He looked offended. "h.e.l.l, no."

The tightness in her chest went down by half. "Then what is it? Tell me what you need the money for. Did you lose a bet? Are you trying to do something? Buy something?"

Her mind, stupid optimist that it was, flashed on the ring he had caught her trying on the other day in the local p.a.w.nshop. Not girlie-far from it-it was a finely detailed snake that curled around her finger and knotted around a polished black stone. Obsidian, the guy behind the counter had called it. She hadn't cared that it had probably belonged to one of the Cobras-to her it wasn't a cobra, it was a snake, like his given name. She had cared, though, that the p.a.w.nbroker wanted close to four months rent for it.

"I need firepower," Dez said flatly.

That was so far off the ring fantasy that she just stared at him for a few seconds. "We've got guns."

"I don't think they'll be enough." He hesitated, then reached for her. This time he made contact, tracing a finger down her cheek.

But instead of heat, the move brought a shiver of dread. "Tell me what's wrong. Please."

He stared down at her. Then he said, reluctantly, "Hood gets out the day after tomorrow. And the word on the street is that you're going to be his first stop."

"He . . ." She trailed off as her stomach knotted and adrenaline kicked through her bloodstream as she flashed on sharpened teeth, scary-dead eyes, and a nose piercing that flared out to wicked points. Rumor had it that the incarcerated cobra de rey was more superst.i.tious than ever these days, and had decided that making her his b.i.t.c.h would give him the power to add the VWs turf to his own.

They had known he'd be getting out soon. They just hadn't known when.

Or at least she hadn't.

"Why didn't I hear about this?" She was the one with the informants, the one with her ear to the streets.

"I paid Jocko to squelch it."

"You . . ." She stared at him, not understanding. "Why?" She could have been finding patterns, making plans. She could have been . . . oh, s.h.i.t. Cold sluiced through her as she got it. She freaking got it. He hadn't told her because he was planning on killing Hood and he didn't want her trying to stop him. Or if things went bad, he didn't want her charged as an accomplice. Sick dread washed through her, bringing a new film of tears. "You're not a killer."

It was what separated them from the gang. She and Dez wore guns and walked tough, but the weapons were strictly for defense, and they shot to scare, to wound. Not to kill. Never to kill.

He cupped her face in his scarred palms and looked down at her, staring like he was trying to memorize the moment. And in his eyes, she saw more darkness today than yesterday. "I couldn't save my family," he said softly. "I can save you."

"You-" She broke off, knowing there was no point in arguing that one. It was why Dez had come to her rescue that first night, when Hood had cornered her, coveted her. And it was why he was willing to sacrifice himself now.

That, and because he was a stubborn a.s.s who didn't f.u.c.king listen.

She reached up and gripped his wrists, right over the new tattoos. "This isn't the only way. We can deal with him legitimately. We did it before-we can do it again."

His eyes burned into hers. "I'm not going to let him touch you."

"I'm not arguing with you there. But there are other options." She took a deep breath. "Let's leave. Fallon said the offer is still open. The department will stake us to a move, help us get started somewhere else."

For the past couple of years, Dez had wanted to bail and start over, but she had refused to be chased out of yet another home. Which she supposed made them a pair of stubborn a.s.ses, but if she had to give up on the neighborhood to save him from himself, she would do it.

He shook his head, expression bleak. "The Cobras aren't just a street gang anymore, Reese. They've got a long reach. Moving to a new city won't solve anything."

She wanted to argue that they could change their names, build new lives-she had done it before, could do it again-but she had a feeling that was just an excuse. As far as Dez was concerned, he had let Keban beat him that night in the storm, so he wasn't going to let Hood beat him now. Or, rather, he was going to be the one to do the beating.

Feeling suddenly sad, small, and desperate, she turned her face and pressed a kiss to his scarred palm. "Promise me you won't kill him."

For a second she thought he leaned into her touch, that his fingers tightened. But when he pulled away from her, his eyes were cool. "I can't."

Tears stung Reese's eyes even in sleep, blurring the memories, which spun past faster now, mercifully showing as single images: Hood's eyes, open and staring; a ruby pendant; a ring box sitting in a pool of blood.

"That's enough," Strike said, his voice breaking through the memories and bringing her back to drowsy reality.

"You want me to block it out?" That came from the silver-eyed man who held her hand, his words resonating in her head as well as her ears. Through their strange mental link she learned his name-Rabbit-and caught a trace of wood smoke, sharp and acrid, along with a sense of worry.

"Not yet," Strike rumbled. "Let's wait and see what she . . ." The words faded.

