Magic Unchained n-7

by Jessica Andersen

  Zane, on the other hand… well, they would have to see.

  “He thinks he’s part Nightkeeper,” Rabbit said, channeling the info he was getting from the winikin. “It was a family legend that his twice-great-grandmother had a child with either her own Nightkeeper charge or another member of his family, putting mage blood into the mix. That’s why Zane was trying to sacrifice Cara—he was looking to activate his supposedly latent Nightkeeper powers. It looks like when he first got here, he had a couple of dreams that reminded him of the coyote cave and gave him delusions of grandeur mixed up with some sort of divine plan. He fixated on Cara, first as his mate, then as his sacrifice.”

  “Did he talk about it to anybody other than Lora?” Cara asked at almost the same time Sven said, “Did he have anything to do with those creatures showing up at the funeral?”

  “Give me a minute.” It took Rabbit longer than that to find the information on Lora, whom Zane had barely registered as more than a spare set of hands. The attack was easier to dial into. “I don’t think you’ve got any other traitors to worry about; it was just him most of the time, with Lora helping out at the end, once she really started cracking under the pressure. As for the attack, he didn’t know anything about it beforehand, but decided it was a sign telling him to act now.”

  After a few more questions and answers that didn’t really add anything to the mix, Dez sighed and said, “I think he’s tapped out. Rabbit, what do you think about reprogramming him?”

  “Same as with Lora, I can change his memories of the past ten months so he thinks he fell in with a doomsday cult that was pretending to be the Nightkeepers, and scramble it around enough so he won’t come looking for us.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ in there,” Dez commented.

  “Not intentionally.”

  “But…”

  “Shit.” It felt way hypocritical to rat out a guy whose brain felt more than a little familiar, but Rabbit told himself it was the differences that mattered. “Using Lora was easy for him, and so was leaving Cara in that cave to die. He’s not a full-on sociopath like Iago, and not crazy like Iago was at the end, either. But he’s not hooked into an ethical code, either human or Nightkeeper. I can change his memories, but I can’t promise he won’t do something else if we let him go. He’s… predatory. Hungry. I don’t think that’s going to go away.”

  “So what do you think? Should we let him go?”

  “I… I’m not sure.” It felt seriously weird that he was being asked to comment on Zane’s moral character, when he himself was a half-blood screwup who had burned down several million dollars’ worth of other people’s property and fallen prey to Iago’s mind games over and over again, jeopardizing the Nightkeepers in the process. He was the Master of Disaster, the guy who gave Murphy’s Law a bad name.… There was no way he was qualified to make this call.

  A little help here, gods? Rabbit thought, automatically using his magic to shape the words into a prayer, even though it had been a long time since his prayers had done anything but rattle around inside him. Instead of rattling, though, the prayer whooshed out of him, disappearing and taking some of his magic with it, and leaving stunned silence behind.

  Holy shit. What just happened? Heart kicking up a dozen notches, Rabbit sought the prayer, tried to follow it, but came up against the blank walls that bounded his consciousness instead. What the hell? Where did it go? Part of his problem was not knowing whether he was supposed to be praying to the sky or the underworld, not knowing what to think or believe. Were the sky gods the saviors the Nightkeepers thought them, or were they lying schemers, like Zane here?

  Hello? he called, hearing it rattle. Anyone?

  In the outside world, the others were discussing Zane’s fate. Sven said, “We can’t just let him go. Not with that inside him. What if we—”

  Out of nowhere, a power surge hit Rabbit, making his blood sing. It poured through the walls of his mind, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. The rattles got louder and louder, sounding like a crazed mariachi band trying to do “Radar Love” on fast-forward; they swirled around him, tightened in on him, blotted out everything except the noise and the magic.

  He must’ve fogged out for a minute, because when things cleared, he heard the others still talking about what to do with Zane. They hadn’t felt the surge. How was that possible?

  Because this power is yours alone, Rabbie.

  Mama!? The word burst from him with such a rush of hope and joy that it almost made it all the way back to his body, to be shouted aloud.

