Dawnkeepers (11 page)

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.

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.