Strike’s low whistle caught her attention, and she looked to her king. He sent Jox and Michael to a locked back room that was filled with surveillance monitors, and gestured for the rest of them to wait.
When Jox signaled the all-clear, Strike waved the Nightkeeper warriors out of the house, leaving Jade and the winikin males behind. Jade looked simultaneously relieved and miserable as the others filed out. She was the only one of them lacking any fighting magic. The only other Nightkeeper lacking the warrior’s mark was Anna, but although the king’s sister wasn’t able to call upon her itza’at seer’s powers, she’d proven able to boost any of the others with her power, so she was going with the warriors as backup.
Alexis sketched a wave at Jade on the way out, thinking that it might suck being on the low end of the warriors’ talent range, but at least she was a warrior and not a librarian.
It was cloudy outside, providing an unexpected continuity with the weather where they’d come from, but the similarities pretty much stopped there. Where the land surrounding Skywatch was arid and red-cast, with little wildlife beyond the occasional hawk, snake, or coyote, the Yucatán was lush and verdant, and before Alexis had gone three steps she’d been bitten by a buzzing insect. Parrots called to one another through the trees despite the gloom and the darkness, and monkeys chattered from farther away.
Giving a second low whistle, Strike sent them into the forest along the narrow path they’d scouted, cleared, and then hidden again a few months earlier. It led through the trees to a squat stone temple made of simple blocks fitted together. The structure was uncarved and unadorned from the outside, almost forgettable until they stepped through the low doorway. The inside of the unprepossessing structure was a rectangular room that during the day looked like nothing much, with little more than a few badly eroded carvings. At night, though, when the stars were bright, the walls showed instructions for opening a secret passageway that was viable for only an hour on either side of an equinox, solstice, or major event like an eclipse.
There were no stars tonight, and the writing didn’t glow quicksilver-bright, but the spell was already familiar. Strike and Leah knelt together, pressed their bloodied palms to the stones at the back of the narrow temple space, and recited the ancient words in synchrony.
When the doorway opened Alexis hung back a little, partially so she could scan the forest for any sign of trouble, and partly so she could avoid being too close to Nate as Strike and Leah led the Nightkeepers down the narrow passageway, and the others started falling in, moving single-file toward the sacred chambers, lighting the way with cheap flashlights.
Magic hummed in the air, heating Alexis’s blood and setting up vibrations where they didn’t belong, drawing her to a man whom didn’t want her, and who she didn’t want. Liar, her inner voice chided, but she ignored it and took up a position at the back of the line, with only Michael behind her.
He always took the rearmost position, because he was the best among them at shield magic. Very few spells worked down in the tunnels, but the shield did, and it could buy them valuable time if they were attacked.
Which left Alexis feeling like a spare wheel, because her shield was for shit.
And you so need to get over yourself, she thought fiercely, not sure where the negativity was coming from, but figuring it had to do with the eclipse, and the things that had happened—real or imagined—
between her and Nate over the past week.
The tunnel sloped gently down, and as the small group moved onward, the sound of running water quickly became audible. They would parallel the river all the way to their destination, which was a rectangular altar room deep beneath the ruins of Chichén Itzá. There they would initiate the ceremony, and if—gods willing—a god accepted Patience as its keeper, she and Brandt would in theory get their asses zapped into the circular chamber where Strike and Leah had first met. Now buried beneath a shit-ton of rubble, the sacred chamber was where the Godkeeper ceremony was supposed to take place.
In theory, anyway. In practice, the Nightkeepers had performed the same calling ritual during the winter solstice, and had returned to the surface without a Godkeeper. There was no guarantee that this time would be any different.
When they reached the temple, which was fairly plain, save for sconces set at regular intervals and a large chac-mool altar that took up most of one end of the chamber, they set their flashlights on the floor and reblooded their palms. Alexis barely felt the pain through the humming that’d taken up residence in her brain. The buzz was one of warm urgency and temptation, though she couldn’t have said what it was tempting her to do.
Joining up again, the Nightkeepers spoke the words necessary to jack into the barrier: “Pasaj och.”
Alexis felt the kick of power, felt the split in her brain as part of her went into the barrier and part stayed behind. As planned, Patience began reciting the Godkeeper spell as the others boosted her power. The intersection was a weak spot in the barrier, supposedly created when the Xibalbans had called the demons to earth in the first millennium A.D. There, the earth, sky, and underworld were very close together, though the skyroad was long and winding by comparison to the hellmouth. As such, the intersection was where the Nightkeepers gathered for their strongest spells, especially those designed to call a god. Yet at the same time it opened the way for a demon as well, which was why Strike and Leah joined up and called on their god, Kulkulkan, to cast blockade magic and help keep the Banol Kax from coming through the portal formed by the Godkeeper spell. As they did so, the king and queen were surrounded by a golden shimmer: the light of love, and of the gods.
Alexis turned away from them, her throat closing on a beat of grief for what could’ve been, yet wasn’t. Telling herself that she was an important part of the battle regardless, she opened herself to the magic, reciting the Godkeeper spell in her head only a beat after hearing it in Patience’s sweet voice, supporting rather than ascending, following rather than leading.
