“The what?”

Anna winced at the knowledge gap. “Camazotz is the ruler of the death bats, which are linked, as you might suspect, with death and sacrifice. You need a better researcher. Seriously. She’s missing basic stuff your average Google search is going to pull up.”

“She’s a therapist.” There was a bite in Strike’s tone now. “And she’s practically killing herself trying to catalog the archive, never mind looking up the things we need her to.” He didn’t add, And we have a better researcher . . . or we would if you’d get your ass back here where you belong, but they both knew that was what he was thinking.

Anna, though, was standing firm. She had a husband and a life in the real world, and didn’t intend to buy back into the universe that’d killed their parents, into the mythology that would eventually kill them all. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in the end-time. It was that she didn’t believe a dozen or so half-trained magi were going to make a damned bit of difference determining whether it came or not, or that she could help save the world. Better that she live the next four years the best she could, and pray to the gods for forgiveness when the end came.

Still, though, she owed Strike something. Family mattered, regardless of how dysfunctional. “I’ll send Jade some Web links that should help her get up to speed on Camazotz.”

“Not good enough. I need you to come out early and read the starscript for us. I need to know what’s on the statuette ASAP, in case it’s something we can use in the eclipse ceremony,” Strike persisted, once again trying to draw Anna back to the world they’d both been born into. She wanted to tell him no, to tell him to call someone else. But like it or not—and she didn’t like it one bit—she was the only translator the Nightkeepers could trust.

She touched the yellow, skull-shaped quartz effigy that she wore beneath her shirt even though her seer’s powers hadn’t so much as twitched since the autumnal equinox. “Fine. I’ll move my flight up and try to leave early tomorrow.” She hated the thought of being at Skywatch longer than absolutely necessary, but she’d already been planning on being there for the penumbral lunar eclipse, which was a time of great barrier power that the Nightkeepers would try to use for one or more of the bigger spells. A couple of extra days wouldn’t kill her.

Strike sighed, the sound coming from deep within his chest. “Thank you.” He paused, then said in a different, more tentative tone, “So, are you okay?”

They hadn’t talked much since the equinox. She’d flown home immediately after their return from the intersection. She hadn’t even stayed for Red-Boar’s funeral, hadn’t been able to. Not after he’d bled out in her arms and died with his eyes locked onto hers. The experience had changed her, though, made her more aware of what mattered. She’d gone straight from the airport to her husband’s on-campus office in the economics building, shut the door at her back, and had the conversation they’d both been avoiding for months, i.e., the one that started with an accusation and ended with an ultimatum: Ditch the other woman, whoever the hell she is.

It hadn’t been as easy as that, of course, because Anna had earned her fair share of the blame for the shambles their marriage had become. She’d wanted a baby, because that was what marriage and family was about. Then, when months of not using birth control had stretched to years with no baby and even their first expensive try at in vitro had failed, she’d gotten wrapped up in the failure. As many times as she’d said she didn’t blame him, she knew he didn’t believe her, knew she hadn’t given him reason to believe. So they’d drifted, her to her work, him to his own pursuits. At first it’d been golf and hanging out at the faculty club. After a while she’d realized those were excuses, that he was actually having an affair. And the worst part was she’d been willing to go on that way, telling herself that it was okay their relationship had changed.

Her parents had died when she was fourteen, and her fledgling powers, those of an itza’at seer, had forced her to live through the experience with them. She’d relived it over and over in her dreams for years thereafter, until the day she’d left Strike and Jox, moving away to college at the age of twenty, after sticking it out for as long as she’d been able. She’d known even then that she was gone for good. As far as any of them had known back then, the magical backlash of the Solstice Massacre had sealed the barrier for good, averting the 2012 doomsday. She’d thought she was free to live a normal life, and had thrown herself with abandon into doing just that, meeting friends and lovers, and enjoying college, then grad school.

Always in the back of her mind had been the knowledge that she could have lovers, but wasn’t supposed to marry or have children prior to the end-time. It was one of the laws Jox had drilled into her head, that she and Strike had to remain unmarried and unmated. At the time she’d thought the winikin was just being a pain. Only later, when the barrier reactivated and Jox revealed that there were other Nightkeeper survivors, did she finally understand. He’d wanted her to stay available for a Nightkeeper mate, should the barrier reactivate and the need arise. Whereas she and Strike had survived because Jox had hidden them in a blood-warded safe room designed for the royals only, the other, younger magi had escaped the massacre because they’d been babies, too young to have been through their first binding ceremonies. That meant the surviving males were all a good dozen or more years younger than she, which might not’ve mattered if she’d stayed in the Nightkeeper milieu. But she hadn’t.

