Dawnkeepers (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alexis, wait.”

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

“What are you going to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, he fucking hated it.

He despised the thought of her with Michael, loathed the idea with both halves of himself, the magic and the man. He was logical enough to recognize that it wasn’t fair, and to know he didn’t have the right to block her from taking on one of the other Nightkeeper males if he wasn’t willing to be what she needed. That didn’t dampen the rage, though. If anything, it made it worse.

He cursed aloud, feeling raw from the fight with Alexis, and guilty that he’d called Hera’s name in the moment of orgasm. Worse, he wasn’t sure which one of them he’d betrayed. Which was just fucked-up beyond words, and made him think he should maybe have a chat with Jade, who’d been a therapist of some sort back in the real world.

At the thought of Jade, he wondered what she’d say if Alexis wound up taking Michael as her lover. Jade and Michael had been together in the months between the bloodline and talent ceremonies, in much the same way as Nate and Alexis had been. Actually, Jade and Michael had been more open about their relationship, more prone to public displays of affection until they’d gone their separate ways. They seemed to get along well enough in the aftermath, but the Nightkeepers were a small fighting unit, and their quarters were close. What would happen if the singles started trading partners?

Nate tried to imagine it, and just got more pissed off.

Torturing himself, poking at the raw spot, he tried to imagine what it’d be like if Michael turned Alexis down—hard to imagine, but what if?—and she hooked up with Sven. The youngest of the male Nightkeepers, Sven came off more like a college party animal than a warrior. He’d been a little more serious about his training since the equinox battle, and his rank within the Nightkeepers would undoubtedly shift now that he had the translocator’s talent mark. The rank might matter to Alexis, as might her desire not to mess with the dynamic between Jade and Michael. Still, though, Nate couldn’t see her being attracted to Sven’s surfer-dude ’tude or the relatively low rank of the coyote bloodline.

“So probably not Sven,” Nate said aloud, feeling something loosen in his chest, only to have it tighten back up when his thoughts circled back to Michael, whom he could picture all too easily being to Alexis’s taste, not the least because he and Nate resembled each other: They were both tall and dark, both stylish in their own ways, and both came off as wealthy. In Michael’s case, though, Nate suspected the money was only surface-deep. More, he had a feeling that a background check that went a level or two further than the one Jox had done on each of them might turn up something seriously dark and dangerous, something that Alexis belonged nowhere near. Nate didn’t have any evidence to back up his hunch, though. It was just a guess, based on a couple of overheard snatches of the telephone convos Michael invariably took in his private rooms, and the fact that of all of them, Michael had shown the least desire to leave the compound and return to the real world they’d left behind.

I should have Carter look into him,
Nate thought, then cursed himself for the impulse. Michael was a Nightkeeper, a teammate. He deserved better.

They all did.

Realizing he wasn’t any closer to sleep than he’d been when he lay down—in fact, feeling even more alert and awake now that he’d worked himself into a mental lather—Nate groaned and swung himself out of bed. Dragging a T-shirt on over a pair of gym shorts, he figured he’d head downstairs for a workout, hoping to exhaust himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the same plan he’d had the evening after the bloodline ceremony, when he’d gone to the gym hoping to tire himself past the perma-boner he’d acquired with his first link to the magic. Instead Alexis had come looking for him, and they’d become lovers.

And that so wasn’t what he wanted to be thinking about right now.

Cursing himself, he headed out of his suite and down the residential hall, toward the stairs leading to the basement. He was halfway there when a scream split the air.

Alexis!
He knew it was her, knew it in his gut, and was running for her door before the sound died off.

Images flashed in his head—not visions, but a mix of the things he’d seen and the ones he feared: scenes of Iago grabbing her and ’porting her someplace he couldn’t follow; scenes of her lying limp, bleeding out from sacrificial cuts in a long, rectangular chamber he didn’t recognize, one that his brain must’ve conjured to fill the need for a dark and creepy setting.

He hit her door at a run, twisting the knob and using his shoulder, slamming the panel inward with such force that it banged against the inner wall hard enough to break the stopper and dent the drywall. He didn’t care about the door, didn’t care about the growing clamor of voices out in the hallway as the others responded to the commotion.

“Alexis!” He pushed through into her bedroom, slapping at the light switch on the way through, his heart in his throat with a half-recognized conviction that she’d be gone, her bed empty.

But she was there, sitting bolt upright in bed with the sheet clutched just above her nightshirt-covered breasts. Her skin was pasty pale, her eyes glazed, seeing nothing. His initial spurt of relief at seeing her there in one piece fled quickly when he realized she wasn’t tracking, hadn’t noticed his arrival.

His first impulse was to grab and shake her, but the memory of being drawn into her link with the Ixchel statuette had him staying clear and raising his voice. “Alexis, snap out of it!”

She didn’t even blink.

Others were starting to come into the room now: Strike and Leah first, followed by Jox and Izzy, and then Michael, whom Nate really didn’t want to see just then. Nate forced himself to block them out, though, as he reached out and gripped Alexis’s wrist. When he wasn’t immediately sucked into the barrier, he said, “Come on, Lexie,” deliberately using the intimate nickname. He was partly hoping she’d hear it and know who was calling her back, partly wanting Michael to hear it and know Alexis was his, even though Nate knew the territorial urge marked him as a complete shit. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

That was so wrong it wasn’t even funny, because he was rapidly learning there was no such thing as “just a dream” in the Nightkeepers’ world. Which was probably why he never dreamed. His subconscious wouldn’t let him.

The lie worked, though. Somehow it worked. Alexis stirred, and her pulse cranked up beneath his touch. She blinked and focused on him, then looked past him to where most of the resident Nightkeepers and
winikin
were crammed in her bedroom, expressions ranging from
what the hell?
to
oh, shit
.

