“I don’t know why we didn’t stay through to the end,” she finished. “I didn’t see anything that had to do with owing anybody anything.” She paused. “Or am I on the wrong track? Do you think there’s something else you’re supposed to remember?”
How am I supposed to know if I’ve forgotten it? He stifled the sarcasm, though. It wasn’t her fault he’d lost twelve hours that felt like days, just like it wasn’t her fault that he couldn’t wrap his head around the way she was acting.
He’d spent the past two and a half years wishing she would let them concentrate on being Nightkeepers. Now that she was doing exactly that, he found himself wanting to hash out the sex, and why it’d felt the way it had. What they could do to keep that connection.
He really was a dick sometimes.
Focus. Exhaling, he pulled on the T-shirt, then stood to tuck it in. He caught a hint of her scent — their scent—but didn’t let himself acknowledge the tug it brought. “I don’t know what debt the nahwal was talking about, but I think you’re right. It makes sense that it’d be something about that night.” He paused. “The thing is . . . when I was stuck in the Triad magic, I kept looping through a different memory.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Something you had forgotten?”
He shook his head. “No. It was there all along, just not in the front of my brain. But the thing is, there were debts owed. I thought I handled it right . . . but maybe not.”
“Was it—” She held up a hand, cutting herself off. “Wait. This shouldn’t be just the two of us. Let’s go get Jade and Lucius, and see if the others are back yet. And you should get some real food into you.”
Part of Brandt wanted it to just be the two of them, the perfect team they had once been. He didn’t understand why a relationship that had worked so right out in the human world had gone so wrong inside Skywatch. It didn’t make sense.
And he had to get his head back in the game. “Yeah. I could go for a breakfast meeting.”
But as they left the suite and the last dregs of warmth from the vision-memory drained away, he found himself wishing he could go back to being the man he’d been on the beach that night, hunting down the blonde he’d glimpsed earlier in the day because somehow, deep down inside, he had known that she was meant to be his mate.
“Shit.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Headache.”
Keeping her tattered version of a warrior ’s detachment wrapped tightly around her heart, Patience led the way to the main mansion.
When they came through the arched doorway leading to the great room, her steps hitched slightly at the sight of the packed kitchen. Strike, Leah, and Jox sat at one end of the breakfast bar, looking tired and strung out. Lucius, Jade, Rabbit, and Myrinne were at the other end, deep in conversation, while Izzy, Shandi, and Tomas moved around the kitchen.
At the sound of Patience’s and Brandt’s footsteps, Strike’s head came up and his cobalt eyes lit briefly. “Brandt. Thank the gods.”
“Hold that thought. I don’t have the magic yet.”
The king’s expression flattened, but he said only, “You’re still better off than the other two.”
Patience’s stomach clutched. “Is Anna . . . ?”
“She’s alive.” Strike scrubbed both hands over his face, which did nothing to erase the strain etched in the deep lines beside his mouth and the dark circles beneath his eyes. “The neurosurgeons relieved the pressure and repaired what they could, but . . .” When he trailed off, Leah reached over and took his hand; their fingers interlaced, caught, and held. “If Sasha hadn’t been there, I don’t think she would’ve made it through surgery. She and Michael stayed behind to keep an eye on things.” His lips twitched. “Rabbit did a little mind-bending on Anna’s husband, retroactively intro-ing him to the family. He thinks he’s known Sasha and me for years.” The smile drained. “He was psyched to leave Sasha with waiting-room duty and bugger off.”
“Dick.” The word came from Lucius, and was both the man’s name and a comment on his character.
Oh, Anna. Sometimes Patience had envied the other woman for having an outside life, a choice to make, and the guts to make it. Sometimes she had resented her for it. But she had never, even in the deepest depths of her blackest moods, wished for something like this. “The etznab spell helped me bring Brandt around. It might be worth trying on Anna.”