  Careful. Some secrets are better kept until you know more. Finish quickly here and then come to me.

  The power snapped out of being, though its echo remained. Rabbit’s heart thudded happily in his ears; the flop sweats were gone, along with his hesitation over what to do with Zane. He was powered up, jazzed, ready to get on with things as he tuned back in to the conversation.

  Cara was saying, “I don’t like it. What’s more, the others are going to be pissed if they find out your idea of ‘releasing’ Zane was to stick him in a mental institution and fake the paperwork to keep him there through the end date. You’re getting dangerously close to imprisoning winikin to avoid a mutiny.”

  “Trust me,” Dez said. “I’m aware of the parallels. But not everything Scarred-Jaguar did was one hundred percent wrong. And, besides, the rumors are your problem.”

  “We’ll tell ’em he was mind-bent and released,” Sven said promptly. “They don’t need to know the rest. And, Cara, seriously? Admit it. You don’t want him released all the way, either. You know what he’s capable of.”

  She made a noise of disgust, but subsided.

  “So I should get started?” Rabbit asked, trying not to let his real body jitter with suppressed excitement the same way his mental projection was doing inside Zane’s skull.

  “Yeah,” Dez said. “Do it. We’ll deal with the logistics.”

  Working fast, riding high on the power that was apparently his alone—the others sure didn’t seem to notice it—Rabbit slapped heavy blocks around Zane’s key memories of Skywatch and the people inside it, repressing them and installing new surface memories that turned the training compound into an encampment hidden in the Blue Mountains, the Nightkeepers into a doomsday militia that was raided and scattered.

  All the while, he was acutely aware of the power flowing through him. It wasn’t dark magic but wasn’t fully light, either. It was his mother’s magic, now his own.

  Gods, he had almost started to believe she’d been a dream.

  “Rabbit? You okay?” The question came in Dez’s voice. “You need a break?”

  “Nope, I’m almost finished.” Hurrying now, he soldered the last few blocks into place and added a couple of fail-safes, along with giving Zane a newfound craving for garlic pickles, because he liked Cara, damn it, and the bastard had messed with her. He might have done more—how’s a little erectile dysfunction sound, there, Zane, old boy?—but the magic was tugging him back toward his cottage, to the place where he’d hidden the two eccentrics.

  He could feel the small carvings vibrating, yearning to be together for the first time since he’d discovered the second one. He didn’t know how or why, but the channel for communication was wide-open, waiting for him to tap into it.

  “He’s all set,” he said as he started backing out of Zane’s consciousness layer by layer. Where he usually had to brace himself to pull out when he’d been so deeply enmeshed, now there was just a faint tug of conscience, a protest from the part of himself that remembered what it felt like to have his own brain fucked with, and regretted having to do it to someone else, even a traitor.

  Then he was out of Zane’s mind and back in his own, blinking to clear his vision while the others talked over his head. The room spun. The magic heated, calling him, begging him.

  “Gotta go,” he mumbled, shoving abruptly to his feet and heading for the door of the small storage room–slash–prison cell. “Need to…” He pant
omimed barfing. “He’s fine. He’s good. Send him wherever he’s gonna go.”

  Cara took a couple of steps toward him. “Do you need something? Food? Help back to your cottage?” As much as she tried not to be a winikin, she was a nurturer at heart. Not that she would thank him for saying it, even if he could get a coherent sentence through the pounding beat of magic that filled his head.

  “No. I’m fine,” he managed, though he didn’t think any of them were buying it. “Just need a bathroom.”

  He made it upstairs to the one on the mansion’s main floor, locked the door, and turned on the water in the sink to cover any telltale noises. Then he yanked his knife, blooded his palms, and sank to the tiled floor opposite the john, his body going heavy and lax as he focused inward, knowing what he had to do and sensing that he was running out of time, the channel of communication threatening to fade if he didn’t get it right.

