Spellfire

by Jessica Andersen

  She balked. “Wait. Should you go alone? The crossover is supposed to be a lone warrior.”

  “That’s the nice thing about being a rebel. I can pick and choose my rebellions. And this is one of them.” He tightened his grip on her hand. “Besides, we were together in the visions, like Jag and Asia.” And he could protect her. More, she could protect herself.

  “Okay.” She nodded and stepped up beside him. “Let’s do this.”

  His chrono said 00:05:32. Five minutes until the magic of the Great Conjunction would kick on, another ten after that until the barrier fell all the way.

  It was time.

  With the Nightkeepers behind them, shielding and protecting them, Rabbit and Myrinne faced the cenote. Heat flared in his veins as he called on his magic, and the world went gold. And Myr was right there with him, joined through their shared magic.

  “Oh,” she breathed, tightening her fingers on his. “Yes.”

  Almost instantly, the huge pool below them bubbled and churned, foaming up with dark leaves and muck, and brighter objects that glinted in the light—artifacts, maybe, or bones. Then the waters parted and fell back as a huge, ominous shape broke the surface. At first it looked like something strange and alien, a hidden spaceship. Then the water and weeds fell away to reveal a circular platform that was rising on some ancient mechanism, traveling up along the side of the cenote, drawn by their magic.

  “It’s the floor of the sacred chamber,” Lucius confirmed. “I see the chac-mool altar!”

  They had found the intersection where Jag and Asia had triggered the massacre. Rabbit only hoped to Christ—and the six true gods—that he and Myrinne didn’t do the same.

  The chamber was huge and heavy, but it rose up like a pebble falling in reverse, until it was level with the stone outcropping. The moment it made contact, magic flared and it fused with the surrounding stone, which meant that he and Myr didn’t have to keep lifting. It also meant that the ancients knew this was going to happen somehow. Then again, so had his dreams. Because suddenly he was standing just as he had been in that last vision . . . with one very important difference.

  In the vision, he’d been alone. Now, he had Myr by his side.

  He glanced at her. “You ready for this?”

  “I’d better be.”

  A glance at Dez got the go-ahead nod. The Nightkeepers had a shield around the cenote and weapons primed. This was as good as it was going to get.

  “Please gods,” Rabbit said, and meant it. And then, united in every way possible, he and Myr lifted their bloodied hands, and began Scarred-Jaguar’s spell. “Uxmal’aach tul—”

  Wind whipped suddenly and a terrible ripping noise tore the air around them. The ground heaved, the nearby temple shuddered, and then the barrier tore at that spot, sending gray-green fog gushing out, pouring toward Rabbit and Myr. Figures appeared in the fog, racing toward the Nightkeepers.

  “Fire!” Dez shouted, but Rabbit shouted in the same second, “Hold! It’s not the enemy!”

  It was the nahwal. They were free!

  Incredibly, impossibly, the ancestral beings were scrambling through the rift and beelining for their bloodline warriors.

  The one that made for Rabbit was walnut-skinned, dark eyed, and wore the mark of the boar bloodline on its wrist.

  Thoughts racing, Rabbit said, “Are you—” His chrono beeped, interrupting. It read: 00:00:00. The magic of the Great Conjunction was online.

  Throom! A pillar of dark magic burst from the sacred well and speared up into the sky just as a huge bolt of lightning cracked down, bringing a matching pillar of sunlight and rainbows. The light and dark magic whoomed together in the middle, and the earth plane shuddered. Dark shapes poured up out of the Cenote Sagrada and bright, brilliant forms plummeted down from the hole in the sky, chilling Rabbit’s blood and making his instincts hiss enemy. But at the same time, mad joy sang in his veins. He had been bred for this, born for it.

  “They’re coming,” Myr said, and clung into him for a moment before she pushed away. “It’s time.” She looked up at him, face etched with determination. “I love you. And when we get out of here, I’m buying the first round tonight.”

  He kissed her hard and fast. “I love you back. And I’ve got the second round for the whole damn army.”

  Suddenly, from behind him, a whole lot of voices all said at once, “Son of the boar bloodline. We are your army.”