Instead she’d gone out into the world. And at twenty-five, she’d met Dick Catori, a wunderkind economist and sometimes poet who designed stunt kites as a hobby, and had taught her to fly them. Standing out in a windy Texas field with her back pressed against his front and his clever hands atop hers, showing her how to touch the lines and tease motion from air, she’d fallen hard somewhere between the stall and the five-forty flat spin.

She’d moved in with him a month later, married him six months after that, and hadn’t told Jox or Strike for nearly another year, avoiding the topic during her biannual duty calls. Jox had thrown a fit, Strike had congratulated her, and she’d spoken to them less and less as the years passed, and her new, normal life eventually fell into a pleasing pattern, then a less pleasing one, until one day she woke up and realized she and Dick were sleeping in the same house but living separate lives, and she was too much of a wimp, too afraid of failing at her marriage, her grand act of rebellion, to do anything about it. Then the barrier had come back online and Strike had called the Nightkeepers home. Anna had fought the call for as long as she’d been able, but in the end had been forced to return to the life she didn’t want, at least part-time. Duty compelled her—and a bargain made with a dead man. But how was she supposed to balance the two pieces of her life?

She couldn’t tell Dick about her heritage, because the moment the magic intruded on her normal life it wouldn’t be normal anymore. Besides, things had been so much better between them since she’d taken her stand and called him on his infidelity. They were actually talking—really talking—for the first time in a long time. They were having date nights, and working with a therapist. Things weren’t perfect, but they were improving. There was no way in hell she was jeopardizing their reconciliation.

She didn’t tell Strike any of that, though. She loved her brother, but she didn’t really know him anymore, hadn’t for a long time. So instead of telling him the truth, she glanced at her watch, intending to make up an excuse to kick him off the phone.

Which was when she realized she didn’t need an excuse. She was late for a meeting. Her breath hissed between her teeth. “I’ve got to go. I’m due in my evil boss’s office five minutes ago for Lucius’s thesis defense.”

“How’s he doing?” The question was far from casual.

Knowing that Strike didn’t really give a crap about Lucius’s defense as long as her senior grad student didn’t mention where he’d gotten the scar on his palm, she said, “He doesn’t remember going through the transition ritual, or almost becoming a makol. Red-Boar’s mind block did the trick.”

Lucius had almost been dead meat the prior fall, and he didn’t even know it, didn’t know he was living on probation as far as the Nightkeepers were concerned. Hell, he didn’t have a clue that the Nightkeepers really existed. He liked to think they did, liked to believe in the end-time myths most Mayanists dismissed as sensationalism, but she’d deliberately steered him away from the truth, leaving him mired in fiction.

“Good to hear he doesn’t remember,” Strike said, but he didn’t sound convinced. Back before the equinox battle, when Lucius had unwittingly offered himself up on a platter for demon possession, Red-Boar would’ve sacrificed him, but Strike had made a deal with her: He’d have Red-Boar reverse the makol spell if Anna agreed to rejoin the Nightkeepers, at least during the ceremonial days.

Now, she knew, he regretted having made the deal, and considered Lucius a liability. The younger man had undergone the transition spell once already, and his natural inclinations had called upon the Banol Kax rather than the gods—which perplexed the hell out of Anna, because Lucius didn’t have much in the way of a dark side, but still, it’d happened. And because it had happened once, she knew Strike was worried that it would happen again.

Basically, Lucius was living on her good graces, and the knowledge weighed, especially given the political crap going on in the art history department these days. The department head, Desiree Soo, had never been warm or fuzzy, but she’d grown increasingly critical over the past half year, particularly when it came to the Mayan studies department. Anna couldn’t prove it, but she was pretty sure Desiree had chased off her last intern, Neenee, who’d taken off around Christmas, leaving only a terse e-mail of nonexplanation. Since then, Anna’s lab had had reimbursement requests kicked back from admin over tiny quibbles, room assignments were constantly getting screwed up, and Anna had found herself loaded down with intro-level lectures that were usually handed straight to the TAs. And then there was Lucius’s thesis defense.

Desiree had been acting professionally enough back when Lucius had asked her to chair his thesis committee. Given the way she’d been behaving lately, though, Anna could pretty much guarantee there was going to be a problem.

Sighing, feeling a hundred years old rather than her own thirty-nine, Anna said, “Seriously. I’ve gotta go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Call Jox with your flight info and he’ll meet you at the airport.”

