Skykeepers (18 page)

The blonde heard her, though, and something like sympathy flashed briefly in her killer blue eyes. “Feel free to keep telling yourself that if it helps. Doesn’t make it true, though.”

“The Nightkeepers are a myth,” Sasha said numbly, repeating the words she’d said over and over to Ambrose, trying to get him to see his delusion for what it was. “It’s a bunch of good stories, nothing more.”

“Like Alexis said,” a man’s deep voice intoned, “just because you tell yourself something, that doesn’t make it true.” There was a thread of amusement in his tone, suggesting an inside joke.

Sasha spun, her hands coming up in automatic defense. But she didn’t throw a punch; instead, she froze at the sight of a dark-haired man standing right where the hawk had been. He was tall, dark, and built, and in a way reminded her of Michael. Or maybe a cleaned-up version of Michael, more businessman than pirate. The man’s black hair was short and slicked, his jaw clean-shaven, his eyes amber rather than forest green. He was wearing dark cargo pants, sneakers, and a black tee, but on him they somehow came across as dress-down Friday rather than at-home casual. He wore a medallion around his neck, a black cuff of polished stone on his right wrist, and had the knapsack slung over his shoulder. The hawk had disappeared. Or had it merely changed into something else?

Sasha shook her head, so freaking confused she wanted to scream with it. Or rather, she wanted to be confused, but was afraid she understood. And that was what had the screams locking in the back of her throat, trapping the fear inside her chest with the growing sense of doom, of guilt.
Oh, Ambrose
.

“Special effects,” she said, whispering it to herself as though the words were a spell.

The blonde looked at the man; Sasha had to believe they were a couple from the way her eyes warmed as they touched on his, caught, and held. But then the blonde’s expression cooled as she glanced at Sasha. “I guess she needs another demonstration,” she said, as though a giant bird that had morphed into a man wasn’t enough proof that either she’d been fully sucked into the collective delusion . . . or it wasn’t a delusion at all.

“No,” Sasha said, panic sparking. “Wait—”

But the blonde ignored her and dug in the back pocket of her jeans, coming up with a cell phone. She flipped it open, hit a couple of buttons, and said, “Taxi for three, please.”

For a second, Sasha was relieved to think it would be something as normal as an SUV coming for them. Then a strange rattle split the air, and a man appeared. Hovering. In midair, maybe a foot off the ground. He had shoulder-length hair that was pulled back into a stubby ponytail at the base of his neck, a close-clipped jawline beard, and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing ragged jeans, a concert tee, and leather sandals, and the whole effect made him look like he should’ve been hanging out over a backyard barbecue with a beer in one hand, grill tongs in the other. Instead, he was hanging in midair.

A moment later, gravity took over and he dropped, landing easily, as though he’d done it a thousand times before. Sasha stared, transfixed by the trick, and the glyph he wore high on his right biceps—the
hunab ku
. The mark of a Nightkeeper king.

“Impossible,” she whispered. Except that this time it was the disbelief that rang false, because she could get only so far denying the evidence in front of her.

“Come on,” the king said. “Let’s go home.”

“That place isn’t my home,” she whispered, pushing the words through a closed-tight throat. The training compound was either an elaborate insane asylum . . . or it was the embodiment of everything she’d spent her adult life trying to escape. The impossibility of it all, the incongruity of it, slapped at her, swamping her and holding her still as the blonde and the man-hawk took her hands and linked their fingers with the king’s, connecting the four of them in an alternating male-female circle.

“It should have been,” the king said in a voice that brooked no argument. “And if you’ll let us, we’ll do our best to make it feel like your home now.”

Before she could react to that—if she could’ve even come up with an intelligent response—the air thickened with a hush of anticipation, a skirr of electricity. Then something rattled, the noise feeling as though it came from right behind her ears, her stomach lurched, and the world disappeared, blurring gray-green.

Sasha involuntarily clutched the strong hands on either side of her and drew breath to scream. Before the cry broke free, though, the gray-green disappeared and the world came back into existence around her. They were back at Skywatch, in the middle of the great room. They blinked in slightly above the ground. The others landed easily, flexing their knees to absorb the impact. Sasha, on the other hand, hit and staggered, fighting to lock her knees when they wanted to go rubbery.

