Which meant he shouldn’t have touched her at all, despite the lure of sex magic and the way their link had seemed suddenly stronger than it had in a long time, more alive than it ever was back at Skywatch. It wouldn’t last, he knew. Never did. But still, he held on to the feeling of connection as he materialized in the barrier: a gray-green, featureless expanse of leaden skies above and ground-level fog below.
The magi zapped in a foot above the ground and dropped, landing on their feet and then fighting for balance when the ground gave a watery heave and rippled outward in concentric circles that were mirrored in the calf-deep fog. The water-bed effect was new . . . probably another sign of the barrier destabilizing as the countdown neared T minus two years.
Brain working on the multiple levels of a warrior, Brandt filed the detail and scanned the scene—
fog and more fog, no surprises there—while another part of him double-checked that the others had made it through okay. Especially Patience.
She was right beside him. And she was pissed.
Pulling her hand from his, she broke their uplink. “If you didn’t think we had enough power to trigger the spell, you should’ve said something instead of just leaning on me for sex magic.”
“I didn’t—” Shit. It might not have been a conscious decision, but that was exactly what he—or rather his warrior’s instincts—had done. “Maybe I did. Sorry.”
He knew it wouldn’t matter to her that it had worked; she would care only that it hadn’t been about them. She didn’t want to believe that for the next two years and five days, they belonged entirely to the Nightkeepers and their blood-bound duties.
“Yeah. Well.” She shrugged and avoided his eyes.
Wearing no makeup, and with her long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, she didn’t look much older than the nineteen she’d been when they met. Which just made him achingly aware of how far they had drifted, how much momentum they had lost. He wished he knew how to talk to her.
Everything used to be easy between them. So why the hell was it so hard now? “Patience—”
“We’ve got company,” Rabbit interrupted. His eyes were locked on a section of the fog.
Brandt turned, annoyed, but also a bit relieved. It wasn’t like there was anything new he could say to her. And even if he had something new to bring, this wasn’t the time or place.
Following Rabbit’s line of sight, he didn’t see anything at first. But then the seemingly random curls of vapor took form, darkening to shadows and then coalescing into human-shaped figures that weren’t quite human. He tensed and automatically took a half step in front of Patience.
She moved away from him, snapping in an undertone, “It’s the nahwal. And I can fight my own battles.”
“Keep your guard up.” He wanted to tell her to stay safe, to duck the Triad spell, to . . . hell, he didn’t know. The words kept getting screwed up inside him, which was why he stayed silent. That, and the knowledge that destiny and the gods didn’t give a shit what the Nightkeepers wanted when it came to the end-time war.
The fog swirled as the nahwal approached. Brandt’s pulse picked up a notch. The Triad codex had mentioned that the creatures, which held the collected wisdom of each of the Nightkeepers’ bloodlines, would be needed for the second layer of spell casting, but the part of the accordion-folded text that had explained exactly how that was supposed to work had been damaged beyond recovery.
For the next part of the spell, the magi were flying, if not blind, then with some seriously low visibility.
The nine naked, sexless, hairless humanoid figures formed an outer ring concentric to that of the Nightkeepers. As before, the creatures had black, expressionless eyes and were adorned only by the bloodline glyphs they wore in stark black on their inner forearms. But where the nahwal had been stick thin and wrinkled before, now they had layers of flesh beneath smooth skin.
This was the first time Brandt had seen the change firsthand, and it was a damned unsettling reminder that nothing stayed the same.
Two of the nahwal—those of the jaguar and harvester bloodlines—looked almost human now. The one facing Strike and Sasha had a single ruby winking in its left ear and the former king’s personality, while Jade’s nahwal had a young woman’s curves and the attitude of her warrior mother. Lucius’s theory was that as the countdown continued, the leadership of each bloodline nahwal was being taken over by the ancestor who had the strongest connection to the surviving bloodline member. He’d predicted that the nahwal would all have evolved in preparation for the Triad spell.
Only the others hadn’t changed. They differed only in their forearm marks.
