‘‘That was before the locals started drinking the Kool-Aid, ’’ her partner, Nick Ramon, said, then winced. ‘‘Sorry.’’

‘‘Don’t be.’’ It’s not your fault my brother joined a cult and drew the short straw. Battling the churning in her gut, Leah scanned the dark, cluttered alley outside the car, looking for Itchy Pasquale, the scrawny gangbanger— and occasional snitch—who’d called her for a meeting, claiming to know where the Kool-Aid was being served this time around.

She and Nick were parked only a few streets over from Miami’s chichi Wynwood Art District, but the alley could’ve been in another world—one peopled with sallow-faced junkies rather than glitterati and run by gang rule rather than art critics. The Miami-Dade PD made regular sweeps of the buildings on either side of the alley, and the raids turned up pretty much every crime on the books, and occasionally some that weren’t.

Like human sacrifice.

The bodies had started turning up eighteen months ago and had followed every three months like clockwork: two at each equinox, two at each solstice. The victims were beheaded, their hearts cut from their chests. The news vultures had dubbed them the Calendar Killings and hauled out all the old favorites—Buono and Bianchi, Dahmer, Kemper, Gacy. Only one reporter had been savvy enough to draw the parallel between the Manson family and Miami’s newest cult, Survivor2012; between Helter Skelter and the doomsday espoused by their leader, Zipacna, who had named himself after the crocodile demon of the Mayan underworld.

Said clever reporter had turned up right after the vernal equinox, sans head and heart. Next to him had been Leah’s thirty-year-old brother, Matt. Unfortunately, the connections between the Calendar Killings and Survivor 2012 were strictly circumstantial; there wasn’t any evidence the locals or FBI were willing to run with.

‘‘Not yet, anyway,’’ she said softly. Anticipation burned in her veins, making her impatient. ‘‘Itchy’s late,’’ she said louder, so Nick knew she wasn’t talking to herself anymore. They’d been partners nearly six years. He’d gotten used to telling the difference.

‘‘We shouldn’t even be here. Not our case anymore.’’ But Nick didn’t look bothered by the thought. Long and lean and dark-skinned, he was dancer-graceful, yet sturdy as a hurricane shelter, and wore a plain gold wedding band she hadn’t gotten used to yet.

Leah had danced at his and Selina’s wedding a month earlier, and toasted them with a big old, ‘‘Better you guys than me,’’ though it’d stuck a little. She and Nick had been there and done that and managed to stay partners in the aftermath, so she had absolutely nothing against the nurse he’d married. Besides, her relationships seemed to have a three-month expiration date, which tended to defeat the whole ‘‘till death do us part’’ thing.

Didn’t mean she loved being alone, though. Heck, even her subconscious was telling her it was time to start dating again, sending her some seriously hot dreams that had her waking up wanting and lonely, and thinking of a dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes, some righteous ink, and what looked an awful lot like a MAC-10 autopistol on his belt.

Great. Just what she didn’t need—a crush on a gang-banger. Although she supposed—hypothetically—that a ’banger would be better than a doomsday nut who believed that when the Maya’s backward-counting calendar hit its zero date in a few years, the world was going to end.

News flash: Not even the modern Maya believed that shit anymore. Most of ’em, anyway.

In the Crown Vic’s passenger seat, Nick rolled his shoulders, trying to work out the kinks. ‘‘Long day.’’ He was wearing yesterday’s khakis and shirt, but somehow managed to make the wrinkles look like a fashion statement.

Leah, on the other hand, was way more wrinkle than fashion in navy pants and a fitted blue button-down that’d done the sexy curve-clinging thing twenty hours earlier, but now chafed beneath the Kevlar vest she’d pulled on for the meet. Her white-blond hair was pulled up in a ponytail and stuffed under an MDPD ball cap, and all vestiges of makeup had hasta-la-vista’ed it hours ago.

Long day, indeed.

They should’ve been off shift at nine. Technically, they were off shift, but the snitch’s call had been too good to pass up . . . and too tempting to pass along. ‘‘Itchy won’t talk to anyone but me,’’ she said, faintly defensive because they both knew she should’ve taken it to the task force handling the Calendar Killings, which had ceased including her the moment she’d ID’d her brother’s body.

