Outside of Farmington, New Mexico

"The star demon and the white G.o.d's head are made from different stones and don't really look like they belong together, stylistically," Dez said into the Webcam's pickup, "but my magic had the same sort of reaction to them, and Keban's letter made it sound like they were part of a set, along with the Santa Fe piece. Question is: a set of what?"

On the laptop he'd snagged from Reese, a video conferencing split screen showed Lucius's face on one side with the stone walls of the library in the background. The other side held overlapping pictures of the star demon, a grainy image of the Santa Fe artifact that Lucius had captured off the museum's security-cam footage, and Dez's own crude sketch of the white statue.

He hadn't wanted to involve the others for a number of reasons, but Reese's arrival-and her insistence on teaming up with him, if only because she didn't trust him as far as she could throw him-had changed that. h.e.l.l, it had changed a lot of things. He had thought he was over her-well, over the infatuation, if not the guilt. But one look at her and a few seconds of having her fighting alongside him once more, and he was halfway back in that crazy, wanting place, even knowing that their destinies weren't headed in the same direction. Maybe they had been, once, but not anymore. He wasn't a street rat now, or even a normal guy. And he wasn't free to make his own choices.

d.a.m.n it all, anyway.

"I think," Lucius began, but then his eyes shifted offscreen as Jade's soft voice said something in the background. "Hang on," Lucius said. "Be right back." Then he grabbed a crutch off the floor, lurched upright, and hobbled out of view.

As far as Dez was concerned, that was pretty impressive considering that a makol had sliced his d.a.m.n leg off with a buzz saw less than a month earlier. Lucius's low-grade library magic and Sasha's chu'ulel healing skills had been enough to put him back together and give his recovery a running start, but without the accelerated recovery time of a Nightkeeper, he was stuck waiting it out. Humans just didn't heal as quickly as the magi.

Which was not a comforting thought under the circ.u.mstances.

Shifting back in his rickety desk chair, Dez took a look through the open connecting door that joined his and Reese's rooms. He knew he should've fought harder to convince her that he needed to deal with Keban alone. h.e.l.l, he would have if it hadn't been for the go-to-h.e.l.l glint in her eyes that told him she would have just doubled back and continued searching on her own. And, yeah, she was d.a.m.ned good at what she did.

"Louis Keban. No, it's 'b' as in 'bus stop, " she was saying. She sat on the edge of her bed, facing away from him with her cell on speaker and a notebook in her lap.

She had showered, and her dark hair was sleek and slick, combed back along her skull and trailing down to dampen the collar of her T-shirt. If he could see her face, he suspected it would be bare of the makeup she had been wearing before, a professional gloss that added an edge and aged her a few years past her twenty-eight. He bet that was a deliberate move, because the Reese he had known never did stuff like that accidentally.

Then again, she wasn't the same girl, was she? For five years, they had known each other as well as two people could . . . but a whole h.e.l.l of a lot had happened in the intervening decade. And a big chunk of that-if not all of it-was on him.

They hadn't talked about the past on the long walk from the crash site back up to his truck, or on the ride into the city. They hadn't talked about anything, really, but the past had sat between them like a hairy-a.s.sed mammoth. He'd let it stay, though, figuring it would be better for both of them if she remembered the bad stuff more than the good. Because as much as part of him-the part that still remembered every touch and sigh from the stormy night they had almost made love-wanted to make things right with her, even beg for a second chance, the man he was making himself into knew that couldn't happen. He was a Nightkeeper. More, he was a serpent, and what had happened before would happen again.

"Okay, I'm back," Lucius said, crutching into view. "Sorry about that."

Dez dragged his attention back to the monitor. "Jade have something for us?"

"For me, yes. For you? Not so much." Lucius tried for a leer that fell flat, as did his voice when he said, "Strike is sending her, Sven, Nate, and Alexis out to check another blip down in Belize."

So far most of the spikes reported by their magic-flow sensors had either been false alarms or teams of Iago's makol trying to take control of power sinks using small war parties that felt more like they were testing the Nightkeepers. But given the countdown, it was only a matter of time before h.e.l.l broke loose.

"She's on a good team," Dez said. Nate's strategic thinking and Alexis's aggressiveness would counterbalance Sven's outside-the-box tendencies and Jade's lack of experience. "She'll be fine." Which was bull, because there were no guarantees.

