Which was unfortunate, because she sure didn’t fit into the Nightkeepers’ world, either.

As agreed, she and Strike avoided the hell out of each other. It wasn’t easy, considering that they crossed paths just often enough to keep the sizzle at a maddening background hum. But because he’d been right, damn it, the sex hadn’t been just sex, and because she didn’t want to be anybody’s sacrifice, she ignored the hum as best she could and threw herself into her work.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have much more in the success department there, either.

She was a bust in Magic 101, showing zero power, which was both a relief and a disappointment—a relief because she wasn’t sure she wanted to play the magic game when it seemed like a good way of getting dead, but a disappointment because she really, really wanted to fry Zipacna’s ass. Then she found out the deal with the MAC-10s: The bullets were tipped with jade, which was apparently anathema to the denizens of the nine-layered hell called Xibalba. They were the Nightkeepers’ silver bullets.

And they were a way for her to fight Zipacna.

According to Jox—who had no use for her but proved to be a bit of a weapons junkie—the jade-tips wouldn’t kill a makol because its human aspect would protect it from the jade while its magic protected it from getting dead right away. But the jade-tips would sure as hell slow it down long enough for her to do the head-and-heart thing and recite a simple banishment spell. Jox said he wasn’t sure whether the banishment spell would work for a human—and of course he said the ‘‘human’’ part with a superior lip curl. That meant maybe the makol would vaporize . . . and maybe it’d sit its headless ass up and make a grab for her.

She had a feeling the winikin was hoping for the latter. But who the hell cared? At least she had a weapon with some hope of success. All she had to do was track down Zipacna, who might or might not be traveling with a hundred or so of his freak-show disciples.

That turned out to be easier said than done.

She leaned on the Nightkeeper’s private eye, Carter, and called in all her markers and then some. She tracked the 2012ers from Miami to the Keys and lost them when they hit the water, headed south. A week later, she picked them back up in south Texas, near the border. Once she had the location, she forced Strike and Red-Boar to take her along on the teleport recon by refusing to give up the location—and the relevant photographs— until they agreed.

They got there half a day too late. Zipacna and his freaks were gone.

Then the same thing happened in Fort Worth, and again in Philly, of all places. Then LA. Each time they were a fraction too late, sometimes a day, sometimes just a few hours, as if the bastard had known they were coming.

‘‘He’s got a seer,’’ Strike said at one point. ‘‘It’s the only explanation.’’

The knowledge hurt him doubly, she knew—once because they couldn’t catch the ajaw-makol, and a second time because it drove home the continued separation between him and his sister, Anna—a rift Leah had learned of when she’d come across him one day, sitting at the kitchen table with the mail open in front of him and his head in his hands. Eventually he’d revealed that he’d given Anna a text for translation and she’d sent it back, refusing to get involved. Which left them with no seer, and no translator the Nightkeepers could trust.

With so much of their magic lost over the years—to time, to persecution—they couldn’t afford to waste any of their assets. But instead of zapping to UT Austin and dragging his sister’s butt back to the compound, Strike had withdrawn completely, giving Jox and Red-Boar control of Magic 101 and spending most of his time locked in the archives. When he did come out in public, he was snarly at best, churlish at worst. Even Red-Boar started giving him a wide berth, which was saying something.

As days turned to weeks, Strike’s absence meant that Leah didn’t have to work so hard at avoiding him, and she could spend as much time as she wanted on the firing range at the back of the compound, perfecting her aim with the jade-tips without his figuring out what she planned to do. But it also meant that the buzz of desire became an ache of loneliness. And she wasn’t the only one missing him, either. The trainees, whom she’d gotten to know little by little, were starting to fall apart . . . and she was the only one who seemed to see it.