  “What the fuck?” He spun. And his jaw hit the deck at the sight of a hundred or so Xerox copies of the boar nahwal, standing rank and file, staring at him with their creepy black eyes. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  Okay, dumb question. But he was in shock here. And when Myr grabbed his arm hard enough to cut off circulation, he knew he wasn’t the only one.

  The nahwal said, in a hair-raising chorus, “You called us from the barrier, helped us cross over from un-death to the earth. While we are here, we have your powers, your magic. Command us.”

  Cross over. Crossover. Rabbit froze in place, because oh, holy shit, this was it. This was the fighting force the Nightkeepers had needed all along, the numbers they lacked.

  “Look!” Myr said, pointing at a cloud of winged shadows that were leaving the ground and flying up into the air. At first he thought it was the animal familiars of the winikin, but these were all the same size, huge and winged, and for all the world resembling—

  “Holy fuck, it’s Blackhawk.” Or, rather, it was a hundred Nates, all in his hawk-shifter form, blazing up into the sky to challenge the kohan as they flew out of the rainbow.

  Off to the other side, silver bolts flared from the ground, launching up into the sky to slam into kohan and kax alike, as Michael and his nahwal soldiers attacked the enemy. Jade and her nahwal threw ice magic; Sasha’s battalion commanded plants that reared up, grabbed at the kax and dragged them back down; and suddenly there were teleporting nahwal everywhere, zapping in under Strike and Anna’s orders to throw vicious fireballs and then disappear before the enemy could launch a counterattack.

  The fire and ice were failing, though. “Their shields are too strong!” Myr cried.

  Rabbit grinned viciously. “Not for long, they aren’t.”

  Forking his fingers, he called on the golden magic. And, using what he’d learned from the kohan back at Coatepec, he brought down the enemy shields.

  Screeches and screams rang out over the battlefield as the kax and kohan found themselves suddenly vulnerable, followed by the Nightkeepers’ cheers as they regrouped and attacked.

  Fierce joy exploded through Rabbit and he shouted to his nahwal. “Let’s fight these fuckers!” At the edge of the cenote a huge, smoky makol was climbing up and out. Behind it there were two more, four, a dozen. Rabbit pointed and bellowed, “Get them!”

  His battalion shouted and charged.

  The next few minutes were a blur of shields and fire as the boar army tore into the makol. Green flames burst amid the red as Rabbit and Myr fought shoulder to shoulder, back to back, however and wherever they could. The magic flowed between them, solidly intertwined, giving him an extra kick of power, an extra layer of fierce protectiveness at the sheer joy of her being his partner. His mate.

  They were going to make it through this war, he promised himself. And they were going to make for themselves the kind of family neither of them had grown up with.

  A makol attacked, then spun and screeched in triumph as a translucent, fiery red creature reared up and over him, swiping with its six-clawed paw and turning solid in the last second before it hit.

  “Down!” he shouted, and he and Myr pancaked as the boluntiku’s slash whistled over their heads. Rabbit came up as the ’tiku reversed for the backswing, and blasted the back of its head with a golden fireball that clung like napalm, eating into the creature. It screeched and fell back into the cenote, leaving the area around the altar momentarily clear.

  Now, said the booming voice inside Rabbit. It is time.

  “Dez!” Rabbit
shouted. “The spell!”

  The king looked at him for a heartbeat, then nodded. He leaped to the top of the temple, filled his lungs and bellowed, “Everyone get under a big-ass shield and link up! And I mean everyone! Pass it on!”

  There was a mad scramble, a huge flare of shield magic, and the frustrated fingernail-on-blackboard screams of new kax and boluntiku erupting from the sacred well, new winged gods dropping down from the sky. The enemy lashed at the shield with flames, claws and acid, but the shield held, by the gods, it held!

  Beneath it, the Nightkeepers, winikin, human and nahwal all cut their palms and connected with each other, blood to blood. Rabbit found himself linked to Myr on one side and one of his own nahwal on the other side, and felt the uplink gain strength as more and more links were added. Boars, jaguars, eagles, iguanas, smokes, stones, harvesters . . . the powers of the different bloodlines flowed through the uplink. And as the magic passed into them, Rabbit and Myrinne smoothed it into a single flowing stream of power, blended and wonderful.