Then, suddenly, she wasn’t following anymore.
Sudden urgency gathered in Alexis’s chest and mind, grabbing onto her. She gasped as the power hum increased, then her lungs vised on the exhale. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream.
Panicking, she opened her eyes, not having realized she’d closed them until that moment. She looked for help and latched onto Nate, saw the surprise on his face, the concern. He said something; she didn’t catch what it was, couldn’t hear him over the humming, yearning buzz. She could hear Patience, though, could hear the spell, could feel it grabbing onto her.
Sudden pain tore through Alexis’s hand, though she’d sheathed her knife. She yanked her hands away from the magi on either side of her and looked down in horror. Blood ran from her palms, pooling on the floor and then running uphill to the chac-mool, where it streamed up the lines of the rain god’s carved body in defiance of gravity. The blood collected in the bowl the statue held in its lap, pooling there.
Then, as she watched, the blood flared to fire, though none of the torches around the perimeter of the room were lit.
“Alexis!” She thought it was Nate’s voice calling her back, thought it was his hands that reached out to grab her as she walked toward the fire, called by her own burning blood. She caught his hand, pulled him along with her. She knew this wasn’t what he wanted, and her heart clutched a little at the pain brought by that knowledge. But the humming wouldn’t be denied, compelling her to lean over the flames and inhale a deep lungful of the sacred smoke.
And the world she knew disappeared.
CHAPTER TEN
One moment Nate was in the altar room, doing the spell-casting thing, and the next thing he knew, he and Alexis had somehow gotten their asses zapped into the buried chamber. And that was so not a good sign.
“No, goddamn it!” he shouted. “You’ve got it wrong. You don’t want us; you want Patience and Brandt!”
His words bounced off the curving walls of the circular stone chamber, which w
ere carved with scenes of sex and sacrifice, as befitted the intersection where the earth, sky, and underworld touched one another in an unstable three-way joining that fluxed with the stars and the moon. At the top of the walls, near the ceiling, human skulls were carved protruding from the stone, their jaws agape in silent screams. Torches were set at regular intervals, with incense-burning braziers hung above. The moment Nate and Alexis had appeared in the space, flames had sprung to life, lighting the chamber and the altar that sat in its center, not a chac-mool this time, but a flat slab with manacles that could be fastened to the wrists and ankles of a spread-eagled victim.
The cuffs weren’t original to the chamber, Nate knew; they’d been put there by the ajaw-makol who had sacrificed Leah’s brother to reawaken the magic, then tried to sacrifice her to bring the barrier crashing down. But even though the cuffs weren’t vintage, they made a hell of a statement, one that pretty much said, Bleed here. Die here.
“Oh, shit,” Nate breathed, panic gathering in his chest—not for himself, but for the woman who both was and wasn’t the girl of his dreams. The Godkeeper ritual required death and rebirth, and a sexual sacrifice on the altar of the gods. “Lexie,” he began, taking a step toward where she stood.
She was staring at the room’s single doorway, which was a flat slab of rock, dropped down to seal the circular chamber. From Strike’s description of the Godkeeper ceremony he and Leah had just barely survived, the slab didn’t respond to normal magic, only to the will of the gods. There was no way out unless the gods saw fit to send them back to the altar room.
“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “I know this isn’t what you want.”
“It’s—” He broke off, because she was right. He didn’t want to be a mated protector—didn’t want to be mated, period. He didn’t want the responsibility of being Nightkeeper to her Godkeeper, when he wasn’t even sure he wanted her. Or, more accurately, he knew damn well he wanted her—he just wasn’t sure for how long, or whether he wanted her, or a fantasy woman who looked like her but acted totally different.
Alexis was still talking, but her voice was lost beneath the roaring that built in his blood. An image slammed into his brain fully formed, with sight and sound and touch and taste. In it, she was bent over the altar as she was now, with her hands pressed flat, as they were now. Only in his waking fantasy she was naked, and he was coming into her from behind.
He’d taken two steps toward her before he could force himself to stop, force himself to lower the hands he’d raised to strip her combat clothes away. Warned by the sound of his harsh, rattling breaths, she spun to face him. He expected her to smack him across the jaw or, knowing Alexis, throw a full-on roundhouse for his thoughts.
But he was wrong, he realized when he saw the flush riding high on her cheeks and the glitter in her eyes. She wasn’t pissed. She was aroused.
“Bad idea,” he managed to say as she advanced on him, still fully clothed, but wiggling inside those clothes in a way that reminded him of before, when they’d been lovers and blamed it on the magic.
She shook her head, seeming lit from within with excitement, with a power he’d never seen in her before as she said, “The world needs a Godkeeper.”
“Patience and Brandt are married,” he countered, telling himself to move away. But his resolve wasn’t as strong as it needed to be. It was weakened by the humming in his blood, the sparkle of power in the air, and the feel of her against him when she rose up on her toes so they were eye to eye.
Mouth to mouth.
Unable to do otherwise, he touched his lips to hers. She leaned into him, opening herself to the kiss.
The moment she did the chamber shuddered and heaved around them. And began to descend.