The men reached out on either side of her, undoubtedly to keep her from hitting the deck, but she held up both hands, waving them off as panic spiked. “No. Please, just . . .” She trailed off when she realized the room was full, with twenty or so strangers packed into it, making it feel incredibly crowded when she’d spent so much time recently alone.

Her hands were shaking; her whole body was shaking as she reeled away from the small group, fetching up against a soft, high-backed chair. Her heart was lodged in her throat and she couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t get her balance. “I need—” She broke off, not sure what she needed until she locked eyes on the one familiar thing in the room: Michael.

He moved through the crowd, his reddened, pepper-burned eyes locked on her. “You okay?” he asked when he reached her, his voice pitched low, as though he sought privacy amidst the crowd. He looked more worried than pissed, which surprised her. She’d been expecting rage.

Maybe she was wrong thinking she’d seen something ugly inside him.

“I’m . . . I don’t know.” The stirred-up, overwrought part of her wanted her to grab onto him, hide her face in his wide, solid chest, and pretend none of this was happening. But her inner fighter, the one who’d given her the guts to escape, had her holding back. The end result was an interrupted physical hiccup in his direction, one that left her awkwardly close to him, with the two of them surrounded by a very interested audience. “Are you okay?” She lifted a hand, focusing on the details, because she thought she’d lose it if she looked at the big picture just then. “Your poor eyes. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be fine. We heal fast.” Taking her elbow in a firm grip that fell on the border between being supportive and making sure she didn’t bolt again, he waved irritably for the crowd to scatter. “Give her room to breathe, will you?”

Everybody moved, but nobody left, which put Sasha and Michael on one side of the open center of the sunken great room, with the others scattered on an assortment of leather sofas, chairs, and love seats, or standing up on the raised landing, near the kitchen. There was a definite generation gap between the two groups that had separated themselves out by location. The five men and four women on the lower level were younger, bigger, and drew her eyes automatically, all but oozing charisma, while the three men and two women who stood above them, watching over them, were a generation older, as well as being smaller, with a slightly darker cast to their skin, consistent with the Sumerian origins of the legendary servants of the magi. Or what she’d always thought were legends.
Nightkeepers and winikin
, she thought, a bubble of mild hysteria pressing at her throat, threatening to cut off her oxygen.
Gods
.

It took her a couple of seconds to realize she’d used the plural of her childhood rather than the singular God she’d consciously clung to as an adult. When she did, her heart started a long, slow descent to her toes. “Oh, shit. I’m in serious trouble here.”

She hadn’t realized she’d said that out loud until Michael’s fingers tightened on her arm, and he said in an undertone, “Do me a favor and don’t make decisions right now. Just suspend disbelief and listen for a bit, okay?”

“I think my disbelief is pretty much shot to shit at this point,” she answered, feeling her stomach churn in reaction. “That hawk wasn’t a special effect.”

“Nope.”

“Your king just teleported all of us back here.” Her knees threatened to buckle.

“Yep.”

“And what happened yesterday was—”

“Turn it off for a little bit, okay?” he interrupted, and she thought his grip tightened in warning before he let her go and moved away. “Let me do some intros first.” He gestured to the hawk-man and his mate, who stood hip-to-hip near a long sofa. “You’ve already met Nate and Alexis. Next to them is our king, as you correctly ID’d. Striking-Jaguar.”

The tall, black-haired man with the vivid blue eyes gave her a nod and turned both palms up in a conciliatory gesture. “Call me Strike, please. The old-school names are tough to work with these days. I’m sorry if the ’port scared you too badly. We wanted to make our point.”

“Consider it made,” Sasha said, her voice gone thin though she stood on her own, keeping herself as strong as she could in the face of incontrovertible evidence she didn’t want to believe. The man was a teleport. He’d instantaneously moved the four of them from the desert to the mansion. It should’ve been impossible, but she couldn’t deny what she’d just experienced. And she couldn’t pass this off as drugs or stress anymore. It wasn’t a dream, wasn’t a hallucination. All this was really happening.

