Alexis skidded to a stop, freezing in disbelief at the sight of his bare forearm, where he wore an unfamiliar quatrefoil glyph, done in bloodred rather than Nightkeeper black.
Impossible.
“What are you?” she whispered, fear and confusion jamming her throat and almost robbing her of speech.
“I’m what your kind wish you could be.” His mouth tipped up at the corners, and he held out his hand. “Give me the statuette.”
“Like hell!” She pulled away, but wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t sure if he’d ’ported or just moved incredibly fast, but one second she had the suitcase, and the next she was flying three feet through the air, and he was holding on to the case.
Alexis didn’t think; she reacted, scrambling up with a cry that came from the warrior within her.
She lunged, grabbed the big guy’s knife off his belt before he knew what was happening, and plunged the weapon into the bastard’s hand. He cursed bitterly and let go of the case, and Alexis grabbed the thing and ran like hell.
The enemy mage roared a curse, pulled his machine pistol, and let loose. Gunfire chattered, though most of the bullets bounced off Alexis’s shield spell. At least one got through, though. It plowed into her shoulder and hurt like hell.
She screamed as pain washed her vision red, then screamed again when the rattle of dark magic surrounded her and yanked her off her feet. Pressure vised her from all sides and bound her motionless in midair, suspended on an oily brown cloud. Energy roared through her, along with the peculiar sliding sensation of teleport magic as he prepared to take her somewhere she positively didn’t want to go. She poured everything she had into her shield, hoping it’d make her too bulky to transport or something. The rattle changed in pitch, dipping slightly, and the pressure eased.
Screaming, Alexis tore free of the brown mist. She tumbled to the ground, still clutching the suitcase in fingers gone numb from the death grip she had on the thing. Rolling as she hit, she scrambled up and started backing away as fast as she could, throwing the last of her strength into the shield spell.
The enemy mage fired again, burning through his first clip and slapping a second home, then resuming fire, his face set in anger and determination. Jade-tipped bullets pelted the invisible shield, deflecting no more than a foot from Alexis’s face, but she couldn’t flee and hold the magic at the same time, not now. Her power was too drained, her strength too low. Holding the metal case in front of her as a pitiful defense when her magic flickered and threatened to die, she crouched down, trying to make herself as small a target as possible, trying to minimize the shield’s dimensions and eke it out a few minutes longer.
Help! she shouted as loud as she could along her connection to the barrier, hoping somebody—
anybody, another Nightkeeper, the gods, it didn’t matter—would hear. Please help me!
Blood trickled down her arm, but even with that sacrifice, the shield magic flickered. A bullet smacked into the edge of the case and ricocheted away; another bounced off the asphalt road a few inches from her bare, bloodied foot. Her eyes filmed with tears of desperation, of anger that this was how it would end.
She hadn’t done so many of the things she’d meant to—hadn’t come into her full powers as a Nightkeeper or proved herself to her king. She hadn’t shown up any of her old “friends” back in Newport, or outgrown the need to do so, and she hadn’t figured out why she sometimes awoke with tears in her eyes, hearing the echoes of a voice she knew belonged to the mother she’d never met. But it wasn’t any of those things she saw in her mind’s eye when the shield winked out of existence and the dark mage unleashed his final salvo. It was the glint of a hawk medallion, one she’d known long before she knew who wore it or what it meant. A wash of desire raced through her, the remembered echo of something that hadn’t turned out the way it should’ve. As she braced herself for the burn of bullet strikes, his name whispered in her heart.
Oh, Nate.
Red-gold light suddenly detonated nuclear-bright, and a shock wave of displaced air knocked her back. The incoming bullets scattered in the blast, and two familiar figures slammed to the ground in front of her.
Nate Blackhawk, with the king at his side.
Both clad in black-on-black combat gear, tall and dark, and larger than life like all full-blooded Nightkeeper males, Nate and Strike should’ve looked similar, but didn’t.
Strike was solid and stalwart, with a close-clipped jawline beard and shoulder-length hair tied back at his nape. Cobalt blue eyes steely, square jaw set, he stepped forward and threw a shield spell around her attacker, his god-boosted powers cutting through the rattle of twisted magic and startling a cry out of the enemy mage. Fighting magic with magic, the Nightkeepers’ king looked like something out of a legend, a man of another age transplanted into the twenty-first century to battle the final evil.
Nate, in contrast, was wholly a man of the day, with short-cut black hair accentuating his strange, amber-colored eyes and aquiline nose. Instead of the black T-shirt most of the others wore under the thin layer of body armor, he wore a black button-down of fine cotton, open at the throat to show the glint of his gold medallion. The combination probably should have looked odd, but on him it looked exactly right, the melding of a successful businessman and a Nightkeeper mage.
Expression thunderous, he crossed to Alexis and threw a thick shield around them both. His magic was stronger than hers, damn him, and the shield muted the sounds of fighting as the king fireballed the enemy mage, who blocked the attack.
Nate glared down at her. “Do you still have the statuette?”
It took a second for the question to penetrate the relief, another for her irritation to rise to match his. She scowled and struggled to her bare, bleeding feet and waved the suitcase at him. “It’s in here.
And I’m fine; thanks for asking.”
“Don’t start.” He snagged the case from her, got her by her uninjured arm, and hustled her to the king as dark magic rattled, signaling that the enemy mage was gearing up for transpo.
The muddy brown mist gathered, enshrouding the chestnut-haired man. The last thing Alexis saw was his startlingly clear emerald eyes, locked on her. She heard the echo of his words on a thread of magic. See you soon. . . .
Then he was gone.
Sirens wailed in the near distance as the mist cleared, leaving the three Nightkeepers standing in the middle of the shoreline drive, near the mangled guardrail and a spray of broken glass.
Strike glanced at Alexis. “You okay?”
She nodded, suddenly unable to trust herself to speak. In the aftermath of the fight, her warrior’s bravery snapped out of existence like it’d never been, and she had to lock her muscles to keep from trembling.
“We should go,” Nate said. “We’ll have company in a minute.” He nudged her closer to the king, whose teleport talent allowed him to ’port himself, along with anyone linked to him through touch, as long as he had enough power to draw from.
Nate and Strike clasped hands. Power leaped at the contact, and the hum gained in pitch as Nate boosted the king’s magic, helping power a three-way teleport.
As Strike closed his eyes to find their way home and lock onto their destination, Nate glanced at the crumpled guardrail, then down at Alexis, his expression fierce. “Let me guess—that wasn’t a Hyundai, and you put it on the AmEx.” He paused. “Jox is going to be pissed, you know.”