Granted, on the surface everything looked pretty good. Patience and Brandt were the perfect couple, and their twins didn’t seem to miss not having other kids around. The boys played with each other under the watchful eyes of the winikin, or tagged after Rabbit, who had the rep of a delinquent but seemed to get a kick out of the twins. Of the others, Alexis and Nate were a couple, though they didn’t spend much time together outside of the bedroom, and Michael and Jade’s romance had fizzled out around the one-month mark, right about the time he discovered a knack for casting force fields. Sven was . . . well, he was Sven. He hung loose, seeming even more chilled out after his young winikin went back to college. Even Red-Boar, whom Leah tagged as living on the manic-depressive side of life, seemed to have settled into the teaching role pretty well.

But beneath the surface, she didn’t like how Rabbit spent so much time alone, and how the others treated him differently, not because he was younger, but because he was half-human, and didn’t have his mark. She didn’t like seeing Patience and Brandt with their heads together, shutting out the rest of the world—and not in a we’re deeply in love way, but in a we’re making plans that don’t include you way. She didn’t like that Nate spent a big chunk of his time on the computer, trading e-mails with his business partners and working on something about a Viking sex goddess, or that Michael got a dozen cell calls a day and always took them behind closed doors.

They trained hard; she’d give them that, though it wasn’t like Jox or Red-Boar would’ve tolerated anything less. In the mornings Jox did a sort of Nightkeepers for Dummies, which was a blinding speed-sampling of their history, starting with Atlantis—and boy, had that made Leah’s cop side cringe—and running through to the present, along with a short version of the Popol Vuh creation myth and a dizzying number of prophecies, some coming from the earliest Nightkeepers, others supposedly from the gods themselves.

In the afternoons, the trainees met up with Red-Boar in the steel-sided training building, which was almost always either too hot or too cold. There, they worked on basic barrier spells like shielding and wielding fire. Of the trainees, only Rabbit could reliably make fire, and Michael showed a talent for shields. Patience got pretty good at the invisibility thing—which was the freakiest by far, in Leah’s opinion—and even figured out that she could occasionally throw her talent to distant objects or people, especially if her husband was boosting her with his power. Which was all well and good, but Leah didn’t see how most of the things they were doing—with the exception of Jox’s late-afternoon lessons on the firing range—were preparing them to fight.

Worse, she was pretty sure the others felt the same way. They were taking their classes, finishing their home-work, and otherwise doing their own things. And that was not a good recipe for teamwork.

Maybe she noticed it because she was an outsider, maybe because Connie had exposed the members of the MDPD to a wide range of touchy-feely exercises designed to build their team spirit. Or whatever. But while the cops had universally mocked Connie’s team-building crapola, as far as Leah could tell, the MDPD had been one big, happy, tolerant family compared to the Nightkeepers. And that was bad. They—and that would be the whole-wide-world ‘‘they’’—needed the magi working together, or very bad things were going to happen. Leah believed that, even if she didn’t totally understand it.

A week before the Venus conjunction, she decided she’d had enough of the bullshit, enough of Strike locking himself away and pretending Jox and Red-Boar were a fine substitute for leadership.

So she sucked it up and went to find Jox.

The winikin was in his quarters near the royal suite, and answered the door barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a book about miniature roses. His expression went cool when he saw her standing there. ‘‘Is there something I can help you with, Detective?’’

You can get your thumb out of your ass and take a good look around, she thought, but didn’t figure that would get her very far. So instead she said, ‘‘Yeah. I need you to help me arrange a party.’’

Strike’s eyes were nearly crossed, and he was pretty sure he’d put a permanent kink in his neck from sitting at the long archive tables in front of a messy stack of books. Unfortunately, the Mac Pluses that’d held the computerized files had shit the bed long ago, leaving him working with some sort of perverse index-card system.

He’d been going through the cards for weeks now, one by one, searching the short annotations and pulling likely-sounding journals, translations, whatever, hoping for a clue, any clue that would help them understand why Leah had shown powers at the solstice and again at the aphelion, but had lost every hint of magic since. He’d also take something about how to track a makol when there wasn’t an itza’at seer handy.