“Do you think Lucius was wrong about the connection between the nahwal and the Triad spell?”
Patience said softly.
“That, or only those two needed to change.” Brandt’s gut tightened as he did the math. The jaguar and harvester nahwal were blood-linked to Strike, Sasha, and Jade. Was that it, then? Had the Triad magi already been chosen?
The hope that he and Patience might be in the clear came with an equal thud of guilt. If the chosen survived, they would spend the rest of their lives sharing skull space with their strongest ancestors.
The power would be incalculable . . . but so would the chaos.
If he could have prayed, Brandt thought he would have done so right then. But praying had never come naturally to him, not even in the barrier, so instead he squared his shoulders and turned to face his nahwal.
He had seen his ancestral being only once before, during his talent ceremony. The other magi had all been formally greeted by their ancestral beings during the ceremony, and some had gotten messages from their nahwal in the years since. Brandt had gotten jack shit then, and now wasn’t any different. The eagle nahwal just stared at him.
Say something, damn it. His parents and two older brothers had died in the massacre; they should be inside the nahwal. So why wouldn’t they freaking talk to him?
“What now?” Strike asked the creature opposite him. The jaguar nahwal held out its hand, palm up, showing the white line of a sacrificial scar. The message was clear. The Nightkeepers would have to uplink with their ancestral beings, forming a conduit for the Triad magic to make the transfer.
Wishing to hell there was another way, one that didn’t involve a two-in-ten chance of winding up dead or nuts, Brandt palmed his ceremonial knife from his webbed weapons belt and offered it hilt first as the others did the same.
Expression unchanging, the eagle nahwal took the knife and drew the sharp stone blade across its right hand. The unlined skin parted with an unnatural zipping noise, and dark red ichor oozed through the slash. A glob welled and dropped, and was quickly lost in the fog as the ancestral being returned the knife, then held out its leaking hand as though offering to shake on a deal.
Brandt braced himself against a power surge as they uplinked, but he got nothing beyond the squish of cold ichor and the cold clamminess of the nahwal’s flesh. He glanced over as Patience linked with her nahwal, but she ignored him.
Be safe, he thought to her, but the message didn’t get through. The jun tan link was stone cold.
Strike and Jade resumed the spell casting, starting from the beginning of the spell in the second of three repetitions. After a moment, two other voices joined in: the jaguar nahwal’s baritone and the high, sweet voice of Jade’s mother, both chanting in single voices rather than the multitonal descant typical of the nahwal . A chill shivered through Brandt. That’s it, then. It’s Strike, Sasha, and Jade.
But then Michael’s nahwal joined in with its multitonal voice, creating an instant chorus and suggesting that maybe the choice hadn’t been made, after all. Alexis’s and Nate’s nahwal took up the spell next, adding depth and texture and turning the chant into something more like a song, something haunting and gospel, though in an ancient tongue.
Then a new voice joined in unexpectedly, one that didn’t belong to any nahwal. Rabbit. Brandt glanced over and saw that the younge
r man’s gray-blue eyes were locked on his nahwal’s face, his expression lit with power and a restless, edgy energy. He wants this, Brandt realized. Son of a bitch.
But it made sense. Rabbit was a mind-bender, and cocky enough to think he could handle the ghosts.
And he was ambitious as hell.
Sasha joined into the spell, then Michael beside her, their voices firm, expressions grim. One by one, the others chimed in, until finally it was down to Patience, Brandt, and their nahwal. Hers took up the chant first, in a sweet, multitonal voice. His lip-synched.
An ache tightened Brandt’s chest, but they didn’t have a choice. The Triad spell was nonoptional; it was their duty as warriors, as Nightkeepers. So he steeled himself and added his voice to the echoless chorus.
After a moment, Patience did the same.
The magi and their nahwal sang together, voices swelling as they finished the second repetition, and red-gold power arced through the sky with a lightning-thunder crack that made the surface beneath them shudder and roll. Brandt steeled himself as the sky darkened to storm clouds that swirled sinuously, though there wasn’t any wind.