“Will do.” She hung up and headed for the dragon’s lair.

Okay, so it wasn’t literally Desiree’s lair—they were meeting in the conference room across the hall from the department head’s office—but Anna had the distinct feeling she was headed into enemy territory as she stepped through the doors. She was the last one in, which meant the entire committee was arranged on one side of the conference table, all facing a slump-shouldered Lucius.

Desiree was seated in the center of the long side of the conference table, flanked on either side by the lower-ranking committee members. She almost always wore long-sleeved, high-collared shirts in jewel tones that enhanced the red highlights in her hair, accessorizing the outfits with a heavy silver cuff on her right wrist. The cuff was embossed with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Anna didn’t remember ever seeing her without it. Desiree was long and lean and gorgeous, with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and shoulder-length hair that fell pin-straight from an off-center widow’s peak. Her eyes were an unusually pale hazel that might’ve looked dreamy on another woman, but somehow managed to look vaguely reptilian in her face.

Or maybe Anna was projecting on that one. As far as she was concerned, the woman was a bitch, pure and simple.

The other committee members included a stout, bearded Greek mythology expert named—ironically—Thor; a cheerful, round-cheeked classics professor named Holly; and a gaunt, aged relic of an art historian whom everyone called Dr. Young. Anna was pretty sure that wasn’t his name, more of a joke that’d stuck. The committee members acknowledged Anna when she came through the door, with nods from the two men, a little wave from Holly. Desiree made a mean little moue.

Lucius, on the other hand, whipped around in his chair and gave her a where the hell have you been? look liberally dosed with nerves.

He was tall and skinny, and typically moved with an awkward sort of grace. Now, though, sitting folded into the conference room chair, he looked pointy and angular, like a praying mantis that someone had bent the wrong way. Or maybe that was the strangeness of seeing him in a shirt and tie rather than his usual grad student uniform of bar-logo tee and ratty jeans. He’d traded his sandals for hiking boots that made a stab at formality, and somewhere over the past twelve hours had subjected his normally shaggy brown hair to an unfortunate trim that screamed “eight-dollar walk-in.”

The overall effect was one of quiet desperation.

Lucius had grown up in middle America, a dreamer misfit in a large extended family of jocks. He’d escaped to the university on a scholarship and had discovered Mayan studies when he’d taken an undergrad intro course on pre-Columbian civilization as a frosh, in a bid to avoid the foreign language requirement. In the nearly ten years since—four years as an undergrad and almost six as Anna’s grad student—he’d proven to be both the best and most frustrating student she’d ever dealt with. He was an intuitive epigrapher, able to tease out the most worn inscriptions and decipher them into translations that stood up remarkably well to scrutiny from even the toughest of critics, including her. Unfortunately, that same level of intuition caused him to see patterns where there weren’t any—or, as in the case with the Nightkeeper myths, in places where she’d rather he not see them. When he saw such patterns, his scientific method sometimes went out the window while he focused on the answer he’d convinced himself was right, searching for evidence that proved his theory and ignoring anything that suggested otherwise.

That was not a good trait in a scientist, regardless of the field. Add to it his penchant for playing fast and loose with personal-property laws—like the time he’d broken into her office and stolen the codex fragment bearing the transition spell that’d nearly turned him into a makol—and he was something of a loose cannon.

The thing was, he was her loose cannon. He was sweet and funny, and when things had been at their worst with Dick, Lucius had been there for her to lean on. And if there had been a spark or two, neither of them had acted on the temptation. Instead they had let it deepen their working friendship until it was a strong, steady piece of her life. That, along with knowing he wouldn’t have come into contact with the codex fragment if she’d been more careful about keeping it hidden, meant there had been no real choice to be made when she’d faced Strike and Red-Boar over Lucius’s rigor-contorted body, while his eyes flickered from luminous green to hazel and back. She’d traded her normal life for his, and though she regretted the choice, she wouldn’t undo it. Nor would she admit to Strike just how much Lucius had changed in the months since his partial possession, becoming withdrawn and secretive. Hell, she was doing her best not to admit it to herself. What she hadn’t been able to ignore, however, was how Lucius had started focusing his research more on the things she’d managed to steer him away from in the past . . . like the zero date, and the few sketchy rumors of a superhuman race of warrior-magi sworn to protect mankind.

She’d made him promise not to go there during his thesis defense, knowing that Desiree would crucify him if he so much as breathed a word about things the establishment considered barely a step up from tinfoil hats and Area 51, namely the 2012 doomsday and the Nightkeepers. Which was why she sent him a warning look and mouthed, You promised.