Nate cursed and hung on to her as the floor dropped beneath them. No, goddamn it! he shouted in his skull. Not us, not her!
He knew the theory: For a god to enter a Godkeeper, she had to be close to death, which brought her close to the gods. Then it was up to her mate to bring her back with the strongest of physical magic: the act of love. The sex would bind both man and god to the woman, linking them in an unbreakable three-way partnership.
To be chosen was the greatest honor in Nightkeeper lore. Yet if he’d been a teleport, he would’ve zapped them both the fuck out of there the moment the chamber started dropping down into the water table. He didn’t want this, didn’t want to be involved in a screwed-up cosmic business arrangement that exchanged sex for power. But the gods didn’t seem to care what he wanted, or whether he was ready for a mate, for the responsibility. He was a conscript, plucked up and press-ganged into a position that Brandt was so much better suited to, with his wife as his mate.
“The gods are fucking crazy,” he snapped, bracing his legs when the inconstant motion of the chamber rocked the floor beneath them. “Where’s the emergency exit?”
But the door was shut tight and there was no other way in or out. They were stuck there until a god’s power brought them out again. Assuming, of course, that the transition spell worked, they didn’t die in the process, and the god didn’t get stuck between the planes, as Kulkulkan had done during Leah’s transition. Which was a godsdamned lot of assumptions, as far as Nate was concerned.
Rock grated against rock as the chamber sped its descent. Alexis gave a low cry and clung to him, then seemed to realize what she was doing and tried to push away. He didn’t let her break free, holding her close until she stopped struggling and sagged against him, breath shuddering.
“I’m scared.” Her words were muffled in the fabric of his shirt, and nearly drowned out by the sound of the subterranean river that was being diverted by ancient mechanisms and magic, to fulfill the need of the gods.
“So am I.” He wrapped his arms around her, cursing the gods for taking away their free will, forcing them into a union they’d tried once before and failed to make work. He and Alexis weren’t prepared for this, hadn’t ever thought it would be them going through the ritual. He could only assume the problems between Patience and Brandt went deeper than he’d thought, or else the gods wouldn’t have bypassed them. Hell, if he and Alexis were better candidates for the spell, then the White-Eagles’ marriage was in serious trouble.
The chamber finished its grating descent, coming to rest with a resonant thud and a shudder. Scant seconds later jets of water burst from the carved skulls at the perimeter of the room. The skeletal mouths screamed the water, dousing Alexis and Nate instantly with fire-hose pressure and cold. There was no preamble, no steady build like the one Leah had described. This was a mad rush to fill the chamber. Either the gods were impatient or something was very wrong, Nate thought.
As in the fucking chamber’s broken wrong.
It wasn’t entirely clear how much of the die-and-be-reborn trick of the sacred chamber was magic and how much was thousand-year-old engineering, and that was a seriously chilling thought, because if whatever was in charge of the water flow had been broken in the cave-ins the tunnels had suffered during the fall equinox, then the chamber might not drain the way it was supposed to when the transition spell was complete.
Game over, he thought as the water climbed past his knees.
“What if this whole place is broken?” he said softly. The water was to their upper thighs now and the pressurized jets continued screaming from the skulls high above.
“It isn’t,” she said without hesitation.
“You don’t know that.”
“I have faith.”
“You want to have faith,” he contradicted, feeling dread curl. “But it’s too simple to say that what has happened before will happen again, or that it’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy. What if all that’s bullshit, just like every other religion out there, just a construct used to frame some commonsense rules?”
She looked as though she pitied him. “It must suck to be stuck inside a belief system like yours.”
“At least I’ve got a system,” he snapped. “You just let your win
ikin tell you what to think.” Inside, though, something said, What are you doing? He was being a jerk; that was what. And he was doing it because he was scared. The water was cool, almost cold, reaching past his chest and threatening to buoy him off the floor. He let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I take it back. I’m being an ass because I’m not sure what else I can do.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point.” Her words were matter-of-fact, but her eyes were wide and scared, and she was trembling. Then the water snuffed the torches, plunging them into darkness. She gave a short scream, then muffled it.
He caught her arm and drew her close, making sure they could find each other in the darkness. The water wasn’t glowing, and there wasn’t any noise or wind, which didn’t match up with how Strike and Leah had described their experience. Those details only added to his worry that the chamber mechanism wasn’t working right.
If this was the end for them, he didn’t want the last thing between them to be anger. Softening his voice and gathering her close, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Lexie.”
Her voice went hollow and very small. “Me too.”
Working by feel and instinct, he found her lips with his in a kiss that was part apology, part wish that things had, in the end, been different for them.
Then the water closed over both their heads. He couldn’t hear the incoming rush anymore, couldn’t hear beyond the pounding of his heartbeat, couldn’t feel much of anything in the cool numbness except her lips against his. She hung on to him, her fingers digging into him for a moment, then two . .
. then loosening and falling away.
Wishing he’d done it differently, that he’d been a better man all along, he held Alexis close and pictured the woman of his dreams. He whispered her name and let himself imagine the impossible as he kissed her and let out the last of his air, resigning himself to death.
White-gold light detonated in his skull. And then he was falling.
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