"Yeah." Lucius brushed his fingers across the jun tan glyph on his inner wrist that marked him as a mated man, then cleared his throat. "Back to the carvings. If we a.s.sume that they're Nightkeeper in origin and go with ancient Mayan symbology, the 'T' glyph represents the wind. Which gives us a black star demon and a white wind G.o.d."

"Any idea what the Santa Fe piece might be?"

Lucius tapped a couple of keys and another picture appeared, showing a carving of a strangely proportioned, squat little man who stretched his short arms over his head, like he was holding something aloft. "I think it was this guy. He was one of the four skybearers who suspended the sky at the corners of the earth."

Dez frowned. "I thought the four balaam jaguars held up the sky."

"Depends on who you asked."

"Have you confirmed this with the museum?"

"The police report just calls it a 'human figure carved of reddish stone' and the curator won't tell me s.h.i.t. He probably thinks it was smuggled up from Mexico after the ban on cross-border antiquities trading, and thinks I'm looking to come down on him."

"I thought it came from a Puebloan ruin."

"Supposedly, it came from the Puye Cliff Dwellings, which are north of Los Alamos on the Santa Clara reservation. But the Puebloans weren't really known for carved stone, and the artifacts found at Puye have been mostly red-glazed pottery with a . . ." Lucius trailed off, eyes sharpening on Dez. "Actually, they were big into serpent motifs. They believed that spirit snakes guarded their crops and protected them. That could be something, given that it's your winikin who seems to know all the tricks here."

Dez lifted a shoulder, playing it casual. "There are a ton of serpent myths out there, and they don't all track back to my bloodline."

Lucius nodded. "Fair enough. h.e.l.l, if they actually did, I'd be tempted to think you guys were in charge, not the jaguar royals."

"Anyway. So we've got a black star demon, a white wind G.o.d, and a red skybearer. What does that give us?"

"A bad joke about walking into a bar?"

"s.h.i.t."

"Sorry. On the upside, they're all connected to the sky." Lucius stared at the pictures. "You said there was at least one more, right? That plays for me-these feel like they should be paired off. Black versus white. Red versus . . . Well, that's what we need to figure out, isn't it? We need to know what and where it is, and what Keban is planning."

"He mentioned waiting for the proper days to collect the two artifacts that hadn't already been unearthed. If we figure one was tonight, the lunar eclipse, then what's the next day of barrier activity between now and the solstice?"

Lucius tapped a few keys. "The Gemenid meteor shower on the fourteenth."

"Which gives us three days to either grab Keban or find the fourth artifact and ambush him when he goes for it." The winikin wanted to meet on the twenty-first, but Dez didn't dare let it go that long. "Piece of cake," he said drily, glancing into the other room, and then going on alert when he realized Reese's voice had gone sharp. "Or not."

She was up and pacing, with the phone pressed to her ear. He couldn't see her face, but her shoulders were tight, her body language radiating annoyance. She caught his eye, then looked away. But she didn't shut the door.

He straightened, letting his bare feet hit the floor in the narrow s.p.a.ce between bed and desk. "You'll call when you find something?"

Lucius nodded. "It's not like I'm going to be sleeping tonight. Might as well use the time for research. I'll check into the powder Keban hit you with, maybe do a little more looking into the locations where these things have been found. I'll ping you in the morning with an update, sooner if I find something."

"Catch you later." Dez ended the vid-con and closed the laptop, aware that the room next door had suddenly gone very quiet. He told himself to leave it alone, keep his d.a.m.n distance. Close the door.

"You done with the computer?" she called.

"All set." He folded it up and carried it through.

She was tipped back in her desk chair, eyes closed, one hand raised to pinch the bridge of her nose. Her hair had partway dried and was beginning to fluff out, and he had been right about the makeup-she looked younger without it, reminding him so strongly of the past that it made his chest ache. But her brows were furrowed and her face was etched with strain. And they were in this together . . . for the moment, at least.

He gave the laptop a gentle toss onto the bed, where it landed in the center of the sagging mattress. "You getting anywhere?"

"I've got a couple more threads to pull on the rental, but I have a feeling it's going to come down to grunt work. Then again, that's what I'm good at." She sighed, then pushed herself upright and swung her feet to the floor, wincing as they hit.

"You're hurting." It came out like an accusation, though he hadn't meant it to.

She shrugged. "It's nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing to me." He jammed his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her. "And we did just roll the s.h.i.t out of the Jeep-you've earned a few bruises." He paused. "The vending machine probably has Tylenol."