He nodded, but there was something in his eyes that made her wonder whether he was accepting her warning or telling her to mind her own damn business.

“Since we’re finally all here,” Desiree said pointedly, “I’d like to get started. If that’s okay with Anna, of course.”

Bitch, Anna thought, but didn’t say. Instead she took the chair beside Thor and nodded. “By all means, let’s get started.”

By the time Lucius was about twenty minutes into his presentation, Anna was starting to relax a little, because he was sticking to the script, thank the gods. Then Desiree held up a hand, interrupting.

Lucius broke off in the middle of explaining his translation of a panel deep within the Pyramid of Kulkulkan at Chichén Itzá. “Yes?”

Desiree pointed to a badly eroded glyph at the lower right corner of the screen. “What about that one?”

Anna stiffened and tried to catch Lucius’s eye. Don’t do it, she mouthed. Say you don’t know.

He avoided her gaze, but answered carefully enough. “There’s some debate about that particular glyph.”

“We’re working on it,” Anna interjected. “As you can see, it’s not in the best condition, which unfortunately means that we may never have a conclusive answer. Or maybe we’ll find a second occurrence of the glyph in the future. Regardless, it should be considered outside the scope of this project.” Which was academia-speak for back off, bitch.

“Your opinion is noted, Professor Catori.” Desiree didn’t even glance at Anna; she kept her unblinking focus on Lucius, a predator sensing weakness. “However, it’s not really a question of scope; it’s a question of propriety. I’m well aware of what Mr. Hunt thinks this glyph represents, and frankly I’m not convinced that the university is best represented by an academician who publicly defends the validity of the Nightkeeper myth.”

Lucius’s color drained, and he sent Anna an oh, shit look.

“With all due respect,” she said quickly, “that is absolutely beyond the scope of this thesis. There’s no reference to that particular myth anywhere in the text or supporting material.”

“With all due respect,” Desiree parroted, “it’s my call what is and isn’t within the scope of this committee meeting.” She shuffled through a small pile of papers, pointedly pausing at what looked like a printed screen capture of a message board dialogue. Glancing at Lucius, she said, “You go by the screen name ‘LuHunt’ on a number of the 2012 doomsday bulletin boards, right?”

Anna would’ve protested again, but didn’t figure it’d get her anywhere. The best she could do would be to sit back and let this play out, hoping Thor, Holly, and Dr. Young would see there was an agenda at work that had nothing to do with Lucius’s skills as a Mayanist . . . and further hoping they’d say as much when she brought a formal university complaint against Desiree.

Lucius looked at her as if he expected her to say something, to defend him, but what more could she do? To an extent, he’d dug his own grave. She’d told him to stay the hell away from that crap until after his defense. If he’d been posting on message boards with the dooms-dayers, there wasn’t much she could do about it now.

When he saw there would be no help forthcoming, his expression darkened, something shifting in his face so he almost looked like a different person—older and less open—as he met Desiree’s smirk with a glare. “I don’t see how my online presence should concern this committee. I’ve never put myself forth as a representative of this university or a member of Professor Catori’s staff while on those boards.”

Desiree arched one elegant eyebrow. “Shall I take your nonanswer of my question as an answer in and of itself?”

He hesitated so long that Anna thought he was going to play it smart. Then he sat up straight and squared his shoulders, suddenly looking less like a praying mantis and more like a taller-than-average guy who’d broadened out through the shoulders and gained twenty pounds or so of muscle while she hadn’t been paying attention. Before she could process that realization, he said to Desiree, “I believe in the Nightkeeper myth. So what?”

Anna winced, even though she’d warned him. Not that having an out-there opinion was a crime, but with Desiree gunning for the entire Mayan studies department and not being real picky about the actual legalities of the matter, he was effectively throwing himself on the academic sword.

Desiree tapped her manicured fingernails—which were pale mauve, rather than the more appropriate bloodred—against her lips. “You actually believe that ancient magicians from Atlantis—Atlantis, mind you—survived the flooding that came the last time this so-called Great Conjunction rolled through, twenty-six thousand years ago, and went on to shape, not just the Mayan Empire, but the Egyptians before them?”

“There are demonstrable parallels,” Lucius said before Anna could intervene. “For example, the dating of the Maya Long Count calendar begins circa 3114 B.C., which is well before the Maya were a people, before even their predecessors, the Olmec, started thinking about being more than scattered pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. It was, however, right about the time the first ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs started popping up, which many people consider the beginning of legitimate human civilization.”