There hadn’t been a Zipacna sighting in nearly three weeks. Strike was guessing he’d gone to ground someplace with some serious power lines—one of the old ruins down south, maybe—and used them to construct a ward barrier. Which meant the bastard was functionally untouchable and free to work whatever magic he had at hand until the equinox, when it was a sure bet he’d be at the intersection, looking to bring a dark lord through.

Time was running out too fast. They had three weeks until the equinox, and it seemed highly doubtful the trainees would be ready. According to Jox and Red-Boar, most of the newbies—with the notable exception of Jade—had mastered the basic pretalent spells of jacking in and manipulating the barrier’s energy, but only Patience had shown any spark of breakthrough talent. And Rabbit, of course, but that was a whole ’nother can of worms. Which left them exactly where they’d been six weeks ago—with a group of untrained magi and no idea what they’d be able to do.

At least they had some weapons training now, he supposed. Jox had brought the newbies to the range every day and gotten them up to speed on the MACs, along with a few different types of handguns and a sniper rifle or two. Jade-tips wouldn’t substitute for hard-core magic, but given that magic was in short supply at the moment, he’d take what he could get.

Which brought him circling back to Leah. Granted, just about every thought train he possessed eventually came back around to her these days. She was under his skin, in his blood. He knew where she was every minute of every day, both from gut-check awareness and from daily reports. Which was how he knew she’d practically been living on the gun range, and had gotten the makol-banishment spell from Jox.

It didn’t take much of a leap to figure out that she intended to be part of things when he teleported the Nightkeepers—all whopping ten of them—to the sacred chamber to meet the makol on the night of the autumnal equinox. What she didn’t know was that he had no intention of letting that happen. Unless there was a very good reason to include her in the attack—like she suddenly developed more power than the rest of them put together— she was going to become very good friends with a basement storage locker that night. He couldn’t afford the distraction of protecting her while trying to keep the others under control, finding the makol, blocking the intersection to keep the Banol Kax where they belonged . . .

Gods. It was too much even to think about.

And he’d just read the same page three times and didn’t have a frigging clue what it said.

‘‘Shit.’’ He slapped shut a binder-bound translation of a 1550s journal written by a missionary with a seriously antinative streak and shoved it aside. The binder slid into a teetering stack of accordion-folded charcoal rubbings, and before he could react, the whole mess went over the side of the table and hit the floor with a papery crash.

Knowing Jox would kick his ass if he’d buffed details off the rubbings, Strike cursed. Then, also knowing his increasingly unstable temper wouldn’t do a damn thing to speed things up or make them better, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh. ‘‘This sucks.’’

‘‘So take a break,’’ Leah said from the doorway.

Going very still, Strike opened his eyes and looked over at her. She’d had a bunch of her clothes and stuff shipped from Miami and was wearing hip-hanging cutoffs and a belly-baring tank, and he wanted nothing more than to rub his cheek across the strip of taut, creamy flesh exposed between them.

Horns locked within him, tightening his muscles and sending his pulse up a notch. ‘‘You shouldn’t be here.’’

‘‘Don’t worry; I’m leaving. But I’m taking you with me.’’ She crossed the distance separating them, skirting the piles of books and notes as she came, and grabbed his hand. Gave it a tug. ‘‘Come on. And don’t stress; we won’t be alone.’’

He resisted for about a nanosecond, then let her pull him up out of the chair and away from the archives. Once they were in the hallway, he tugged his hand from hers. It was hard enough being near her, feeling her body heat and letting the light, fresh scent of her seep into him—soap and woman, with an undertone of something sharper, gun oil, maybe, or determination.

They walked through the mansion side by side, a little awkward with each other. Trying to ignore the sexual tension that snapped in the air and dug deep within his gut, Strike said, ‘‘You’ve got something on Zipacna?’’ But he didn’t think that was it; her energy was different than that, more relaxed, though maybe a shade wary.