No! Reese grabbed for consciousness as it started to slip away again. Come back! She fought against the grayness that crept in from the edges of her dream state, but couldn't stay awake. As she faded, another memory broke through unbidden, one that came from years earlier than the others.

"Hurry!" Fingers biting into her wrist, the stranger dragged her along the outside wall of Seventeen while rain lashed down around them. As they ran, he muttered to himself, "Mendez, what the f.u.c.k are you doing?"

Behind them, shouts sounded as the Cobras pounded in pursuit. They were cursing vilely that she had gotten away and threatening the guy who had helped her escape.

He dragged her over two buildings, to a pile of junk lumped haphazardly behind Fifteen. Then he let go of her so he could shove aside a metal sheet. Behind it, a corrugated pipe led into pitch blackness. "Get in," he ordered roughly. "They don't know about all of the tunnels."

In the light of one of the few unbroken outside floods, she saw that the guy who had risked his own a.s.s to get her away from Hood was a couple of years older than she-maybe eighteen, nineteen? He was tall but whip-thin, his fierce eyes rendered colorless by the sodium lights, his dark hair plastered to his skull as the rain poured down. He wore the ragged, mismatched clothes of a castoff, but he wasn't anything like the other street kids she had met in the month or so that she'd been on her own. He had a presence the others lacked, an aura of capability and strength. There was a layer of menace, too, one that warned that he wasn't someone she wanted to f.u.c.k with.

She hesitated, shaking. He had gotten her away from Hood, but that didn't necessarily make him any better than the cobra de rey. He might just have wanted the fresh meat for himself.

When he moved, she flinched back, expecting him to make a grab. But he put his hand over his heart instead. "I'm one of the good guys, okay? And I swear on my sister's soul that I won't hurt you." Then he held out his hand to her, in an invitation that showed where a wide, slashing scar crossed his palm.

The sight should have scared her. Instead, it made her feel a strange kinship. Nodding, she darted past him and ducked into the tunnel as the gang members footsteps got closer and she heard Hood shouting: "You're mine, b.i.t.c.h. You hear me? Mine."

"Not on my watch," Mendez grated as he pulled the metal sheet back into place, cutting out the light. Then he guided her fingers to the tail of his ragged denim coat. "Be as quiet as you can, and hang on to me. I'll take care of you, I promise."

Then, with him leading the way, they crept into the darkness together, leaving their enemies behind.

The next time Reese aimed for consciousness, she made it all the way back, waking up to find herself lying on a couch. A thick blanket was tucked around her, its suffocating, too-warm weight threatening to trigger claustrophobia.

She didn't let the fear take over, though. Instead, she forced herself to lie still and feign sleep as she tried to get a sense of her surroundings. Given the weirdness that had already gone down, she needed all the intel she could get.

All she came up with, though, was that the air was clean and processed, the couch and blanket smelled fresh, and her surroundings were silent except for the background hum of appliances. She didn't hear anyone nearby, but that didn't mean they weren't there, waiting for her to come around and . . . and what? The fragments that came back to her didn't make any sense, didn't tell her where she was, or what Strike and the others wanted from her. Panic sparked. She hated not knowing things. Knowledge was power. Control. Safety.

s.h.i.t. Breathe. In and out.

Logic said they had drugged her-the impossible memory of Strike appearing out of thin air had to be some sort of retrograde hallucination. Then, after they had knocked her out, they had kidnapped her and interrogated her under some sort of hallucinogenic. But why? And how long had she been out? Had anyone realized she was missing yet?

The answer to that last one was "no," she knew. Not after she had made such a big deal about being independent and not needing to clock in or out.

Breathe, she told herself. Pretend you're asleep. She was pretty sure she was alone, though.

A minute pa.s.sed, then two, and the panic leveled off. She took a deep breath, then another. Then she opened her eyes.

And froze, heart hammering anew.

It wasn't the sight of a generically furnished three-room apartment that caught her by the throat and ramped the panic back up . . . it was the view outside the window nearest her: a few buildings, a few trees . . . and a red-rock canyonscape that didn't look anything like the Cancun hotel district.

Where the h.e.l.l was she?

Letting out a low moan of terror, she wrenched off the blanket and bolted for the door. It was locked from the outside, the intercom keypad beside it nonresponsive. d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n. Survival instincts clawed at her as she tried the windows, found them locked too.

Breath sobbing between her teeth, she grabbed a desk chair and swung it as hard as she could at the gla.s.s.

