Dawnkeepers by Jessica Andersen Read Free Book Online Page A

Nightkeepers from stopping it. And that would be a serious problem, because if the cycle ran through, bringing all seven demons across the barrier to complete the tasks assigned to them by legend, the Nightkeepers were screwed.

    The sound of a sliding glass door broke into Nate’s mental churning, and he looked up to see Rabbit coming in from the pool area. The teen was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and the arms cut off, paired with jeans that hung low off his ass, serving mostly to hold the business end of his iPod. Just turned eighteen, Rabbit was the youngest of the magi, the half-blood son of Red-Boar, who had been the last Nightkeeper survivor of the solstice massacre of ’84, when Strike’s father had led the Nightkeepers to the intersection, compelled by a vision that said he could avert the end-time by sealing the barrier. Instead, he’d led his people into genocide. Red-Boar had survived the battle at the intersection, and had later joined up with Jox, who was raising Strike and his sister, Anna. It hadn’t been until the previous year that Jox had admitted there were other Nightkeepers living in secret with their winikin —or, in Nate’s case, without them.

    Rumor had it that Red-Boar had sired Rabbit while on walkabout in south-central Mexico or Guatemala or something like that. Nate had heard different versions, different explanations of who the kid’s mother had been, and why the teen had some scary-strong powers that didn’t always act like the legends said Nightkeeper magic should.

    Seeing that Nate was staring at him, Rabbit stopped dead, shoved his hands in his pockets, and scowled. “What’s your problem?”

    Having learned it was safer to ignore the kid’s ’tude when possible, Nate said, “You hear about the meeting yet?”

    “I was out at the—” The kid broke off and shrugged. “No. So?”

    In other words, he’d sneaked out to the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon again. Nobody knew exactly what he did up in the sprawling collection of rooms, kivas, and burial chambers, but most of the residents of Skywatch gave Rabbit a wide berth anyway. He wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.

    “Confab in the big room, five minutes,” Nate said. “You want to help me round up the others?”

    For a second Rabbit looked as if he were going to tell Nate to go to hell. But surprisingly, he nodded. “I’ll check the firing range; you hit the rec area and the training hall.”

    He was gone before Nate could ask. Not that he was going to—he didn’t really want to know what was going on in Rabbit’s head. Always one to walk on the moody, broody side of life, the kid had gotten even stranger in the months since his father had died during the equinox battle. It wasn’t like father and son had gotten along all that well, either—they’d struck sparks off each other like nobody’s business, and as far as Nate could tell, Red-Boar’d pretty much hated the kid’s guts.

    Then again, who was he to criticize a father-son relationship? Nate thought as he headed for the rec room, which was located past the kitchen and down a short hall toward the forty-car garage. It wasn’t like he had any experience in the area. Besides, he wasn’t part of the whole Nightkeepers-as-family movement that Strike, Leah, and the winikin —and Alexis, to a degree—kept harping on. As far as he was concerned, the current residents of Skywatch were nothing more than twenty or so people who’d grown up separately, weren’t related by blood, and had their own lives outside of the whole Nightkeeper thing. They might be a team out of necessity when it came to the end-time stuff, sure, but that didn’t make them inseparable, didn’t make them a family. If Rabbit wanted to march to his own backbeat, Nate wasn’t going to get in his way. He understood privacy and the need for freedom.

    Sticking his head through the door of the room they called entertainment central, he saw two of his teammates locked in