She shook her head. ‘‘I’m declaring a moratorium on that stuff for the next few hours, at least until the party is over.’’

‘‘Party?’’ he asked, but the moment she got him through the sliders near the pool, his senses perked up at the smell of smoke and sauce. Hel-lo, barbecue.

He heard shouts and good-natured catcalls coming from the direction of the big steel building that had replaced the Great Hall.

Leah said, ‘‘Your gods—the gods, whatever—can’t expect us to keep going forever without cutting loose a little, right? Well, consider yourself cut loose for the rest of today. You need a break. We all do. And I think you need to do some reconnecting.’’

He barely heard her as he pushed ahead, drawn by the sounds and smells.

When they rounded the corner of the mansion, he saw the Nightkeepers and winikin all gathered beneath the ceiba tree in front of the big steel building. They’d dragged out folding tables and chairs and fired up a pair of big gas grills Strike didn’t recognize. Jox was manning one of the grills, Woody the other, while Hannah and Izzy chopped veggies and readied burgers, wings, and dogs. Red-Boar and the remaining winikin sat nearby at one of the picnic tables. Most of the trainees were in the middle of a touch-football game, while off to the side Jade sat apart, watching the twins sneak up on a lizard that was sunning itself on a flat rock.

They were all contained within the ash shadow of where the old Great Hall had been.

Before, when the Nightkeepers and their winikin had gathered in the compound for the four cardinal days, the Great Hall had been jammed with tables. Friends and families—and occasionally rivals and enemies—had packed in elbow-to-elbow for the rituals, and the hard partying that followed.

Now the tables formed a tiny cluster at one end of the ash shadow, and the football game ranged the length of the empty space.

‘‘There are so damn few of us,’’ Strike rasped, stopping to stare at the pitiful handful of magi. ‘‘We’ve lost before we even get started.’’

‘‘That’s probably true,’’ Leah said conversationally. ‘‘Unless you get your flipping head out of your ass.’’

It took a second for that to sink in. Another for him to believe she’d said it. His too-ready temper flared, fueled by his frustration with the situation, with her. He raised an eyebrow in warning. ‘‘Excuse me?’’

They had stopped at the edge of the ash-grayed footprint of the Great Hall, out of earshot of the football game and picnic tables. The others glanced over, then away. All but Jox, who stared down at the grill.

Which meant the winikin had been in on whatever was going on, Strike realized. He’d been ambushed. The knowledge didn’t do a damn thing to sweeten his mood.

Either unaware of his temper or figuring it was his to deal with—probably the latter—Leah said, ‘‘Look, I know I’m not a Nightkeeper—trust me, that’s been made crystal clear. But the thing is, I didn’t ask to come here; you brought me. Your gods brought me. Whatever. So I’m going to tell it how I see it.’’ She paused, her voice softening a notch. ‘‘You and Jox and Red-Boar got tossed headfirst into a hell of a situation; I get that. But I think they’re dealing with it by leaning way too hard on traditions that just aren’t relevant anymore . . . and you’re dealing with it by not dealing.’’

‘‘I don’t think you’re in a position to lecture,’’ Strike said through gritted teeth. ‘‘As you’ve pointed out, you’re not one of us.’’ Which was mean, but she had him feeling mean. Did she think he liked spending fourteen hours a day locked in the archive? He was doing it for her, damn it. For all of them.

Something flickered in her eyes—hurt, maybe, or an anger that echoed his own—but she kept her tone reasonable when she said, ‘‘All the others were raised, to some degree or another, within the Nightkeeper culture. I’m an outsider. I can see stuff you can’t. Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, things aren’t happening exactly the way the stories say they should. You’ve got a human who seems to have a god’s powers, but only when the barrier is at its thinnest, a half-blood with wild talent but no mark, and a full-blood with a mark but no apparent talent. Not to mention that you’re dealing with a bunch of trainees who grew up in the modern world and have opinions of their own.’’ She paused. ‘‘Seems to me that it’s time to make some changes.’’

