Nightkeepers (13 page)

‘‘So if the
boluntiku
came through the barrier again, they’d come straight for us, and once they found us, they’d be likely to kill the youngsters, too.’’ Strike nodded, his gut knotting at the memories. ‘‘But after a few years, once you knew it was safe, you could’ve said something.’’

‘‘I couldn’t risk it,’’ the
winikin
said in his
end of discussion
voice, warning Strike that it wasn’t worth pressing. Not now, anyway.

Besides, he could make an educated guess from the way Jox and Red-Boar were careful not to look at each other.
There’s something there,
Strike thought, and he wondered, not for the first time, exactly what had happened between the two men back when Red-Boar had disappeared into the rain forest near the sacred tunnels, and returned several years later with his son in tow.

And why the
winikin
had felt it necessary to protect the young survivors from the sole remaining full-fledged mage.

Twelve hours later, Strike, Jox, Red-Boar, and Rabbit stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the New Mexico badlands, staring at an empty box canyon off the Chaco River cut-through.

Some thirty miles away over rough terrain lay the intricate, soaring ruins of the six-hundred-room Pueblo Bonito, which the early Puebloans—with a little help from traveling Nightkeepers up from the Yucatán—had built as a ceremonial home for the gods around A.D. 1000. The larger-than-life stone-and-mortar ruins formed the center of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which saw its share of tourist traffic. Farther north, the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness offered dinosaur skeletons and funky ’shroom-shaped rock formations.

Here, though, a stiff five-mile drive off a gravel track that optimistically called itself Route 57, there was nothing but canyon walls of sandstone, flatlands dotted with chamisa and saltbush, and the occasional rock formation.

The box canyon was maybe a half mile across, widening out past the mouth to form a flattened arrow shape of open land that dead-ended in a sheer rock face about a mile away. High stacks of cumulus clouds dotted the blue sky, and large bird shadows passed now and then, one of the few signs that they weren’t completely alone.

Strike squinted into the sharp-edged sunlight and thought he could just make out the shadows of pueblo ruins high up on the rock face of the box canyon’s back wall. The memory of climbing up to those ruins with a group of kids his own age was the only thing that clicked. Nothing else seemed familiar.

‘‘You sure this is the right place?’’ Red-Boar asked suddenly.

It was a relief to hear him speak after so many hours of silence. As far as Strike was concerned, it was also a relief to know he wasn’t the only one with doubts. He’d expected to feel something when he got here. He’d expected to remember more, but the canyon was just a canyon.

‘‘This is the place,’’ Jox said with quiet assurance. He stepped back, gesturing for Rabbit to join him. ‘‘Let’s let these two work.’’

‘‘Hey,’’ the teen protested. ‘‘I want to—’’

"Not now," Red-Boar said sharply. ‘‘Go with the
winikin
."

The kid shot his father a look, and Strike could’ve sworn that the air crinkled with heat for a second. Then Rabbit slouched over to join Jox, temper etched in every fiber of his sweaty-assed, hoodie-wearing self.

Strike glared at the older Nightkeeper. ‘‘Do you think we should—’’

‘‘Not now.’’ Red-Boar did the interrupting thing again, then palmed the knife from his belt. It was a Buck knife knockoff they’d bought from a roadside stand, not a purified ceremonial dagger, and they wore combat black-on -black instead of the ceremonial robes, but they’d tied fabric strips around their upper arms—black for Red-Boar, royal crimson for Strike—as a nod to the regalia they’d lost in the fire.

With a smooth motion, the older man flipped open the knife and drew it across his right palm, signifying that his would be the lead power for this spell. He tossed the knife to Strike, who caught it on the fly and scored his left palm for the subordinate role.

The moment the first drop of blood hit the sand, the air hammered with an invisible detonation. The ground trembled, then stilled, but the world around them shimmered gold.

‘‘Pasaj och,’’
the men said in unison, jacking in.

Strike could feel the power within, could feel it straining against the barrier. He saw a yellow thread but didn’t dare grab on, because he’d promised Jox he wouldn’t ’port again until he’d done some controlled practicing. Catching a flash of motion, he turned his head to follow, but didn’t see anything. Was that weird? He didn’t know.