Thor perked up a little. “You’re talking about von Däniken?”

Anna cringed. The Dutch pseudoscientist’s publication of Chariots of the Gods? in the sixties had been good in that it’d popularized the idea of connections and parallels amongst a number of ancient civilizations, prompting “real” researchers to investigate the possibility of trans-oceanic voyages long before the time of the Vikings. On the downside, it’d also popularized what Lucius often called the Stargate effect, i.e., the notion that most of early human civilization had been shaped by aliens.

Welcome to the tinfoil-hat zone.

“Not von Däniken per se, though he wasn’t entirely wrong,” Lucius told Thor. “The Nightkeepers were—maybe even are—far more than that. They were mentors, magi who lived in parallel with several of the most successful early civilizations, teaching them math and science, especially astronomy.” There was a subtle shift in Lucius’s face, making his features sharper, more mature as he said, “The commonalities between the Egyptians and Maya are too close to be coincidental—both religions were based on the sun and sky, and on the movement of the stars.”

Thor frowned. “I thought the Egyptians worshiped a single sun god. The Maya were polytheistic.”

“Exactly.” Lucius thumped the table, making his laptop jump. “The Cult of the Sun God was conceived by the pharaoh Akhenaton, who forcibly converted all of ancient Egypt from their long-held pantheistic religion to his new god, Aten. His guards slaughtered the priests of the old religion and defaced all of their temples and effigies, destroying millennia of worship in the space of a few years.” Leaning forward in his enthusiasm, he said, “That was when the Nightkeepers fled Egypt—the survivors, anyway. Most of them were killed in Akhenaton’s religious ‘cleansing,’ but a few survived. Those survivors eventually made their way to Central America, where they stumbled on the Olmec, who were just beginning to centralize, and were ripe for the teachings the Nightkeepers brought. Over time the Olmec, with the Nightkeepers’ help, eventually bloomed into the Mayan Empire. It’s . . .” He paused, then said, “It’s perfect. It all fits. Just look at the time line.”

Dead silence greeted that pronouncement.

For a second, Anna thought she caught a glint of satisfaction in Desiree’s eyes, but the dragon actually sounded sympathetic when she said, “That was what we were afraid of, Lucius. Given that, along with the disciplinary problems you’ve had in the past, your mediocre GPA, and the general lack of substantiated evidence underpinning your thesis, it is the opinion of this committee that you should not be granted the degree of doctor of philosophy in art history at this time.”

Anna wasn’t altogether surprised, but the punch of it still drove the breath from her lungs. When she got her wind back, she said, “I wish to formally appeal this decision.”

“Of course you do,” Desiree said, sounding as if she couldn’t care less. “The request is noted.” Shuffling her papers into a pile, she rose, indicating that the meeting was over.

She and the others filed out, leaving Anna and Lucius alone in the conference room. He hadn’t said anything since Desiree had made her decision. Anna would’ve thought it was shock and denial, except that neither of those things was in his face. Instead he looked . . . pissed. Resentful. Like this was somehow her fault.

“What’s that glare for?” she snapped, annoyed.

“Please. Like you don’t know.” He stood, towering over her, and for the first time she was aware of him not just as a man, but as someone significantly bigger than she. “I just got mowed down in the cross fire of the art history department pissing contest you and the Dragon Lady have going. You think I should be happy about that? Spare me.”

He gathered up his papers and the handouts the others had left behind, shoving them into his knapsack with jerky, angry motions.

Anna stood. She wanted to go to him, wanted to touch his arm, hug him, something to bridge the gap that’d grown between them. What happened to us? she wanted to say. What happened to you? But it didn’t take an itza’at seer or a mind-bender to know he wouldn’t welcome the contact or the questions. There was something seriously bad going on with him, far worse than she’d suspected.

“Lucius, what’s wrong? You can talk to me.” She reached out but didn’t touch him, just made the gesture and left it up to him whether to step toward her or away.

Something flashed in his eyes: guilt, maybe, or sadness. But it was quickly swept away by disbelief, then mirth. “Do you actually not know? Is it possible you’re really that dense?” He moved toward her, but didn’t take her proffered hand. Instead he leaned in and said in a low, angry voice, “Think about it, Anna. The crap with Desiree started right about the time you came back from your little mental-health break in New Mexico, and your not-so-saintly husband swore off other women, right? You do the math.”