He hated being ambushed, but had to admit she might have a point. Temper leveling slightly, he said, ‘‘Like what?’’

She waved to the barbecuers. ‘‘Did it occur to you to ask why the winikin are cooking while the Nightkeepers screw around?’’

‘‘Because—’’ He stopped himself.

‘‘Right. Because they’re winikin. Am I the only one here who has a problem with that?’’

He cut her a frustrated look. ‘‘This is a monarchy, not a commune, and the hierarchy exists for a reason. The Nightkeepers need to conserve their energy for the magic. For fighting.’’

‘‘But there’s not much magic going on at the moment, and even less fighting.’’

‘‘Don’t start,’’ he warned. He gestured to the field, where the football game was more a mess of arms and legs than a coordinated strategy. ‘‘Do they look like they’re ready to fight?’’

‘‘And whose fault is that?’’ she demanded. ‘‘If this is a monarchy, then the king’s son needs to give some serious thought to stepping up and taking over rather than hiding in the library.’’

‘‘I—’’ He broke off, practically choking on a quick flash of rage. He wanted to grab her, shake her, shout at her. Who did she think she was, talking to him like that, making it sound like he was shirking his duty, when all he’d ever been was duty? Every decision he’d made since the summer solstice had been for the Nightkeepers, for mankind, though he’d get no thanks from that corner. Humans were—and had always been—narrow and self-absorbed, too caught up in their small little lives to see—

Whoa. Strike reined himself in, fighting back the anger as best he could. His body hummed with rage, with bloodlust and deep disillusionment. He wanted to run and howl, wanted to fly, though that wasn’t one of his talents. He wanted to take Leah, to possess her, absorb her very being into himself until he was complete.

And none of those were his emotions, he realized with a start. They were coming from a hard, hot place at the back of his skull, along with a pounding pressure that felt like hate. Like darkness.

Holy shit, what was going on with him?

‘‘In order to fight,’’ Leah continued, unaware of his inner turmoil, ‘‘they’re going to need to feel like a unified force. And every team needs a leader. Trust me, cops are about as independent a bunch as you’ll find, but we need to know there’s someone calling the shots. The trainees need that from you. The winikin keep telling them that you’re in charge, that the king has the final say, but they barely know you. You’ve left the training to Jox and Red-Boar, and you spend practically all your time in the archive. How can you possibly run this show if you don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of your people?’’

They were standing outside, yet he felt as though walls were closing in around him, suffocating him until he could barely breathe. The darkness rose up, threatening to swamp him, to take him over and leave nothing but rage and frustration.

Part of him feared it was makol magic that had somehow slipped through the wards surrounding the compound. But it didn’t feel like evil; it felt like anger, like the need for freedom.

And it was that last piece of the emotions, that need to escape, that made him think it wasn’t coming from an outside source at all. It was inside him—his anger, his frustration . . . and his desire to run away.

The question had dogged him for weeks now. What sort of a king could he possibly make when he didn’t really want to be king at all?

‘‘Grub’s on!’’ Jox called, his voice tinny with distance, providing a much-needed distraction.

The football game broke up and the trainees headed for the tables, pushing and shoving one another, and cursing good-naturedly about the game as they loaded their plates and grabbed drinks from a couple of coolers nearby. Strike saw a few curious glances shot his way, but nobody shouted for him to hurry his ass up so they could eat.

Instead, they started without him, which proved Leah’s point. While he’d been wrestling with his own demons, he’d lost track of what the others needed. Not only was he not their leader, he wasn’t even part of their gang.

‘‘Damn,’’ he said, which seemed to sum things up.

She took his hand and tugged him toward the barbecue. ‘‘It’s fixable.’’

Is it? he thought, but didn’t say. Instead, he allowed himself to be led to the small barbecue, where he made a concerted effort to engage with the other magi, putting faces and impressions to Jox’s and Red-Boar’s reports, and trying to channel what he remembered of his father’s public persona, which was all he knew of how a king should act.

