Skykeepers Read Online Free PDF

, Tomas, sounding clipped and disapproving. As usual.
    Michael stifled a curse at his winikin ’s tone. The two of them had been close from Michael’s youngest years through his teens, when he’d lived and breathed martial arts and aced his schoolwork with minimal effort. Tomas had played the role of Michael’s godfather, standing in for parents who had supposedly died in a drunk-driving accident when he’d been a baby. Tomas—short and slight, like most winikin —had been there for Michael through college, and had just about pissed himself with pride when Michael had been recruited into the FBI’s training program. Things had changed, though, when Michael washed out of the program, then took a high-tech sales job and started partying more than he worked out. Tomas had poked constantly, telling him he was better than his job, that he should do something more, be something more. Eventually, they had stopped really talking to each other . . . until almost eighteen months earlier, when the winikin had dropped the dime on the infamous, the Nightkeepers are real, you’re one of them, and you’ve got four years to save the world and six hours to get your ass on a plane to New Mexico bombshell.
    Hello, mind-fuck.
    After learning that Tomas was actually his winikin , Michael had partway understood where his supposed godfather had been coming from all those years, pushing him to be a fighter, to demand justice, hell, to be the best at whatever he chose to do. But knowing what had caused the pressure didn’t really change the fact that his de facto father had stopped loving him—or even liking him—when he’d refused to do as he was told.
    The tension between them had remained even after Michael gained his bloodline and talent marks, binding him to the barrier as a full-blood mage. Hell, things hadn’t even really improved between them over the past five months, ever since Michael had finally managed to cut ties with his old life and dedicated himself to becoming a better mage. On some level, he’d figured his new level of effort would finally make Tomas happy. That had been a “fail,” though. His growing role within the Nightkeepers hadn’t made any difference in his relationship with his winikin . They still rubbed each other very wrong.
    “Get. Your. Ass. Private,” Tomas gritted. “Strike needs to make an emergency grab.”
    Oh, hell . Shelving the interpersonal shit, Michael took a quick look around and headed for a likely looking gap between two buildings on the edge of the hotel district. “What’s wrong?”
    “Anna just got a phone message from Lucius,” Tomas reported.
    Michael’s warrior talent flared hard, revving his magic and sweeping all the other garbage aside. Strike’s sister, Anna, was a Mayan-studies expert at UT Austin; Lucius had been her grad student until he’d gotten himself possessed by an underworld nasty called a makol , one of the minion species of the demon Banol Kax . In the months since his possession, the Nightkeepers had been unable to find Lucius. Strike hadn’t even been able to get a ’port lock, and there were only three things that could foil ’port lock: death, rock shielding, or the efforts of a mage capable of breaking ’port lock . . . like Iago.
    “What did he say?” Michael asked as he headed for the alleyway.
    “Supposedly, Iago and thirty or so Xibalbans are holed up in the old Survivor2012 compound. They’ve got Sasha Ledbetter there . . . and they’re planning on sacrificing her tonight at the height of the meteor shower. They couldn’t torture the library’s location out of her, so they’re going to see if they can get the answer out of her spirit.”
    “Oh, hell.” Michael hissed out a breath as a complicated mix of emotions mule-kicked him in the chest and an image plastered itself across his mind’s eye; a promo shot of a dark-haired woman posing in a restaurant kitchen with a handful of peppers and a ten-inch knife, looking sexy as