‘‘So where is he?’’

‘‘Damned if I know.’’ She tried Itchy’s cell again, but it bounced straight to voice mail.

‘‘Wait.’’ Nick pointed as a figure emerged from behind an overflowing Dumpster at the far end of the alley. ‘‘Over there.’’

Leah’s heart did a bumpity-bump as she identified her informant by the faint hitch in his get-along, courtesy of a drive-by a few years back. ‘‘That’s him.’’ She checked the clip on her .22 and reached for the door handle. ‘‘Stay here. You know how twitchy he gets around you.’’

‘‘Dude was born twitchy.’’ But Nick hit the headlights. ‘‘Keep in sight.’’

Anticipation flared through Leah, alongside something that hummed in her veins and stomach and made her feel like this was it; this was the moment she’d been waiting for—a chance to pin something real on Zipacna and his freakazoid followers.

Taking a deep breath, she climbed out of the car, leaving the door open in case she needed quick cover. She held the .22 at the ready. ‘‘Hey, Itchy.’’

The banger was in his late teens, wearing a pair of low-slung jeans and a T-shirt featuring a cartoon penis and a caption she had no desire to read. His head was shaved bald, and a hollow plug stretched his earlobe around empty space the size of a quarter, making him look lopsided.

He grinned, baring a shiny set of caps with both front teeth filed to points. ‘‘Hey, beautiful. Got a present for you.’’

‘‘Zipacna.’’ It was no secret she thought the head of Survivor2012 was the Calendar Killer, but three warrants had failed to find any evidence in the mansion he’d retrofitted for the bloodletting rituals he conducted, claiming to be descended from King Somebody-or-other. Freak.

Unfortunately, he was a smart freak. She hadn’t even been able to pin him with a parking ticket. Until tonight.

Lowering the .22, she patted her pocket beneath the Kevlar. ‘‘I’ve got the cash, and the solstice hits in twelve hours. Time for a couple more bodies. You going to tell me where he kills them?’’

Itchy grinned. ‘‘I’m gonna do better than tell you, baby.’’ His eyes flicked to a point over her shoulder in a blatant signal.

Shit! Survival instincts going into overdrive, Leah spun and lifted her weapon just as a dark figure stepped from the shadows and lifted a rocket launcher to shoulder height, aiming it at the Crown Vic. Panic spurted and she snapped off three quick shots, screaming, ‘‘Nick, run!’’

But her shots missed and her words were lost beneath the rocket thump. Seconds later, the car exploded and a red-orange fireball howled outward, flattening everything in its path.

The shock wave slammed into Leah, flinging her through the air. She hit a Dumpster with battering force and crashed into a pile of spilled refuse.

‘‘Nick!’’ Head ringing, pulse hammering, she scrambled to her hands and knees in the garbage. He got out, she told herself. He can’t be dead.

Except deep down inside, she knew he was.

‘‘She’s over here,’’ Itchy’s voice called, and footsteps rattled as a half dozen of Itchy’s compadres converged around the Dumpster, warning that she could mourn Nick later. She had her own ass to worry about right now.

Breath sobbing in her lungs, she scrabbled around, found the .22 half-buried beneath a pile of garbage, grabbed the gun, and came up firing.

Her first shot caught a shirtless teen in the chest, punching a hole just above the tattoo of a flying crocodile on his left pec. The guy fell back, but that left Itchy plus four others. She got off another shot before she felt a sting of impact, though no major pain. She looked down and saw the double barb of a high-powered Taser hooked onto her pants. Before she could yank it out, Itchy hit the button and nailed her with fifty thousand volts.

Leah’s jaw locked tight, holding the scream inside as everything went numb and she flopped to the pavement, twitching hard.

Then they were pawing at her, groping her as they hauled her up and dragged her out of the alley. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe, could do little more than scream inside her own skull as they gagged her, zip-tied her hands and feet, and tossed her in the back of a van. Moments later, she felt a sharp prick in her left butt cheek, and as the doors slammed and the van drove off into the night, everything started to go gray. Then black.