Strike shook his head. “We can’t do anything until she’s medically stable. Magic can only go so far
. . . at least within our tenets.” His lips twisted in a bitter smile as he quoted from one of the codices Lucius had recently finished translating. “‘A Nightkeeper shall not raise the dead, lest the barrier rift asunder.’” Leah tightened her grip on him. “She’s not going to die. Sasha’s going to help her find her way back.”
“Gods, I hope so.” Strike nodded to Carlos as the stocky ex-wrangler winikin slid him a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. While the others dug into their breakfasts, he continued: “As for Mendez, Nate and Alexis found him unconscious in his flop. They’re bringing him back now. There’s still no sign of his winikin.”
“So the Triad spell not only didn’t give us any Triad magi—it hurt Anna and is forcing us to bring Mendez into the compound,” Brandt said sourly. “If that was the will of the gods, then the gods are—”
“Sit your butt down and eat,” Carlos interrupted, fixing Brandt with a look.
Brandt exhaled and sat. After a moment, Patience took her place beside him. The breakfast bar wasn’t designed for so many people, which meant that the two of them had to sit very close together, bumping at hip and thigh.
Seeming unaware of the warmth that gathered at those points of contact, Brandt said, “After the firebird’s ghost nailed me and the nahwal did its overlapping thing, I blacked out. When I woke up, I was eighteen years old, and I was trapped inside a crashed BMW with a busted leg, screaming my fucking head off as the car sank in Pine Bend River.”
Patience frowned at him. “When I asked you about the scars on your leg, and why you limp when you’re really tired, you said you were in an accident in college, that it was no big deal.”
He didn’t meet her eyes. “I might’ve downplayed it. Wasn’t something I liked remembering.”
Another lie, she thought. There had been so many of them back then, when they had both been playing human. “Go on.”
“It was my freshman year at Dartmouth. Joe and I stayed with Dewey and his parents during winter break, because they were local and we could get back to campus from his house. Joe and Dewey were both on the football team and wanted to get in some extra workouts, play a little hockey, and I . . .” He paused. “I guess I just wasn’t ready to go home yet. College was . . . different.”
That part Patience got. She remembered the freedom of being on her own for a change, with no winikin telling her to be better, to try harder, that her parents had died saving the world.
Brandt continued: “Dewey’s dad let us use his Beemer—it was sweet, borderline vintage, and could go like hell on the straightaways. Dewey was a good driver, though. The accident wasn’t his fault. The bridge was fine when we went out, and it wasn’t even that cold . . . but there was a slick spot at exactly the wrong place. The car spun out, went over the railing, and we ended up in the river. I must’ve blacked out for a minute, because I don’t remember going over or hitting the water. Everything cut out after we hit the pylon. Anyway, I woke up alone, headed downstream in the Beemer, saw the other guys in the water and started yelling for help.”
He described using the hockey stick to hit the horn, then the ensuing race between his rescuers and the water level in the car while he fought to free himself, nearly ripping his leg off in the process. “I blacked out again, and the next thing I remember is waking up, lying near a boat landing. Alone.” His voice was flat, his expression unreadable. “I was so fucking cold, and my leg hurt so bad, that I wanted to curl up right there and go to sleep. But I heard Wood’s voice in my head, telling me
to get my ass up, that I was too damned important to die like that. So I busted a branch off a piece of deadfall to use as a crutch, and hauled myself up to the road, where I flagged down a car and got help.”
When he paused, Patience swallowed hard, trying to ease the tightness in her throat. “What about your friends?” she said, not letting herself ask the other questions that rattled around inside her.
Questions like, Why is this the first time I’m hearing this story? And, What else aren’t you telling me?
“Searchers found their bodies a quarter mile further downstream. The pathologist said they both drowned, but even after dredgers found the car and hauled it back up, nobody could tell me whether they died getting me out.” He paused. “I think that’s what happened, though. They died saving me.
And that creates a debt.” He spread his hands. “Woody had saved up to get me started after college, in grad school or whatever. We used the money to set up a scholarship instead, in their names. I talked to their parents, tried to apologize, but they wouldn’t let me take the blame. They just kept saying it was just a terrible accident.”
