alexis looming over Rabbit, who was sitting on the side of a camp cot, wearing track pants and a hoodie and staring at the floor, jaw set in the sort of mulish intransigence she’d always associated with his sire.

His hair had grown out from its skull trim to a military brush, and he was thinner than before, especially through his sharp-angled face, as though the last vestiges of the childhood he’d continually rejected had been burned out of him. His eyes flicked to her momentarily, and she felt him weighing her, trying to decide whose side she was on. Then he looked back down, and she didn’t have a clue where he’d shelved her.

The sight of him was a forcible reminder that he wasn’t a kid at all. Hell, he was light-years from the freshmen she’d just been comparing him to. He was, what, eighteen? Yet at the same time, he was a stronger mage than any of them, save, perhaps, for Iago. And that, she knew, was the problem. Humans and Nightkeepers alike feared that which they could not control.

Help him, whispered a familiar voice inside her skull, one that she knew was a construct of her own mind, a bit of wishful thinking. Even so, she shot back, I’m going to try. It’s not like he makes it easy, you know.

Besides, she’d already endangered the Nightkeepers by bringing Lucius into the mix. Where did she draw the line?

“Okay,” Strike said, breaking the tense silence. “We’re all here. Let’s get started.” When Rabbit just kept staring at the floor, throat working, the king prompted, “Don’t worry, kid; you’re safe now. Just start at the beginning and walk us through everything that’s happened since the museum bust.” He took a risk and gripped Rabbit’s shoulder, though the teen wasn’t big on being touched.

Rabbit didn’t shake him off, though, didn’t even react. He just stared at the floor and whispered, “I killed the three-question nahwal.”

Which was so not what any of them had expected him to say. And it so incredibly not good news.

Shock rippled through the room. Strike’s jaw went very tight, and Leah nodded as though she’d figured it’d been something like that; Jox muttered under his breath and cast his eyes upward to the gods. Anna’s stomach knotted, and her breath whistled out as she tried to even conceive of such a thing. She’d nearly died in her one encounter with a nahwal; it was difficult to imagine killing one, impossible to work through the implications besides the most obvious: that there would be no more free answers for the Nightkeepers.

Nate and Alexis seemed to be the only ones who didn’t have any outward response to the news, which seemed odd, given that they were the ones who’d nearly died trying to enact the three-question spell. More, Anna had assumed they’d been planning on enacting the spell again, during the equinox. It only stood to reason, given their need to find the Volatile.

As her own shock dimmed, Anna gave the two of them a long look, realizing that while they stood side by side, there was a distance that hadn’t been there before, an awkwardness that didn’t bode well for tomorrow’s battle. Alexis might be able to call on the goddess alone, but a Nightkeeper was always stronger with a mate than without, which made it seriously bad timing if they were arguing, or worse, had broken up again. Just as Patience’s and Brandt’s magic had weakened the more they fought, so too would Nate’s and Alexis’s. And frankly, Alexis needed all the magic she could get.

Get a grip, people, Anna wanted to snap. This is a war. Let’s be practical. But the current crop of Nightkeepers hadn’t grown up steeped in the old ways, and didn’t always buy into the expectations of their ancestors’ times. That added a too-human element to what should’ve been a warrior’s life and a soldier’s strategy.

One problem at a time, she warned herself, but felt a skirr of worry at the realization that the members of the royal council weren’t at their best going into the equinox. Strike was messed-up over Rabbit, as was Jox to a lesser extent, and Leah was trying to keep the two of them on an even keel. They were trusting their advisers to balance them out, perhaps not realizing that Nate and Alexis were having issues of their own. That left it up to Anna to oversee all five of them and bring some perspective, which was exactly what she didn’t want to do. It was like she’d told Red-Boar the year before, when he’d pressured her to rule in her brother’s place: She didn’t want to lead the Nightkeepers. Hell, she didn’t even want to be a Nightkeeper.

But, like all of them, she hadn’t exactly been given much choice in the matter.

“Okay, people, let’s take a breath,” she said, aware that they’d all sort of frozen in the wake of Rabbit’s announcement. “We knew something had happened to the nahwal; now we know what. Let’s move on. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to get comfortable.”

Ignoring Rabbit’s quick sidelong look and her brother’s scowl, she dropped down to the floor and sat cross-legged.

Seeming to shake himself out of wherever he’d gone in his head, Jox said, “Wait. I’ll get some folding chairs.”