Then nothing.

The blonde leaning over the garden center’s display table of annual flats was wearing a tight pink tank top and no bra.

Not that Strike was looking or anything.

‘‘I just love impatiens, don’t you?’’ She bent over further to select just the right six-pack of flowers, giving him an eyeful.

Hello. He dialed down the water wand he’d been using to fertilize the hanging begonias, and moved around the table. ‘‘Impatiens are pretty enough,’’ he said, pretending to look at the flowers. ‘‘But I prefer the full-sun varieties, myself. No tan lines.’’

She shot him a gotcha look before nodding at his right arm. ‘‘Nice ink. Aztec, right?’’

He normally wore long-sleeved shirts to avoid just this sort of conversation, especially from people who noticed that his business partners, Jox and Red-Boar, wore similar glyphs. Today was scorching hot, though, and he’d gone with cutoffs and a black T-shirt that bared his marks: the jaguar that symbolized his bloodline and the ju that marked him as royalty.

‘‘They’re Mayan.’’ He could’ve told her that the Maya had been the only society in the New World to develop a fully functional writing system, or that it was because they, like the Egyptians two millennia earlier, had been taught by a warrior culture that went back twenty thousand years or so to Atlantis.

He didn’t tell her that because, one, she’d think he was whacked; two, lectures weren’t sexy; and three, the details, like the forearm marks, weren’t relevant anymore. The barrier was sealed, the Nightkeepers unnecessary. In four-plus years, the Great Conjunction would come and go with nothing more than a Michael Bay disaster movie and some empty hype.

Hopefully.

‘‘Very nice,’’ she said again, and it was clear she wasn’t just talking about the marks.

‘‘Thanks.’’ Strike was bigger than average—most Nightkeepers were, or had been—and he kept himself fighting fit. Add that to deep blue eyes, shoulder-length black hair worn in a ponytail regardless of trends, and a close-clipped jawline beard, and he had a look that either fascinated women or scared them off, depending.

The blonde didn’t seem scared as she took a long look around the garden center.

The sturdy barn-red store was flanked with plastic-covered greenhouses, with the one- and five-gallon shrubs grouped out front like leafy islands sprouting from an ocean of parking lot. The balled and burlapped trees were set around the perimeter, and tables of flowers and veg flats were strategically placed so shoppers couldn’t miss them on the way in. ‘‘This place is cute,’’ she said finally. ‘‘Yours?’’

In other words, was he an owner, a contract landscaper working out of the nursery, or a schlub who, at thirty-three, watered plants for a living at seven bucks an hour?

‘‘Mine and my partners’,’’ he said, wondering how she’d react if he told her it was a little bit of all of those things.

He was part owner, along with Jox and Red-Boar, because all three of their names were on the Nightkeeper Fund started by his umpteenth-great-grandfather after he’d sold off most of the old artifacts. Strike also did some landscaping now and then, when he got the itch. And yeah, he was thirty-three, and although he had an MBA from Harvard Biz and used it to manage the fund, at the moment his career pretty much consisted of watering plants and discussing the intricacies of dried versus composted cow manure.

That, and studying spells that hadn’t worked in twenty-four years.

‘‘Want to give me a behind-the-scenes tour?’’ The blonde shot him a look of pure invitation that normally would’ve had his glands sitting up and taking notice.

Now, though, his libido sort of shrugged and yawned, which gave him serious pause. Oh, come on. How could he not be interested in getting some of that?

He ought to be . . . hell, he was trying to be, but he was doing the autoflirt thing—and had been for the past few weeks—all because of some seriously funky, sexed-up dreams that had him waking up horny as hell. He could clearly picture the woman in those dreams: her high-cheekboned face and pale blue eyes, a set of full lips that seemed made to wrap around a guy and hang on for the ride, and white-blond hair that sifted through his fingers like spun platinum.

He looked at Pink Top again to make sure. Nope, wrong blonde. Assuming, of course, there was a ‘‘right’’ blonde . . . which was a serious stretch, because even if the barrier were active, which it wasn’t, and he’d gone through the talent ceremony at puberty to get his full powers, which he hadn’t, Nightkeeper males weren’t supposed to be precogs. Which meant the dreams were just dreams, and he should be good to go.

