On the Hunt

We go hunting tomorrow, and I hope to hell I don't fuck it up. Some chan camazotz. That first time was a fluke and blind fucking luck, and now they've gone and made a hero of me.

Mostly because they need one, and the real heroes are gone.

I don't even know if the jade ammo will work for me. We're still eight years out from the endtime. If things are bad now, what are they going to be like two years from now? Six?

Fuck me. I never should've come down here. Because now I'm trapped.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered, her skin chilling to prickles of gooseflesh as things started to line up in a patchwork of fact and fiction—or what she had thought was fiction, even though old Cooter had sworn it was all true.

Her fingers trembled as she closed the journal, then laid her hand flat on the cover. Her scientist self should've been electrified by the grim discovery—it was a huge find, way more important than the temple. But she couldn't get excited, not over this.

JT hadn't just lied about his background and the' zotz. He had lied about everything.

"Snooping, Natalie?" he said from the doorway, voice neutral.

She looked over as her heart thudded and her stomach gave a sick churn that was mingled with heat and heartache. He was wearing a tee and jeans and had one hand braced on the doorframe, so the FREEDOM tattoo faced her. He didn't look angry so much as haunted. Caught.

She hated that she had to blink back tears. "How much of our relationship was you keeping track of me and my team, and using us to find tunnels the camazotz might be living in?"

It wasn't the most important question in the grand scheme, but it was the one she wanted answered first, damn him.

He looked away. "Some of it."

"How much?" The burn of tears went to a wistful ache. Give me something. Tell me the sex was about us, at least. She couldn't have been that far off. Could she?

He didn't answer for a long moment, just stood there staring at her. Then, finally, he muttered an oath and jerked his head toward the kitchen. "Come on. If we're going to do this, I need some damned coffee."

She sat for a long moment, holding the journal in front of her like a shield. Then she got up and followed him into the other room. "Got anything stronger than coffee? I think I'm going to need it."

Five minutes later, armed with drinks and sandwiches, JT faced Natalie across the narrow butcher-block bar that separated his kitchen from the rest of the main room. He was strangely calm.

She had seen a ' zotz, heard him call on the gods, and read enough in his journals to figure out that he'd been using her. There was no point in denying any of it. And he was so godsdamned tired of being alone.

She was his lover. More, she might be impulsive, but she wasn't irrational. Once she understood what was going on—as well as he did, at any rate—she wouldn't blab when she got back to civilization.

Hell, he was almost glad she had found the hidden room. Their lovemaking just now had changed something inside him, or maybe it had been changing for a while now. He didn't know.

All he knew was that he wanted her to understand who he really was. No more lies, no more secrets.

"How much did you get from the journals?" he began.

Something shifted in her eyes, but she said only, "Enough to know that the camazotz aren't anybody's cryptic species."

He took a deep breath, orienting himself. "Okay. Twenty-six thousand years ago, there was a . . ." He trailed off as he heard the words echo in other voices, other times, handed down from father to son, generation after generation. "Scratch that. Screw the history. What matters is that there's a barrier of energy that separates the earth from the underworld. It's been destabilizing over time, making it easier for things like the camazotz to get through weak spots and come to earth. It's my job—if you want to call it that—to make sure they don't get far."

" 'Over time,' " she repeated. "You mean as we get closer to the winter solstice of 2012."

His gut tightened at the reminder that the end date was way too fucking close for comfort. But he nodded. "Yeah. On the zero date, there's a good chance that the barrier will collapse entirely, releasing all of the nasties that've been banished to the underworld over the past twenty-six millennia." He waited for her disbelief. Didn't get it. Cool fingers walked down his spine. "Why aren't you making noises about meds and rubber rooms?"

"Beyond having been attacked by a demon?" She paused, blew out a breath, and said, "I used to work for this professor who was obsessed with the 2012 doomsday. He was always telling us stories about the end-time war."

"A nut job, you mean." But something dark and nasty moved through him. Stories. He had known storytellers, once. An entire culture of them, gone in a night, killed by a king who had dreamed of a great victory and had led his people into a massacre instead.

She tipped her hand. "In some ways. In other ways, Cooter was one of the smartest people I've ever met. And it was hard not to see how his stories lined up exactly with the historical record."

