On the Hunt

She couldn't be a magic user—she had all the physical hallmarks of winikin ancestry in her dark coloring and eyes, and the Nightkeepers always bred true. No way they would mix their precious blood.

But the evidence was there. He couldn't deny the scar. And the skull. . . What the hell were they going to do about the skull? More, what was he going to do about her? Whatever her bloodlines, whatever her powers, she didn't have the right training to stay here and fight. Not to mention that she was reckless, too willing to throw herself headlong into danger.

But he couldn't just chase her off, not now that she knew that she, too, had a connection to this chunk of godsforsaken forest. And not now that he knew there were more zotz on the loose. The tatter-winged fuckers had somehow trashed the Jeep without tripping the alarms. What else could they do now?

He was all too aware that it was almost dawn. The day of the equinox.

Gods help them.

"Tell me about the skull," she said, pressing. "What can it do?"

Nothing without a Nightkeeper, he thought. But he didn't say it, because suddenly that didn't seem as clear-cut as it had minutes earlier.

"When the Nightkeepers' long-ago ancestors used the barrier to trap the demons in the underworld, they created thirteen life-size crystal skulls that together balanced the energy flow across the planes. They hid four of them on earth, sent four to the underworld, and sacrificed four to the sky gods. They kept the last one, and used magic to divide it into thirteen smaller replicas.

One was given to a female seer in each of the major bloodlines. They became the itza'at seers.

The visionaries."

She exhaled softly. "The skull can tell the future?"

"When wielded by a fully trained itza'at mage. It's no use in a fight."

"If that's true, then why did you haul ass out there? And why did the camazotz take it?"

Knowing they had moved past the point of convenient lies, he said, "When a skull is separated from its wielder, it broadcasts powerful magic. Once you brought it up out of the temple, any creature with a link to the barrier would have been able to zero in on it." His gut tightened. "The zotz that attacked you was probably coming after the skull, but once it saw you, it decided to have a snack first, add some skin to its wings." He deliberately paused, letting the gory details sink in.

"As for why they took it, power is power. Destroying it in an equinox ritual could fuel some serious magic."

Her eyes flared. "Destroying it? No. No way. We can't let that happen. We have to get it back."

"Natalie—"

"Don't 'Natalie' me, JT. If I'm a winikin, then I'm a protector by nature, right? And if we're free, then that means we get to pick what we want to protect. You chose your village. I'm choosing the skull that belongs to my bloodline."

"It doesn't belong to your bloodline," he gritted between clenched teeth.

"It does if all of the magi are dead," she countered neatly. "Why else would I have been the one to pick up its signal?"

"I—" He broke off. "Damn it." She was right. And it was a plausible explanation for why she looked like a winikin but seemed to have some connection with the magic. In the absence of a better option, the power was reaching out to the D-list.

Only in this case, D stood for danger.

"The camazotz would have brought it to their hell mouth for any sort of ritual," he said finally, wishing she didn't have a point. "That's the hole in the barrier where they're coming through, one that takes a hell of a sacrifice to get open. Theoretically, it should be inside a big-ass temple, but I'll be damned if I can find it. And if I haven't managed to track it down in seven years of searching, there's no way you're going to find it in less than a day."

She just looked at him, unblinking. "I told you. I can sense the skull. I can lead us to where it's gone." In that instant, her certainty reminded him all too strongly of how the old king had looked as he stood at the front of the meeting hall, talking about his plans to attack the barrier.

JT's blood chilled. "Natalie, for gods' sake."

"Tell me about the hell mouth. Can we use it to get into Xibalba?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't a joke."

Frustration sparked through him. "Do you seriously think we can take out the underworld itself, just the two of us?" When the argument edged way too close to those old, blood-soaked memories, he veered off. Don't dwell. Move forward. "No way. We're not doing this. I'll tell you what we are doing: You're going to go inside and lock up where it's safe, and I'm going after the zotz that busted up your Jeep. I'll track them, find them, and killthem."

She closed the distance between them and wrapped a hand around his arm, gripping right over his ink. "My instincts are good, always have been. And right now they're telling me that if we don't get the skull back, everything you've seen up to now is going to look like a warm-up act."