‘‘Focus,’’ Red-Boar said quietly, and held out his hand. The blood from his palm looked crimson in the golden air, which shimmered some twenty feet away from them at the mouth of the box canyon, as though some sort of field were repelling the power itself.

Strike pressed his bleeding palm to Red-Boar’s, boosting the older Nightkeeper.

‘‘Gods,’’ Red-Boar said, and power sang through their connected hands and exploded in Strike’s head. The jolt rocketed through his body and blasted outward in a shock wave that drove Jox and Rabbit back on their asses. The golden curtain thickened before them, moving and roiling as if it were a living thing that fought destruction.

Red-Boar rapped out a string of words so quickly and so oddly accented that Strike couldn’t begin to follow, finishing with a loud cry of,
‘‘Ye-ye-ye!’’ Reveal!

The gold burst like ground-level fireworks, raining down on them in pellets of power that felt cool to the touch. Air rushed into the space where the golden light had been, a howling whip of wind that moved the sand and plucked an eagle from the sky.

The bird recovered quickly, winging away over the canyon with a screech of protest, then swerving sharply to the right when a huge leafy tree materialized in front of it. As the eagle flapped its powerful wings, seeming eager to get the hell away, four other buildings shimmered to life, becoming solid and recognizable, and punching Strike with a grief so fresh that he nearly dropped to his knees. He couldn’t, though, because he was held up by Red-Boar’s viselike grip on his hand.

Through the connection, he saw the image of a golden-haired woman and two toddlers, identical copies of each other, and felt a wash of love so acute he wanted to scream with it.

Realizing he was catching Red-Boar’s emotional backlash, he tried to pull away, shouting, ‘‘Jack out!’’ When the mage resisted, Strike got in his face, grabbed him by the jaw, and forced the older man to look at him. ‘‘Listen to me! Let them go; they’re not real!’’

Red-Boar released his hand and the golden light cut out. The images dimmed, and Strike sagged, bracing his hands on his knees to stay upright.

Then Red-Boar punched him in the face and Strike went down anyway.

‘‘What the
fuck
?’’ Strike rolled and blocked, in case there was another coldcock incoming, but it’d been a one-shot deal.

The older man just stood over him, breathing hard. ‘‘They were real to me,’’ he said, and turned and walked toward the newly materialized buildings.

Red-Boar’s step didn’t change when Rabbit called after him. He didn’t hear the quaver in the boy’s voice. Or maybe he didn’t care.

‘‘Here. Up you go.’’ Jox hauled Strike to his feet with a strength that seemed disproportionate to his size. ‘‘You okay?’’ At Strike’s nod, he turned to Rabbit. ‘‘You?’’

‘‘Whatever.’’ The kid took a good, long look at what had sprung to life in the box canyon, and his lips twisted. ‘‘You guys better be able to magic us up about fifty Ty Penningtons, because this place needs a serious make-over. ’’

Strike followed the direction of his gaze—he’d managed to avoid looking at the compound up to that point—and let out a long, shaky breath. It was the scene of his nightmares. Yet at the same time it wasn’t.

Yes, the walls were scored with claw marks, but they were faded and worn from wind, rain, and blowing sand. Yes, wrecked cars dotted the landscape, but they were dated, rusted shells now, looking like a more appropriate setting for a junkyard dog than for fear.

Strike had worried that all he’d see was the past. Instead, he saw possibilities.

The main house was as huge as his nine-year-old self remembered, a three-story mansion of mortar-set sandstone with wings running off on either side, curving around, a swimming pool in the back. The driveway ran around the left side to the huge connected garage, and on the right a covered tunnel led to the Great Hall. At least, it had. Now the spot where the rec building had stood was nothing more than a dark stain on the canyon floor, marking the ashes of the dead children and
winikin
.

In the center of the rectangular impression where the hall had once stood, there was a huge tree that hadn’t been there before. Yet, oddly, it looked like it’d been there for hundreds of years, because there was no way it’d gotten that big in a couple of decades. It had to be five or six feet across at the base, probably fifty-plus feet high, with lush green leaves that seemed completely out of place amidst the arid dryness of the New Mexican landscape.

‘‘What the hell?’’ Rabbit said.