"I've already taken all the drugs I can if I want to be functional tomorrow. I . . ." She trailed off, pressed her lips together for a moment, and then said resignedly, "I was a little banged up to start with. A few years ago I got sloppy, and it caught up with me."

Knowing he had given up the right to have an opinion on what she did, or how, he pokered up. "Go on."

She sent him a measured look, but continued, "I was after a high-dollar bounty n.o.body else would touch, a real sleaze named MoJo, chasing his a.s.s through this s.k.a.n.ky apartment building, when I whipped around a corner and found him waiting for me. With an UZI." She paused, smiling with zero humor. "I kept going, right out a second-story window. Seemed like the better option at the time."

A chill washed through him. "Christ, Reese."

She held up a hand. "Neither of us wants to do the whole 'So what have you been up to for the past decade?' thing, so let's just leave the past where it belongs. But I figure you should know that I don't bounce back as fast as I used to. I was in the hospital and rehab for a while, then turned private locator when I was back on my feet, partly because I had lost the taste for bounty hunting, and partly because these days I do better with the finding than the grabbing." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm fine on a day-to-day basis, and Sasha worked some healing magic on me while I was at Skywatch, but all the rattling and rolling we did today threw something out of whack again."

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't you say something before I dragged you hiking in the dark? If I had known, I would've-" He broke off because there wasn't much he could've done different. They had needed to get moving before the cops arrived, and calling for a 'port pickup wasn't an option. He had to stay the h.e.l.l away from Skywatch until he'd dealt with Keban, or things could get seriously ugly.

"I didn't tell you partly because my instincts are telling me that you're right-we're better off staying out and here following our noses. Or, rather, your nose." That was the plan-if none of her inquiries yielded better options, they would return to the crash site in the morning to see if he could track the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's scent trail.

"If that was 'partly' it, what was the rest?"

"Because I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself," she snapped, eyes suddenly flaring. "I don't need a man to tell me how to run my life."

"Whoa." He held up both hands. "Rewind. I wasn't-"

"I'm not talking about you." She glared at the phone she had tossed on the desk.

She hadn't been arguing with a contact, he realized suddenly. It had been a man. Leave now, he told himself. Close the door. Instead, he bared his teeth. "Boyfriend back in LA giving you grief about being gone?"

She shot him an unreadable look. "He's just a friend. And I'm in Denver now."

"You moved back?" That shouldn't have bothered him, just as it shouldn't have bothered him that she had a "friend." She had her own life, her own existence. And he didn't have any f.u.c.king right to comment on either.

And if he kept telling himself that, maybe it would sink in.

"I flew back when I heard the VWs had gunned you down. Then, after . . ." She hesitated. "I stayed. Denver was home." Or it had been once he was gone, he realized. And he couldn't blame her for that. She continued: "It wasn't hard to move the locator business. It's mostly Internet searches and phone calls, with the occasional plane ride and face-to-face for variety."

"When did you get hurt?" What she had described wasn't sloppy, it was suicidal. And if he focused on that, it would keep him from going where he way didn't belong.

"No." She crossed her arms, shaking her head. "No more 'remember when' c.r.a.p. I only told you about my getting hurt so you would know I'm not the a.s.s kicker I used to be. Not to get sympathy points, or what-the-h.e.l.l-ever. So just leave it alone."

"You said a few years, which puts it right around the last time we saw each other." He had been p.i.s.sed off about getting convicted for a bunch of small s.h.i.t that he knew had come from her, deep in withdrawal from the black artifact having been locked away with the rest of his effects, and about bursting with rage and self-pity. And he had been f.u.c.king ugly to her. Hateful. Worse, even, than Keban at his nastiest.

He should know. It was one of the two scenes Anntah had shown him, over and over again, using the guilt, shame, and pain to break him down to nothing, so he could be rebuilt tougher and stronger, and ready to be a good Nightkeeper.

Reese didn't say anything, but although his instincts weren't as uncannily accurate as hers, they were good enough, and right now they were telling him he had nailed it. After that last visit, when he'd pretty much blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in his life, she had headed home. And she had freaking decompressed.

Son of a b.i.t.c.h. "If I made you-" he began, but broke off when she practically exploded out of the chair.

She got right in his face, and poked him hard in the chest, eyes blazing. "You can cut the big brother s.h.i.t right now, Mendez. It won't play anymore. I'm responsible for my own choices, my own mistakes. n.o.body makes me do anything."