Only he wasn’t.

‘‘There’s really not much to see out back.’’ He smiled in an effort to soften the brush-off. ‘‘Besides, I’ve got to keep working. My boss is a real ballbuster.’’ There was even a bit of truth to that—Jox might be the royal winikin and thus technically Strike’s servant, but the garden center was his baby, and woe to he who skimped on watering duty.

Surprise flicked across the blonde’s face, along with a hint of temper he figured she was entitled to. ‘‘Really? Wow. Guess I called that wrong.’’

‘‘My bad, not yours.’’ He cranked the water wand and hit a hanging pot of salmon-colored begonias. ‘‘Enjoy the impatiens.’’

As she huffed off and the begonia pot overflowed, a voice from behind Strike said, ‘‘What are you, fucking stupid?’’

Exhaling and counting to ten backward, Strike dealt with the water first, shutting it off and dropping the hose. Then he turned and held out a hand. ‘‘That’ll be five bucks, Rabbit.’’

Wearing low-slung jeans, heavy work boots, and a black hooded track jacket even though it was in the high eighties and rising, with the hood pulled up over his shaved head and his iPod buds stuck firmly in his ears, Red-Boar’s seventeen-year-old son was dressed to depress, and wore the ’tude to match.

Smirking, the kid dug in his pocket, pulled out a ten, and slapped it in Strike’s palm to pay the ‘‘no saying ‘fuck’ on the job’’ fine they’d been forced to institute when Rabbit graduated high school a full year ahead of schedule, blew off his SATs to joyride down the coast in Jox’s truck, and then e-mailed all his completed college applications to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras while swearing to Jox and Strike that he’d submitted the apps on time.

He’d probably figured—hoped—that his father would cut ties after those stunts, leaving him free to do whatever the hell he wanted. Instead, Red-Boar—aka the only adult Nightkeeper who’d survived the Solstice Massacre—had surprised all of them by rousing his PTSD-zonked self long enough to ground Rabbit’s ass, cancel his AmEx, julienne his license, and order the kid to work at the garden center all summer, where he’d promptly started cussing out the customers.

Thus, the ‘‘fuck’’ fine.

Strike pocketed the ten. ‘‘You want change?’’

‘‘Put it on account.’’ The kid’s eyes, so light blue they were almost gray, followed the blonde into the store. ‘‘But seriously. How can you not want a piece of that?’’

‘‘I take it you’re done pruning out back?’’

Jox and Strike did their best to keep Rabbit away from the front of the store as much as possible, because they never knew what he’d get into next. Sometimes his ideas were brilliant, sometimes terrifying, quite often both. But Rabbit was Red-Boar’s son, which meant he was one of them. It also meant that he was at a serious disadvantage, because his father was a head case, and nobody knew a damn thing about his mother except Red-Boar, who wasn’t talking. So Strike tried to cut the kid some slack. In the end, the four of them were a family, albeit a seriously dysfunctional one.

Rabbit lifted a shoulder, still focused on the front of the store even though the blonde was long gone. ‘‘Why don’t you check on the pruning for yourself, Strike-out? ’’

‘‘In other words, no.’’ Strike rubbed absently at his wrist, which had started aching early that morning, along with most of the rest of his body. He was tired, and vaguely pissed off for no good reason. There was nothing wrong, but there was nothing particularly right, either.

He was used to living with Jox, Red-Boar, and Rabbit in a strange bacheloresque symbiosis that was part necessity, part history, but it wasn’t the life he would’ve picked. Four and a half more years until the world doesn’t end, he reminded himself. You’ve just got to hang on until then.

‘‘Delivery’s here,’’ Rabbit said, shifting his attention as an eighteen-wheeler turned up the driveway. ‘‘I’ll sign for it.’’

‘‘No way.’’ Strike grabbed Rabbit by the back of his hood, knowing the kid was just as likely to blow straight past the truck and down the street to the liquor store, bucking for another shoplifting conviction. He headed the teen toward the greenhouse with a shove. ‘‘Prune. Now.’’

