Spellfire

by Jessica Andersen

  Ew. Rabbit didn’t say anything, half-afraid his old man would elaborate.

  “I didn’t know where I was or who I was with. I just went where I was told, did what I was told, and when Anntah put me together with his daughter in a hut some ways away from the village . . . well. Anyway. We did what we did, and I don’t remember any of it. All I know was that the next morning, I woke up alone, hungover and feeling like shit. And when I tried to leave, I couldn’t. The door was locked, and what I thought was a hut turned out to be a cage.” His flat, cold voice gained an edge. “Every night after that for a couple of months, it was the same fucking thing. The food, the drugs, his daughter. Turns out old Anntah had been looking for the last surviving Nightkeeper for a long time. I guess he had a prophecy to fulfill.”

  Rabbit’s Coke can was a crumpled mess, though he didn’t remember crushing it. He just stared at it—easier than staring at his old man—for the first time realizing the familiar logo was the color of blood. “He was trying to breed the crossover. Half Nightkeeper, half Xibalban.”

  Somewhere far away from his conscious mind, his stomach was knotted and his heart thudded a sickly, sticky beat. But inside his brain there wasn’t much going on except a whole lot of buzzing and a couple of neon flashes of “Does not compute.” In a way it did compute, though, which was a bitter damn pill to swallow. Because Anntah hadn’t just given Rabbit the stone eccentric, he’d been the one to tell him he was the crossover, the key to the war . . . and he was the one who’d convinced him that the demons were the true gods and the sky gods were his enemies. He’d planted the seeds.

  More lies. And Rabbit had bought into every fucking one of them. He’d been so ego-blinded, so ready to believe that he was right and everyone else was wrong, that he’d jumped on the godsdamned bandwagon.

  “He wasn’t just trying to breed the crossover,” Red-Boar said. “He succeeded.”

  All Rabbit could think was: Don’t puke. Coke in reverse hurt like a bitch, but what other response was there to learning that you’d been bred like a fucking science experiment? “Go on.”

  Maybe his old man’s eyes softened a little. Maybe not. Probably not. “After a couple of months, there weren’t any more drugs and she stopped coming around. They kept me there, though, locked up like an animal. A stud dog they were just warehousing in case they needed to rebreed their bitch.”

  Rabbit made an inarticulate noise as the last of his illusions crumbled. He’d been looking for his mother, thinking that learning about her would help, when, really, it just made shit worse. He hadn’t had a loving mother, a twin brother, or a father who gave a crap. And Anntah had been his grandfather, his creator. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?

  “At first I raved,” Red-Boar continued, “or just sat there like a godsdamned lump. Eventually, though, I started sharpening up, coming out of the place I’d been since the massacre. I finally wrapped my head around the fact that Cassie and the boys were gone. I knew I had to get away and warn the others that the Xibalbans were real, and, worse, that they were working toward their end-date prophecies even though the barrier was sealed off. So I pretended I was still out of it, and waited for my chance. And I listened. The villagers didn’t think twice about what they were saying when they brought my food. That was how I found out what Anntah and the others were trying to do. What the crossover was supposed to mean.”

  Unable to sit still anymore, Rabbit got up, grabbed a couple more drinks—beers this time, because who gave a fuck that it wasn’t even noon?—set one in front of his old man and plonked back down in his seat, feeling like gravity was working on him harder than it ever had before.

  “Drink,” he ordered. “Then tell me. For fuck’s sake, it’s time to rip off the godsdamned Band-Aid already.” Anger fisted hard and heavy in his chest, but there was no point in being pissed that his old man had taken this long to tell him. What was done was done.

  Yeah, another beer or five, and I might even believe that. So he hammered his first while his old man was still popping the top.

  Red-Boar took a couple of swigs, and said, “Yeah. Fuck it all. Yeah. You’re right.” Which didn’t feel like the victory it once would have, especially when the Nightkeepers had been busting their asses trying to figure out the crossover’s secrets . . . and Red-Boar had known them all along. Bastard.

