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The king blinked, his face went to stone, and he took the pendant from Jade with an almost violent swipe.

“I’m sor—” Jade began, but Leah cut her off with a lifted finger that said, Not now, and Jade subsided.

Strike folded the chain carefully and slipped the pendant into his pocket before refocusing on the others, his cobalt eyes gone hollow. “That probably explains it. She should’ve brought it back to Skywatch herself. It’s not safe to separate these sorts of things from their bound bloodlines.”

Lucius didn’t have an answer to that, so he stayed silent. Inwardly, though, he cursed Anna. Bad enough that she’d given up on the Nightkeepers; worse that she’d endangered Jade in her cowardice.

Four dark shadows melted from the darkness: the sweep teams reporting back that the site was clear. Strike nodded. “Okay. Michael, you and Lucius wait for Rabbit and take the Jeep. I’ll ’port everyone else back with me.” He moved away to an open space, and he and the others started forming the palm-to-palm link he typically used for group ’ports.

Neither Jade nor Lucius argued against their separation. As far as he was concerned, if there was a demon out there hunting Nightkeepers and their relics, he wanted her safely back at Skywatch ASAP.

When they were gone, Michael tapped his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get the Jeep.” The mage claimed the driver’s position and waved Lucius to shotgun.

“Isn’t Rabbit coming with us?”

“In a minute.” Michael burned rubber out of the parking area and didn’t stop until they’d hit the top of the hill. Then he spun a quick one-eighty and parked, leaving the vehicle idling as he looked down at the Weeping Willow Inn.

The first lick of flames came from an upper floor of the main house. The second came from one of the cottages. Then it was hard to keep track of where the fire was tracking as it danced back and forth, lighting the buildings, consuming them. Rabbit stood at the edge of the visitor’s parking lot, visible in silhouette against the firelight, as he conducted the destruction with wide sweeps of his arms, a maestro of fire.

“Oh,” Lucius said as understanding dawned.

“I did my best with the bodies,” Michael said quietly. “If their families ask questions, the sort of investigation there’s likely to be out here will conclude that they died quickly in their beds, with no suffering.”

“Which is a lie,” Lucius said hollowly. “They suffered.”

“Yeah, they did. But it won’t help for the people left behind to know it.”

Lucius thought of what he’d yelled at Anna, sanctimoniously bitching at her to think about how she would feel to know that people were dying and she could have done something to stop it. Well, now you know, asshole. How does it feel?

The ranch was fully involved now, the fire tongues reaching up to the sky where the deaf gods lived.

He pressed his forehead against the now-warm glass of the Jeep’s window and watched the flames, how they swirled and slashed, almost but not quite making pictures that seemed they should have meaning. In them he saw the garrulous innkeeper, not as she’d been that evening, but as the young woman in the framed picture that had sat on the front desk. In it, she’d had her arms wrapped around a smiling GI, neither of them knowing they would both die under enemy fire, some fifty years apart.

She’d never remarried, she’d told him; had never really even dated. Her Bobby had been her man, her one true love. She might not have died for him, as Jade’s mother had done for her family, but in a way, Willow had given her life just as surely to love.

Gods, how do people do it? Lucius wondered, making himself watch as Rabbit conducted events down below. Why do they do it? What was the upside of love, when there seemed to be so many downsides?

“You kept Jade safe,” Michael said suddenly, unexpectedly. “You got her out of the cottage.”

“We should’ve kept driving.”

“Then they would’ve hit the Jeep and you probably wouldn’t have made it out.” Michael paused.

“Look, I know the math doesn’t work on that one: two people if they hit the Jeep versus five people at the ranch. I’m sorry, but not all of the ‘we the people’ are actually created equal. Jade is valuable, potentially vital. You’re . . . well, we’re not sure what you are. But you’re something. So, yeah, I’ll trade the two of you safe for the lives of five noncombatants.”

“Is that the sort of math they taught you in assassin school?” Lucius asked bitterly. “Or is that more of an us-versus-them Nightkeeper thing? How many humans would you trade for a single Nightkeeper’s life and still consider it a fair trade? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?”

Although Michael’s temper had mellowed since his engagement, he still had a hell of a glare. He used it now. “Honestly? However many it took. There are eleven of us and however many billion of you. If our survival now means that you all get to see Christmas Day 2012, then fuck the math and protect the magi.” He sent a sidelong look in Lucius’s direction. “Same goes for the woman you love, mage or not. You do what it takes, whatever the sacrifice.”

Lucius let that one pass and returned to staring down at the ranch, where Rabbit was concentrating his fire white-hot on a couple of key locations. “Doesn’t he ever get tired?”

“Apparently not this week,” Michael said cryptically.

It was another ten minutes before Rabbit, satisfied with his work, doused the flames and trudged up the hill to the Jeep. Michael dug through Jade and Lucius’s road supplies and pulled out a gallon of water and Lucius’s spare clothes, and made the soot-covered, sweat-soaked mage wash and change before he let him in the Jeep. Still, the smell of smoke was thick and cloying.

Rabbit opened the passenger-side door and jerked his thumb at Lucius. “Out. I’ve got shotgun.”

Lucius bristled. “Why? Mage’s prerogative?”

“No, asshole. You grubbed through my apartment. Not that there was anything to see there other than Pervy Doughboy’s wiener pics, but still. It’s the principle.”

Discovering that he didn’t have a comeback for that, Lucius climbed into the cramped rear deck, collapsed across the bench seat, and found a semicomfortable position as Michael sent the Jeep back along the narrow secondary roads and out onto the highway. They passed a couple of fire trucks headed the other way, sirens going. Lucius didn’t know why that made him feel a little better about leaving. After that, he didn’t fall asleep so much as his brain simply shut off, unable to process anything more. It didn’t turn off all the way, though; instead it sent him dreams of dead eyes and flames, and a wall of stone that looked solid, but wasn’t.

PART III

DUSK

The sun descends, light is lost, the world darkens, and secrets grow in the shadows

CHAPTER TWENTY

June 18 Two years, six months, and three days until the zero date Skywatch Jade awoke groggy; for a few moments, she stared at the ceiling of her suite, seeing a gauzy white canopy that wasn’t there.

As she dragged her ass out of bed and into the shower, she ached, not physically, but mentally and spiritually. There had been too many highs and lows lately; she just wanted a few hours of peace, maybe with a mindless project that would occupy her brain just enough that she wouldn’t have to think about the five dead strangers, or the fact that she would’ve sworn on her soul that she and Lucius had been simpatico when they’d made love in the cabin. That had been lovemaking, damn it, not fuck-