Because gods forbid the king sit on the floor, Anna thought with a kink of amusement at the thought of her little brother, who’d regularly eaten worms and bugs as a child, being unable to sit his ass on the floor.

Nate dropped the ward to let the winikin through, but when he went to reset the guard, Anna said, “Wait. Why isn’t the girl in here? Myrinne?”

“Because it’s not safe,” Nate said immediately. “We don’t know who or what she is.”

“She’s important,” Rabbit said without looking up, the hoodie falling forward to shadow his face.

Anna said, “How so?”

One shoulder lifted. “Dunno. She just is.”

She crouched down and got in the teen’s face. “Your father saved my life twice last year, which means I owe him. Since he’s not here to tell me to take my owesies and shove them, you’re going to have to do it . . . or else you’re going to have to let me help you.”

He looked at her for a second, and she saw a flash of the boy she remembered from years past, one who’d wanted to be a good kid but had always seemed to get in trouble regardless. Then that flash was gone and there was only the pale blue of his eyes, which went hard and dangerous when he said, “I’ll tell you everything, but you’ve got to promise me that she’ll be okay. I don’t care what she is, or what the witch or Iago did to her; she stays safe. She doesn’t become anyone’s bond-slave, she’s not blood-bound, and she’s not sacrificed. You let her go free and set her up however she wants, or I’m not talking.”

“Out of the question,” Strike said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Rabbit didn’t even look at the king, kept looking at Anna. “You say you owed my old man? Then make it happen.”

“If we agree to this,” Anna said, emphasizing the “if,” “then you have to swear to mind-wipe her before she leaves—and I mean wipe, not light blocks, not something that you think you’re going to reverse when we’re not paying attention.”

The teen’s face went white, then flushed brick-red. “You knew?” Now he did raise his head. He stared at her full-on. “You knew I could mind-bend and you didn’t tell me?”

“We figured it out after you left,” Anna said. When he kept on glaring, she firmed her voice. “Rabbit, we guessed. We didn’t know for sure until just now.” He’d confirmed it by his reaction, which was potentially good news for Lucius.

Rabbit looked up at Strike and Jox, and his voice shook when he said, “If you didn’t know about the nahwal , and you didn’t know about the mind-bending, then why didn’t you come looking for me more than that once back at the museum? Did I finally reach my last forgivable fuckup or something?”

Anna started to respond, but Strike cut her off with a sharp gesture and motioned her away from the teen. She backed off and Rabbit stood, letting his hood fall back as the king strode toward him, got in his space. The teen stuck out his chin as if he were looking for a punch.

Instead of throwing a fist or an accusation, though, Strike said, “I tried. Jesus, kid, I tried. We all did. Leah and I couldn’t pick you up, not even a trace. You were off my radar—still are; Iago blocked your ’port lock back at the museum, then let you loose to see what would happen or something. Since I couldn’t lock, we’ve had Carter turning over all the rocks he can think of. Leah’s called in favors. Jox even went to New Orleans to search.” His voice went rough when he said, “We’ve looked at John Does in half a dozen morgues, and thanked the gods each time the body wasn’t yours. We’ve been killing ourselves trying to find you.”

Rabbit hesitated, but his expression didn’t change. “And now that I’m back?”

“We’ll find a way to deal with whatever’s been done to you, and whatever you’ve done.” Strike paused. “You’re a fuckup, but you’re family. Nothing’s ever going to change that. Got it?”

The teen swallowed hard and nodded. His voice was thick when he said, “Got it.” After an awkward pause his lips twitched a little. “Please tell me we don’t have to hug now.”

“Sorry. That’s nonnegotiable.” Strike pulled Rabbit into a manly hug, with lots of backslapping and such.

Anna’s throat lumped with relief, coupled with a kick of surprise when she realized that Rabbit wasn’t that much shorter than Strike anymore. They’d always assumed the kid was small because he was a half-blood. Maybe he was just taking longer to grow into himself.

When they finally pulled apart, Rabbit said, “What about Myrinne?”

Strike grimaced. “As king, I can’t accept her running around here, never mind being set free, without some sort of assurances.” When Rabbit started to protest, he held up a hand. “As a man, though, I can’t overlook the fact that I brought Leah here under very similar circumstances.”

“With the exception that I wasn’t raised by a witch or held prisoner by the enemy for any great length of time,” Leah put in, laying it out flat. “Sorry, Rabbit, but we just can’t have her here without some sort of oversight.”