  But, bastard or not, he was talking now. “The way Anntah and the others saw it, the crossover was going to be their Messiah. He was going to win the war for them, lead them to the promised land, what the fuck ever. So the first thing they had to do was make sure he was born the way their prophecies said—from the union of a lone survivor with a princess of the blood. Or some such shit.” Red-Boar’s tone wasn’t nearly so dismissive as his words, though, probably because the prophecy had come true. “When I heard that, I knew I couldn’t leave you there.”

  “You . . . oh.” The beer hit Rabbit hard, making his head spin.

  “I waited until you were a few months old. Then, when the guards started to look at me with enough pity that I knew it was only a matter of time before they killed me, tying up loose ends, I decided to make my move. I saw my chance one night, and I took it. I got out, grabbed you, set a couple of the huts on fire as a distraction, and bolted.” He said it matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t in the process of confetti-ing Rabbit’s whole damn existence. “I should’ve killed them all. Would have if it hadn’t been for you slowing me down.”

  It was yet another in a long line of the “if it wasn’t for you” comments Rabbit had heard all his life, but where it might’ve stung before, now the dig was indistinguishable from the rest of the shitstorm going on inside him. How could his old man’s version and Phee’s be so fucking different, yet both fit the evidence? Fact: Red-Boar had flipped his lid, disappeared into the rain forest, and had come out a few years later with a kid in tow. Fact: He’d never been what you’d call an affectionate father. Hell, there had been more than a few times Rabbit had been pretty sure that his own father had hated him, wished he’d never been born. Now he knew why. He hadn’t been a baby; he’d been a fucking hybrid. To the Xibalbans, he’d been a weapon, to his old man, a threat.

  Swallowing past the aftertaste of a beer he already regretted, he said, “Why didn’t you tell anybody where I came from, what I might be capable of? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The stubborn set of the old man’s jaw got harder. “That wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “You don’t know that.” Rabbit told himself not to bother, that it was enough that he knew the truth now, but the churn in his gut wouldn’t let him leave it alone. Who the hell was he supposed to be? What was he supposed to do now that he knew where he’d really come from? Ignore it? Forget it? Use it? Voice close to cracking, he got out, “Why didn’t you just kill me? Fuck knows it wasn’t like you wanted me.”

  If there was ever a time for Red-Boar to say something kind—or even uncruel—this was it. But all he managed was: “Anntah would’ve known you were gone. He would’ve tried to recapture me—or find someone else he thought might work—and breed another crossover. This way, as long as I could keep us off his radar screen, I could control things and keep you from getting your hands on the magic . . . or at least I thought I could.”

  Another piece of Rabbit’s childhood puzzle thudded into place—it explained why his old man had barred him from the little shrine he’d set up wherever they’d lived, and why he’d refused to tell him any of the old stories, though Jox and the others had. It explained why he’d refused to accept Rabbit as a magic user even when the evidence had been right there in front of him, and why he’d refused to let him go through an official bloodline ceremony. It even explained why his old man hadn’t ever warmed to him, even a little.

  Didn’t make it right, though.

  Anger settled, cold and bitter in Rabbit’s stomach, and maybe the vault cracked open a little. It was hard to tell when two decades worth of resentment felt so much like the burn of dark ma
gic. “Sorry to disappoint you. I never was very good at controlling myself . . . or being controlled.”

  Red-Boar looked past him, out the window to where the sun was beating down like it was just another day, not potentially one of the last nine. “You’re pissed, and maybe you’ve got a right to be.”

  “Maybe?”

  He looked back with a glint of anger. “Haven’t you learned a godsdamned thing? How about you get your head out of your ass and focus on your damned priorities? The gods sent me to bring you back here for a reason. It’s not just the Xibalbans you can help—you can help the Nightkeepers, too. And that means blocking off the dark magic. Whatever you need to do, you can do it with light magic.”

  Rabbit might’ve been telling himself the same damn thing, but that didn’t stop him from baring his teeth. “Is that what the gods told you when they sent you back? Or are you just making this up as you go along?”

  Red-Boar pushed abruptly to his feet. “If I knew what you were supposed to be doing—or how you were supposed to be doing it—I would’ve told you right off the fucking bat.”