But as the night wore on and beer and wine flowed, and Jox even broke out the potent ceremonial pulque— one shot each, no more—and everyone else relaxed, Strike grew increasingly tense while he fought the red haze that threatened to coat his mind with anger, hatred, and vicious sexual frustration. A single thought kept pounding through his skull, chasing itself around in endless circles.

How in the hell was he supposed to lead the Nightkeepers when he couldn’t even manage what was inside his own head?

As dinner and dessert wound down, Leah got more and more keyed up.

She’d gone into alligator-infested waters after bodies the gators considered theirs. She’d faced down gang-bangers. She’d been shot in the leg and kept up the foot chase. Hell, she’d escaped being a human sacrifice in an ancient Mayan temple. There was no reason for her to be nervous about what she had planned next.

Or so she kept telling herself. But she was getting a seriously weird vibe off Strike, one that had her thinking she should’ve waited on the second part of her scheme, the one Jox didn’t even know about. Problem was, they didn’t have the time to wait. A barbecue would get them only so far. They needed an identity, something to rally behind. Something that was theirs alone to protect.

So she stood up and cleared her throat, and waited until she had everyone’s attention. Feeling like a total freak-show fraud to be telling a bunch of magicians how they should run their own universe, she said only, ‘‘I’d appreciate it if you’d all come out to the front of the house. I have something for you.’’

For a few seconds nobody moved. Then Strike nodded and rose. ‘‘Lead on.’’

His words were neutral, even encouraging, but his expression was closed and cool, like he thought she’d already done enough damage for one night. And maybe she had . . . but she’d never known how to quit while she was ahead. Why start now?

So she led the way around the side of the mansion, conscious of Strike’s lethal warrior’s grace right behind her, the others following behind him, including the winikin , and even the sleepy-eyed twins, who tagged on either side of Rabbit, babbling in incomprehensible twinspeak.

She stopped by the front door of the mansion, where she’d hung the polished brass plaque earlier in the day, still covered in brown paper wrapping.

Sucking in a deep breath to settle her nerves—like that was going to happen—Leah said, ‘‘Some of you don’t think I belong here, that having me here breaks tradition.’’ She looked at Jox and Red-Boar, standing off to one side of the main crowd, and could all but hear them thinking, Yeah, so? ‘‘And maybe you’re right. I don’t have the same magic that you do, I wasn’t raised in your culture, and I’m not related by blood. But I am a trained cop, and a good one. I can shoot. I can fight. And I know, for better or worse, how to manipulate people.’’ That got her a few shuffles, and even some frowns. She held up a hand. ‘‘I’m giving you honesty here. And honestly, what I see is a bunch of strangers with similar goals. You’re not a unit yet. You’re not the team you’re going to need to be in order to fight whatever’s coming through at the equinox.’’

She deliberately used ‘‘you’’ rather than ‘‘us’’ because she wanted them pulling together, and if uniting against her was what brought them into alignment, then so be it.

‘‘What do you suggest?’’ Strike asked, but she got the idea he was playing along so the others would think she had his support, not because she actually did.

‘‘Team Building 201,’’ Leah answered. ‘‘You need a name. Not you as a people, or your bloodlines,’’ she said quickly when the dirty looks started. ‘‘For this place.’’ Her gesture encompassed the mansion, the training compound, and the wide box canyon lost in the darkness. ‘‘For your home.’’

‘‘This isn’t—’’ Jox began, then broke off.

‘‘It wasn’t your home before,’’ she agreed. ‘‘It was a place where you gathered for feasts and training.’’ Personally, she thought it should’ve had a name back then, regardless. ‘‘But wake up. It’s a new day, and things are going to need to change. Starting now. So I’m giving this place a name.’’

Without further ceremony, she ripped the paper free, baring the intricately engraved plaque.