“I won’t have her blood-bound,” Rabbit said. “Not to me, and not to anyone else. If that’s your answer, then we’re out of here.” He paused, expression darkening. “And if you think you can stop me, just try it.”

Anna didn’t like the way Strike got big at Rabbit’s tone, didn’t like the idea of picking a fight she wasn’t entirely sure the Nightkeepers were going to win, so she stepped between them, turning her back on Rabbit and facing Strike squarely. She looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll take responsibility for her.”

Which was more than promising to babysit. Even without the blood-bond, if a Nightkeeper claimed a human, the mage was responsible for—and liable for—the human’s actions, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, same as with a bond-servant.

If Myrinne betrayed the Nightkeepers, Anna would be punished as a traitor; if she killed one of them, Anna would be sacrificed in return. The same was true for Lucius, but the blood-bond allowed her a degree of control over him. Without the blood-bond she would have no magical leverage over Myrinne, no recourse if the girl attempted to escape, or worse. Which meant Anna was essentially hooking her safety to the behavior of a witch’s brat she’d barely spoken to.

The world seemed to freeze for a second as her rational side screeched, What in the flying hell are you doing?

She was repaying her debt to Red-Boar by doing what was necessary to keep his son within Skywatch, within the reach of magi who could—hopefully—help him deal with whatever Iago had done to him. Whatever else that meant in terms of her own life and freedom, she’d deal. She was, whether she liked it or not, her father’s daughter, heir to the jaguar bloodline, whose members were notorious for making decisions based on emotion. Damn it.

Strike’s eyes searched hers. “Are you sure?”

She was aware of Rabbit holding his breath behind her, aware of a flash of hope coming from him. Within that flash, that emotion, a fragment of a vision broke through, showing her Rabbit and Myrinne hand in hand, running along a beaten snow trail. The vision was from the previous night, she knew, but the Rabbit she saw in the vision was no teen, no boy. Tall, strong, and purposeful, wielding his magic out of necessity rather than anger, he was a man, a Nightkeeper protecting the woman he’d chosen as his mate, even if he didn’t fully recognize the connection yet, or believe in it.

“Yes,” she said clearly. “I’m sure.” If having Myrinne to lean on, to protect, would help Rabbit find the man the Nightkeepers needed him to be, then it was worth the risk.

Or so she told herself.

Strike glanced at Jox, then at Nate and Alexis. “Arguments?”

“Numerous,” Alexis said dryly. “But none on this particular matter. Fact is, the options are pretty much all equally risky, and this is the one that’ll keep the Nightkeepers intact.”

“Agreed,” Nate said without looking at her.

Sitting on the other side of Strike, Jox nodded. “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said to Anna. Knowing the royal winikin as well as she did, she could tell he hated the added exposure she was piling onto herself, but knew it was the only and best option within a culture where both debt and responsibility were weighty matters.

“Then it’s settled,” she said, pushing the words past a sudden tightness in her throat. She sat back down and waited until Strike and Rabbit had done the same before she said to Rabbit, “Okay. Myrinne described her experiences to Leah pretty thoroughly, but I think it’d be good if you start from the beginning and walk us through what happened, what you learned from Iago.”

“There’s a second archive,” Rabbit said quietly, looking at his knuckles, which had gone white with fisted tension. “A library. I found out that much.”

Anna’s breath froze in her lungs, and the world seemed to contract to just the two of them as she whispered, “Iago has it?”

“No. Not as of last night, anyway. He used my powers to . . . question a woman.” Rabbit’s tone and the disgusted twist to his lips made the word “question” into a curse. “He kept asking her where her father hid the stuff.”

The connection sparked on a gasp, and Anna blurted, “Sasha!”

“Did she tell him where to find the library?” Nate asked quickly, his eyes going dark and intent.

Rabbit shook his head. “No. Her mind is super-strong.” He paused. “It was, anyway.”

Anna went still. “Why do you say that?”

“She was linked to Iago when I reversed his mind-bend and tried to fry his cortex.”

Horror gathered in Anna’s gut, alongside despair that they might’ve already lost their next-best chance at finding the library, and the woman Lucius had sought for reasons she didn’t yet understand but wasn’t willing to ignore. “Is she dead?”

“She was breathing when I left her. They both were.” He looked to Strike. “I can take you back there.”

The king nodded and stood. “Let’s go.” But they returned within twenty minutes, empty-handed. Sasha and Iago were gone.