  “Like you told me about my mother?”

  “Does any of that help with what we’re up against right now? Dez didn’t think so, and neither do I. But he told me to give you the whole story, so there it is.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rabbit muttered, not just to blaspheme and piss off his old man, but because there didn’t seem to be much else he could say. As his father turned for the door, though, he said, “Wait. Why did you name me ‘Rabbit’?”

  Red-Boar turned back, brows drawing together. “Seriously? That’s your biggest question?”

  “No, it’s not, but I’ll save the rest for Lucius or someone else who gives a shit about figuring this out. Because, guess what? I’m doing everything I can to get this right. I took your oath, I’m training my ass off, and I’m blocking the hell out of the dark magic. What’s more, I’m damn well going to figure out what the crossover is supposed to do, and I’m going to fucking do it, no matter what it takes.” The words came out with the force of a vow. “Right now, though, I’m asking you this one question, and you damn well owe me an answer. Why ‘Rabbit’?”

  “I didn’t name you. They did . . . and you answered to it, so I didn’t bother changing it.”

  Rabbit didn’t mistake that for compassion. “Fine. Why did they pick the name?”

  There was a long pause—long enough that he thought his old man was going to blow him off. But then, grudgingly, Red-Boar said, “They named you after the Rabbit shadow in the moon. It’s an old legend. Xibalban. Aztec. Whatever. Supposedly, the god Quetzlcoatl was on a long journey, but he couldn’t find any food. He was damn near close to starving when he came on a rabbit eating grass, and rather than running away, the rabbit sacrificed itself so the god could survive. Quetzlcoatl was so grateful that he put the rabbit’s image up on the full moon, etched out in its shadow half. He said that way mankind would always know about the rabbit’s sacrifice.”

  A shiver tried to crawl its way down Rabbit’s vertebrae. “So what does that make me?”

  “Either a hero, or somebody’s fucking dinner. You figure it out.” With that, Red-Boar shoved through the door and stumped down the short stairs, leaving Rabbit sitting there staring after him and feeling like . . . shit, he didn’t know what he was feeling right now. All he knew was that he was glaring at the kitchen door with his stomach tied in fucking knots in a way it hadn’t been in years. Not since the old man died.

  Fuck. Don’t go there.

  He wasn’t that pissed-off, lonely kid anymore. He didn’t think the world owed him an explanation or even a break. He had to think this through. What had the Xibalbans wanted from him back when he was born? What did the gods want now? A little help here?

  “Shit.” Shoving away from the table, he surged to his feet and stood there for a moment, seeing the long-gone oinking cookie jar and fridge magnets that’d been in Red-Boar’s old cottage when he and Rabbit moved back in twenty-four years after the massacre. The boar-themed dust collectors were long gone, just like his old man should’ve been, but suddenly Rabbit couldn’t stay there one second longer. But he didn’t want to be in the mansion, either, and the thought of heading back up to the pueblo made his stomach lurch.

  Suck it up. Don’t be a pussy. Just fucking deal. The words trickled through his mind, maybe in his own voice, maybe in the old man’s. But for the first time in a long time—maybe ever—they didn’t resonate. Instead, they chimed faintly wrong, like some part of him was saying, Been there, done that.

  Yeah, he’d sucked it up, he’d dealt, and he’d ended up wound so fucking tight that it hadn’t taken much for him to implode. And maybe what had happened before would happen again, but that didn’t mean it had to happen exactly the same. He could do things different, do them better. Which meant finding someone to talk to, someone he trusted to give him a reality check.

  Except there was really only one person he trusted like that . . . and she didn’t want anything to do with him.

  “Leave her alone,” he said, the words echoing in the kitchen he and Myr used to share. “She’s better off without you, and you need to learn to deal with that.” Wasn’t like he had much time to make the adjustment, either.

  He couldn’t do it in the cottage, though—there were too many memories there, too much old stuff pressing in on him from all sides. So he headed out, not following his old man toward the mansion, but turning the other way instead.

