“Hey.” Nate stepped back and waved his assigned winikin through the door. “Come on in.” He didn’t figure he could avoid the convo, so he might as well get it over with. Maybe they could even get a few things settled. Or not.
Carlos was a short, stocky guy in his mid-sixties who wore snap-studded shirts, Wranglers, and a big-buckled belt with the ease of someone who actually was a cowboy, rather than just pretending to be one because the clothes were cool. His salted dark hair was short and no-nonsense, and his nose took a distinct left-hand bend, either from bulldogging a calf or losing a bar fight, depending on which story Nate believed.
On his forearm Carlos wore the three glyphs of his station: a coyote’s head representing his original bound bloodline, the aj-winikin glyph that depicted a disembodied hand cupping a sleeping child’s face, and a hawk that was a smaller version of the one on Nate’s own forearm. If either Sven or Nate died, their glyphs would disappear from the winikin’s arm in a flash of pain. That was a sobering thought, as was the realization that back before the massacre, each winikin had worn one glyph for each member of their bound bloodline, in numbers so large the marks had extended in some cases across their chests and down their torsos, reflecting the might of the Nightkeepers.
Now each winikin wore a single bloodline mark, aside from Carlos and Jox, who each had two.
Carlos had escaped the massacre with his infant charge, Coyote-Seven, and stayed on the move as t he winikin’s imperative dictated, making sure the young boy remained safe from the Banol Kax.
Eventually, they had wound up in Montana, where Carlos had changed Coyote-Seven’s name to Sven and taken a job as a ranch manager. Eventually he’d married a human woman and they’d had a daughter, Cara. By the time the barrier reactivated, Cara had been in her last year of college, her mother had died of cancer, and Sven had been wreck diving off the Carolina coast, all but estranged from his winikin’s family.
There was something there, Nate knew, having seen the subtle tension between Sven and Carlos, and the overt tension between Sven and Cara, who’d been pressed into service as the Sven’s winikin when Carlos had transferred his blood tie to Nate. Not long after they’d all arrived at Skywatch, Sven had ordered Cara to leave, claiming he didn’t need her, didn’t want her. Cara had seemed relieved.
Carlos had been devastated.
Quite honestly, Nate didn’t even want to know that much, but it was damn difficult to avoid gossip in a place like Skywatch. Besides, he was pretty sure Sven’s rejection of Cara—which was how it must’ve seemed to her dignified, tradition-first father—was part of what made Carlos push Nate so hard when it came to matters of propriety and prophecy, and why he found Nate incredibly frustrating.
“Have a seat.” Nate waved the winikin to one of the two chairs in his small living room, which contained a couch and chairs, with a flat-panel TV stretching across one wall, and wire racks holding the latest gaming consoles of each format.
Carlos remained standing just inside the door. “What really happened today?”
Nate was tempted to fake misunderstanding, but that’d just draw out the pain, so he turned both palms up in a who the hell knows? gesture and said, “It was exactly how I told Strike and the others.
Alexis touched the statue and blanked. I was the closest one to her, so I grabbed on to pull her away, and followed her instead. We were in the barrier for only a few seconds; then we were out. Nothing more sinister than that.”
But the winikin’s eyes narrowed on his. “Did you actually see her in the barrier?”
“I’m not even sure I was all the way into the barrier,” Nate said, going with honesty because there didn’t seem to be a good reason not to. “I got a flash of the barrier mist, but never actually landed, and then I was back here at Skywatch. It was more like a CD skip or something, where the sound cuts out for a second and the music comes back farther down the line.”
“Or,” Carlos said slowly, his eyes never leaving Nate’s, “maybe your mind chose to block off whatever you experienced.”
“You think I’m hiding something?”
“Not intentionally, maybe. But Alexis definitely saw something more, and she seems to think you did too. What if you did and can’t remember it?”
Something quivered deep in Nate’s gut, but he shook his head. “There are an awful lot of ‘what-ifs’ I could pull out of my ass around here. That doesn’t mean any of them are true.”
Carlos tipped his head. “Why are you fighting this so hard?” And by this, they both knew he didn’t mean just the vision-that-wasn’t.
“We’ve had this argument before. Neither of us ever wins,” Nate said, dropping into one of the chairs, suddenly very tired of it all. He pulled on the chain that hung around his neck, withdrawing the hawk medallion from beneath his shirt.
His own personal amulet-to-be-named-at-a-later-date, the medallion was a flat metal disk etched on each side with a design that looked like the hawk bloodline glyph if he tipped it one way, a man if he tipped it another. It had been the only identifying thing he’d been wearing when he’d been dumped at Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital, aside from the words My name is Nathan Blackhawk, which had been carefully printed on his forehead in pen.
It hadn’t been until the prior year that he’d learned his abandonment had been shitty bad luck, that hi s winikin had died of injuries he’d sustained during the massacre, and hadn’t been able to get a message to any of the other survivors before he’d died. Since each winikin’s imperative in the aftermath of a massacre was to keep his or her Nightkeeper charge alive and hidden, nobody had come looking for Nate. He’d dropped into the system, and from there to juvie, and then a short stint at Greenville for grand theft auto, before he’d straightened up and pulled it together to make himself into the successful entrepreneur he’d become.
He’d done that with the help of a social worker whose hide had proven tougher than his. Not the Nightkeepers, not the winikin, and not the gods. It’d been his choice to straighten out, his choice to succeed.
“Why don’t you ever ask about them?” Carlos asked softly, and there was an aha look in his eyes that made Nate wish he’d kept the medallion where it belonged: out of sight and mind.
“Because they didn’t make me what I am. I did that.”
“Are you so sure?”
“That’ll be all for tonight,” Nate said, his voice clipped with anger, which was pretty much how all of their convos eventually ended. But when the winikin turned and headed for the door, Nate cursed himself and said, “Carlos?”
The winikin turned and raised an eyebrow.
“Have you guys asked Alexis exactly what she saw?”
“Isabella is doing that right now,” Carlos said, but with a look that suggested he would’ve rather had anyone else in the world be doing the asking. Which Nate could understand, sort of, because if Alexis sometimes acted like an overambitious brownnose, it was largely because that was what her winikin had raised her to be.
Which, Nate realized, glancing at his laptop as Carlos left the room, was one of the fundamental differences between Alexis and Hera: Alexis had a winikin, while Hera had grown up on her own. Just like he had.