Lucius didn’t know where he was, didn’t know how to get back to where he was supposed to be. At times he wasn’t even sure he knew where he was supposed to be, only that it wasn’t where he was, so he kept walking, even though he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

His legs ached, but the road he traveled along never changed. The surface was smooth-packed dirt unmarked by tire tracks or hoofprints, though he occasionally saw the tracks of other pedestrians, always headed in the direction he was going, never the other way. On either side of the road, rocky, gray-brown plains stretched out to join somewhere in the distance with a gray-brown sky that held no clouds. There was only gray-brown everywhere, and the road that stretched out in front of him and behind him.

A part of him wondered if he’d died, if this was the journey the Maya spoke of, where the dead traveled through Xibalba to be sorted according to their actions in life. Those who died a violent death went straight to the sky, while everyone else had to meet a series of underworld challenges, and cross a river whose overlord needed to be paid with the jade pebbles buried over the eyes of the dead.

So far, though, Lucius hadn’t been challenged by anything worse than boredom, nor did he remember dying, and he had to imagine that wasn’t the sort of thing a guy forgot. Last thing he remembered was—

Oh, shit. Calling Anna for help as the green haze descended on him. Had he gone makol? Had the Nightkeepers sacrificed him while he’d been caught up in the Day-Glo fugue?

Amidst a strange sort of calm that had him continuing onward instead of freaking out and running screaming into the distance—or just standing still and screaming—he found he didn’t blame Anna and the others if that was what they’d decided. Risk was risk, and one grad student’s life didn’t matter much when balanced against the dozen Nightkeepers who needed to save the world. If he’d gone makol and put the Nightkeepers in danger, then they’d done what they’d needed to do.

If that was the case, he decided, he was okay with dying.

The moment he thought that, a shadow appeared in the distance, growing closer as he continued walking. Pretty soon he could make out a high stone arch stretching over the road, with huge, openmouthed serpents carved on either side.

Beyond it was a wide, sluggish river.

On instinct, Lucius reached into his pants pocket and found two hard, round objects in there. Pulling them out, he stared at the jade beads. That’s it, then, he thought, sadness breaking through the fog. Game over.

“Turn around,” a multitonal voice said, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. “She needs you.”

Lucius stopped dead, and the fog blinked out of existence. He could see details all of a sudden, could see that the rocky plains on either side of him were painted curtains writhing with reptilian movement from the other side, and the archway was cracked and broken and black, the water brackish and stinking.

A pit opened up in the center of his stomach, yawning, dark, and terrifying.

“Who said that?” he called, his voice falling flat in the echoless space.

There was no answer, but suddenly he had control over his limbs again and could turn around on the path. He took a step back in the direction he’d come. The moment his foot landed, a terrible scream arose from the waterway, then another.

Lucius didn’t think, didn’t look back. He just started running toward the light that appeared in front of him, at the other end of the road of the damned.

Back to the land of the living.

It took most of the day for the members of the royal council to debrief Rabbit and Myrinne, alternating between them when Jox announced it was time for one of the exhausted, malnourished kids to eat or sleep, or both. By the end of the day, as Alexis headed to her rooms to change, shower, and generally take a big breath, she wasn’t convinced they knew much more than they had going in. Or rather, they knew more, but what they’d learned probably wouldn’t go very far toward helping them the next day, when they would ’port to the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá and defend the barrier against Iago and Camazotz.

The plan was for the Nightkeepers to ’port to the safe house early in the morning and stake out the tunnel entrance. Problem was, they weren’t even sure Iago would be working his magic through the intersection. Rabbit didn’t know if the mage had found the actual hellmouth, the place where the Xibalbans had called the Banol Kax through to earth in A.D. 951. If Iago knew where the hellmouth was, then he had direct access to Xibalba, do not pass go, do not collect, no need for the Nightkeepers’ intersection and its tortuous connections to the sky and underworld.

If Iago didn’t show at the intersection—which Alexis strongly suspected would be the case—the Nightkeepers would do as they had done during the winter solstice and eclipse, uplinking and banding together to hold the barrier that separated Xibalba from the earth. Strike and Leah would call on the power of Kulkulkan, and Alexis would add Ixchel’s strength to the mix. The barrier was a psi-entity that stretched everywhere and nowhere at once, which meant that if they managed to fortify it with enough power at Chichén Itzá, it should prove impenetrable at the hellmouth. In theory. In reality, they had no frigging clue. And that was the worry that had Alexis unable to settle in her rooms, and had her pacing from one to the next, touching a light fixture here, a book there, somehow needing the tactile reminders, the solidity of the earth plane.

