It was the thought of Rabbit that finally drove her out of bed. He, like the rest of them, hadn’t asked to be born into this mess. What was more, he’d started off at a serious disadvantage, child to a single parent who’d denied him a true Nightkeeper name and refused to accept him into the bloodline until almost too late. Strike and Jox had done their best with the kid, but they’d walked a fine line, trying to help without alienating Red-Boar, who had been antisocial at his best, pathological at his worst.
Then there was Rabbit’s magic, which both awed and scared Anna—a sentiment shared by most of the Nightkeepers and all of the winikin. It might not be fair, but there it was: his magic didn’t play by the rules and neither did he. Was it any wonder most of them had tried not to get too close? That doesn’t make it right, her conscience nudged; he’s just a kid . He was the same age as most of the freshman undergrads in her intro lectures. And he needed help.
Moving slowly, feeling sore all over though there was no reason for it, she dragged on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved pullover and headed for the kitchen.
Izzy met her in the main room, handed her a mug of coffee—cream, no sugar—and aimed her for the stairs that led to the lower level. “Jox says you’re to go down right away.”
“Great,” Anna muttered into her coffee. “I’ve been dressed for, like, three minutes and I’m already late.” But she headed downstairs. She hesitated outside Lucius’s warded door, but then kept going to the adjoining rooms where they’d locked Rabbit and his friend—girlfriend?—the previous night.
Seeing the gold-red shimmer of wards across the doorway and not in the mood for magic, she raised her voice. “Knock, knock? Izzy said you were waiting for me.”
A muffled voice called, “Just a sec.” Magic hummed just behind her jawbone, the red-gold shimmer cut out, and Nate opened the door. “Come on in.”
After what Izzy had said up in the kitchen, Anna was expecting to be the last one there. She hadn’t, however, anticipated how much it would bother her to see Strike, Leah, Jox, Nate, and Alexis looming over Rabbit, who was sitting on the side of a camp cot, wearing track pants and a hoodie and staring at the floor, jaw set in the sort of mulish intransigence she’d always associated with his sire.
His hair had grown out from its skull trim to a military brush, and he was thinner than before, especially through his sharp-angled face, as though the last vestiges of the childhood he’d continually rejected had been burned out of him. His eyes flicked to her momentarily, and she felt him weighing her, trying to decide whose side she was on. Then he looked back down, and she didn’t have a clue where he’d shelved her.
The sight of him was a forcible reminder that he wasn’t a kid at all. Hell, he was light-years from the freshmen she’d just been comparing him to. He was, what, eighteen? Yet at the same time, he was a stronger mage than any of them, save, perhaps, for Iago. And that, she knew, was the problem.
Humans and Nightkeepers alike feared that which they could not control.
Help him, whispered a familiar voice inside her skull, one that she knew was a construct of her own mind, a bit of wishful thinking. Even so, she shot back, I’m going to try. It’s not like he makes it easy, you know.
Besides, she’d already endangered the Nightkeepers by bringing Lucius into the mix. Where did she draw the line?
“Okay,” Strike said, breaking the tense silence. “We’re all here. Let’s get started.” When Rabbit just kept staring at the floor, throat working, the king prompted, “Don’t worry, kid; you’re safe now.
Just start at the beginning and walk us through everything that’s happened since the museum bust.” He took a risk and gripped Rabbit’s shoulder, though the teen wasn’t big on being touched.
Rabbit didn’t shake him off, though, didn’t even react. He just stared at the floor and whispered, “I killed the three-question nahwal.”
Which was so not what any of them had expected him to say. And it so incredibly not good news.
Shock rippled through the room. Strike’s jaw went very tight, and Leah nodded as though she’d figured it’d been something like that; Jox muttered under his breath and cast his eyes upward to the gods. Anna’s stomach knotted, and her breath whistled out as she tried to even conceive of such a thing. She’d nearly died in her one encounter with a nahwal; it was difficult to imagine killing one, impossible to work through the implications besides the most obvious: that there would be no more free answers for the Nightkeepers.
Nate and Alexis seemed to be the only ones who didn’t have any outward response to the news, which seemed odd, given that they were the ones who’d nearly died trying to enact the three-question spell. More, Anna had assumed they’d been planning on enacting the spell again, during the equinox.
It only stood to reason, given their need to find the Volatile.
As her own shock dimmed, Anna gave the two of them a long look, realizing that while they stood side by side, there was a distance that hadn’t been there before, an awkwardness that didn’t bode well for tomorrow’s battle. Alexis might be able to call on the goddess alone, but a Nightkeeper was always stronger with a mate than without, which made it seriously bad timing if they were arguing, or worse, had broken up again. Just as Patience’s and Brandt’s magic had weakened the more they fought, so too would Nate’s and Alexis’s. And frankly, Alexis needed all the magic she could get.
Get a grip, people, Anna wanted to snap. This is a war. Let’s be practical. But the current crop of Nightkeepers hadn’t grown up steeped in the old ways, and didn’t always buy into the expectations of their ancestors’ times. That added a too-human element to what should’ve been a warrior’s life and a soldier’s strategy.
One problem at a time, she warned herself, but felt a skirr of worry at the realization that the members of the royal council weren’t at their best going into the equinox. Strike was messed-up over Rabbit, as was Jox to a lesser extent, and Leah was trying to keep the two of them on an even keel.
They were trusting their advisers to balance them out, perhaps not realizing that Nate and Alexis were having issues of their own. That left it up to Anna to oversee all five of them and bring some perspective, which was exactly what she didn’t want to do. It was like she’d told Red-Boar the year before, when he’d pressured her to rule in her brother’s place: She didn’t want to lead the Nightkeepers. Hell, she didn’t even want to be a Nightkeeper.
But, like all of them, she hadn’t exactly been given much choice in the matter.
“Okay, people, let’s take a breath,” she said, aware that they’d all sort of frozen in the wake of Rabbit’s announcement. “We knew something had happened to the nahwal; now we know what. Let’s move on. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to get comfortable.”
Ignoring Rabbit’s quick sidelong look and her brother’s scowl, she dropped down to the floor and sat cross-legged.