A year ago, Sven would’ve laughed his ass off. Now, he just wished he’d remembered to mute the damn ringer. He was low on patience, felt like crap, and wanted to get this over with so he could get some space. Normally he loved the trips to El Rey—the ruin was right on the coast, giving him a rare chance to breathe salt and see endless blue-green ocean. Now, though, he had his back to the harbor and just wanted to go home. He wanted dust in his sinuses, dry heat on his skin, and packed earth beneath his feet.
“You okay?” Patience asked in an undertone.
“Yeah.” Realizing he was bottlenecking the uplink, he refocused and channeled the magic as the phone went silent and dumped to voice mail. “Sorry.”
She shot him a worried look. “Don’t be sorry. If something’s wrong, talk to me. Or if not me, talk to someone.”
“I’m fine. Really.” He lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug, covering the wince when the move pulled at the bandage he wore on one biceps, hidden beneath his pullover.
The damn wound was taking far too long to close up. He would’ve thought his healing skills were on the fritz, except that his other injuries were doing fine. Which meant . . . shit, he didn’t know. He couldn’t even remember how he got the jagged slice. And he couldn’t think about it now. Focusing on the uplink, he kept the magic zinging around the circle as Rabbit gripped the small carving he’d gotten from a dying Xibalban mystic the year before. Although the flattened stone didn’t seem to have any real power, it had become his talisman. Now, he held it out in front of him as he leaned on the magic and cast a new spell that Jade and Lucius were hoping would work.
Magic flared around the uplink, moving smoothly and ramping up, making the air sparkle red-gold. More, the spell coalesced and took shape in an unusually visible form, a cloud of glossy glitter that was headed for Rabbit. It coalesced, sped up, took form and substance as it neared him, and then—
Without warning, it doubled back and accelerated straight into Sven.
Holy shit. He gaped as it thwumped into him feeling like a feather pillow doing forty. The impact sent him staggering back, breaking the uplink. Power flowed into him, arrowing to the injury high on his biceps, and from there dragging him straight into a vision that was more a series of impressions than anything: He breathed dust, walked on hard-packed ground that burned his feet. He was searching, searching, missing something. But what? He heard a hawk’s cry, a scurry of small feet, a death keen. Then wings flapping back up into the sky.
“Sven?” Cool hands touched him, sending magic that brought him out of the vision. “Sven, can you hear me?”
For a few seconds, the words didn’t make any sense; they were only sounds. Then they came clear, as did the sight of his teammates clustered around him as he lay flat out on the rocky ground. Sasha was bent over him, touching him, healing him.
“My arm—” he began, then broke off because she already had his sleeve up, the stained bandage off. But his skin was whole and unmarked, like he’d never been hurt.
He was searching for something, needed something, didn’t know where to find it. Hot sun. Burning feet. Thirsty. The world tunneled down, blackening at the edges and withering inward until all he could see was Sasha’s face, her eyes wide and worried, her lips shaping his name. Then dust washed across his vision and he coughed, fighting for breath, fighting the hands that tried to hold him, take him captive.
“The spell is linking to something, but I can’t follow it,” she said, her voice nearly lost beneath the howling noise of a sandstorm. “Rabbit, get in here and—”
Blackness.
Somewhere off Virginia Beach
Voices washed over Cara Liu, unintelligible at first and then slowly coming clear, followed by other sensations: a cool, wet deck beneath her, the gentle roll of waves, the smell of the ocean, the humid air that was at odds with her parched-dry mouth.
“Give her some room,” said an older-sounding woman, the kind with the built-in cluck in her voice. “Let the poor dear breathe!” The tone brought the image of a weathered sixty-something in a crazy pink sun hat as Cara’s brain came back on line—sort of—and worked to match the voice with one of the forty-three passengers on the Discovery III.
Right. She was doing the naturalist thing. Or rather, doing the “ex-journalist pretending to be a naturalist” thing. Out at sea. Whale watching.
“What happened?” The voice belonged to a man, and sounded more excited than worried. Probably one of the three bored husbands who had congregated by the snack bar.