She and Ixchel were supposed to counteract the first of the demon prophecies, but Alexis had no idea how. The others were acting as though the first prophecy were a moot point, given that Iago planned to bring through all seven of Camazotz’s sons simultaneously. But she wasn’t so sure. If there was no such thing as true coincidence, if everything that was happening was truly influenced by fate, or destiny, or the gods, then shouldn’t the gods have foreseen Iago’s threat? Assuming they had, then that meant Ixchel was supposed to serve a larger purpose, or else she and Alexis wouldn’t have formed the Godkeeper bond.

Right?

“I don’t know!” Alexis practically shouted. “I don’t know why she picked me, or how I’m supposed to use her powers.” Her stomach twisted on a gut-deep fear of failure, fear of death. Fear of losing the people she loved.

Frustrated and heartsore, she threw herself on the sofa, then bounced back up almost immediately when she couldn’t stand not to be moving. It wasn’t just the fears and worries that kept her going, either; the magic of the coming equinox rode her hard. She could close her eyes and tell where the stars were overhead just by feeling their pull and seeing the faint color shimmers they gave off in her soul. The barrier was thinning, and with it her self-control. She wanted to scream and throw things, wanted to drive off into the desert in one of the four-wheelers Jox kept in the garage, wanted to spin the tires and kick up sand and jump the vehicle from hill to hill, though she’d never actually driven one of the damn things.

Then she heard a knock on the door. She knew who it was without question, and in that instant all the crazy, jumbled needs inside her coalesced into a single emotion.

Desire.

She opened the door and saw Nate standing there, exactly as she’d expected, wearing jeans and a soft black pullover that did nothing to gentle the angles of his face and the edgy tension surrounding him. She arched a brow, but before she could work up a witty opener, he said simply, “I know you don’t owe me a damned thing, and you might not want to be around me right now, but I had to come. I need you to know that if I could’ve figured out how to love anyone, I would’ve loved you.”

The simplicity of that, the finality of it, drove the breath from her lungs and sent a spear of pain through her heart. It took her a second, but once her throat unlocked, she said, “Then why can’t you?”

“Nature, maybe, or nurture. Maybe both. Probably both.” He lifted a shoulder. “It took me a while to see it, but if you look at the pictures of my parents, my mother’s always the one surrounded by other people, while my father is always apart just a bit. And the paintings . . . they’re all of places seen from a distance. No people, no close-ups. If that’s not detachment, I don’t know what is. Add his DNA to my growing up in the system, and you’ve got a guy who likes people okay but does best alone.” He exhaled long and hard. “Look, I’ve tried to feel the things other people feel, and it . . . it just doesn’t work. It’s just not in me to love someone.” His eyes went very sad. “Not even you. I’m so sorry.”

Alexis bowed her head as all the restless energy drained into a moment of pure, profound emotion. It wasn’t heartache; that would come later, she knew. It wasn’t failure, either, though she was due for a heaping pile of that too. No, this was a piercing regret that the things they’d already had together were the end of it, even if they survived the equinox. There would be no moving into Nate’s cottage and waking up next to him each morning, no trying to cook for each other and sneaking food from the main mansion when the stuff didn’t turn out, no hardwood floors and little smoke-motif knickknacks.

“Alexis, please say something,” he pressed when she’d been silent for too long. His lips twitched in a small, sad smile. “Either that or rack me a good one and slam the door. Whichever works for you.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said slowly. “Maybe it’s better to go into tomorrow without this between us.” Better to go into battle with nothing she was looking forward to except more fighting, more training. More war.

Maybe that was what this had been about all along. Maybe the goddess had been trying to teach her to let go.

He exhaled a long breath. “Good. Okay . . . good.” He didn’t look as though he thought it was good, but she understood that too. “So . . .”

“So . . .” Now she did smile at him, letting him know it was really okay. “See you tomorrow.” She shut the door between them, not slamming it, but shutting it slowly and letting the latch engage with a final-sounding click.

Then, and only then, she finally collapsed onto the couch and put her face in her hands. Her hair, unbound and still moist from her shower, fell forward in long, ribbonlike strands.

And when she wept, her tears were rainbows.