Nightkeepers (14 page)

‘‘You have no idea.’’ Alexis hiked herself up onto the stool opposite her and waved to the bartender. ‘‘Two of whatever she’s having, along with a basket of fries and the catch of the day.’’

Izzy’s lips twitched. ‘‘Hungry, dear?’’

Dark, petite, and graceful, with a wonderfully calm way of dealing with life, Izzy was the diametric opposite of Alexis in so many ways, both physically and emotionally, that it was a wonder they got along. Then again, maybe it was because of those differences that it worked so well, even though just being near her godmother made Alexis feel huge, ungainly, and loud, like a flatulent elephant in an antiques store. She’d long ago decided she loved Izzy too much to mind, though, even if she still envied her long dark hair and olive-toned skin, and the way she never seemed to age or doubt herself.

‘‘I’m starving.’’ Alexis glanced through the clear plastic sheets the waitstaff had pulled over the screened-in porch, preparing for the squall. ‘‘Not much sea for such a heavy sky.’’

‘‘Give it ten minutes.’’ Izzy paused. ‘‘How are things?’’

‘‘Complicated,’’ Alexis said, wondering if her godmother had somehow known early that morning, when she’d called with a lunch invite, that her goddaughter’s life was going to have taken a big dump in the great cosmic toilet bowl by noon. ‘‘Let’s just say the weather’s not the only thing that’s going to be changing around here.’’

Izzy idly rubbed her inner right forearm in a habitual gesture, pulling the skin tight across a pair of old, faded tattoos. One was of a disembodied hand touching a smiling face; the other was a stylized symbol that might’ve been a vaguely reptilian head beneath a puff of smoke.

Alexis had expected questions, or sympathy, or something after her dire pronouncement. Instead, Izzy had a seriously weird look on her face.

‘‘Iz?’’ Alexis asked after a moment. ‘‘Are you okay?’’ Her problems with Aaron took a quick backseat to a spurt of worry. She’d lost both her parents before her second birthday. If she lost Izzy, too . . . Panic backed up quickly, closing her throat and making her force the words. ‘‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’’

Izzy shook her head but remained silent as the bartender delivered their drinks. When he was gone, she said quietly, ‘‘You know all those stories I told you growing up?’’

‘‘Of course,’’ Alexis said, puzzled. Granted, the first words out of Izzy’s mouth weren’t
I went to the doctor,
or
I have cancer,
but she wasn’t sure she was relieved yet. Her godmother’s expression was too strange. ‘‘What about the stories?’’ she asked, then as a thought occurred: ‘‘Are you finally thinking of getting them published? ’’

Izzy had all these great stories about gods and ancient magical warriors. More detailed than Tolkien, more mythos-based than
Star Wars
. . . Alexis had always thought the book would sell in a heartbeat. God, she could practically see the cover, with a handsome, dark-haired warrior who wore a hawk’s insignia at his throat, and—

She jolted, then coughed and grabbed for her drink to cover the depth of her response to the image. Where the hell had
that
come from?
More important, where can I meet him?

‘‘Not exactly.’’ Izzy reached over and took her god-daughter’s right hand, turning it palm up to show the lighter underside of Alexis’s forearm, where she’d neglected her tanning. ‘‘What if I told you that all of those stories were true?’’

Cara Liu frowned at her father, Carlos. ‘‘I’d say, ‘Bullshit, ’ but you raised me better than that.’’ She pulled off her Stetson and messed with her long, dark hair, feeling the different texture of the white section in front, the one her friends called a skunk stripe. Beneath her, Coyote, the blue roan gelding she’d raised from a foal, shifted his weight and flicked an ear back as though sensing her distress but realizing she wasn’t in any immediate danger under the wide-open Montana sky.

The horses stood on a low ridge that sloped down to the farthest fence line of the Findlay Ranch, which Carlos had managed for more than two decades. It was Cara’s home. Her sanctuary. She’d come back for the summer intending to take stock of her life. Instead, it looked like she needed to deal with the distinct possibility that her father was losing his mind.

She glanced at him, searching for a sign that this was some sort of elaborate setup, maybe for a welcome-home party. Hell, she’d even settle for one of his famous ‘‘I feel like you’re going in the wrong direction’’ talks.

