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children because of a decades-old curse; and Dez had spent ten violent, lawless years under the influence of a dark-magic idol. Each of them had come back and redeemed himself, and the Nightkeepers were hoping Rabbit would do the same. They wouldn’t trust him easily—he had gotten plenty of second chances already—but they were willing to give him the slim benefit of a doubt.
    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