The chair bounced off with a reverb that sang up her arms and made her hands go numb. But she was only peripherally aware of the pain as she let the chair drop and stared, horrified, through the window, to where a pair of Jeeps and a dune buggy were parked near the steel building.

Holy s.h.i.t. Oh, holy, holy s.h.i.t. They were all wearing New Mexico plates.

And she was in serious trouble.

She hadn't told anyone where she was going or who she was meeting, had left only a breezy "Got a new case; call you when I get a chance" voice mail and turned off her phone. Now, her latest move in the "don't stifle me" argument had come back to bite her in the a.s.s, because n.o.body would know where to start looking for her. They would have to track the GPS in her phone, and-Her phone!

She gave herself a hasty pat-down. She was still wearing all her clothes-wrinkled now and damp with fear. The .38 was gone, and her carryall was . . . no, her bag was sitting on a low coffee table beside a blue binder with some papers on top.

Ignoring the paperwork-though the pile sent a clear "read me" message-she grabbed the carryall and pawed through it. She wasn't really expecting to find her phone, but adrenaline jolted when her fingers glanced off its familiar shape. She yanked it out, flipped it open, started to dial, and then stopped.

There wasn't any signal. Not even a fraction of a bar.

"s.h.i.t." She started to flip the phone shut, but then froze, eyes locked on the upper corner of the display, where the little digital clock was trying to tell her that less than an hour had pa.s.sed since she had walked into that tacky-a.s.sed Cancun hotel. Which didn't make any sense. There was no way they could have gotten her from the Yucatan to New Mexico in less than an hour. It just wasn't possible.

Yet there she was.

It had to be a trick. Someone had changed the time on her phone to mess with her head. She looked around, searching for a clock, for something that would verify that she wasn't crazy, that it was her phone that was wrong, not her perceptions.

Next to the sitting area, a breakfast bar separated out a small kitchen nook, with a bathroom beside it. On the other side, open doors led to bedrooms-one was furnished, the other looked empty. The decor was relentlessly neutral, all muted beiges and bare walls, the only stab at playfulness a small entertainment center on the wall opposite the couch.

The digital display showed the same time as her phone.

"Bulls.h.i.t," she whispered.

Was she still drugged? She didn't feel woozy, but hallucinations were a better explanation than believing she had somehow been whisked from a Cancun alley to the New Mexican desert in the blink of an eye, like Strike had-oh, s.h.i.t.

Her stomach knotted as the pieces started coming together in a pattern that was impossible. Abso-freaking-lutely impossible.

"No," she whispered, stomach knotting. But the denial didn't prevent her from remembering that New Mexico was where Dez's family had supposedly lived-and died-in a big-a.s.sed training compound hidden in a box canyon. Kind of like the one outside the window.

What. The. f.u.c.k?

Once the idea took root, more pieces fell into place, in the sort of mental cascade that was usually a relief but in this case just freaked her out worse.

Strike and the larger members of his crew were all gorgeous, bigger and better than human norm. Much like Dez. s.h.i.t, she thought, pulse hammering thickly in her ears as she inwardly acknowledged that Dez could almost be related to the others. Or, if she wanted to go all the way into a bunch of bedtime stories that couldn't possibly be true, they could all be members of an ancient race capable of channeling psi energy with their minds. A race whose members had lived alongside humanity for millennia, together yet apart, waiting for the day they would need to defend the earth plane from the rise of the underworld.

"Bulls.h.i.t," she whispered. But the pieces fit.

The smaller wedding guests, most of them a generation older, could have been the winikin, the hereditary protectors and tutors of the magi. And they had all been wearing long sleeves-possibly to cover the forearm glyph marks that denoted their bloodlines and abilities . . . like the ones Dez had been wearing when she had dragged him back to jail.

At the time, she had thought they were more tattoos, more signs that he was buying into his own hype. But what if they had been real? What if his magic had finally started working, after all?

Her blood ran simultaneously cold and hot as the pattern gelled into a theory that should have seemed impossible, but somehow didn't.

Strike and the others-and Dez-could be Nightkeepers.

Holy. c.r.a.p.

She had been so sure that the stories he had told her to pa.s.s the time had been elaborate fairy tales, creative lies Keban had used to brainwash Dez for the first sixteen years of his life. Then, later, she had talked herself into believing that the things she thought she had seen during the storm had been a concussion-induced hallucination. Because there was no such thing as magic.

Except that Strike had materialized practically on top of her, and then freaking teleported her thousands of miles. Then some guy named Rabbit had interrogated her. Or, rather, he'd read her G.o.dd.a.m.ned mind.