At sixty-three, Carlos sat straight in his saddle, his spine stiff as always, as if he were forever trying to combat his five-foot-nine-inch stature. His dark hair was short and gray-shot, his skin deeply tanned with the color neither of them lost completely even during the long winter months. Now, as she’d seen him do so many times before, he stared off toward the horizon, where blue-gray mountains rose up to touch the low-hanging clouds, and the look in his eye made her think he was seeing something else entirely.

‘‘This is a joke, right?’’ she said. ‘‘I’m being
Punk’d
. Where are the cameras?’’

Carlos shook his head. ‘‘No cameras, baby, and no joke. Twenty-four years ago King Scarred-Jaguar and the Nightkeepers sacrificed themselves in order to close the intersection, but in the last minutes before the spell took hold, terrible creatures came through and killed all but a few of their children.’’ The faraway look in his eyes darkened. ‘‘I was there. I saved and raised the child entrusted to me. Now the king’s son has called the survivors home.’’

‘‘This
is
home,’’ Cara protested automatically.

‘‘Give me your hand.’’

‘‘Seriously, where are the cameras? Who put you up to this? It was Dino and Treece, wasn’t it? They haven’t forgiven me yet for that thing with the goat.’’

‘‘Your hand, Cara Liu.’’ He was deadly serious.

A tremor started deep down inside Cara’s stomach and spread outward. She’d known her father had been depressed since her mother’s death eighteen months earlier, but she hadn’t realized it’d gotten this bad. She should’ve come home more, should’ve called more.

What the hell was going on? And what was she supposed to do with a grown man who’d confused fiction with reality but otherwise seemed like his old self?

Using her knees, she cued Coyote to move up alongside her father’s sorrel, so the two horses were nose-to-tail and she faced her father squarely. She saw sadness in his eyes, and regrets. She didn’t see craziness, but what exactly did crazy look like?

Wishing she’d taken Abnormal Psych last semester instead of Ancient Mythology—most of which she’d already known anyway—she held out her right hand, expecting him to grab it, maybe give her something he thought proved what he was saying.

Instead, he drew the jade-handled knife he’d worn at his waist for as long as she could remember, and sliced the blade sharply across his palm. Blood welled up as Cara gasped. Before she could recover, he grabbed her hand and cut her as well.

‘‘Daddy!’’
She tried to jerk away but he held her fast, gripping her wrist tightly as she struggled. ‘‘Stop it. Let go!’’

Coyote shied sideways, but her father hung on to her wrist, dragging her from the saddle as the blue roan bolted off. She fell in slow motion, her father lowering her to the ground and following her down, still holding her wrist. Once they were both kneeling, he shifted his grip and clasped her bloody hand with his.

She thought he whispered, ‘‘I’m sorry.’’ But she couldn’t be sure, because there was a sudden roaring noise in her head, and the grass seemed to surge beneath her as he spoke in a language she’d never heard before, but that seemed to call to something deep inside her when he said,
‘‘Aj-winikin.’’

No cameras,
she thought, gasping for breath as an invisible pressure grabbed onto her, holding her in place.
It’s for real. Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

Terror flared alongside pain.

Carlos lifted his face to the sky and raised their joined hands so their mingled blood ran down the insides of their forearms, where he wore a couple of old tattoos. ‘‘Gods!’’ he shouted now in English, maybe for her benefit, maybe for his own. ‘‘Accept this child as your servant!’’

Wind erupted from nowhere, lashing the hot summer air against them, around them, forming a swirling vortex with them at its center. Cara’s straw Stetson blew off and her hair whipped free, plastering itself to her face and getting in her mouth when she screamed, ‘‘Daddy!’’

Then, as if that scream were a sign, the wind funnel abruptly reversed itself, sucking upward into the cloudless sky. And disappearing.

In the utter silence that followed, which was undisturbed by even the rustle of branches or the cry of a hawk, Cara scrambled up, eyes bugging. ‘‘You’re losing it. Or I am. Maybe both of us. Mass hallucination.’’

‘‘Hallucination?’’ He took her hand and turned it palm up, then held it beside his. The cuts were gone, leaving only long, thin scars.

Cara gaped. ‘‘That’s impossible.’’

‘‘It’s magic,’’ he said simply. ‘‘Push up your sleeve.’’

Numbly, dumbly, she did as she was told, unfastening the single button that held the bloodstained cuff of her denim work shirt in place and rolling it up, part of her knowing what she was going to see before she saw it.