“She was talking about migration patterns and just fainted,” clucked Crazy Hat Lady.
“We should sit her up.” Another voice, young and piping, female. One of the dozen interchangeable bouncy teens who had taken the trip together. Gymnasts, maybe, or cheerleaders.
“Wait. No, don’t move her. She might’ve hurt her spine. Someone should call the Coast Guard!” That was Bored Husband, far more interested in a possible medical emergency than humpbacks. Or maybe he just wanted to hitch a ride back to shore.
“She passed out,” said Captain Jack, having apparently descended from the pilothouse to restore order to his little kingdom. “She didn’t go overboard.”
“But—”
“I’m fine,” Cara croaked, cracking her lids and forcing herself to pull it together before Bored Hubby had her strapped to a backboard and being winched aboard a rescue chopper.
Flamingo pink straw eclipsed the sun. “Are you sure, dearie?”
“Positive. I just . . .” Cara trailed off, not sure what had happened or why. One second she had been talking about humpbacks traveling north from the Bay of Fundy, and the next, click. Lights out.
Captain Jack—fiftyish, grizzled, and straight out of central casting—eased Crazy Hat aside and held out a hand to help Cara up. “On your feet. No napping on the job, girlie.” But his eyes were kind and concerned, telegraphing: You okay?
She had been on the Disco for only a month, but he had a daughter her age who was too busy to call, and Cara had daddy issues. They had bonded instantly.
“Sorry,” she said aloud, giving him a nod. I’m okay. But she wasn’t, really. She felt like unholy crap—woozy and tired, as though she’d been up for a week. Was last night’s takeout coming back to bite her? Ugh, hope it’s not another flu.
For the past few years she had gotten every sniffle and cough within a fifty-mile radius, to the point that some of her friends joked that she might as well teach kindergarten or work at a hospital. The doctors hadn’t been able to find any real reason for it, had advised her to wear a mask. Since she couldn’t bring herself to go out in public looking like something out of a disaster movie, she lived on Airborne, vitamin C, and echinacea, and took her sick days and then some. It had cost her several good jobs. Oh, her bosses hadn’t said it directly, of course—it wasn’t kosher to can people for health problems these days. But whatever the reasons that had gone into her files, her health had been the problem. She hadn’t been able to put in the hours, and there had been a waiting list of junior reporters who could work ridiculous hours for pennies, and wouldn’t call in.
That was one reason she loved working on the Disco: Not only had Jack still hired her even after she had warned him about being a sicko, but it had turned out that the sea air was good for her—she hadn’t had to miss a single day so far. Sigh. Guess it was too much to hope that would last.
“You need to lie down?”
She shook her head at Jack’s question. “God, no.” Her sea legs were great when she was up and walking around or when the boat was moving, but she didn’t do so well with sitting—never mind lying—down for long with the boat stationary and rolling beneath her in long, undulating waves. The sway was already getting to her: A low churn of nausea checked in to join the fatigue and deck spins. She needed to get up, breathe the salt spray, feel the wind in her face, and remember that she had come a long way from who she used to be.
Summoning a bright smile for the crowd that was still gat
hered around her, she said, “Thanks for your concern, everyone, but I’m good. I’m great. Let’s get this show back on the road.”
“Take it easy for a few minutes,” Jack said. “I’ll need to hunt up a new whale.”
A glance over the railing showed that the gently swelling waves were cetacean-free. “Shoot. That was a good sighting.” She sighed. “Sorry.”
“No biggie. Won’t be hard to come up with another.” Meaning that there were plenty of big contacts on the fish finder or some chatter on the informal network of whale-watching boats and local fishing vessels that traded info in an effort to keep the cash flowing as the winter season got under way.
“Thanks.” Taking Jack’s hand, Cara boosted herself up and made it to the rail, where she breathed deeply, lungs aching when she tried to inhale all the way.
She let Crazy Hat press a lukewarm bottle of water on her and fuss about dehydration and sunstroke, even though it was only in the high fifties and she’d eaten and drunk the same thing she did every day. The clucking reminded Cara of better days, back before her mom died.