He straightened and jerked the knapsack over his shoulder. Tucking his laptop under one arm, he strode away, not looking back.

Anna didn’t move; she couldn’t. She was trapped, not in the soul-searching that should’ve followed Lucius’s revelation, but in something that was a thousand times worse because it came with pictures and a sound track.

The vision caught her unawares, slamming through her subconscious blocks as if they were nothing, hammering her with the sounds of lovemaking, and the sight of her husband and Desiree twined together in the sort of raw, unabashed sex that Anna didn’t remember having had with him in years. Shock blasted through her. Heart-break. She’d known he’d had a lover, had dealt with it as best she could when they’d reconciled after the fall equinox. But seeing it, seeing the look on his face as he . . . She couldn’t bear it.

“No!” She clawed the air, slapping at the images that were buried deep in her soul, in the seat of her magic. “Gods, no!”

Pain seared the skin between her breasts, where the skull-shaped effigy rested. Inert in the months since Strike had returned it to her, the pendant’s power flared now, hot and hard. More images crashed through her, snippets of them together, sometimes naked, sometimes not. To her surprise she realized it was worse seeing them together clothed, strolling arm in arm along streets she didn’t recognize, telling her that they’d traveled together, that his frequent business trips hadn’t been all business.

On some level she’d known that, accepted it. But she hadn’t known—and damn well couldn’t accept—that it’d been Desiree. Her boss. Her nemesis. Worse, Anna’s gut—or maybe the magic?—told her that Desiree’s undeclared war on her was more than jealousy or jilted love. The bitch thought she was still in the running . . . which meant she had some reason to think it. Dick had left the door open, damn him.

“No.” This time the word was little more than a broken sound, a sob that hurt Anna’s ribs as the burning power drained and the images faded. Eventually she became aware of her surroundings, aware that she was in a conference room with the door open, and there were people passing by in the hall.

New grief tore through her at the realization that the safe security of her “normal” job was as much an illusion as her “happy” marriage. She’d forsaken her brother and the responsibilities of her royal blood in order to be a regular person and be married to the man she loved, yet that life was coming unraveled just as the Nightkeepers were reconnecting.

Fate, she thought. Destiny. There are no coincidences. This was the gods’ will, their way of punishing her for turning her back on her duties, their way of reminding her where she belonged.

“I give up,” she said to the gods as her heart cracked into a thousand pieces, each sharper than the last. “You win.”

She crept to her office, moving slow, feeling sore. Grabbing her purse, she headed for her car, a four-year-old Lexus that Dick kept wanting her to trade in for something newer and shinier. Once she was on the road, she turned away from home. Or rather, she turned away from the home she’d made with her husband and headed toward the one she’d grown up in. The one hundreds of people had died in, though she had survived, a small piece of her always wondering why she’d been spared and other, better, more dedicated Nightkeepers hadn’t.

Sometimes the phrase the will of the gods didn’t even begin to cover it. But, she thought through a sheen of tears as she hit the highway and put the hammer down, Skywatch was a stiff fifteen-hour drive away. Maybe by the time she got there, she would’ve figured out what the hell she was doing with her life, and why.

After the thoroughly weird moment when Alexis had come out of her statuette-induced fugue, Nate shut himself up in his three-room suite in the residential wing of the mansion, ostensibly to get some work done for Hawk Enterprises. That was bullshit, though: first, because he was making zero headway on Viking Warrior 6 and had been for some time, and second, because his real motivation had been to get the hell away from the crowd and away from Alexis’s puzzlement.

She’d been looking at him the way she had right after they’d broken up, like she didn’t know what’d just happened, or why.

Sure, he’d given her a reason back then—several of them, in fact, starting with, “It’s not you, it’s me,” and ending with, “My life is too complicated right now to start something serious.” All of which had been true, as far as it went, but it hadn’t begun to touch on the reality, which had been more along the lines of, “You scare the shit out of me,” and, “I want to make my own choices and can’t get enough distance from all the crap that’s flying around in our lives right now to figure out if we’re good together or just convenient.” He’d just told her it was over, and hadn’t let her see that the decision tore him up, made him mean and surly, not because he’d known it was better for both of them that way, but because it sucked knowing she was a few doors down the hall and he’d given up the right to knock. Hell, he’d not only given it up, he’d taken it out behind the woodshed and shot the shit out of it, all in the name of free will. Goddamn it.

None of which explained what’d happened with the Ixchel statuette, he reminded himself when a low burn of lust grabbed onto his gut and dug in deep. And the here and now was what he should be concentrating on, not what’d happened in the past.

