Myr, on the other hand, had no intention of giving him anything, ever again.
Just leave, whispered her inner, smarter self. Just grab a Jeep and go.
It wasn’t the first time she’d considered it—she even had a plan, and had stashed some cash and liberated one of the remote controls that the winikin used to deactivate the blood ward and open the main gates. Before, she’d always wound up staying, telling herself that the world needed saving and she could help. Now, though, she realized that she wasn’t nearly so tough as she’d wanted to think, because when it came down to saving the world or avoiding her ex, she was all about plan B.
“So what are you waiting for?” she asked when she found herself in front of the door leading to the garage wing. “An invitation? Permission?”
She wasn’t going to get either, she knew, and she shouldn’t have needed them. She was supposed to be a loner, an independent contractor who did what she wanted, when she wanted to. That was what she’d told herself back in New Orleans when freedom had finally beckoned. But almost immediately after the disappearance of the Witch—foster mother, fake tea shop psychic, and general evil bitch—she had fallen in with Rabbit, then fallen for him, hard. He had rescued her, brought her to Skywatch, and offered her everything she’d been raised to want: magic, power, a greater purpose. She had thrown herself into the Nightkeepers’ world, marveled at it, fought for a place in it, and earned the right to call herself a warrior, even if only a human one. And through it all, she and Rabbit had been a team within the team, a pair of misfits who fit perfectly together.
Or so she had thought.
When tears fogged her vision, she swiped them away with her sleeve. “Get over it. He’s gone.”
The others could welcome him back if they wanted to, but as far as she was concerned, the demoness had taken Rabbit away from her long before he’d physically disappeared. In those last few weeks, he had been moody, suspicious and angry, entirely unlike the man she had loved. And that last morning. That horrible morning . . . No. She blocked the memories, not wanting to remember how his eyes had been cold, his voice a double-edged blade, his—
“Fuck this.” She was moving before she was aware of having made the decision, pushing open the door into the garage and beelining for the wrecked Jeep Compass that sat in the corner, waiting for some body work and a new motor—or a decent burial. The cash and remote were right where she had hidden them, as were the keys to the oldest and most nondescript of the Jeeps, which didn’t have GPS tracking installed. Given that the teleporters couldn’t lock on to her with their magic—so long as she kept herself out of trouble, at any rate—she would be off the Nightkeepers’ grid.
Heart drumming in her chest with a cadence that seemed to say hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, she fired up the vehicle, hit the override for the garage doors, and aimed for the widening patch of sunlight and desert. She was doing twenty when she burst from the garage, thirty when she flew through the wrought iron gates that guarded the front entrance of the compound. And by the time she hit the first downhill dune leading from Skywatch, she had the pedal to the metal and the Jeep’s engine whining in protest. She didn’t know where she was going, didn’t care, just so long as she disappeared.
The Nightkeepers could save the world. She was saving herself.
Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico
Rabbit was just short of making it out of the tunnel when a dozen camazotz suddenly dogpiled him, jamming the tunnel and coming at him like a fucking swarm.
Cornered, he fought hard, swiping at his enemies with the broken-off whip handle, which had cracked on an angle that gave him a weak-assed excuse for a blade. But it was something. By the gods, it was something.
“Go to hell!” The snarl tore at his throat and drew stabs from his tortured ribs, but the grab-yank-dick-hack move that accompanied it melted another ’zotz to a stinking pile. It was his fourth kill with only eight, maybe ten left to go, but that didn’t matter fuck-all when another rat-eyed bastard took its place almost immediately.
He was wedged in a narrow spot of the tunnel, where the ’zotz were forced to come at him one by one, like something out of a freaking Spartans-versus-everyone-else movie. Beyond the next curve, sunlight shone in, gleaming white off the limestone. When was the last time he saw the sun?
“Come on, motherfuckers. Bring it!” He stepped out of his niche and the two nearest creatures screamed and closed on him. He stabbed one in the eye, got a splatter of ichor in his mouth, spat it out and turned on the second just as it wound up to bitch slap him with razor-sharp claws. He cursed and ducked, but he was too damn slow. Fiery pain slashed across his cheek and throat, but he straightened, jammed his makeshift knife straight into the thing’s screeching mouth, and shoved until stone grated on bone.
As the ’zotz headed for the floor, he spun back to the other one and did a Lorena Bobbitt, in some dim corner of his brain wondering whether he should be worried that it wasn’t even freaking him out anymore to grab on to a demon’s dick, hack it off, and have it puff to dust in his hand. Don’t think. Just do it. Ah, a Nike commercial by way of ancient demondim, he thought, and knew he was brain-babbling. He was losing it—losing steam, losing coherence, losing everything except the driving force that told him he didn’t have time to lose anything. So he turned to the sixth ’zotz he’d taken down—seven if he counted the one back in the tunnel—and did his thing. Grab, yank, hack, gone.
Eight . . . eleven . . . he was kneeling on number thirteen when it vaporized, dropping him to his knees on the stone with a vicious crack that made him see stars. Bleeding heavily, he dragged himself to his feet and came around to face . . . nothing.
The tunnel was empty.
Sunlight beckoned up ahead.
New energy burst through him, and he hurled himself around the corner. But then he skidded to a stop and yanked up a hand to shade his eyes.
The arching cave mouth opened to a brilliant white sand beach that gleamed so bright that it hurt. A breeze stirred nearby palm trees, and beyond that, turquoise water stretched like glass to a distant blue-sky horizon. It was beautiful. Incomprehensible. More, it was a fucking “wish you were here” postcard come to life, a few hundred feet from where he’d been tortured. There were even folding chairs, a cooler, and a couple of towels laid out on the beach, as if a swimsuit model had just stepped out of the picture.
Spurred on by the thought of Phee hanging out there in between his torture sessions, catching a tan while he bled, he tightened his grip on his blade, and headed outside. “Okay, you bitch. How did you—Fuck.”
The stone monoliths were all too familiar, though on a different scale than the carved eccentrics he’d once carried in his pocket. The wickedly curved half-moons—one black, the other a deep, red-streaked amber—were three times his height, with their bases set together, deep in the sand. Their inner faces matched perfectly and could magically interlock to create a transport spell. They were separated right now, so the stone slabs formed a huge, jagged V, but they would have been joined all too recently. That was how Phee traveled the earth, damn her, just as she had used the smaller stones to send her image into Skywatch to contact him. To corrupt him.