  “Ready?” Dez called to him.

  Rabbit took a look around to confirm.

  A nahwal caught his attention; it was staring at him intently. More, it was distinguished from the others by the wink of a ruby earring in one ear. Jag. The former king nodded to him, man to man, and sudden certainty filled Rabbit. This was how it was supposed to have been. This was what Scarred-Jaguar had been destined to do, only he’d tried to do it thirty years too early, and without the help of the crossover and his earth-mage mate.

  Now, though, things would be as the true gods had meant them to be.

  “Yeah,” he said, tightening his grip on Myr’s hand. “We’re ready.”

  They sent the spell words around the blood-link, so the entire Nightkeeper army, more than a thousand strong, spoke in synchrony, like the biggest, baddest nahwal ever made.

  As they began the spell, two earth-shuddering roars rose up in response—one from above and one from below—and the fabric of the air around them shivered and started to tear.

  Hurry! Myr’s mind spoke in Rabbit’s head, in his heart, but the spell was complicated, couldn’t be rushed. He kept going as a huge winged creature, black as night, came up from the depths while another, identical but pure white, dropped down from above. They were enormous, monstrous, and power crackled around them like storms. They landed together, thud-thud, on the Nightkeepers’ shield and started tearing at the magic with teeth that glinted like diamonds. The shield gave and made a wretched crackling noise.

  Behind the creatures, though, the pillar of dark and light magic shuddered and began to rotate, moved by Rabbit’s spell.

  “It’s working!” he ordered. “Give it more power!” They had finished the incantation, but the momentum was slow, the barrier frail. The Nightkeepers and their allies dug deep and gave it everything they had, and as the power amped its flow through the uplink, the pillar spun faster and faster. “More!” he shouted and then, through the uplink itself, he sent into their minds, Think of your mates, your children, your families. It went against the writs but he didn’t give a shit. Not when he’d learned firsthand that love was everything. Let your magic flow. It doesn’t matter what talent, big or small, just send it to me and Myr and we’ll make it come together.

  The stream of power coming into him became a river, then a flash flood. And beyond the shield and the monsters on their roof, the pillar went into overdrive, split apart, and started tornadoing. The twin funnels cranked and whirred, sucking in everything that had come out of the sky and underworld.

  Rabbit saw a boluntiku go, more ’zotz, a makol or three. But the huge winged beasts above them hung on and dug in. A section of the shield caved, and a clawed foot broke through. They were so fucking close, but they weren’t going to make it!

  “Myr,” he said, the word coming out broken. “Jesus Christ, Myr.”

  She looked up at him, and found a way to smile. “What a perfectly wonderful disaster this is turning out to be.”

  And, holy shit, he laughed out loud at that, and somewhere, somehow, let go of the last little thread of control, giving himself over to the chaos. The golden magic flared through him, into the uplink and from there to the funnel clouds, and the damn things exploded, expanding to suddenly wrap around the winged creatures, which growled and snapped, then howled as they were torn away and sucked into the vortices, one to the sky, the other to Xibalba. The one headed to hell was joined by dozens of little flickers of red and green, hundreds of them.

  “The xombis!” Anna cried. “You’re banishing the xombi magic!”

  Rabbit let his head fall back and let out a whoop. “It’s working!”

  He wanted to dance and sing, wanted to spin Myr around and around, but he held on to the spell instead, pouring himself into it, feeling the strength of the Nightkeepers’ uplink. The last of the xombi flickers whipped past them and down, and then, with a final roar, the funnel clouds folded in on themselves and sucked back to where they’d started.

  And pop. They were gone.

  It was over.

  Only it wasn’t.

  The storm was gone, the kohan and the kax were gone, and everything was the same as it had been when they got there . . . except for the nahwal. The Nightkeepers’ armies of the dead stood clustered near the last members of their bloodlines, waiting to cross over to the afterlife.

  Crossover.

  The golden magic pulsed inside Rabbit, chaotic and disordered, just like life itself. And, going on instinct, he looped an arm around Myr’s waist, pointed to the sky, and sent a stream of the magic winging up, up, and up some more, until it hit a cloud.