What the hell had Alexis seen in the barrier? Obviously he’d been in whatever vision she’d had, and from the way she’d been looking at him he had to figure it’d been a sex fantasy. Which meant . . . ?

Damned if he knew, but as far as he was concerned, it changed nothing.

“So stop thinking about it and get the hell to work,” he muttered, glaring at his laptop screen. The storyboard for Viking Warrior 6: Hera’s Mate had been three-quarters done on the day Strike had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, asked Nate about his medallion, and given him his first taste of magic. Now, because he’d dumped a bunch of shit out of the middle, the game was less than half-finished, and he wasn’t sure he liked what was left.

Hera was a goddess and a hottie, a leader of her people, a magic user and a prophet. She deserved—hell, demanded—a mate who was worthy of her, and one who could kick ass just as well as, if not better than, she could. The gamers needed a strong, interesting character to get behind, and Nate needed to give her a fitting match. And yeah, maybe—probably—he was projecting, but so what? He was the boss. He could get away with crap like that, as long as he produced.

Right now, though, he wasn’t producing. The hero that his head story guy, Denjie, and his other writers had come up with originally had been a solid character the gamers would’ve liked well enough. Problem was, Nate didn’t think Hera would’ve given him the time of day; the dude had been an idiot, with a vocabulary of approximately six words that weren’t swears.

Hera, for all her ass-kicking prowess, had a spiritual side as well.

So Nate had taken over the project and blown up the guy’s story line. While he was in there, he’d morphed the hero from blond to dark, and taken him from meat-head to something a little more refined. He’d ditched the guy’s name—who the hell thought Hera would fall for someone named Dolph? Please. He’d put Hera and Nameless together, let them fight it out a little, and then, just when things had been getting good and the two of them were teaming up to go after the main bad guy . . . Nate had stalled.

He knew what ought to happen next, what the storyboard said should happen next, and it sounded like a pile of contrived, clichéd shit.

“Get a grip on yourself,” he said to himself, or maybe to the characters that lived inside the humming laptop. “Contrived, clichéd shit sells; it’s a fact of life. The gamers aren’t looking for originality; they want something that looks familiar but a little different, something challenging but not impossible. You’ve done it a hundred times before. What makes this any different?”

He didn’t want to look too closely at himself to find the answer, and damn well knew it. Which was why, when there was a soft knock at the door to his suite, he was relieved rather than annoyed, even though he had a pretty good idea who it was going to be: his winikin coming by for another round of This Is Your Life, Nate Blackhawk.

Sure enough, when he opened the door he found Carlos standing in the hallway.

“Hey.” Nate stepped back and waved his assigned winikin through the door. “Come on in.” He didn’t figure he could avoid the convo, so he might as well get it over with. Maybe they could even get a few things settled. Or not.

Carlos was a short, stocky guy in his mid-sixties who wore snap-studded shirts, Wranglers, and a big-buckled belt with the ease of someone who actually was a cowboy, rather than just pretending to be one because the clothes were cool. His salted dark hair was short and no-nonsense, and his nose took a distinct left-hand bend, either from bulldogging a calf or losing a bar fight, depending on which story Nate believed.

On his forearm Carlos wore the three glyphs of his station: a coyote’s head representing his original bound bloodline, the aj-winikin glyph that depicted a disembodied hand cupping a sleeping child’s face, and a hawk that was a smaller version of the one on Nate’s own forearm. If either Sven or Nate died, their glyphs would disappear from the winikin’s arm in a flash of pain. That was a sobering thought, as was the realization that back before the massacre, each winikin had worn one glyph for each member of their bound bloodline, in numbers so large the marks had extended in some cases across their chests and down their torsos, reflecting the might of the Nightkeepers.

Now each winikin wore a single bloodline mark, aside from Carlos and Jox, who each had two.

Carlos had escaped the massacre with his infant charge, Coyote-Seven, and stayed on the move as the winikin’s imperative dictated, making sure the young boy remained safe from the Banol Kax. Eventually, they had wound up in Montana, where Carlos had changed Coyote-Seven’s name to Sven and taken a job as a ranch manager. Eventually he’d married a human woman and they’d had a daughter, Cara. By the time the barrier reactivated, Cara had been in her last year of college, her mother had died of cancer, and Sven had been wreck diving off the Carolina coast, all but estranged from his winikin’s family.