  If the pueblo was where he’d always gone to embrace a state of temporary amnesia, the cacao grove was where he went to find some approximation of peace. He’d always felt at home in the rain forests and Mayan highlands. Maybe it was because he’d been conceived there, born there, but he didn’t want to think about that right now. And as he paused at the edge of the cacao grove, it didn’t matter why; it only mattered that his brain slowed down somewhat and the anger dulled as he inhaled the soft, tropical air.

  Yeah. This would help.

  Exhaling, he entered the grove, pushing past shrubby cacao trees that reached to touch him with leafy fingers. The sense that the sunlight was warmer here came from the power of suggestion, he knew, as did the phantom cry of a parrot and the smell of vanilla.

  Except the scent of vanilla wasn’t his imagination, he thought, pausing as his instincts went on alert. The smell was really there. More, there was a faint crackle coming from up ahead, along with a skim of magic.

  He told himself to walk away. He followed the sound instead, and when it led him to a small grove he hadn’t realized was there, he hesitated in the shadows, and stared.

  Myrinne sat cross-legged at the edge of a circle of stones that danced with flickering green flames. She was wearing wide-legged jeans, a woven green belt that sparkled in the light, and a green T-shirt that moved with her body as she gestured and then whispered a chant he couldn’t quite hear, but that sent the blood thrumming through his veins and made the air around him sizzle with Nightkeeper power.

  She stilled suddenly. Maybe he had made a noise, or maybe she had felt the answering surge of his magic; he didn’t know. But her head came up, her hand went for the pistol that lay beside her, and she said softly, “Hello?”

  “It’s me.” He moved out of the shadows. “I didn’t know you were here. I was just . . .” He trailed off, because it didn’t matter why he’d come, or that he suddenly wondered whether some part of him had known she was here. “Never mind. I’ll go.” He took a step back.

  “Wait.” The word was low, ragged.

  He froze in place as her eyes softened and—incredibly, impossibly—he saw a glimmer of warmth, an echo of the way the girl she used to be had looked at the guy he’d been.

  “Sit.” She pointed to the opposite side of the fire. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Myr cursed herself as he crossed the grove. She should’ve told him to get lost the moment she sensed him, should tell him that now. Things would be a whole
lot easier if they stayed away from each other. Problem was, easier wasn’t necessarily better. Especially not now.

  As he took a seat opposite her, she murmured a few words and cast a handful of salt into the fire.

  Tendrils of darker green threaded within the flames and the scent changed, making her think of the sea. Leaning in, she breathed the salted smoke and felt the sharp edges smooth out. “It’s a cleansing ritual,” she told him, though he hadn’t asked. “It’s supposed to help you cast out doubt. The salt represents us anchoring ourselves to the earth, while the flames are the way we move through our fear.”

  He leaned in and took a deep breath, then held the scented smoke for a moment before he let it out on a sigh, and said, “You don’t need to doubt me, Myr, or be afraid of me. I’ve learned my lessons when it comes to the dark magic.” His voice was low, his eyes intense, and even though they were no longer linked, she could sense that he was telling the absolute truth . . . at least as he saw it, right here and now.

  But she shook her head. “It’s not just about me doubting you, Rabbit. It’s more about us doubting ourselves, and each other.” She paused. “I was going to come find you later today.”

  “Oh?” The word carried a note of wary surprise.

  She knew he must think she was afraid of him. Why wouldn’t he? She’d run away from him. She had been more overwhelmed than anything, though, and she’d had the night to think it through. And when she came down to it, their past didn’t matter right now. The kiss didn’t even matter, really. It couldn’t. What mattered was that he’d squelched the dark magic rather than give in to it. She didn’t sense it in him anymore, didn’t see it in his eyes. And he needed to become the crossover.

  So she said, “I owe you an apology.”

  “You don’t owe me a damn thing.”

  “Maybe not on balance, but this needs to be said.” She couldn’t smell the salt anymore, couldn’t taste it at the back of her throat. Her senses had gotten used to it, she thought, just like the two of them had gotten so used to how things were between them that they hadn’t noticed when the dynamic had gradually changed. “Yesterday, when I saw you with the dark magic, I remembered something you said to me that morning.”