Then, deep within the swirling clouds, a figure took shape. The size of a small airplane, shaped like a bird of prey, and plumed like a parrot, it glowed crimson, orange, and yellow. Fire dripped from its wings, beak, and talons, brightening the stormy sky.
“Kinich Ahau,” Patience breathed.
The sun god had arrived.
Or rather, its emissary had arrived. The firebird’s image was thin and translucent, not the god itself, but rather a projection of some sort, a vaporware version that had been sent into the barrier to choose the Triad.
Brandt’s pulse kicked. This was it. They’d been prepping for the ceremony for weeks now.
Whatever happened next would change history.
The ozone smell grew stronger and static electricity charged the air as Strike led them into the final repetition of the spell.
The god-ghost circled high above the chanting group, once, twice. . . . Then on the third circuit the image shimmered, flaring sun-bright in a nova that forced Brandt to blink away the afterimage. When his vision cleared, there were three smaller firebirds where there had been one before; they flew in formation, wings outstretched, gliding in a wide spiral opposite the movement of the churning storm clouds.
The hum of magic gained a new note, counterpointing the grumble of thunder that deepened as they reached the end of the spell’s third repetition. Then Sasha, who had a closer bond to Kinich Ahau than the others, raised her voice and called, “Taasik oox!” Bring the three!
Lightning slashed as the god-ghosts screamed a clarion call of trumpets and fire. And then they dove, headed straight for the Nightkeepers.
Tension ran through the magi, a thought-whisper of last-minute hopes, fears, and prayers that turned to gasps as two of the ghosts shimmered . . . and disappeared.
“What the—” Brandt broke off as the remaining firebird locked its glowing gold eyes on his. Oh, shit.
He held his ground as the thing plummeted straight toward him, but he bared his teeth at the sky.
No, damn you. I don’t want—
The ghost veered at the last millisecond. And slammed into Rabbit.
CHAPTER TWO
The firebird felt like a godsdamned fifty-caliber round going in.
“Fuck.” Rabbit staggered back against his nahwal’s grip as pain howled through his body, starting at the point of impact and searing outward, then reversing course and arrowing to his head and heart, the two seats of a mage’s power.
The white-hot energy poured into his heart unchecked, where it became Nightkeeper magic, red-
gold and awesome in its intensity. But in his head . . . gods. Pain lanced through his skull, incredible pressure building to flash point in an instant when the flow of magic crashed into an immovable mental barrier.
It can’t get through the blocks. Fuck. He’d installed the barriers on Strike’s orders, to ensure that he wouldn’t burn shit down or climb inside someone else’s mind unless he frigging meant to. The blocks slowed him down, forced him to think stuff through before lashing out. Which was a good thing, usually. Now, though, the barricades went from benefit to liability in a flash.
The magic roiled within his conscious mind, knocking loose a spate of recent memories: flickering candles, a huge house in flames, a knife that dripped onto Myrinne’s fixed, staring eyes. . . . He cursed viciously, rejecting the vision images that had haunted him ever since he’d let her talk him into the scrying spell and gotten nightmares instead of answers.
He wouldn’t hurt her, couldn’t. He loved her, even if the gods hadn’t yet tagged them with their mated marks. She was on his side; she believed in him more than anyone else did, some days more than even he did. Hell, she was the one who’d guessed he would be chosen, the one who believed he could handle the magic.
So let’s do this.
Steeling himself against the pressure and pain, centering himself within the deep-down excitement of so much fucking power, he focused on the outer layer of mental blocks, the ones that kept him from using his mind-bending on others. Whispering a short counterspell, he visualized the protective shields as a solar array, row upon row of high-tech panels that folded up, accordioning smaller and smaller until they finally disappeared.
The invading magic rushed inward the moment the mental barrier was down, swamping him with a tornado of memories that flashed and collided, flaring bright in his mind’s eye for a second before disappearing.