‘‘It’s a ceiba tree,’’ Strike answered, though he’d been thinking pretty much the same thing. Their ancestors had planted the sacred ‘‘world trees’’ in the center of their villages and plazas. They’d believed the ceiba’s roots ran to the underworld, and its branches held up the heavens. He turned to Jox. ‘‘Did you plant it?’’

The
winikin
shook his head, seeming stunned. ‘‘No. It makes a hell of a memorial, though. Wish I’d thought of it.’’

‘‘Someone did,’’ Strike said, though he couldn’t bring himself to say what he knew they were both thinking. It was one thing to jack in to a concentration of psi energy that existed at the barrier between the planes. It was another to suggest that an actual god had planted a tree in their backyard. A tree that grew exclusively in rain forests. One that shouldn’t have had leaves during the dry season, and looked like it’d been there far longer than was actually possible.

He stood there for a moment, wondering if this was the point where he woke up from the dream. Instead, he stayed exactly where he was.

After a moment, Jox looped an arm across his shoulders and hugged him close, as he had done when Strike was a boy. ‘‘Come on, kid. It’s time to call your people home.’’

But as Strike followed his
winikin
through the main entrance of the training compound built by his ancestors, he wasn’t thinking of the massacre and times past, or the renovations they’d need to do to get the place livable, or even of the strangers he was supposed to turn into a tiny army. He was thinking about Leah, and how she’d stood up to him, chin jutting like she was leading for a punch; how he’d watched her sleep, her face going soft and vulnerable; and how she’d looked at him after they’d been together, how she’d seen him as a man rather than something so much more complicated.

And as he stepped through the doorway into the entryway of the king’s mansion, where the past and future ran together and made his heart hurt, he wished like hell that he could’ve been just a man, could’ve been
her
man. But he wasn’t and couldn’t be.

He was a Nightkeeper.

APHELION

Alexis Gray strode toward the Fish Shack, fuming. Her long legs ate up the distance across the pier to the restaurant, which was far more elegant than the name implied, and her waist-length hair, which was streaky blond this week, crackled with static electricity. That, along with a low mutter of thunder in the distance, warned that a squall was coming in over Newport Harbor.

If I’m lucky, the storm’ll sink his damn yacht with his lying dick caught in the tiller
.

Alexis glanced down the marina, where her suckfest newly ex-boyfriend, Aaron Worth—aka the Worthless Prick who’d screwed his way through the Riviera—had tethered his pride and joy front and center for everyone to admire. The yacht, that was, not his dick, though it turned out both pieces of equipment had been around the world a few more times than she’d thought. Meanwhile, she’d been holed up in her beachside office, managing the scum-sucking cheater’s portfolio for him and making him money hand over frigging fist.

Which, it turned out, had just given him less of a reason to come clean with her.

Or maybe he was right; maybe he’d tried to tell her it wasn’t working and she’d been too stubborn to listen, too determined to keep their sinking relationship afloat. God knew, Isabella called her mule-stubborn more often than not.

Smiling at the thought of the godmother who’d raised her from the age of two, Alexis shoved aside the thoughts of her ‘‘sorry about the triplets in the bedroom; how am I fixed for liquid assets?’’ jackass ex and opened the door to the Fish Shack.

The smell of garlic and fresh bread greeted her first, followed closely by the maître’d, Tony. ‘‘Your usual table, Miss Gray?’’

‘‘Not in a million years.’’ That was another of those front-and-center things dictated by Aaron, who liked to sit smack in the middle of the huge window facing the boardwalk. ‘‘I’m meeting Izzy today.’’

Tony’s smile broadened, though she wasn’t sure if it was because she was guyless for lunch, or because her godmother made pretty much everyone smile. He waved through the dining area to a covered porch that faced the sea. ‘‘She’s in the bar.’’

‘‘Perfect.’’ Alexis headed in that direction, thinking that she could always count on Izzy to know what she needed even before she did. Today, that included a drink before noon.

In the bar area, Izzy sat at the farthest table down, close to the water and the incoming storm. When she saw Alexis, her dark eyes lit and she raised an umbrella-topped glass. ‘‘Cheers. The wind just changed.’’