Focus, she told herself, shoving aside the lingering heat and the churning excitement that belonged to the too-optimistic girl she couldn’t afford to be anymore. “What’s wrong?” she asked as she reached the winikin. They gave way, muttering and shifting, letting her into the group and then closing around her, shutting Sven on the outside.
As she reached the center, JT snarled, “Fuck this,” and spun and stalked away in the opposite direction, shoulder-checking a couple of guys who didn’t get clear fast enough.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dez shaking his head as if to say, Typical, but she knew that JT might have a temper and a major shoulder chip when it came to the Nightkeepers, but the fiery rebel wasn’t irrational. If he was in a mood, there was a reason.
Just as she turned to ask her father what the hell was going on, another of the newer winikin, Sebastian, caught her arm. “You going to show us yours?” He was a hard-edged fiftyish man who had lost his wife and child in the massacre and made no secret of his hatred for the magi… and right now, he was looking at her like she was the enemy. His eyes were hard and harsh, his grip rough enough to put a stir of fear in her belly, though she didn’t—couldn’t—let it show.
“Godsdamn it, Sebastian.” She yanked her arm away. “What the hell are you—”
She broke off as he shoved back his right sleeve to bare his forearm… which now wore a black, tattoolike mark of two interconnected ovals, along with eyes and a gaping beak, and the hint of feathers. Cara froze as her heart thudda-thuddaed in her chest, kicked off rhythm by shock.
Oh, holy shit. It was the mark of the owl bloodline.
And it hadn’t been there before the funeral.
Cloth rustled and a few more of the rebels pushed up their sleeves to bare their forearms, which now bore their bloodline marks. She saw an eagle, an ax, a curl of smoke, and two others she didn’t recognize. But she sure as hell recognized the despair in their eyes. She’d seen it in her own right after Carlos had forced her marks on her, indenturing her to Sven and putting her under Nightkeeper law whether she liked it or not. Because where the Nightkeepers’ forearm marks were the symbols of status and power, the marks of the winikin made them into servants, pairing the aj winikin “I serve” glyph with smaller bloodline glyphs.
The rebels hadn’t chosen to have their souls linked to those of specific Nightkeeper children, and they hadn’t been through the marking ceremony.… Yet they were suddenly wearing bloodline marks, as if the gods themselves had commanded it.
“Well?” Sebastian demanded. “Where’s yours?”
Oh, shit. Her stomach clutched and she reflexively clasped her right wrist beneath her jacket, which suddenly felt heavy and too hot. The coyote and the aj winikin had faded when Sven sent her away from Skywatch, leaving her with a chronic low-grade malaise that hadn’t cleared up until she returned to the compound. Still, though, she hadn’t gotten her marks back when she returned, and she’d been damned grateful to have that freedom. Now, though…
She took a deep breath and pushed back her sleeve, then hissed out a long, slow breath. Because her arm was bare, and she didn’t have a clue whether that was a good thing or not.
By later that afternoon, as Sven’s debriefing with Dez in the royal quarters headed into its second hour, the Nightkeepers knew three things about the attack: One, the blood-ward surrounding the compound hadn’t been deactivated to let the creatures through; two, there was no evidence of a magical hot spot within Skywatch that might’ve been used as a conduit to bring the creatures up from the underworld; and three, there hadn’t been any detectable power surges suggesting a spell other than Rabbit’s fire magic.
In other words, they didn’t have a fucking clue how the things had gotten in.
More, the brain trust—aka Jade, Lucius, and the Nightkeepers’ ancestral library—couldn’t figure out exactly what the attackers had been. They didn’t seem to have been true demons—too easy to kill; they were too big to have been demon-possessed animals of earthly origin; and they didn’t match up to anything else in the records.
So for the moment, Skywatch was sporting some serious motion and magic detectors, and everyone was staying armed, indoors and out, while trying to get back to business as usual.
“Sorry,” Dez said as he hung up the house phone after yet another update. “Where were we?”
The Nightkeepers’ leader was sleekly bald—a characteristic of the strongest magi of the serpent bloodline—and he wore a muscle shirt that showed off the hunab ku king’s glyph on his bulging upper biceps. With his black leather jacket slung over the back of a fussy sofa—a holdover from when the former rulers, Strike and Leah, had lived in the royal suite—and wearing ripped jeans and a studded belt, he looked more like a rocker than a king, but his eyes were piercing and intelligent, and his questions had made it clear that he’d studied all the reports Sven had e-mailed back over the past six months.
“I think we got through most of it,” Sven said, keeping his voice dead level and his face set, because that was the only way he could talk about the things he’d seen and done down south. A low whine came from the floor behind his chair, though, where Mac had finally settled.
Dez crooked a finger. “Let’s finish it, then.”
“After Sasha and Rabbit confirmed that the human hosts died during the very first stages of the xombi infection and the virus allowed the Banol Kax to control the body from that point on, we didn’t have a choice. We spent the next few weeks hunting and exterminating the infected villagers.” Sven paused, wishing he could spit the bitter taste from his mouth, swallowed it instead. “It’s been a month since the last report of a new infection. Rabbit’s friends down there will keep their ears to the ground and let us know if and when a new outbreak occurs… or something else happens.”
Dez nodded. “The demons need to get a foothold here on earth. With the xombis knocked back, they’ll regroup and try something else.”
“I’ll head back down south in a few days,” Sven said. “Between Mac’s nose and my magic, we’ll have a better chance of picking up on whatever they try next.” And he’d be out and moving, away from the hemmed-in box canyon and the training compound that might’ve been built to accommodate hundreds, even thousands, but somehow felt overcrowded with only seventy or eighty people rubbing elbows.
“Actually, I’d like you to stick around for a while.”
Sven smothered the wince that came when his bone-deep need to keep moving bumped up against the fealty oath he had sworn to his king. “You and Reese headed north?” The two were Denver natives, and had set up an urban center of ops in an old warehouse in their former ’hood. Sven had Skywatch-sat once or twice when the king and his mate had gone up to the city, keeping a Nightkeeper presence at the compound while the others were on assignment.
“Actually, I’ve got something else in mind.” Dez paused. “How are you getting on with Carlos and Cara these days?”
“Fine.” Or they would be fine once he had a chance to sit down with them. Yelling at Cara hadn’t been part of the plan, but he could fix it. He would fix it, all of it. He’d made that promise to himself.
Dez nodded. “Good, because I need someone on the inside.”
“Whoa.” Sven held up a hand. “Wait. On the inside of what?”
“The winikin,” Dez said flatly. “Those creatures came in during Aaron’s funeral, and it sure as hell looked like they were after the winikin, not us. I want to think it’s another sign that there’s some sort of winikin magic waking up, but the cynical side of me says there might be something more… as in, maybe one of them already found his—or her—magic and is using it against us.”