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suddenly he wasn’t so sure about that, either. Because if the magic was real, then the other stuff was real, too . . . and what the hell was he going to do about that?

CHAPTER TWO
    Present day
Cancún, Mexico
December 5; one year and sixteen days to the zero
date
     
    Reese had long thought that themed wedding hotels were tacky as hell, but she was pretty sure this one took the freaking multitiered, pink-frosted cake.
    In case the velvet sombreros and striped serapes plastered on every available surface of the hotel lobby were too subtle, the decorators—and she used the term lightly—had lined the halls with a series of cringe-inducing tropical signs directing her to the wedding chapel. And when she got there, she found the entryway decorated with what she suspected was meant to look like an ancient Mayan temple, but came across as papier-mâché gone horribly wrong.
    Inside the chapel, a faux stone archway took the place of the usual flower-and-lattice bower, the aisle was lined with fake palm fronds, the rank-and-file chairs were wearing parrot-hued slipcovers, and the roll-away screen behind the main stage was painted with an art student’s version of Chichén Itzá in its heyday, with the city intact, the ruins unruined, and cartoonish pre-Columbian natives thronging in the foreground, staring at the papier-mâché archway with creepy, goggle-eyed intensity.
    Thank Christ the room was empty. It was bad enough she was semi-crashing. Be worse if she walked in and started laughing her ass off during the I-dos.
    This so wasn’t what she had been expecting. But then again, the expectations were her own fault: The moment she opened the FedEx to find a plane ticket to Mexico and a request for her to come talk about a job, her brain had gone straight to a tropical fantasyland, complete with umbrellaed drinks and bare-chested bartenders, far from Denver′s drab gray winter.
    Hell, it was probably just a run-of-the-mill deal for aging parents who had lost track of a kid and were feeling guilty in the middle of the sib’s wedding prep. Typical locator gig.
    But those cases still paid better—and were way safer—than her old job.
    Tracking a low drone of voices that said “the party’s over here,” she crunched across the fake palm fronds to where an open doorway led to the reception area. Looking for a little advance intel—run-of-the-mill job or not, it was pretty extreme to fly her across the border just for a meet-and-greet—she tucked herself into the shadows and peered through to where a couple of dozen bodies thronged an open-air dining area.
    Then she exhaled in surprise and eased back further into the shadows. Because whatever these guys were, it wasn’t run-of-the-mill.
    The twenty or so people, an even mix of men and women, were knotted together on one side of the room, the men in decent suits, the women in an eclectic mix of high-end, with no rent-a-tux’d groom or Barbie-doll bride in evidence. They were all wearing long sleeves, which was weird; it might be shitty with early December back home, but it was still pretty damn tropical down in the Yucatan.
    Going into the figure-it-out-fast survival mode that used to be her only option, she scanned the room. Six of the wedding guests—three men, three women—were small and compact, their gestures quick, their eyes always on the move. Four of the six were in their sixties or so and hung together like family or old friends, while the remaining two were younger and new-coupleish: a military type in his early forties holding hands with a thirtyish cutie who had dark hair and laughing eyes. Overall, aside from a strange air of uniformity, those guys weren’t too far off ordinary.
    The rest of them, though . . . Whoa. Way not ordinary. Most in their late twenties, early thirties, they were uniformly huge—in height and muscle, with zero flab—gorgeous, and somehow glossy , like the overhead lights bounced off them differently from the others. More, they