“Why . . .” Patience trailed off, not sure if it was the woman or the warrior asking, or if it mattered either way. This wasn’t about the two of them, even if it felt that way to her.
“Why didn’t I tell you the whole story before now?” He shook his head. “It just . . . I don’t know.
Until last night, it wasn’t something I thought about, ever. Which, given the nahwal’s message, makes me wonder whether I’m supposed to remember something about the accident, instead.”
Patience knew it was stupid to be hurt by the possibility that they might not need to remember the rest of their first night. “According to the nahwal, you need my help. If the Triad spell dropped you straight into the river vision, then that’s not what you need to remember.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Jade shot Patience a sympathetic look before she continued. “We don’t know how the nahwal communicate with each other. We have to assume that they do communicate, given that Patience’s nahwal relayed information from Brandt’s, but if you think about it, there wasn’t much time for them to confab. Maybe once Brandt’s nahwal merged with him, his ancestors realized that they could help him access the river memory directly, without needing your help.”
Brandt frowned. “But if my nahwal knew I couldn’t use the Triad magic, then the gods should’ve known about it too. So why the hell did Kinich Ahau pick me?”
“For the same reason it picked me first,” Rabbit said. He twirled a finger next to his ear, but his eyes were serious. “Maybe its brain—do gods have brains?—got screwed up while it was being held in that Xibalban pit. Maybe the Banol Kax implanted a mind-bend, programming it to screw us over when the opportunity presented.”
“Damn it, Rabbit, that’s—” Jox broke off, paused, then exhaled before finishing, “—not the dumbest thing you’ve ever said. Entirely sacrilegious, but not the dumbest. Shit.”
As the others went back and forth trying to interpret Kinich Ahau’s actions, Patience felt her magic flicker. It wasn’t her warrior’s talent, though; it was her other talent, that of invisibility, kicking into gear as the conversation flowed past her, making it seem that she didn’t need to be there, that the others would all be fine without her.
You want to make me feel invisible? her magic seemed to say. What if I just disappeared? What would you do then?
But that was the sort of thing the old Patience would have thought and done—something self-
pitying and pointless. So instead of sitting there and stewing, she broke into the debate and said bluntly, “No offense, but we have four days to make Brandt into a Triad mage. I think we should focus on that rather than quibbling over abstracts.”
“Figuring out how I pissed off my own dead ancestors is pretty damned abstract,” Brandt pointed out, but he nodded. “But you’re right. We need to figure out what this debt is all about.” His thigh pressed more firmly against hers as he shifted to face her. “I think should try the etznab spell again.”
Her breath went thin, her blood heating with sensory memory and the mingled anticipation and unease that came with the thought of connecting with him again on that level. We won’t have to use the jun tan the next time, she reminded herself. “We could also try visiting the actual places where the visions took place, and jacking in,” she suggested.
“Good idea,” Strike said. “Get me a satellite picture or something, and I’ll ’port you two whenever you’re ready.”
Brandt turned away from her to say, “I’d rather go solo. It’s not safe out there if Iago’s awake and fully joined with Moctezuma’s demon.”
The flash of anger caught Patience by surprise. She was halfway off her stool before she was aware of moving, getting right in his face to snap, “It’s not my job to stay safe. And whether you like it or not, we’re still stronger together than apart—magically, at least.” Suddenly becoming aware that she was on the verge of causing major a scene, where before she had been careful to keep things so private between them, she lowered her voice a notch. “I’m your partner. You can give me that much, damn it.”
Their eyes locked. She sensed his anger, not through the jun tan, but in the set of his jaw and the tense lines of his body. She didn’t back down, though. Not this time.
After a few heartbeats of standoff, he exhaled. “I’m not trying to be a dick here.”
“I know.” In a way, that made it all worse, because both of them kept trying to do what they thought was right, and it kept not meshing. “But you’re not going to win on this one.”