“Cluck, cluck, cluck . . . dehydrated. Unless, of course, you’re pregnant.”
Those last two words brought Cara’s head whipping around so fast that a few white strands from her skunk stripe escaped from her ponytail and draped in her face. “No.” When the older woman recoiled, Cara exhaled. “Sorry. But no. No chance of that.”
She might believe in magic, but she didn’t believe in immaculate conception.
As Crazy Hat fussed, winding down, she chugged the rest of the water, which felt lumpy, like it was catching on something lodged in her throat. Beneath her, the Disco’s engines thrummed as they got back under way.
The others had dispersed, Bored Husband no doubt to the snack bar, most of the others to the railing, where they elbowed each other and scanned the horizon, competing to be the first to “thar she blows” it. Usually, Cara found the thrill of the hunt infectious; it was another of the reasons she had taken the job. That, and the surprising discovery that she, a born-and-raised Midwesterner, freaking loved being out at sea. Now, though, she couldn’t summon any enthusiasm. What was more, she suddenly felt out of place, like she didn’t belong there. Or, rather, like she needed to be somewhere else, right now.
Images flashed through her. Urges. She saw herself boarding a plane. Renting a car. Moving fast and traveling light, heading southwest, to where ancient pueblos overlooked wide-open canyons and the sea was a distant memory.
“Did you hurt your wrist, dearie?”
“No, I . . .” Cara trailed off as she glanced down and realized that she’d been rubbing her inner right forearm. Oh, shit. She should’ve caught on quicker, would have if she didn’t feel so crappy. But although this wasn’t the first time she had felt something echo through the severed blood-bond, it was by far the worst. Bad enough, even, to bring a stab of concern for a brother who wasn’t hers by blood. “Excuse me. I need to make a call.” She lurched away from Crazy Hat and headed for the stairs leading up to the wheelhouse, feeling like she was thirty fathoms down and walking against a stiff undertow, with everything happening in slow motion.
Jack met her at the door. “You’re lying down. Now.”
“I need to make a private call.”
“Cara. Honey.” He looked at her closely, and she could practically see him adding twenty-something single female plus fainting plus nausea and coming to the same conclusion Crazy Hat had reached.
She didn’t correct him, because it wasn’t like she could tell him the truth. She just said, “Please, Jack. It’s important.”
He checked his course, made a couple of adjustments, and then got on the radio to connect to a landline. When it was ready to go, he waved her to his high swivel chair and motioned that he would leave her alone. “I’ll need to get back in here in ten minutes or so. Charter says there’s a couple of big males spyhopping up by them.”
“This won’t take long.”
When he was gone, she took a deep breath. Or tried to, anyway. There wasn’t room enough in her lungs for the oxygen she needed, strengthening the drum of fear until it overcame the dread. Almost.
“Number, please?” That was the operator, probably tired of listening to heavy breathing.
She gave it automatically, then listened to the call ringing on the other end. She tried not to picture the phone sitting on the marble-topped counter in the big open kitchen, tried not to guess who was on comm duty, who would be walking to the phone, picking it up, and—
“Hello?” a man’s voice said.
She couldn’t place it. Not her father, certainly. Had she been away so long that she had forgotten the others?
“This is Cara,” she said. “I need to talk to my father.”
There was a beat of silence. Then, “And who would that be?”
She wouldn’t have thought she could feel any shit-tier and still be upright. Wrong. Breathing shallowly through a stab of pain, she said, “I’m Carlos’s daughter.” She should’ve stopped there, but couldn’t help saying, “Out of sight, out of mind, huh?”
“Not really. I’m the new guy. Which is why I’m on comm and gate duty.” He paused. “Well, that and because the others still aren’t sure what to do with me.” Before she could process that, he continued: “Carlos is out getting supplies. You want his cell number? Oh, duh. You probably have it.”