Memories churned, souring the back of his throat. But he said only, "Go inside and stay there. Let me do my job."

"It's— Behind you! "

Whatever else she might have said was drowned out by a whip crack of leathery wings and the high screech of a zotz in attack mode.

"Get inside!" JT bellowed, and was relieved to see her bolt for the house. He spun and ducked, then brought up the shotgun and fired at the incoming blur as it soared over the damned wall, its wings fully extended. And intact.

Not for long. Blasting away, JT shredded the bat-faced bastard's wing membranes, rage flaring at the sight of the pale, smooth skin. Human skin. Shit, Rez. What the hell happened?

The thing flapped hard and then slammed to the ground short of him, keening in pain and fury.

Eyes gleaming coal red, it scrambled to its feet and lunged for him, mouth splitting in a tricornered screech.

He unloaded the second barrell into the creature's face. Chunks and ichor sprayed, and he moved in fast, whipping out his blade and making the necessary cuts—throat and dick—before it could recover.

It puffed to greasy-ass mist, leaving him crouched there, breathing hard. "Son of a—" Another blur hurtled over the wall; another screech raised the hair on the back of his neck. "Shit!" He slapped for his ammo belt but wasn't wearing it. The shotgun was empty, the—

"JT, down!" Natalie shouted from the house, punctuated by a door slam as she bolted back out with one of his shotguns.

He pancaked it into the dirt and she fired over him, nailing the zotz center-mass. The thing went down hard, and he got himself up and running. Knife. Dick. Gone. He stared at the place where it had been, trying not to see the pink skin of its wings.

"Come on." She was beside him, pulling on his arm, trying to drag him into the house. "There might be more."

"There will be," he said hollowly, not sure how he knew. "They're coming through too fast. They must have used the skull to stabilize the hell mouth somehow. . . ."

"Exactly. And we're going to need more than a couple of empty shotguns if we're going to be any good out there."

That snapped him out of his daze. "Natalie . . ." He trailed off at the sight of her.

Barefoot and wearing his sweats, with her long dark hair swinging into her face, a stone-edged knife stuck in her waistband, and a double-barrell held one-handed, she looked nothing like the fiery, driven researcher whose boundless energy had lured him from the role of observer to that of lover. Her eyes were fierce and determined, her expression set, and she held her body with a hunter's stillness.

Before, she had made him think of joy and laughter, reminding him that there was a larger world out there, one worth saving. Now she reminded him of the warrior women he had once lived among. The change terrified him. Yet at the same time, it gave him something strange and unfamiliar.

It gave him hope.

"Okay," he said with a short, soldier-to-soldier nod. "Let's arm up. I'm sure Rez could use the extra help."

But as they headed inside, she said, "Just defending the village isn't going to be enough. We need to get that skull back."

Frustration beat at him—that she wouldn't listen to reason; that because he had been making love to her instead of hunting, the zotz had taken human victims and patched their wings; that he and Natalie were the only ones at ground zero when there should've been hundreds of magic users holding the barrier.

"I know you want the skull back," he said carefully as he reset the security system—futile, maybe, but at least they might get some warning of an incoming attack. "Believe me, I do, too." Though not for the same reason. She saw it as her identity. At the moment, he considered it an enemy asset.

"But while we're trying to find the hell mouth, the zotz will be going after the villagers." The certainty curdled thick and cold in his veins. "More people are going to die."

"Yes, they are." Her eyes were shadowed with grief, her voice steady with purpose as she swapped his sweats for her beat-up clothes from the day before. "But how many will die if the camazotz use the skull for an equinox ritual?" When he didn't have an answer for that one, she nodded. "Thought so. Which means we need to get the skull back and destroy the hell mouth."

He scowled, hating the hell out of the situation. "I should've run you and your team out of the area when I had the chance."

"I would've come back." fully dressed now, she moved to face him, so they stood toe-to-toe in the center of the main room. She looked up at him, reached up to cup his face in her palms. "It's time to stop defending your perimeter and go on the offensive."

"Winikin don't do offense," he grated, trying not to notice how her warmth seeped into him, trying not to remember the things her soft scent made him want to dwell on.

"I do," she countered. "So what does that make me?"