Her father might not have been entirely sane, but he hadn’t been nearly as crazy as she’d thought.
Oh, Ambrose
, she thought on a burst of aching, awful guilt. Learning the truth didn’t make right what he’d done to her. But it sure as hell explained why he’d done some of it. In the end he’d been failed by the magic itself. If she accepted this new reality, then, according to Michael’s story, the barrier had been closed off throughout her childhood, explaining why his magic—and potentially her own—had never worked.

“This is Leah,” Strike continued, dropping a light hand on the shoulder of the woman who stood beside him, and his arresting eyes glinted with satisfied possessiveness as he elaborated, “My mate and queen.”

The woman—an edgy-looking white-blonde who was smaller than the others, but still looked fighting tough in the extreme—sent him an affectionate eye roll, then sketched a wave in Sasha’s direction. “Leah Daniels, formerly of the Miami PD. I’m fully human, and got dropped into this a bit like you did. If you want to scream, or vent, or shoot something, whatever—I’m available.”

That seemed to require a response, so Sasha wet her lips and managed a weak, “Thanks. I’ll . . . Thanks.”

“Patience and Brandt White-Eagle,” Michael said, continuing the intros by indicating a porcelain-skinned woman, also blond, sitting on a love seat beside a square-featured man with dark brown hair. “Patience used to run a dojo. She can make herself invisible, and she and Brandt have a pair of four-year-old twins, Harry and Braden.They’re off property, in hiding with their
winikin
, Hannah and Woody.” Without giving Sasha time to process that, he moved on to the other sofa, where a tanned guy with bright, interested blue eyes and a stubby blond ponytail was sprawled akimbo. “That’s Coyote-Seven, aka Sven. He used to be a marine treasure hunter. Now he moves things from point A to point B with his mind.” There was something else in Michael’s voice, but before Sasha could think to wonder, he’d turned to the last of the Nightkeepers gathered on the lower level. “And this is our archivist, Jade.” The lovely brunette had arresting pale green eyes and seemed wrapped in a layer of serenity Sasha badly envied.

“I was a counselor in the outside world,” Jade offered. “I know Rabbit did some work on you, but if you ever want someone to talk to, I’d be honored.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow at Michael. “Rabbit?”

“He’s one of two other magi who aren’t here,” he answered without really answering. “Strike’s sister, Anna, is a Mayanist at UT Austin. Our resident juvie, Rabbit, is in school there with his human girlfriend, Myrinne, under Anna’s supervision, gods help her.” When she just stood there, waiting, he finished, “Rabbit’s a mind-bender. He put some mental filters into your head to help you deal with what Iago did to you.”

The admission didn’t surprise her nearly as much as it probably should have. She touched her temple briefly, finding a fragment of memory she hadn’t been aware of before. “He interrogated me.”

“He tried to. You blocked him.” Sending her a look that she interpreted as,
Later
, Michael moved on to the group near the kitchen, introducing the others, who were, as she had deduced earlier, the
winikin
. Jox—a wiry, gray-haired man with kind eyes and several small marks on his inner forearm—was the royal
winikin
, meaning that he looked after Strike and his sister, and had leadership rights over the other
winikin
. Hangdog Tomas was Michael’s
winikin
, and didn’t look particularly happy about the fact. The two women, Izzy and Shandi, looked after Alexis and Jade, respectively, and the remaining man, a stocky bulldog named Carlos, watched after both Nate and Sven.

The names, bloodlines, and marks piled up in Sasha’s head, bringing to life the childhood stories she’d been raised on, making her head spin with wonder, fear, and terrible, dragging guilt. The very air seemed to press in on her, but she tried not to let herself sway, tried not to let the impending panic show. The people gathered in the big room weren’t her enemies, she was coming to realize. But she sure as hell wasn’t ready to deal with what they might be, what it might all mean.

“Do you want to sit down?” Michael asked.

She shook her head. “What I really want is to get out of here.” She didn’t think there was a rat’s chance of that, though. The last time she’d set foot outside, she’d done her damnedest to escape.

So she was caught off guard when Strike nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I know how that feels.”