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for the convertible when she’d rented her car. But it’d been drizzling when she landed, so she’d treated herself to a sporty silver BMW that hugged the road like a lover. Convertible or not, the silver roadster ought to be automotive muscle enough to entertain her on the way back to LAX.

    Sure enough, once she was on the road with the metal case in the passenger seat beside her, the feel of engine power and smooth leather lightened her mood, sending a victory dance through her soul. She had the statuette, and she wasn’t technically due back at Skywatch for another day. There was a sense of freedom in the thought, one that had her cranking the radio to something loud and edgy with a heavy backbeat as she pulled onto the narrow shoreline drive that led away from the lavish private estate that was being sold off, piece by piece, to settle the owner’s debts.

    Alexis had thought it a stroke of luck that the sale had come up just as they’d started tracking down the lost artifacts, but Izzy had reminded her that there wasn’t much in the way of actual coincidence in the world. Most of what people thought of as happy accidents was really the will of the gods.

    As she sent the BMW whipping around a low-g curve that dropped off to the right in a steep embankment and a million-dollar view of the Nor Cal coast, the thought of fate and the gods brought a quiver of unease, a sense that she’d already failed.

    “If it was that easy to buck destiny it wouldn’t be destiny,” she told herself. Which was true, but still, it was hard not to feel like she’d gotten it wrong in the relationship department. Again.

    The day Izzy had revealed her true heritage, Alexis had gotten a mental flash of an image: an etching of a fierce bird of prey. Then, just under a week later, she’d seen it again—on the medallion worn by Nate Blackhawk. No way that could be a coincidence. Neither could the fact that they’d immediately clicked . . . on the physical level, anyway. They’d danced around each other for the first couple of weeks, but once they’d gone through the bloodline ceremony and gotten their first forearm marks and their initial connections to the barrier, the overwhelming hormonal fluxes and enhanced sex drive that came with the magic had overridden their reservations and they’d become lovers. They’d done very, very well together sexually . . . but not so much outside the bedroom, where they’d clashed on almost every level. He was closed and difficult to read, and seemed to spend most of his time trying to prove that the gods didn’t control him, that he was free to make his own choices. In the end, she hadn’t been strong enough to hold them together—hadn’t been sure she’d wanted to, despite the omens that said they were meant for each other, and the knowledge that the magic of a mated Nightkeeper pair was ten times that of either mage alone.

    It’d helped that Izzy didn’t like him either. Since the winikin both guided and protected the Nightkeepers, Izzy’s relief at the breakup had helped ease the sting . . . particularly since Izzy was the one who was always pushing Alexis to do her best, be her best, and live up to her mother’s memory. Gray-Smoke had been a legend in her own time, a powerful mage and adviser to the king. As far as Izzy was concerned, Alexis could be nothing less.

    “Unfortunately, that’s proving easier said than done,” Alexis muttered.

    Torturing herself, she shoved her sleeve up to her elbow, baring her right forearm, where each of the Nightkeepers and winikin was marked with Mayan glyphs that denoted status and power. The black marks looked like tattoos but were actually magic, appearing fully formed during special ceremonies in which a Nightkeeper went from child to trainee, from trainee to mage. Alexis wore two marks: the curling anthropomorphic b’utz glyph representing the smoke bloodline, and the three stacked blobs of the warrior’s talent mark, which had given