In one of them, he was in a crowd of bare-chested, loincloth-wearing men and women who danced in front of a new-looking Mayan pyramid. In another, he lay bound to a stone altar as a hawk-nosed priest wearing an elaborate bone, feather, and jade head-dress lifted a stone knife above him. In the next, he stood in the hallway of an earlier version of Skywatch, laughing as three kids raced past him, chasing a half-grown puppy that looked more like a coyote than a dog.
Rabbit hadn’t danced that dance, been that sacrificial victim, or watched those kids chase a coy-dog through Skywatch, but those experiences were suddenly inside him, along with thousands of others that beckoned for him to accept the power he was being offered by a god that had picked him, not one of the others.
The Triad magic. Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Before, it had been a fantasy, the subject of more than a few “wouldn’t it be cool if I got picked so I could kick some major ass” convos late at night. Now, though . . . now it was very real.
Rabbit’s heart hammered off-rhythm as the magic slammed into the second set of mental filters, the ones that blocked his talents of pyro- and telekinesis. Working faster now, he pulled down the blockade. More magic flowed into him; more memories raced past, going too fast for him to glimpse his ancestors’ pasts.
Then the power hit the final layer of shielding: a thick blockade made of repeating geodesic panels, each marked with a bloodred quatrefoil glyph like the one he wore on his inner right forearm. The symbol belonged to the Nightkeepers’ enemies, the Order of Xibalba. His mother’s people. It was the sign of the dark hellmagic.
Of all the blocks, this was the one he relied on the most. When it was in place, the darkness couldn’t reach him; the Xibalbans’ leader, Iago, couldn’t touch him.
But neither could the Triad magic.
Oh, fuck. Now what? Rabbit’s mind raced as bloody tears hazed his vision red.
The last time he’d probed Iago’s mind, a week ago, the Xibalban had still been comatose, his soul deadlocked with that of the powerful demon he’d summoned and then lost control of. Which meant it should be safe to drop the hell-block to let the Triad magic through.
It was a risk, but a calculated one. And Kinich Ahau had chosen him. The swirling memories—and the Triad power—could be his. Excitement sizzled, driving him on.
He could do this. For the Nightkeepers. For himself. The prophecy was clear: If the Nightkeepers didn’t call the Triad, the Banol Kax
would have the upper hand next week, when the solstice-eclipse destabilized the barrier enough for the dark lords to punch through. The good guys needed the magic, and he could bring it to them.
Heart hammering, Rabbit whispered the counterspell that made the final blockade fold in on itself and disappear. He braced for the magic to rush into the center of his psyche, for the Triad spell to flood him with souls, spells, and incalculable power.
Instead, the hell-link slammed open and dark magic spewed into him, brown and oily, rattling like a damned striking snake.
Fuck! Rabbit made a grab for the doorway, but an alien force locked onto him, digging sharp claws into his consciousness and paralyzing his thoughts.
He flashed briefly on a fluorescent-lit cinder block room seen through half-open eyes. He recognized the view Iago saw in his comatose daze, recognized the bastard’s semiconscious mental pattern. And in the half second it took Rabbit to make those connections, Iago’s power made a connection of its own: straight to the Triad magic.
No! Rabbit screamed the word, but no sound came out; no warning reached the others. They didn’t have a clue that things had just gone way fucking wrong, didn’t know he needed help. He was on his own, fighting desperately to get free as ropes of twisted darkness twined around the Triad power and began pulling it back through the hell-link into Iago.
Echoes of rage flashed through Rabbit’s consciousness as his ancestors’ ghosts were pulled along with the Triad magic. Panic slashed. Impotence. He had to do something, but he couldn’t get away from Iago, couldn’t overpower him, couldn’t—
Make a new fucking block, idiot. He didn’t know if the order came from an ancestor or from inside himself, but he latched on to it with desperate terror. Summoning every ounce of magic he had left, he cast the spell, pouring himself into the high-tech portal that shimmered into being, open at first, then irising shut around the dark magic, pinching and then severing the greasy tendrils. Adrenaline surged as the Xibalban’s grip faltered. It was working! It was—
New tendrils spewed through the opening, latched onto the doorway, and ripped it from its mental moorings.
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