  Concentrating so hard that sweat popped down his spine and chilled against the cool marble of the bathroom wall, he thought of the eccentrics, stuck in separate socks at the bottom of a drawer. Telekinesis was his weakest talent, but with all the magic rocketing through him right then, he could’ve moved a frigging mountain.

  Instead, he eased the eccentrics out of their socks and slid them together, all of it happening inside his underwear drawer. He felt the pieces move, felt them click into place and fuse. The universe seemed to take a breath and hold it. Then there was a soundless detonation inside him, a boom of pressure. For a second his perceptions lurched and grayed out.… And when they cleared, he found himself standing in the middle of a blasted desert that wasn’t like anything he’d ever experienced before.

  What… the… fuck?

  He turned a full circle, seeing only gray and more gray: an ashen landscape of dunes and black, twisted trees with a horizon of a black, featureless sky.

  It looked like the in-between, the wasteland that separated the plane of the living from that of the dead, and where souls could walk forever and never get anywhere, looping endlessly until they were ready to begin their journey through Xibalba, where they would be tested and earn their way—maybe, hopefully—to reincarnation. But the in-between didn’t have a fitful breeze that brought him the sharp, acrid smell of ashes, and it was the reddish brown of sky and soil, not corpse gray. More, this didn’t feel like any of the other planes he’d ever been to. If anything, it felt like home, like the earthly plane.

  Only it sure as shit didn’t look like it.

  A shiver worked its way through him. “Mother?” Although he’d called her “mama” before, that was for kids. And he didn’t know her, not really.

  I am here.

  He spun and found her behind him, though she hadn’t been there an instant earlier. As before, she wore flowing white and had pale, gleaming eyes. This time, though, she wasn’t translucent. Her body was solid and her bare feet left marks in the ashes. She was really there.

  Hello, Rabbie. Her words still sounded in his head, not aloud, but they were stronger now, in a voice that stirred long-buried memories, as did the name.

  Rabbie. It had been circling inside his head for days now, alternately warming him and depressing the shit out of him, until he’d felt like a fucking seesaw or a dippy bird or something, zigzagging between extremes of emotion underlaid with the deep, dark fear that it had been a onetime thing, that he’d never see her again.

  And now here they were.

  He reached for her, needing to touch, but his hand passed right through her image. His gut hollowed out on the realization that wherever they were, he was the ghost. That brought a big-ass chill crawling down his spine, as did the realization that he couldn’t feel the magic anymore, as if he’d used it up… or he was in a place where magic didn’t work.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “Is this the dark barrier?” The shiver dug in and got claws, but beneath it there was a thread of excitement. Iago might have blocked him from using the dark magic, but the connection—and the fascination—remained.

  It’s not where that matters, but when. This is your home at the dawn of the coming new year.

  “My…” Sharp horror flooded him as the twisted black stumps around him stopped looking like random trees and started looking way too familiar. One huge, charred stump rose up above a cluster of smaller tree-skeletons. Beyond that, what he’d initially thought was a series of dunes started looking like the folded-in remains of a steel building buried beneath a layer of ash.

  He didn’t need to look behind himself to know that the other dunes were more buildings set in an achingly familiar pattern. And even though he’d never fit in quite right at Skywatch, never been able to fall into lockstep with the others, his heart shuddered.

  Gone. All of it… gone.

  He could barely breathe as he flashed back to how it used to be, before things got serious and the fun stuff fell by the wayside. He saw bodies crowding and elbows bumping at the tables, the winikin-manned Weber grills set up off to one side, a bruising ball game working its way up and down the open area where the old Great Hall had been, and dappled shadows of sunlight coming down through the lush green leaves of the ceiba tree that marked the center of Skywatch, the heart of their tiny village.

  He saw Patience and Brandt, who had taken him in after his old man died, making him feel as welcome as he ever had; he saw their twin sons, Harry and Braden, who had worshiped their Unc’ Rabbit and whom he still missed, even knowing they were safer in hiding. He saw Myrinne in the middle of the game, laughing as she fought Strike for possession of the tough rubber ball. He saw Leah, Anna, Sasha, Cara…

  Gone.

