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their souls linked to those of specific Nightkeeper children, and they hadn’t been through the marking ceremony.… Yet they were suddenly wearing bloodline marks, as if the gods themselves had commanded it.
    “Well?” Sebastian demanded. “Where’s yours?”
    Oh, shit
. Her stomach clutched and she reflexively clasped her right wrist beneath her jacket, which suddenly felt heavy and too hot. The coyote and the
aj winikin
had faded when Sven sent her away from Skywatch, leaving her with a chronic low-grade malaise that hadn’t cleared up until she returned to the compound. Still, though, she hadn’t gotten her marks back when she returned, and she’d been damned grateful to have that freedom. Now, though…
    She took a deep breath and pushed back her sleeve, then hissed out a long, slow breath. Because her arm was bare, and she didn’t have a clue whether that was a good thing or not.
    By later that afternoon, as Sven’s debriefing with Dez in the royal quarters headed into its second hour, theNightkeepers knew three things about the attack: One, the blood-ward surrounding the compound hadn’t been deactivated to let the creatures through; two, there was no evidence of a magical hot spot within Skywatch that might’ve been used as a conduit to bring the creatures up from the underworld; and three, there hadn’t been any detectable power surges suggesting a spell other than Rabbit’s fire magic.
    In other words, they didn’t have a fucking clue how the things had gotten in.
    More, the brain trust—aka Jade, Lucius, and the Nightkeepers’ ancestral library—couldn’t figure out exactly what the attackers had been. They didn’t seem to have been true demons—too easy to kill; they were too big to have been demon-possessed animals of earthly origin; and they didn’t match up to anything else in the records.
    So for the moment, Skywatch was sporting some serious motion and magic detectors, and everyone was staying armed, indoors and out, while trying to get back to business as usual.
    “Sorry,” Dez said as he hung up the house phone after yet another update. “Where were we?”
    The Nightkeepers’ leader was sleekly bald—a characteristic of the strongest magi of the serpent bloodline—and he wore a muscle shirt that showed off the
hunab ku
king’s glyph on his bulging upper biceps. With his black leather jacket slung over the back of a fussy sofa—a holdover from when the former rulers, Strike and Leah, had lived in the royal suite—and wearing ripped jeans and a studded belt, he looked more like a rocker than a king, but his eyes were piercing and intelligent, and his questions had made it clear that he’d studied all the reports Sven had e-mailed back over the past six months.
    “I think we got through most of it,” Sven said, keeping his voice dead level and his face set, because that was the only way he could talk about the things he’d seen and done down south. A low whine came from the floor behind his chair, though, where Mac had finally settled.
    Dez crooked a finger. “Let’s finish it, then.”
    “After Sasha and Rabbit confirmed that the human hosts died during the very first stages of the
xombi
infection and the virus allowed the
Banol Kax
to control the body from that point on, we didn’t have a choice. We spent the next few weeks hunting and exterminating the infected villagers.” Sven paused, wishing he could spit the bitter taste from his mouth, swallowed it instead. “It’s been a month since the last report of a new infection. Rabbit’s friends down there will keep their ears to the ground and let us know if and when a new outbreak occurs… or something else happens.”
    Dez nodded. “The demons need to get a foothold here on earth. With the
xombis
knocked back, they’ll regroup and try something else.”
    “I’ll head back down south in a few days,” Sven said. “Between Mac’s nose and my magic, we’ll have a better chance of picking up on whatever they try