No, she didn’t. And she couldn’t handle this, any of it. But it was clear that the winikin, at least the ones back at Skywatch, didn’t know there was something very wrong. “You call him, please. Tell him he needs to find Sven, fast. There’s something . . .” She trailed off, choked up. Whispered, “Just tell him for me, okay?”
She cut the call before he could say anything, ask anything, knowing that her father would do what needed to be done. Then she bolted for the head. And was miserably sick.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
December 14
Bandera Crater and Ice Cave
New Mexico
The sign at the end of the access road identified the privately owned attraction as the LAND OF FIRE AND ICE. Which didn’t half suck, Reese had decided.
The site offered two short hikes: one to ogle the blown-out cone of the Bandera volcano, the other to climb down inside a kiva-shaped cave where a combination of water seepage and convection airflow created a crazy microenvironment that never got above freezing. The underground pool at the bottom of the cave was perpetually frozen and glowed green in the sun, tinted by a strain of algae that was otherwise found only in the Arctic. Most of the long-ago tribes in the region—and those who traveled to it from afar—had called it Winter Lake and mined it for ice. But Lucius had turned up a reference in a British explorer’s journal that described seeing thirteen warrior-priests wearing serpent-headed masks and making blood sacrifices to call the rain god.
Ancient sacred site, check. Pro-snake ritual, check. And it was located right at the southern point of the compass cross that could be drawn from the places where the other artifacts had been found. Granted, the pattern assumed that ten years earlier, when Keban had told Dez that the star demon was coming to him courtesy of Montezuma, he wasn’t using an alternate spelling of the god-king Moctezuma’s name, but rather talking about the Palace of Montezuma, which was a Pueblo ruin located just over the Arizona border. Given that the compass lines connecting north to south and east to west then crossed directly over Chaco Canyon, Reese was just fine with the assumption. More, one of the local black-market guys she had tracked down was holding an endangered rattlesnake for pickup by a guy with a scarred face, who had put in the order a week ago and paid cash.
This was the place. It had to be. And tonight was the night; the Gemenid meteor shower would be starting soon.
But as she and Dez, both lightly shielded by his magic, slipped past the locked entrance gate for the third night in a row and followed the cow pasture–flanked road to the trading post that marked the trail-heads, it bothered her that they hadn
’t been able to pinpoint Keban. Hell, they hadn’t even caught a whiff of him. Granted, the winikin had been trained to disappear, and he would have gone deeper under once he knew Dez was after him, but still. It didn’t feel right.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she murmured as they passed the trading post and took the ice cave trail, the details gone green behind her night-vision goggles. She was very aware of Dez, sleek and solid beside her, his movements predator-smooth in the darkness. Despite her best intentions and the fact that they had been strictly hands off over the past three days, focusing on the job, his taste and the way he had felt inside her seemed burned into her neurons. “Can you sense him?” she asked, voice sharper than it needed to be.
He shook his head. “I’m not getting a damn thing.” Which could mean that although Keban’s potions couldn’t knock him out anymore, they could still camouflage the winikin’s scent trail . . . or it could mean there was nothing to sense.
“He’ll be here,” she said as they moved off again. He had to show up. Not that they wanted to fight for the two-faced mask, but they needed to get their hands on the white god’s head and the red skybearer, too. And they needed to do it before Iago got wind of the weapon’s existence. The Nightkeepers had the black star demon safely locked up behind a heavy, magic-cloaking ward, but still.
White, red, black, yellow, she thought, because they were expecting the two-faced mask to be made of yellow stone. Once she had figured out the trick of what they had taken to calling the compass artifacts, Lucius had come up with another layer to the symbolism: In Nightkeeper lore, each direction was associated with a color and certain traits. Black-west was the power of shadows and dreams, as well as the ability to shake things up. Which was Dez in a nutshell, and explained why he had connected so strongly with the star demon, but hadn’t felt the same pull to the white god’s head, which represented truth, integrity, and the winds of change. Red-east represented inspiration, passion, and flashiness; no doubt he’d click with the skybearer statue when they got their hands on it. Not so much the two-faced mask, though, because yellow-south was connected with patience and balance, neither of which was his forte.
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