Teleporter. Mind-bender. Oh, holy s.h.i.t.

This wasn't part of a story, and it wasn't a hallucination.

More pieces fell into place, forming connections that left her reeling as she reached the logical-or illogical?-conclusion. Because if the magic and the Nightkeepers were real, then there was a good chance that the other parts of the stories were true, too. Like how the magi were blood-bound to defend the barrier in the years leading up to the end date, when terrible demons would break through and fight to conscript mankind into a h.e.l.lish army that would make war on the G.o.ds.

She was keenly aware that the end date was a little more than a year away, not just because of the connection to Dez, but because it had been impossible to avoid the movies and doc.u.mentaries, and the news stories about the tinfoil-hat brigades digging into their bunkers and acting like they knew something the rest of the world didn't. She had laughed all that off. Now she stared out the window at the back-a.s.s end of a box canyon and wondered whether she'd been dead wrong.

Her knees went wobbly, and she dropped back down to the couch, mouth drying to dust like the desert outside. This wasn't happening. She was still drugged, still hallucinating.

Right?

Closing her eyes, she pinched herself hard on the arm. "Okay, Reese. It's time to wake up." But when she opened her eyes the only difference was the presence of reddened fingernail marks on her arm, which stung.

She glanced at the "read me" pile on the coffee table.

Don't do it.

But how could she not? Knowledge was power.

On the bottom was a blue binder, half full of pages, with its spine marked "Open log, reunion onward" and fluorescent green Post-its flagging a couple of spots. Sitting on top of the binder was a short stack of papers that were clipped together at one corner. She flinched when she saw her name on the first sheet. But she couldn't not read the note.

Dear Ms. Montana, Rabbit said that you'd rather have this in writing to digest at your own speed, so here it is. When you're ready to talk, dial 1313 on the intercom, and someone will come for you. At that point, it will be up to you whether to stay or go. If you choose to leave, you'll wake up in the hotel remembering only that you turned down the job, and you'll never hear from us again. But we hope you'll decide to stay, because we badly need someone like you on our side right now . . . and Rabbit says you've always wanted to save the world. Stick with us and you'll get your chance, G.o.ds willing.

"Oh, s.h.i.t." Reese sat back, crossing her arms over her churning stomach.

That was a seriously low blow, especially when it was those d.a.m.ned stories that had started her crusading in the first place. Back then, she had needed to believe that there were heroes out there, that someone was working behind the scenes to save her. She had been obsessed with Dez's stories of the Nightkeepers, had pictured herself fighting at the side of a brave and powerful warrior who wore a familiar face. And when Fallon-then an ambitious young detective-had offered her a choice between relocating or helping the cops go after Hood, it was because of the stories that she had chosen to stay. That, and because it had given her a chance to fight, in her own way, at her warrior 's side. But that was then and this was now, and . . .

Screw it. She kept reading.

You may have already guessed, but if not, here it is: We are the last of the Nightkeepers, and the doomsday war is here. The blue binder contains a rundown of our more recent history, including the ma.s.sacre that left us scattered as orphans, being raised in secret by our winikin; the events that led to our reunion three years ago; and the things we've seen and done since then. You're in there. You impressed the h.e.l.l out of me in that warehouse-even more so now that I know that you were trying to save Dez's a.s.s, and why. And you did a job for another of us, Patience White-Eagle, a while back. You found her sons and their winikin in hiding, and that should have been impossible.

"The bride," Reese murmured, putting it together with the funny look the blonde had shot her back at the hotel.

She remembered the case clearly, not because she had met any of the players-it had all been done by remote control, highly hush-hush-but because it had been a rare challenge. Given that the client had provided her a last-known address, it should have been easy to find a sixty-something couple living with twin kindergarten-age boys. In actuality, she had sweated the job, eventually dumping everything else to focus on that one case, day and night, until she had cracked it.

The guardians had been winikin, she realized now, hiding a pair of Nightkeeper children. No wonder she'd broken a sweat.

The note continued: Your skills are part of why we need you. We're currently fighting a rearguard action against a Xibalban mage named Iago and the creatures he controls, and to do that we need all hands on deck, including Dez. Also, you'll find that there's a matchmaker inside most of us, because a Nightkeeper who has bonded with his or her rightful mate is so much stronger than before. I realize that you and Dez had problems, but- "Oh, no. You're so not going there." Crumpling the three-page note, Reese shot to her feet and strode to the window. But the sight of all that wide-open s.p.a.ce made her long to be back in the city. Any city.