  Sunlight flared, bright and unexpected, and a beam speared down, descending along the stream of golden magic until it reached the ground.

  “Oh,” Myr breathed.

  Once the sunbeam was on the ground, it moved with a magic of its own, seeking out the nahwal. Some flared quickly bright and then disappeared, becoming golden glitters that flowed up the sunlight shaft and headed for the sky. Not to the realm of the kohan, but to the true sky. The reward for brave warriors.

  The few nahwal who didn’t disappear, though, grew solid. More, their eyes turned normal, clothes glistened into being around them, and they suddenly looked like real people.

  Rabbit’s heart thudded in his chest. “Holy shit,” he whispered, and felt Myr squeeze his hand.

  Anna gave a soft cry and moved toward one of them. “Mama!” She hesitated as the gold dust swirled, but when it cleared, it revealed a woman who was very familiar to Rabbit from his dreams. Asia. Scarred-Jaguar’s queen. Gods.

  The two women embraced while Sasha moved toward them, eyes alight. Strike, meanwhile, faced the nahwal with the ruby earring as the old king’s features became clear, and father and son saw each other for the first time in thirty years. And it would be the last, Rabbit saw, because after a brief exchange, the shimmers intensified and the old king streamed up into the sky.

  “Do you see?” Myr’s voice cracked and her fingers dug into his arm. “Are you seeing this?”

  It was happening all around them, for each of the Nightkeepers. Which meant . . .

  Stiffening, he turned. And found himself facing not one nahwal . . . but four of them.

  Red-Boar stood beside a pretty, perky-looking brunette with a wide smile. And in front of them, wrapped in their arms, were twin boys who looked up at Rabbit with eyes so much like his own that his heart clutched.

  He had hated them, he realized. All along, he had hated them.

  “Go on,” he told them now. “Go be together.” And he sent the crossover magic toward them.

  As the sparks gathered and surrounded the four, Red-Boar raised a hand in farewell.

  Then the golden magic streamed airborne and up onto the sunbeam, and Rabbit’s old man was gone. For real this time.

  He had been the last of them, Rabbit saw. The nahwal were all gone, and the winikin’s animal familiars were streaming up along the sunlight as well, bei
ng waved off with cheers and tears, and cries of thanks. When they were gone, figuring it was over, Rabbit let his magic die away. He held Myr close to his side and said, “Well, as disasters go . . .” He trailed off as the sunbeam intensified once more. “This one may not be over.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Myr pressed close to Rabbit’s side as the golden sparks flitted down from the clouds, then spun, dipped and formed the head of a giant creature, one that had the pointy features of a Doberman, but with a drooping, anteater-like nose and wide, squared-off ears that stood high at attention.

  Seth, the lord of chaos, looked down at the Nightkeepers and their allies, and smiled. Which in itself was pretty damn terrifying, she decided. But at the same time, her blood thrummed.

  They had survived the war! They could handle whatever came next.

  “Well done, children of the Earth plane.” Seth spoke, as Bastet had, in all of their minds at once. But then he turned, sweeping the crowd and zeroing in on Rabbit. “Especially you, son of chaos.”

  Rabbit had gone still. “I know that voice.”

  Myr did too. It came from the vision, from Asia’s king. Only it hadn’t been Jag’s voice, she realized now. It had been the god’s.

  The great head inclined. “I spoke to you as I could, and told you what you needed to hear. You are the crossover, the embodiment of random chance. My son on this earth. You are risk and danger, change and invention. Your blood will reinvigorate the Nightkeepers, keeping the magic alive for another twenty-six thousand years, until the next Great Conjunction.”

  “We get to keep the magic?” Myr blurted. She had assumed that it would disappear now that the barrier was sealed once more, quiescent until the next cycle, like a zillion generations from now.

  Those golden eyes locked on her. “Yes and no, earth daughter. The magic still exists, but it is hidden. It will work only on the Cardinal Days, or if the earth should need its Keepers and their allies again in the future.” Seth’s eyes swept the crowd again, touching on each of them. “So teach your children well, and your children’s children, and down the line. Protect them. Hide them if necessary. And do not forget the lies of the other realms . . . or the power of love.”