There was a collective indrawn breath, and in the moment of silence that followed, one of the twins laughed, the sound rising into the night high and sweet and pure.

Finally, unable to stand it one second longer, Leah turned to Strike, who’d frozen and gone pale. ‘‘What do you think?’’

I think you humble me, Strike thought, but he couldn’t get the words out. So he took her hand and held it while he stood and stared at the name she’d given the Night-keepers’ home.

SKYWATCH.

It was engraved in big letters above a line drawing of a ceiba tree, with three Mayan words inscribed below, the letters formed from the tree’s spreading root system.

Skywatch. It clicked. It was right. The sky was the realm of the gods they served, the gods who’d charged them with watching over the barrier. More, waatch was the Mayan word for ‘‘soldier,’’ though she might not have known that. Or maybe she did, he thought, looking at the words carved below the tree of life.

She’d not only given them a name; she’d given them a motto. A coat of arms. A battle cry in modern Quiche Mayan. Waquqik—to fight. Cajij—to protect. And—

He frowned. ‘‘What’s kuyubal-mak?’’

‘‘It means ‘to forgive,’ ’’ Jox said, his voice rough. ‘‘But there’s nothing to forgive.’’

‘‘I think there is,’’ Leah countered. ‘‘If there weren’t, you would’ve pressured him to take charge long before this. You would’ve dragged him out of the pool house and locked him in the royal suite, and you sure as hell wouldn’t have let him hide out in the library for the past two months. You would’ve forced him to take the crown— or whatever it is that your king wears. But neither you nor Red-Boar did any of those things. Thus, I have to assume there’s a reason.’’ Taking a deep breath, she said, ‘‘I’m thinking it’s because, deep down inside, you’re not sure you want him to be king.’’

Strike didn’t know which was worse—that she’d said it, or that there was dead silence in the aftermath.

Finally, Jox said, ‘‘You presume too much, Detective. You don’t know us, and you sure as hell don’t know Strike.’’

‘‘I think I do.’’ Her eyes met Strike’s. ‘‘And I don’t think he wants to be king. If he did, he’d be arguing with me right now.’’ She closed the distance between them, said softly. ‘‘I think you’re afraid you’ll make the same mistakes your father did. And I think you’re figuring that if you don’t become king you’ll nullify the thirteenth prophecy. No king, no greatest sacrifice.’’

Strike told himself the rage wasn’t him, the hatred wasn’t him. But that was all he could see or feel, all he could be just then. A scream built in his soul, and he felt the darkness closing in on him. Suffocating him. He tried to find words to tell her—to tell any of them—what was going on, but he was afraid that if he opened his mouth something terrible would come out, something vicious and violent.

So he didn’t say anything. He just closed his eyes and imagined being someplace else, someplace alone. He was so revved on anger, on power, that he zapped blind before he’d intended to, the world dissolving around him before he’d envisioned the travel thread or picked a destination.

Then the universe jolted sideways, the floor fell out from beneath him, and he dropped with a yell.

He fell too long, and hit bottom too hard, but the spongy surface yielded beneath him, cushioning the impact. He felt the feathery touch of mist on his face, and knew where he was even before he opened his eyes and saw a world of gray-green.

He’d zapped himself into the frigging barrier. And the anger—oh, the anger rose up, gripping him, tearing into him. He arched and screamed with the rage, with the bloodlust and mad hatred that came from outside him, from within him, until he wasn’t sure where he left off and the craziness began.

Gods. His mouth drew back in a rictus, his eyes rolled wildly, and his heart stuttered in his chest. Darkness blurred the edges of his vision, and he was pretty sure he was dying. Panic closed in.

He was barely conscious of the mist swirling nearby, thickening and taking on the shape of a stick-thin Nightkeeper with obsidian eyes and a ruby stud in one ear. The nahwal.

‘‘Father!’’ he shouted, though he wasn’t sure if he said the word aloud or only thought it in the small corner of his mind that was still his to control.