Her forearm, which had been bare that morning, was now marked with the perfect outline of a canine head, a tattoo where there hadn’t been one before. Its nose was rounded, its tongue and teeth pointed, its mouth slashed in a snarl. Below it was the image of a hand touching a face. Her father made a sound of utter satisfaction and held his own forearm next to hers. There, he had the same two marks, along with a newer mark she didn’t remember having seen before, shaped like a bird of some sort. Maybe a hawk.

His voice was gruff with emotion when he said, ‘‘Welcome to the family, Cara.’’

She struggled to breathe normally, struggled to do
anything
normally as her heart pounded in her chest and low-grade nausea twisted in her gut. She looked around and saw that the ridge and fence line looked as they always had; the sky was blue and the sorrel grazed peacefully nearby. Coyote was long gone, but he’d always been spooky like that. Luckily, he also had a good homing instinct. No doubt they’d find him in his pen, chowing down on his evening ration of pellets.

That thought, that normal, everyday thought, lodged a ball of emotion in her throat, part panic, part . . . excitement. She glanced at her father and saw pride in his eyes, as though she’d just done something wonderful, just
become
something wonderful. Which she had, she realized. If her father was telling the truth, she’d woken up half a semester away from a journalism degree she wasn’t sure she wanted anymore, and in the space of the past five minutes she’d become Wonder Woman. A magic user.
Holy crap.

Her lips curved and she touched the marks on her arm, feeling a faint buzz jangle through her system at the contact. ‘‘Does this mean I can do all those things you used to tell me about? It’s all real? I’m a . . . a Nightkeeper?’’

‘‘Um. Not exactly.’’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘‘What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?’’

Quick hurt flashed across his face and was just as quickly masked. ‘‘You’re my true daughter. My heart. My blood.’’ Then he waited, as he’d done ever since she was a little girl when he wanted her to figure out something for herself rather than telling her the answer straightaway.

When it clicked, Cara shot to her feet, elation morphing to betrayal, anger, shame—a sickening mix of emotions that cranked her volume as she shouted, ‘‘You’re fucking kidding me! I’m a
winikin
?’’

He didn’t chide her for her language, which just proved she was right.

She wasn’t Wonder Woman. She was a sidekick. Even worse, she was a sidekick to—

‘‘Oh, no.’’ She backpedaled, nearly falling when she stumbled on a rock. ‘‘Oh, hell, no. You’re shitting me.
Sven?
’’

But if—even for an instant—she bought into the delusion that the
winikin
were real, then her adopted older brother fit the description of a Nightkeeper all too well. Where she and her father were small and olive-skinned, with dark hair and eyes, Sven was their exact opposite in every way. He was over six-three and as wide as two of her father standing side by side. His skin was fair, his dark blond hair prone to bleaching in the sun, and where she had always been happy with the small pleasures of ranch life, he’d lusted for bigger and better, for the next challenge, the next conquest.

Sven lived life right out loud and loved being the center of attention. He was the true golden boy. At least, he had been. She hadn’t seen him in close to five years, and that wasn’t nearly long enough for her.

Her father nodded. ‘‘Yes. Sven is a Nightkeeper.’’

‘‘How fitting,’’ Cara said, looking at the mark on her wrist. ‘‘He’s a dog.’’

‘‘The Coyote bloodline is old and respected, as are its
winikin
,’’ he said, voice chiding.

‘‘Don’t call yourself a servant, and don’t call me one, either,’’ Cara snapped. ‘‘I’m nobody’s slave.’’

‘‘A
winikin
is no slave,’’ her father said with quiet dignity. ‘‘We protect the magic users, and help them stay the moral path.’’

‘‘News flash. You didn’t do so hot on the morality thing.’’ No wonder he’d never wanted to face the truth about Sven. That would’ve meant accepting that the child—the Nightkeeper child—he’d raised wasn’t perfect. Far from it, in fact. Sven had been a spoiled, mean-tempered brat who’d grown into a moody teen, and from there to a young man who’d been far too attractive for his own good, and did his own thing regardless of how it affected others.

‘‘Cara—’’

‘‘I don’t want this,’’ she said, scrubbing at the mark on her arm. ‘‘Take it back.’’

‘‘I can’t . . . I need you. The Nightkeepers need you. The king has recalled the survivors, but one among them has lost his
winikin
. They’ve asked me to teach him, which means I need you to take my place watching over Sven.’’