‘‘Fuck you.’’

Strike patted his pocket, where he’d stuck the ten. ‘‘We’re even.’’

He signed for the delivery—more cow shit—and headed into the store, which was functional and homey without being unrelentingly cute.

The walls were lined with shelves and bins holding everything from fifty-cent peat cakes to three-hundred-dollar customized bird feeders, complete with advanced squirrel deterrent systems that made no sense to Strike. Rows of freestanding shelves held the seeds and chemicals, and twenty-pounders of fertilizer, crabgrass killer, and slug repellent were stacked neatly in a row headed for the checkout area, where books and magazines competed for space with other point-of-purchase doodads. The counter was paneled in rustic wood like the rest of the shop, and the high-tech cash register was disguised to look like something out of the forties.

Behind the counter, Jox was perched on a bar stool chatting with the blonde, whom he’d apparently talked into a pink ceramic pot for her impatiens, along with a bonsai money tree.

The winikin was wearing khakis and a green long-sleeved jersey that covered the two jaguar glyphs on his arm—one for Strike, the other for his sister. Anna might’ve renounced her magic and taken off, but the bloodline connection remained unbroken. Jox’s dark skin was relatively unlined for his fifty-seven years, his close-cropped hair shot through with silver. He looked relaxed enough, but his expression was edged with the same tension Strike felt in his own gut, the same sense of dread mingled with anticipation.

The thirteenth prophecy spoke of the final five years before the Great Conjunction, when a terrible sacrifice would be required to keep the Banol Kax from coming to earth and precipitating the big game-over. Thing was, King Scarred-Jaguar’s attack on the intersection twenty-four years ago had sealed the barrier, preventing the few surviving Nightkeepers—i.e., Strike, Red-Boar, and Anna—from using their powers. The seal also prevented the Banol Kax—and the gods, for that matter—from even communicating with the earthly plane, never mind reaching through the barrier to possess a willing, or unwilling, host. In all those things, Scarred-Jaguar’s vision had proven true, though it had cost him the Nightkeepers.

Had it been worth it? Strike didn’t know, and a whole hell of a lot of the answer depended on whether the barrier stayed sealed through the final five-year countdown.

With her purchase concluded, the blonde wiggled out, winking at Strike. ‘‘Your loss.’’

‘‘No doubt.’’ He watched her go, thinking that Rabbit was right. He was an idiot.

Scratching a red patch on his inner wrist—he must’ve gotten nailed by a spider or something—he told Jox, ‘‘Your shit’s here.’’

‘‘Thanks.’’ The winikin skirted the counter and headed for the back, where a set of swinging doors led to the warehouse and loading dock. ‘‘Watch the register for a few minutes. I want to make sure they didn’t send me broken bags again.’’

‘‘Ah, yes. A smell to remember.’’ Strike took Jox’s customary place on the bar stool behind the counter, swallowing hard against an unexpected surge of nausea.

A glance around the storefront showed a few browsers, but nobody who looked like they needed immediate attention. Which was a good thing, because all of a sudden he wasn’t feeling so hot. His wrist was burning like a son of a bitch, and when he looked down he saw three right hands where there should’ve been one. A quick grab told him he hadn’t sprouted extra limbs; he was seeing triple. He was also sweating like a pig, and the idea of sticking his head in the john so he could barf in peace was sounding real good.

Narrowing his eyes to cut the spin, he groped for the phone to buzz Jox out back, and came up with a utility knife instead. This’ll do, he thought out of nowhere.

Moving without conscious volition, he flipped the knife open and sliced the blade across his right palm.

Blood spilled over, tracking down his wrist and across his glyph marks. Then the pain hit, first from the cut, and again when he slithered off the bar stool and landed hard on his knees. His head spun and the nausea increased, but it was more like a pressure in his throat, a burning compulsion to say . . . what?

Jesus, what the fuck’s going on? he thought, but the acid burning at the back of his throat told his head what his heart already knew. It was the summer solstice, one of the four days each year that the barrier used to be at its thinnest, when a Nightkeeper’s powers had been strongest.

