CHAPTER FIVE
Vibrating with excess energy after a good meal and a short postmagic nap, Alexis headed for the pool an hour or so after dinner, intending to work off her frustrations. She could’ve used the gym that took up a good chunk of the lower level of the mansion, but that was where she and Nate had initially hooked up, the night after they’d each jacked into the barrier for the first time, gaining their bloodline marks and a serious case of the hornies. Which meant the gym and its ghosts were out.
Besides, she realized as she shucked out of her yoga pants and zippered hoodie and dumped them on a pool chair, baring her body in a decent one-piece, swimming a few hundred laps or so would not only wash away the nonexistent evidence of the sexual encounter she and Nate hadn’t had, it would give her an excuse for the uncharacteristic aches in her inner thighs and the hollowness in her core.
The heated pool water was warmer than the air, and steam rose softly from the surface, making her think of the barrier mists, and Nate’s insistence that nothing had happened.
“And you so need to get out of your own head,” she said aloud, then dove in cleanly. After growing up very near the Newport beaches, with friends who’d brought her along to the country clubs as their guest, she was nearly as at home in the water as on land, and quickly fell into the rhythm of laps.
The pool was located at the back of the mansion in a rectangular alcove flanked on either side by the residential and archive wings, and fronted by the big glass doors of the sunken great room. The open side looked over the ball court, with the ceiba tree and training hall off to one side, the small cottages where the Nightkeeper families used to live off to the other. In the distance, lost in the darkness, the canyon walls were studded with Pueblo ruins she’d visited only once, staying away thereafter because the place gave her the creeps.
Nightkeeper traditions were one thing. Indian burial mounds were another. Besides, the pueblo was Rabbit’s territory, and most of the Nightkeepers left the kid more or less alone, not because they didn’t like him, but because he seemed to prefer solitude.
Relieved to let her mind skip from one thought to the next, as long as none of them were dark haired and amber eyed, Alexis was on lap number twenty when she heard Izzy call her name.
A large part of her wanted to keep swimming—or maybe dive down and hold her breath for a while, and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. She just wasn’t in the mood for conversation. But duty to—and love for—the woman who’d raised her had Alexis stopping to tread water. “Hey,” she called softly to her winikin, who stood by the edge of the pool holding her robe and a towel. “You need me?”
Izzy nodded. “I thought we should talk.”
The winikin was petite and ultrafeminine, with long dark hair caught back in a French braid that was as elegant as it was practical. Wearing trim slacks and a soft button-down that was about as casual as she ever got, Izzy looked put-together and in control.
In contrast, Alexis was a scattered mess. “I know,” she said, but what she really meant was damn it.
She’d wanted to avoid this convo, at least until after she’d gotten a good night’s sleep, and preferably after she’d made the trip to New Orleans and acquired the sacred relic from the witch. Not only because they needed the artifact and the demon prophecy, but because she was hoping that spending the day alone with Nate would remind her why the two of them didn’t work as a couple, namely that he was an arrogant, detached, egotistical jerk who didn’t want any of the same things she did, didn’t believe in the things she believed.
“Come on out. You’ll shrivel.” Izzy held up the robe and towel, her voice making it more of an order than a suggestion.
Alexis sighed and obeyed her winikin, mostly because there was no point in picking a fight just to blow off some steam. Her sense of peace was gone, her hope of burning through the restless, edgy energy pretty much shot. She might as well dry off and deal with Izzy.
The very thought gave her pause. Since when did she “deal” with Izzy? The two of them were closer than most mother-daughter pairs, and had stayed good friends through the ups and downs of teenagerdom and life thereafter. They’d dealt with things together, not one against the other, even after Izzy had revealed the truth about Alexis’s parents and her role as protector and conscience, not just godmother.
But as Alexis climbed out of the pool, shivering as the crisp February air rapidly chilled the water on her skin, she realized that she and her winikin were back on opposite sides of one of their few true disagreements, a battle they’d thought had turned into a moot point months ago: the issue of Nate Blackhawk.
“Thanks.” Alexis took the towel and dried off, then pulled on the robe, which was a thick terry-cloth indulgence with a pleasing nap and drape. Belting it securely at her waist and pulling the lapels close across her chest, needing the sense of being clothed, of being armored, she sat in one of the plastic chairs that was set around the long poolside table that served the Nightkeepers for everything from picnics to councils of war.
Izzy sat opposite her, folding her hands one atop the other. “Okay, no more evasions. What did you really see when you touched the statuette?”
Alexis thought about continuing to avoid the question, but knew from experience that she wouldn’t be able to hold out very long. Izzy wasn’t just gorgeous and graceful; she had a sort of sixth sense when it came to her charge, an almost preternatural ability to tell when something was—or soon would be—bothering her. So instead of ducking, Alexis said, “Were Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk lovers?”
There was a beat of shocked silence before Izzy said, “Absolutely not—they could barely stand each other, and she loved your father. Why in the gods’ names would you even think something like that?”
Because when I dream, I can’t tell if I’m myself, my mother, or someone else, some sort of me existing in a parallel reality where I grew up so much better than I did in this one, Alexis thought, but didn’t say, because she didn’t want to get into the dreams. Hell, she didn’t really want to get into what’d happened earlier in the day. Gods knew, she hadn’t fully processed it herself. But because she depended on Izzy for perspective, even when she didn’t agree with the other woman’s opinion, she said, “I’ve been getting . . . I guess you could call them flashes of a man and woman together.
Sometimes I think it’s me and Nate, but other times it’s different, like it’s us but not.”
The winikin’s eyes sharpened. “These flashes are sexual in nature?”
“Um. Yeah.” Quickly, feeling beyond awkward, Alexis sketched out the scene she’d found herself in earlier that day, describing the stone chamber and the water, skimming over the sexual details for both their sakes.
Izzy frowned. “Maybe it wasn’t Blackhawk. Maybe it was someone else and your brain filled in the last man you were with.”
“Meaning if I hadn’t slept with Nate, it would’ve been Aaron?” Alexis thought of the charming prick she’d dumped just before Izzy revealed to her that she was a Nightkeeper. She tried to picture Aaron Worth, heir, philanderer, and world traveler, in the vision she’d had while touching the statuette of Ixchel, and failed miserably. “Maybe,” she said, but she wasn’t buying it.
A new gleam had entered Izzy’s eyes. “You should have Jade pull some of the itza’at spells for you.
Your aunt and a couple of cousins had the sight.”
“I’m not a seer. I don’t have a talent beyond the warrior’s mark.”