‘‘It is time,’’ the nahwal said in its voice-of-many-voices. It leaned down and gripped Strike’s wrist, and its touch burned like flame and acid, the worst pain he’d ever known.

He threw back his head and screamed.

The gray-green mist disappeared.

And he was home, reappearing exactly where he’d left from, standing in front of the main door, staring at the sign that said, SKYWATCH: TO FIGHT, TO PROTECT, TO FORGIVE.

The others were gone. The anger was gone, too, leaving him hollow and drained. He only had the strength left to whisper, ‘‘Forgive me, Father.’’

Then he collapsed on the welcome mat and passed the hell out.

After Strike pulled his disappearing act, leaving Leah standing there looking like a complete idiot, she held it together until she reached her rooms. His rooms. Whatever.

The moment she was through the carved double doors, though, she let go of the control she’d been holding on to by the last thread. She halfway expected tears, though she’d never been a weeper, halfway expected destructive, lamp-throwing anger, which was more typical for her. But either the two canceled each other out or she’d used up all her emotional space and had nothing left.

She sank to the couch in the sitting area, exhausted. Empty. There were no skitters of warmth or electricity. She doubted she could kill a gnat, never mind a coffeemaker. Her supposed powers were long gone, leaving her as nothing more than what she was—a cop with a big mouth and zero subtlety who didn’t really belong in Skywatch.

Skywatch. She hoped the name—and the motto— stuck. Her timing and delivery might’ve sucked, but she was right, damn it. They needed something to rally around, and Red-Boar and the winikin needed to accept that the past was gone and it wasn’t going to repeat itself, no matter what their writs said about the cyclical nature of time. The trainees weren’t going to fight because their winikin told them to. They needed to believe in the cause, in themselves, and in one another. And more important, they needed to believe in their leader. She didn’t care if he called himself king or Papa Smurf; he needed to step up.

Instead, he’d brushed her off and then freaking zapped himself straight out of the argument, which was against the rules of fighting. And he’d been really pissed, too, like he hated the fact that she was standing up to him.

‘‘Which is way too bad,’’ she said aloud. ‘‘If he doesn’t like a woman who gets in his face and tells him where to get off occasionally, then he can—’’ She broke off, because he didn’t have to do a flipping thing. The decision was going to have to be hers.

She could stay—if they’d let her—and add whatever weight she might have to the coming battle. Or she could go home, fast-talk her way back onto the job—which would undoubtedly include some serious shrink action— and keep hammering at Survivor2012.

She didn’t want to go back . . . but she wasn’t sure she could stay, either. Strike was using her as an excuse to avoid the others—which wasn’t fair to any of them— and his disappearing act suggested he wasn’t looking to change that strategy. Besides, she knew how to kill Zipacna now; she just had to find him, and she could do that as effectively from the outside as she could in the compound. She could defend herself. She didn’t need to stay.

More important, she didn’t have any reason to. She wasn’t Strike’s Godkeeper, and she wasn’t his mate. Hell, after tonight, she probably didn’t even rank as a friend.

‘‘Shit,’’ she said, hearing the single word echo in the too-big suite. Then she started packing.

Twenty minutes later, figuring she’d ‘‘borrow’’ a car and call Jox later to let him know where to pick it up, she slung her duffel over her shoulder and headed out without saying good-bye to anyone, because she didn’t particularly want to see the looks of relief when she said she was leaving. Telling herself she wasn’t going to cry, she swung open the front door, slamming it into something lying on the welcome mat outside.

It took her a second. Then her heart stopped in her chest. ‘‘Strike!’’

She dropped down beside him, scrambling for a pulse. She found it—sort of—but it wasn’t the thready beat that held her attention as she raised her voice and shouted, ‘‘Jox! Need some help here!’’

No, what drew her attention was the new mark on his forearm, one that hadn’t been there an hour earlier . . . and which looked a hell of a lot like a flying snake.