The barrier—and his power—was coming back online after all these years.

Panic mingled with excitement as blood dripped onto the floor, pooling near his right knee. The warm smell touched his nostrils, tangy and sweet and calling to something inside him, something that ripped at his chest like fear. Like heartache.

‘‘Pasaj,’’ he whispered. The word was the basic command for a Nightkeeper to open a connection to the barrier, to his ancestors, and it hadn’t worked since the massacre.

Gray-green mist filled his brain, and the world started to slide sideways beneath him.

‘‘Pasaj!’’ he said again, louder. ‘‘Are you out there? Talk to me, damn it!’’

He heard distant voices, a woman’s cry of alarm. ‘‘He’s bleeding! Someone help!’’

Inside his head, though, there was nothing beyond the spin and the terrible, awful pressure in his throat. Then he saw something in the grayness behind his eyelids. A single slender thread of yellow in the fog. Holy crap. Acting on instinct, he reached out with his mind and touched the thread, grabbed onto it, and whispered the second word of the barrier spell. ‘‘Och.’’ Enter.

And the world around him vanished.

Jox was counting bags of cow shit when he heard raised voices from out front, and what sounded like a woman’s scream. Seconds later, Rabbit burst through the warehouse doors, his eyes wild, his hood thrown back, and one earpiece dangling. ‘‘Jox, come quick!’’

Jox’s heart shimmied in his chest. Oh, hell. ‘‘What’s wrong?’’

‘‘Hurry!’’ The kid disappeared back through the doors and Jox bolted after him, spurred by a quick jolt of adrenaline, because anything that rattled Rabbit had to be bad.

Shit, he thought. The pipes. The plumbing running the length of the store had needed replacing when they bought the property five years earlier, but there was always something that needed fixing more urgently, so the pipes had waited. Maybe too long.

But when he got out to the front, he didn’t see a flood, didn’t hear the telltale hiss of a broken pipe. A few customers were gathered around the counter waving their hands and talking loud and excitedly, but the source of the drama wasn’t immediately obvious. Pausing, Jox looked around for Strike, who no doubt already had things under control. Then he froze.

He. Didn’t. See. Strike.

Brain instantly upshifting from store owner to winikin mode, Jox shoved between two customers to where Rabbit was hunched behind the counter. He grabbed the teen by the sweatshirt. ‘‘Where is he?’’

Rabbit’s face had gone chalky. ‘‘He was here a second ago, I swear.’’

‘‘He disappeared,’’ said a thirty-something woman, voice cracking with excitement. ‘‘His hand was bleeding— there, you can see the blood. Then he said something, and—poof! Gone.’’

Jox stared at the blood pool and the stained utility knife lying nearby. A litany of denial rattled through his brain. Oh, shit. Oh, no. Oh, shit, no. No. Please, no.

‘‘The barrier,’’ Rabbit said, his voice climbing. ‘‘The solstice is today. He must’ve—’’

‘‘Zip it!’’ Jox shook him harder than necessary, because he needed Rabbit to stop talking, and also because the kid was right, damn it.

‘‘Poof! Then he was gone,’’ the woman said again, and two other customers behind her nodded, like they’d seen it, too. There were four of them, eyes bright and excited, and a fifth was edging in with his camera phone aimed at the blood pool.

‘‘Excuse me; I need to borrow that.’’ Jox snagged the phone and stuck it in his pocket before the guy could even yelp.

His brain raced. They needed damage control and a search party, pronto. If it’d been three decades earlier he would’ve had his choice of magi. As it was, he had no choice at all.

‘‘Go get—’’ Jox started to say to Rabbit, then broke off. ‘‘Never mind, I’ll get him.’’ He leaned close to the teen and hissed, ‘‘Make sure nobody else comes in, and nobody gets out.’’

Rabbit looked startled. ‘‘How am I supposed to do that?’’

‘‘Get creative.’’

As Jox headed up to the apartment above the shop, he knew he was asking for trouble, giving the kid free rein. But Red-Boar was a mind-bender. He could wipe Strike’s disappearing act from the customers’ brains . . . and he could go deeper if Rabbit went too far.