Bright spots of embarrassment stained her cheeks. “I screamed, didn’t I?” When she closed her eyes for a second, Nate saw the pain she was trying to hide.

“What did you see?” he asked quietly, aware that he was still holding on to her wrist, and she’d curled her hand around to grip his forearm, linking them palm-to-mark.

When she hesitated, Leah said, “Would you like us to leave?”

“No,” Alexis said, too quickly. Her blush went darker and she pulled away from Nate, scooting higher up in her bed so there was a sizable gap between them. “No, you should all stay and hear this.”

It stung that she didn’t want to be alone with him, didn’t want to lean on him, but that was what he’d wanted, right? He didn’t get to bitch about getting his way.

“The dream?” Strike prompted, his eyes intent on her, no doubt because of all of them, he was the biggest believer in dreams and their portents.

“I saw . . .” She shuddered and looked at Nate, then away, staring out the window and the gathering dawn when she said, “I saw Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk; I’m sure of it this time.”

The logical part of Nate would’ve asked, “This time?” because he hadn’t known she’d seen their parents before this. But the other part of him, the closed-off, judgmental part, had already turned away, blocking off acknowledgment of the past. He didn’t care what his father had done, who he’d been. The circumstances had been beyond his parents’ control, granted, but that didn’t change the fact that they’d been nothing more to him than DNA donors.

It was Strike who said, “What else did you see?”

That implied he already knew about the visions, which just irked Nate more. If Alexis had kept this from him, what else was she keeping secret? But even as he wondered that, the rational part of him knew that it wasn’t like he’d encouraged sharing.

“They were in that long, narrow stone chamber,” she said slowly. “The same one I saw when I touched the statuette.” She bit off the word, making Nate wonder what she wasn’t saying.

Anna pushed through the crowd, moving between Nate and the bed, subtly easing him away. She shot Strike a look, and he started clearing the room.

“Go on,” Anna urged Alexis. “You saw your mother. What else?”

“I—Wait,” she said breaking off when Strike herded Michael toward the door. “I want him to stay.”

Nate muttered a curse and fought to stifle a flash of rage he had absolutely no right to feel.

Strike glanced from Nate to Michael and back, but raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. Michael stays.” But the look he shot at Nate promised a serious convo to come.

Alexis nodded, then said, “In my dream, Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk were at the altar, which was made of stalagmites mostly, carved with scales and rainbows. They were working some sort of ritual—at least, they started to. Then they broke off and started arguing about something.”

“Did you hear the spell?” Anna asked. She was holding Alexis’s hands in hers, and Nate suspected she was either leaking the younger woman power or trying to see her dream through the contact. “Or what they were fighting about?”

“No.” Alexis paused and took a deep breath. “But here’s the thing: It was the same chamber, only the altar wasn’t the same. Well, it was, but there was a small door open on it, one that I didn’t see before. Maybe it was a secret compartment? Anyway, there was a little alcove behind the door, and inside the alcove there was a small carving.” Now she looked at Nate, their eyes locking. “It’s the other half of the Ixchel statuette. I’m sure of it.”

He nodded. It made sense that Ixchel would want them to find the other piece of her demon prophecy. Would’ve been nice if she could’ve beamed the missing text straight to Alexis or something, but he had a feeling none of what they were up against was going to be that easy. The gods had rules the Nightkeepers didn’t understand any better than they knew the extent of their own magic, or the limitations of the Xibalbans and
Banol Kax
. “What else did you see?” he asked.

“Nothing much.” She shook her head, grimacing. “There was this buzzing over everything, like interference. Static. I couldn’t hear any of what they said, and they were still arguing when I woke up.”

Strike shot a look at Nate. “Did you dream anything?”

“I was awake.” He didn’t think it necessary to mention that he didn’t dream, or if he did, never remembered anything but the nightmares.

“Damn,” the king muttered. “Anna, you get anything?”

The
itza’at
disengaged from Alexis, shaking her head. “Nothing. Sorry.”

Nate didn’t know whether that meant she had nothing to add from Alexis’s vision, or she hadn’t been able to pick it up at all. He cleared his throat. “Where does that leave us?”

Strike didn’t hesitate before answering. “After the first Ixchel vision, I had Jade start searching for references to a temple like the one Alexis saw: a narrow rectangular room deep underground, water access the only way in or out, with a carved crowd scene looking toward a naturally formed throne.”

Alexis straightened against the headboard. “And?”

“Last I checked she had it narrowed down to three possibilities. By now she may’ve gotten it figured all the way out.”

“I’m going,” Alexis said, her tone brooking no argument. “I’ll leave as soon as she’s sure of the location.”

Strike nodded. “Of course. I’ll transpo you and Nate once—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I want Michael.”

Nate hid the flinch as best he could. He’d known it was coming, of course, but that didn’t temper the instinctive kick of rage.

Surprised, Michael looked from him to Alexis and back. “Blackhawk?” he said, letting that one word ask several questions.

Michael was the only Nightkeeper to call Nate by his bloodline name; Nate had never been sure if it was intended as a sign of respect or a subtle dig. Whichever, it sparked his anger even higher now, but he throttled back the urge to rip, tear, and fight, knowing that this, at least, wasn’t anybody’s fault but his own. “It’s fine,” he said tightly. “Go ahead.”

“You don’t need his permission,” Alexis snapped.

“I’m not chattel.” Nate gritted his teeth. “Nobody said you were.” Knowing she was safe—for now, anyway—and that the convo was likely to go downhill fast if he stayed put, he headed for the door. He brushed past Michael harder than necessary, a body bump of warning, and growled under his breath, “Anything bad happens to her—and I mean
anything
—and you answer to me.”