  “We lost the war,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “Or we’re going to lose it. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  No. This is one possible future. It is what will be unless you wish it otherwise. Her eyes kindled to a silver gleam that had his heart thudding once more in his chest. You are mankind’s best hope, Rabbie. The old shaman was right: You must become the crossover and persuade the Nightkeepers to turn away from the sky gods and support the Banol Kax in their fight.… Or else mankind’s champions will lose the war, and the world will become what you see around you.

  The crossover. Gods. He sucked in a breath, pulse bumping as the part of him that had been sliding to despair did an about-face and beelined for wary hope. But that hope had a problem of its own. “They won’t listen to me,” he said, hating the shame of the truth. If he’d been a different person, lived a different life, maybe the Nightkeepers would’ve paid more attention. As it was, he’d blown up so much shit over the years they wouldn’t—couldn’t—take him seriously when it came to something that went against everything they’d been raised to believe.

  You must make them.

  “How?” He had tried. Gods knew he’d tried.

  You’ll find a way. She smiled, eyes softening through the silver gleam. You’re my Rabbie. You found me… which means you can do anything.

  His chest went so tight he couldn’t breathe as his heart whispered that same silly lullaby he’d heard earlier, the one he almost remembered. Rabbie and Tristan, sitting in a tree… The song lightened the gloom within and without, making it seem as if the sun might break through the thick, choking clouds.

  Swallowing hard, he said, “I want to see Tristan.” He hadn’t acknowledged the need even to himself, hadn’t realized how important it was to him until his question was met with a telling silence and a dimming of her eyes, and his heart fucking fell to his toes. “Why not?”

  It’s complicated, my sweet Rabbie.

  “I need…”

  You must be brave, baby. More important, you must work alone. Tristan can’t help you, and my powers are limited. And be warned: When you go up against the system, everyone you know will turn against you.

  He shook his head. “Not Myrinne.” If anything, this would bring them closer together, because he would finally be doing what she’d been on him to try for months now. Longer.

  Ev
en her. Especially her. The answer was immediate. Absolute.

  No. Impossible. Rabbit’s brain seized and then radiated pain, like he’d just chewed his way through a half gallon of Rocky Road that’d been hanging out in liquid nitrogen. “Bullshit. That’s just bullshit.”

  She is an agent of the enemy, and she’s using you.

  His stomach hollowed out instantly. “You’re lying.”

  She reached out to him, but was unable to touch. I’m sorry, Rabbie. I’m so sorry to take this away from you.

  “You’re not. You can’t.” Hands balling into fists, he started to take a step toward her, then spun and stalked away a few paces and stood, staring out over the wreckage that had been the main mansion of Skywatch.

  His mind flashed on the plaque that hung—had hung?—beside the front door, the one that showed the ceiba tree as the ancients had seen it, with its roots sunk deep in the underworld, its branches touching the sky, and its trunk supporting the earth plane and forming the heart of the village. Beneath it was—had been?—engraved the motto of the modern Nightkeepers: To protect, fight, and forgive.

  He had done all that, damn it. He had protected his teammates and by extension all of mankind; he had fought enemies on this plane, the in-between, and even in Xibalba itself. And he’d done his damnedest to forgive his old man for being a prick and a lousy father, and himself for making some pukingly bad decisions over the years. He’d protected, fought, forgiven. He’d done his best to be a good soldier, a good mage.

  Yet still he got fucked?

  Hot frustration raced through him. Why wasn’t it enough? Where was his balance, his good to even out the bad?

  There is more bad to get through before you reach the good, Rabbie. Please believe me. Please trust me in this, if you trust me in nothing else. Your good times will come.

  “When?” His voice broke on the word. He looked around at the familiar canyon, torn to shreds and filled with ash, and the grayness that stretched in all directions to meet the lifeless sky, and his righteous fury curdled at the knowledge that it would be like this in three months if he made the wrong decisions now.