There was something there, Nate knew, having seen the subtle tension between Sven and Carlos, and the overt tension between Sven and Cara, who’d been pressed into service as the Sven’s winikin when Carlos had transferred his blood tie to Nate. Not long after they’d all arrived at Skywatch, Sven had ordered Cara to leave, claiming he didn’t need her, didn’t want her. Cara had seemed relieved. Carlos had been devastated.

Quite honestly, Nate didn’t even want to know that much, but it was damn difficult to avoid gossip in a place like Skywatch. Besides, he was pretty sure Sven’s rejection of Cara—which was how it must’ve seemed to her dignified, tradition-first father—was part of what made Carlos push Nate so hard when it came to matters of propriety and prophecy, and why he found Nate incredibly frustrating.

“Have a seat.” Nate waved the winikin to one of the two chairs in his small living room, which contained a couch and chairs, with a flat-panel TV stretching across one wall, and wire racks holding the latest gaming consoles of each format.

Carlos remained standing just inside the door. “What really happened today?”

Nate was tempted to fake misunderstanding, but that’d just draw out the pain, so he turned both palms up in a who the hell knows? gesture and said, “It was exactly how I told Strike and the others. Alexis touched the statue and blanked. I was the closest one to her, so I grabbed on to pull her away, and followed her instead. We were in the barrier for only a few seconds; then we were out. Nothing more sinister than that.”

But the winikin’s eyes narrowed on his. “Did you actually see her in the barrier?”

“I’m not even sure I was all the way into the barrier,” Nate said, going with honesty because there didn’t seem to be a good reason not to. “I got a flash of the barrier mist, but never actually landed, and then I was back here at Skywatch. It was more like a CD skip or something, where the sound cuts out for a second and the music comes back farther down the line.”

“Or,” Carlos said slowly, his eyes never leaving Nate’s, “maybe your mind chose to block off whatever you experienced.”

“You think I’m hiding something?”

“Not intentionally, maybe. But Alexis definitely saw something more, and she seems to think you did too. What if you did and can’t remember it?”

Something quivered deep in Nate’s gut, but he shook his head. “There are an awful lot of ‘what-ifs’ I could pull out of my ass around here. That doesn’t mean any of them are true.”

Carlos tipped his head. “Why are you fighting this so hard?” And by this, they both knew he didn’t mean just the vision-that-wasn’t.

“We’ve had this argument before. Neither of us ever wins,” Nate said, dropping into one of the chairs, suddenly very tired of it all. He pulled on the chain that hung around his neck, withdrawing the hawk medallion from beneath his shirt.

His own personal amulet-to-be-named-at-a-later-date, the medallion was a flat metal disk etched on each side with a design that looked like the hawk bloodline glyph if he tipped it one way, a man if he tipped it another. It had been the only identifying thing he’d been wearing when he’d been dumped at Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital, aside from the words My name is Nathan Blackhawk, which had been carefully printed on his forehead in pen.

It hadn’t been until the prior year that he’d learned his abandonment had been shitty bad luck, that his winikin had died of injuries he’d sustained during the massacre, and hadn’t been able to get a message to any of the other survivors before he’d died. Since each winikin’s imperative in the aftermath of a massacre was to keep his or her Nightkeeper charge alive and hidden, nobody had come looking for Nate. He’d dropped into the system, and from there to juvie, and then a short stint at Greenville for grand theft auto, before he’d straightened up and pulled it together to make himself into the successful entrepreneur he’d become.

He’d done that with the help of a social worker whose hide had proven tougher than his. Not the Nightkeepers, not the winikin, and not the gods. It’d been his choice to straighten out, his choice to succeed.

“Why don’t you ever ask about them?” Carlos asked softly, and there was an aha look in his eyes that made

Nate wish he’d kept the medallion where it belonged: out of sight and mind.

“Because they didn’t make me what I am. I did that.”

“Are you so sure?”

“That’ll be all for tonight,” Nate said, his voice clipped with anger, which was pretty much how all of their convos eventually ended. But when the winikin turned and headed for the door, Nate cursed himself and said, “Carlos?”

The winikin turned and raised an eyebrow.

“Have you guys asked Alexis exactly what she saw?”

“Isabella is doing that right now,” Carlos said, but with a look that suggested he would’ve rather had anyone else in the world be doing the asking. Which Nate could understand, sort of, because if Alexis sometimes acted like an overambitious brownnose, it was largely because that was what her winikin had raised her to be.

Which, Nate realized, glancing at his laptop as Carlos left the room, was one of the fundamental differences between Alexis and Hera: Alexis had a winikin, while Hera had grown up on her own. Just like he had.