"What stories?" He forced the question through gritted teeth.

Her expression went wary, making him wonder what she saw in his face, but she answered, "He told us about a race of magic users who have lived in secret among humankind, century after century, guarding the barrier against the occasional demonic breakout and training for the zero date, when they would become our saviors."

"Son. Of. A. Bitch." He lurched to his feet, heard the chair crash to the floor behind him. He wanted to pace, wanted to run. Instead he stood there, vibrating with an anger that had gone cold and sour with age.

She rose to face him, eyes wide with excitement and dawning wonder. "I'm right, aren't I? That's why you're out here fighting the camazotz. You're one of them. You're a Nightkeeper!"

She might as well have said, "You're my hero," because that was the way she was looking at him.

Bile rose. "Not in a million years."

Anger flashed in her eyes. "Stop it," she snapped, advancing on him and drilling a finger into his chest. "No more lies. It fits with Cooter's stories. You fit. You're exactly how he described them: You're a trained fighter, charismatic as hell, and"—she paused, her cheeks pinkening—"the most sensual, sexual man I've ever met." She met his eyes. "That's part of your religion, isn't it? Sex magic."

Something twisted inside him. "I'm no magic user."

"But you're a Nightkeeper."

The moment he had decided to tell her the truth, on some level he had known it might come to this. He'd built his life on living in the moment, dealing with the crisis in front of him, and didn't want to look back at a past he had finally managed to forget. But for Natalie, whose enthusiasm and impulsivity had both charmed him and gotten her in a shitload of trouble, he would do it.

"The Nightkeepers are gone," he said bluntly. "Back in the eighties, their king got it in his head that they could prevent the apocalypse by attacking the barrier at a sacred site in Mexico. He ordered every able-bodied man and woman into the battle, nonoptional." He paused, forcing back the memories that tried to come. Apparently, he hadn't forgotten any of it. He'd just blocked out the nastiness. "They all died, not just the fighters, but the children, too. Every fucking one. The demons slaughtered the warriors and then went after their home base, wiping it off the earth and turning it to godsdamned dust."

That was the only explanation for why, when he'd gone back, he'd found only an empty box canyon where the training compound had been. And it was why he'd never been able to find anyone else like himself in years of sending out the signals his parents had taught him, until he'd finally given up.

Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. He couldn't tell what she was thinking—hell, he barely knew what he was thinking, except that he'd gotten only halfway through smashing her illusions.

He made himself keep going. "But the thing is, the stories tell only part of what it used to be like, the part that makes them seem like heroes." He paused. "I don't know if the world is better off without them. Maybe not, given that the barrier is getting thinner by the year. But the thing is, I know for damn sure that I'm better off without them. Because I wasn't lying when I said I wasn't a Nightkeeper. . . . I was one of their slaves."

Chapter Five

"A slave," Natalie whispered, reeling not just from that revelation, but from all of it. Her gut told her that this was the key to understanding JT, that this was the truth. And oh, holy crap, what a truth. It was unbelievable, impossible, yet instinct also said this was what she had been looking for. This was the reality.

The doomsday war was real, and it was coming. Oh, God.

She leaned on the breakfast bar, mind spinning as she tried to take it all in. But even as she grappled with the realization that this was far, far larger than just the two of them, she was acutely aware of the rigid set of his shoulders, the wariness in his face as he waited to see how she would react.

He had called himself a slave. Cooter had never said anything about slaves. But he had mentioned another race that had lived with the Nightkeepers. "You're talking about the winikin."

He flinched. "I don't like the word. Aj winikin means, 'I live to serve my master,' and I fucking don't. Nobody should have to." But something changed in his expression and he said cautiously,

"We didn't usually make it into the stories."

The we sent a shiver through her. This was really real. It was really happening. She was talking to a winikin. One of the hereditary protectors of mankind's salvation. One of the people they were going to need if the war was really coming.

Holy. Shit.

Trying to keep her voice from shaking, to stay cool when on some level it felt like JT had suddenly changed in front of her, becoming even more than he'd been before, she said, "The way Cooter told it, the winikin were a vital part of the society. They raised the Nightkeepers, taught them, protected them. It was their job to make sure that if anything happened to the warriors, the children would survive to start over."