That was assuming, of course, that the barrier was all the way active. Jox had to assume that, because if it wasn’t and Red-Boar couldn’t go into the barrier and drag Strike’s ass out, then they were seriously screwed. The possibility made the winikin’s breath whistle in his lungs as he pounded up the stairs and skidded through the main door of the apartment. Going on instinct, he headed for the back, to a door that was almost always kept locked.

The padlock hung open.

Taking a deep breath, Jox pushed open the door and stepped through into Red-Boar’s ritual chamber.

They’d had the windows drywalled over, the recessed lights removed, and the walls covered with a fake stone facade. Lit braziers hung at the four world corners, and a small chac-mool altar stood against the far wall. Shaped like a man sitting in a sort of zigzag shape, with his feet, ass, and elbows on the ground, and his knees and upper body raised, balancing a flat slab on his kneecaps and collarbones, with his head turned ninety degrees, the chac-mool, represented the sacred rain god. It served as altar and throne, and as a place for sacrifice.

Red-Boar sat cross-legged in front of the chac-mool, with his eyes closed and his hands lying on his knees, palms up. His right palm was slashed and bloodstained, though already partway healed. Another sign that the magic was working.

‘‘I need you,’’ Jox said quietly, hating to disturb him but having no choice.

Red-Boar’s dusky face, with its slashing, hooked nose and wide, high cheekbones, didn’t change. He didn’t even twitch.

He was wearing his ceremonial robes, which were long and black, with stingray spines forming intricate glyph patterns at the cuffs and collar. The hood was thrown back, revealing his dark, close-clipped hair and the gray streaks at the temples that made him look older than his forty-five years, though his body was big and strong beneath the robes.

His right sleeve was pushed up to reveal the chitam glyph that tagged him as a member of the boar bloodline, along with the mind-bender’s talent glyph and the mark of an elite warrior-priest. Between those marks, though, was a bare patch where he’d once worn the jun tan ‘‘beloved’’ glyph for his wife, along with two smaller chitams representing his twin sons, all three of whom had died during the Solstice Massacre.

‘‘Red-Boar.’’ Jox reached out and gripped the other man’s shoulder. ‘‘We have—’’

At the touch, the Nightkeeper exploded off the floor and grabbed Jox by the throat. Pain seared at the point of contact, and a terrible scream erupted in Jox’s head as the Nightkeeper slammed him against the wall and held him there.

Red-Boar’s eyes seared into him, gleaming with power, with hatred.

Jox flailed, trying to shout at Red-Boar, to tell him to snap out of it, but all he could manage was a panicked gurgle. His vision went gray at the edges, telescoping down to the blackness of the Nightkeeper’s eyes.

Then the other man blinked. And let go.

Jox landed in a heap, gasping for breath.

Red-Boar crouched down beside him, not to aid or comfort, but to hiss, ‘‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, winikin?’’ In his rasping voice, the title was a slur. ‘‘You know better than to interrupt magic.’’

‘‘And you should’ve known better than to jack in the moment you felt the barrier come back online,’’ Jox got out between gasps. ‘‘You should’ve damn well checked on Strike first.’’

‘‘You forget your place, winikin. I—’’

‘‘He’s gone,’’ Jox interrupted, and had the satisfaction of seeing the other man go pale.

‘‘He jacked in without an escort?’’

‘‘He vanished in front of five witnesses.’’ Jox mimicked the woman downstairs: ‘‘Poof.’’

Red-Boar’s breath hissed out as he made the connection. ‘‘Shit. Teleport.’’

Strike’s father hadn’t had an innate talent beyond the warrior’s mark—only about one in three Nightkeepers did—but his father had been a teleport, as had a couple of other jaguars in the generation prior. So, yeah, that made sense. But it wasn’t good news by any stretch. Teleporting was a tricky talent—the user had to link to a person or place first, then initiate the ’port. Jumping blind was . . . well, it wasn’t good.

‘‘Can you track him?’’ Jox demanded, almost afraid of the answer.

‘‘I can damn well try,’’ Red-Boar said, yanking open the door and heading for the stairs.

But his voice made it sound like ‘‘probably not.’’