Nightkeepers Read Free Page A

of them as people who’d been alive only seconds earlier.
    Around him the screams and fingernails-on-blackboard howls continued and the air smelled of blood and death. Then he was at the doors, and Anna grabbed him, and she was hanging on to Strike, and all Jox could think about was getting the hell out of there.
    Someone must’ve hit the panic release—shit, he should’ve thought of that—because the doors weren’t locked anymore; they were wide-open and survivors were running out into the starlit crevasse where the training center was hidden, deep within Chaco Canyon. Winikin were dragging their children away from the carnage, running for their lives, but the boluntiku pursued with single-minded ferocity, their vapor bulks partially submerged beneath the ground as they gained strength from the magma flow at the earth’s mantle.
    ‘‘Jox, come on!’’ Anna pulled him toward the door. ‘‘Jox!’’
    Three boluntiku were closing in on them, drawn by the smell of royalty.
    ‘‘Not that way.’’ Most of the escapees were headed toward the forty-car garage, or for the barns and the high canyon trails beyond. Jox’s heart hurt with the knowledge that they’d never make it to the vehicles or horses. More important, it wouldn’t matter if they did, because distance was nothing to the boluntiku . Only smell mattered.
    He had to get the children to the secret blood-warded room beneath the archives, which only the royal winikin knew of.
    ‘‘This way,’’ he said, making the only call he possibly could, though it nearly killed him to turn away from everyone else he’d ever known.
    Making sure Anna was right behind him, he grabbed a dazed-looking Strike by the waist and arm, half carrying, half dragging the boy across the great hall to the covered walkway leading to the mansion. It’d been locked all night, but now the doors stood open, one hanging halfway off its hinge. ‘‘Don’t look,’’ he ordered as their feet slid in the bloody wetness that seemed to be everywhere. He lifted Strike higher and the boy trembled and clung to him like a limpet, pressing his face into the winikin ’s chest.
    Jox heard fingernails on blackboard behind them, heard an infant’s wail and a familiar feminine voice screaming a battle cry. Something deep inside him wept— Hannah . But he didn’t turn back to help her.
    He took the king’s children and ran for his life.

CHAPTER ONE
    June 21
The present
    The glowing green numbers of the Crown Vic’s in-dash clock ticked from eleven fifty-nine to midnight, signaling the start of a new day. Detective Leah Ann Daniels let out a slow breath, trying to settle her nerves. ‘‘First day of summer used to be a good thing.’’
    ‘‘That was before the locals started drinking the Kool-Aid, ’’ her partner, Nick Ramon, said, then winced. ‘‘Sorry.’’
    ‘‘Don’t be.’’ It’s not your fault my brother joined a cult and drew the short straw. Battling the churning in her gut, Leah scanned the dark, cluttered alley outside the car, looking for Itchy Pasquale, the scrawny gangbanger— and occasional snitch—who’d called her for a meeting, claiming to know where the Kool-Aid was being served this time around.
    She and Nick were parked only a few streets over from Miami’s chichi Wynwood Art District, but the alley could’ve been in another world—one peopled with sallow-faced junkies rather than glitterati and run by gang rule rather than art critics. The Miami-Dade PD made regular sweeps of the buildings on either side of the alley, and the raids turned up pretty much every crime on the books, and occasionally some that weren’t.
    Like human sacrifice.
    The bodies had started turning up eighteen months ago and had followed every three months like clockwork: two at each equinox, two at each solstice. The victims were beheaded, their hearts cut from their chests. The news vultures had dubbed them the Calendar Killings and hauled out all the old