“Yeah.” He smiled humorlessly. “I got that.” But when he met her eyes, instead of the dark frustration she expected, she glimpsed a hint of gold. More, she saw him—the man, not the warrior—
for just a second before the shields slammed back down.
Unexpectedly, energy sparked in the air between them.
Help him remember. The nahwal’s order echoed through her soul, and her pulse jumped as a new thought occurred. It was far too tempting to think that he was supposed to remember how to be her husband, her lover. She wasn’t sure what that theory had to do with debts and ancestors, but it certainly jibed with how the magic worked. The closer their emotional ties, the stronger their magic.
What if he’d had it backward all along? What if they weren’t supposed to table their marriage for the duration of the war? What if they were supposed to fix it instead?
Don’t go there, she warned herself. They had tried too many times before to patch up their relationship. She was sick of trying, sick of failing. And there was no reason to think anything had changed, really.
Unless it had.
“Given what the nahwal said and the way the etznab spell seems to work, I want the two of you teaming up on every aspect of this. Find a way to make it work,” Strike said in his “end of discussion, the jaguar king has spoken” voice.
Brandt faced front. “Like I said. I got it.”
Patience sent him an edged look, but said to the king, “We’ll do what needs to be done.”
Strike didn’t look totally satisfied by that answer, but he let it go and turned to Lucius. “Moving on.
What have you got on the two gods the nahwal mentioned?”
Lucius had been frowning over something on his laptop. At the king’s question, he looked up, blinking around at the group as though he’d forgotten they were there. “Kali and Cabrakan.” He cleared his throat. “Right. The nahwal said that if—when—Brandt becomes the Triad mage, he’ll be able to prevent Cabrakan from avenging his brother and finishing what Kali began. Which gives us two gods to work with. Starting with Kali, there’s some debate on whether he—and this god is most definitely a ‘he,’ enormous schlong and all—is allied with the sky or Xibalba. Either way, he’s the god of leadership. Nightkeeper leadership, in particular.”
“That’s why it sounded familiar,” Strike said. “The Manikin scepter is carv
ed in Kali’s image, enormous schlong and all.” The scepter, which resided in the barrier with the jaguar nahwal, was the symbol of his rulership. “Which I suppose makes us Kali’s children, and means that Cabrakan is going to come after us.” He paused. “So who or what is Cabrakan?”
“The lord of earthquakes.”
“Shit,” Brandt muttered. “Not good.”
“Uh-oh,” Patience whispered. Up until now, the Banol Kax had been able to send only relatively minor demons to test the barrier during the cardinal equinoxes and solstices. The earthquake lord, though, didn’t sound like any minor demon.
Strike held up a hand to quell the rising buzz in the room. To Lucius, he said, “Go on.”
“The ancients knew how to track the movement of the stars and predict basic weather patterns, which allowed them to make the proper sacrifices and feel like they were in relatively decent control of their environment. In contrast, earthquakes struck without warning, and could be absolutely devastating. Because of that, Cabrakan was one of the most feared of the Banol Kax. When an earthquake struck, the priests would hustle to throw together massive rituals of appeasement, in the hopes of mitigating the aftershocks.”
“In other words,” Brandt said, “this particular Banol Kax isn’t something we want to fuck with.”
Lucius nodded. “Problem is, we already have . . . and in doing so, we messed with the legends.” He paused. “Cabrakan’s brother is—or was—Zipacna.”
Strike growled, “Son of a bitch.”
Patience drew in a breath as the dots connected. Two years earlier, Strike and Leah had joined together with the creator god, Kulkulkan, to defeat the winged crocodile demon, Zipacna, in a fierce aerial battle. In the process, Zipacna’s essence had been destroyed rather than being returned to Xibalba as part of the Great Cycle.
“According to the legends,” Lucius continued, “Zipacna was destined to make it through to the end-
time war, when he and Cabrakan would fight the Hero Twins. The outcome of that particular battle was to be pivotal in determining whether the barrier falls completely, giving the Banol Kax total access to the earth plane. But now . . .” Lucius spread his hands. “We’re off the map here, people.”
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