She drilled him again, and he had to stop himself from catching her hand, holding it, holding her. His blood heated, and in the back of his brain something dark and greedy whispered: Mine. Except she wasn't his, hadn't ever been. Couldn't ever be, given the threat of the serpent bloodline.

And f.u.c.k it all, he should've knocked her out, called for a pickup, and left her with a note that if Rabbit didn't wipe her memory and Strike didn't'port her home and leave her alone, there would be h.e.l.l to pay.

He took a step back, which put him in his own room, and raised his hands. "Reese, calm down. If you-"

"Don't tell me what to do." She shot him a look of pure venom. Then she slammed the door that connected their rooms. And locked it on her side.

The next morning not long after dawn, Reese opened her side of the connector and tapped on the other panel. Expecting the click of the lock, she jolted when the door swung open immediately to reveal Dez, wearing desert-camo pants and a tight, dark brown Under Armour shirt that zipped up to his throat and showed every ridge and bulge. His sleeves were pushed up on his forearms, baring not just the dark blue-green tattoo bands that hid his scars, but also the three stark black glyphs on his right forearm: the swirling ovals of the warriors mark; the plumed serpent's head; and the stacked, intricately decorated circles that identified him as a lightning wielder. She had first seen the marks the day she had grabbed him out from underneath Strike's nose. At the time, she had thought they were just affectations. Now, though, she knew they were real, understood what they meant.

He's a new man, Strike had written of Dez. But if that was true, why had he gone off on his own? What wasn't he telling the others? That's what I'm trying to figure out, she told herself, ignoring the twist of unease that warned her motives weren't so simple.

"Morning," she said to him, holding out a Dunkin' Donuts bag containing three egg sandwiches and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. "Here."

He took the bag with a raised eyebrow. "Making sure I've got enough calories on board to do the bloodhound thing?"

Her face heated. "More like an apology for losing it last night. I'd like to blame the pain meds, but the truth is that I probably would have melted down regardless. Yesterday was . . ." She trailed off.

"Yeah." He nodded. "Yesterday definitely was." He paused. "Feeling better?"

"Fine, thanks." And she was, physically. Emotionally . . . well, she would deal.

"You ready to get on the road?"

She exhaled, then nodded. "Yeah." The sooner they found Keban, the sooner she could get back to reality and away from a man who was simultaneously the boy she had loved, the guy who had broken her heart, and a stranger she didn't trust in the slightest.

They drove up a winding pathway, to the top of a forty-some-foot cliff overlooking the S curve where Keban had abandoned his car the night before. Reese's gut and basic logic said that the winikin had made his getaway in a second vehicle that he had stashed somewhere, and that the plateau would've made a good hiding spot. But Dez spent only a few minutes pacing back and forth along the flattened parking area before he shook his head. "I'm not sensing anything up here. You see anything down below?"

Lowering the binoculars she'd been using to scan the crash site, she said, "Nothing is jumping out at me." With the wreckers apparently having come and gone the night before, there wasn't much left of the crash beyond a crumpled section of guardrail, some skid marks, and scattered debris. "I keep thinking there should be more," she said, remembering the jolt of impact and the wrench of going over the edge . . . and then his magic feathering over her skin, making her feel like she was inside a giant Fourth of July sparkler.

He came up beside her, standing close enough that his sleeve brushed against hers. "There probably is more. If not right here, then somewhere along the trail."

"b.o.o.by traps, you mean."

Nodding grimly, he said, "He needs to slow me down enough that meeting him on the twenty-first is my only option. He'll want to call the shots and set the scene."

"Do you know what kind of a spell he's planning on casting?"

"He can't do magic. That's why he needs me." It was an answer of sorts, but she was keenly aware that he was avoiding her eyes.

d.a.m.n it. More disappointed than she should have been, she turned back to surveying the site. "If there's a trap down there, I can't see it."

"I'll keep my senses wide open." He shrugged out of his desert-camo jacket and hooked it over her shoulders. His eyes were unreadable behind dark, frameless sungla.s.ses. "Stay up here and watch my back."

Until she was surrounded by his secondhand body heat, she hadn't really realized she was cold-her jacket was fine for A-to-B-ing it in the city but not much else, which meant that the weight of his coat was a major improvement.

Not wanting to examine her sudden flush of warmth any further, she nodded. "Will do."

As he headed down the narrow trail that led to the road, she folded back the sleeves and tried not to think that once upon a time, his simple gesture would have made her weak. Now it just made her hope they found Keban quickly, and that Dez's secrets would turn out to be no big deal.