Blood Spells n-5

by Jessica Andersen

  A voice boomed in his head, somehow sounding like flutes, drumbeats, and a man’s voice all at once. “Son of eagles, your offer is accepted because the earth cannot lose a Triad mage in this era. But to keep the Triad intact, a triad must be sacrificed. Two will be taken as tradition holds, but one will come later. The last sacrifice will have both power and your love, because there is no sacrifice without pain.”

  Brandt convulsed as his body fought for air. He was distantly aware of movement, a rush of water and bubbles, a hand grasping his wrist. Panic clawed at him. His terror that the voice might be real was equally balanced by the fear that it was nothing more than a delusion, the light at the end of the tunnel, a final salute by his dying brain.

  Which was it, a god or biological death?

  “Son of eagles, do you accept?”

  Accept what? He couldn’t follow, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but crave oxygen. With his free hand, he clawed at his throat, his chest. Both of his legs were pinned now, by a heavy weight that yanked at him in return, pulling until he felt muscle and tendons tear. A jolt of adrenaline cleared his perceptions slightly and he realized that Joe and Dewey were in the car with him, trying to get him out.

  Gods, yes! Pull! he shouted, but didn’t make any noise. Yank the fucking leg off. I don’t care what happens. Just get me out of here!

  The voice came again, saying, “If you do not care what the cost, then take the oath mark and carry it willingly until the balance is restored.”

  Out of nowhere, glyphs streamed through his head, symbolizing words in the language of his long-

  ago ancestors. He didn’t know how to read the symbols, but somehow the syllables were right there in his head.

  “Kabal ku bootik teach a suut!” he gasped, parroting the syllables that danced in his spinning brain.

  New pain flared in his injured leg, but he was beyond screaming, beyond caring. The white light went dim, the pain receded, and the world grayed out.

  Then, blessed gods, he was breathing again!

  He coughed out water, sucked in biting cold air, and shuddered as it burned his lungs. Slowly, the world came back into focus. Sort of.

  He was hanging on to something solid, pointy, and buoyant, and the bitingly cold current was carrying him along. For a minute, all he could do was concentrate on breathing—in and out, in and out. Then his other senses started coming back online: He could hear the rush of the river and feel his ribs hurt with the effort of moving the air. His throat burned and his injured leg throbbed with dull, cold agony. But he was alive!

  He went weak with relief. Hell, he was weak, period. It was all he could do to hang on.

  “Fucking A,” he croaked. “I can’t believe you guys got me out of there.” His voice sounded strange in his ears.

  Even stranger was the silence that followed.

  Jarred fully awake by a sudden slash of fear he couldn’t pinpoint, he opened his eyes and squinted, trying to make sense of the shadows and moonlit reflections.

  He was hanging on to a piece of deadfall; the nubs of broken branches dug into his ribs and stomach, but at least the thing was keeping his head above water. He was floating along, carried by the river’s current, paced by other flotsam from the wreck. He saw a couple of hockey sticks and what looked like the unopened package of gym socks he’d had in his bag.

  Then the reflections shifted and the white flash stopped looking like a lumpy plastic bag and started looking like something else entirely.

  His already freezing body iced further and his heart stuttered. “No.” The word came out chattering and broken. “NO!”

  That wasn’t Dewey’s face, open-eyed and fixed in death. The shadows around it weren’t a body that moved limply with the current.

  No. Impossible. He wouldn’t believe it. His buddies were alive, they had gotten him out, they had—

  Suddenly, he heard his own voice saying, “Kabal ku bootik teach a suut.” And although he didn’t know the old tongue, the words somehow translated themselves inside his head: The gods pay; you return the price.

  The ice inside him shattered as the rest of it came back—the god’s voice, the bargain it had offered.

  “The sacrifices will be taken as tradition holds,” it had said. He hadn’t thought about what that meant; he’d been starving for oxygen, fighting to live.

  “Joe? Dewey?” His voice wobbled on the word. “Come on, you two, answer me!”

  A soft touch of cloth brushed his arm as something heavy, solid, and yielding bumped into him from behind. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t not look.

  A harsh sob caught in his throat at the sight of a moon-silvered face and shadowed, lifeless eyes.

  “Joe.” The word turned to a groan when he saw that the white splash had drifted nearer and definitely wasn’t a bag of socks. “Dewey.”

  Grief broke over him like a storm, filling him with a huge, terrible anger.

  “No!” He lashed out, hammering at the water that surrounded him, at the deadfall that had saved him. “Damn you, that wasn’t fair! I didn’t know! I couldn’t think!” He lost his grip and went under, then fought his way back up, screaming, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t fucking mean it!”

  He thrashed and fought until he was bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, clinging limply to the floating wood as tears streamed down his face, feeling barely warmer than the water surrounding him.

  He sobbed for his friends, and for himself, and when his body went increasingly numb and his grip slipped, he was tempted to let go, tempted to even up the gods’ precious balance on his own terms.

  He didn’t, though, because the sacrifices had already been made, and because Woody had taught him better than to quit.

  The sound of a car’s engine punched through the shock and misery. He jerked around in time to see a pair of brake lights disappear around a turn in the middle distance. Adrenaline gave a cold-numbed kick at the sight of a light farther downstream, shining on a small building and a dock.

  The black riverbanks rose high everywhere else, ominous and impassable.

  “Okay,” he said through teeth that had stopped chattering as he passed from cold to the beginnings of hypothermia, despite his hereditary toughness. “You can do this.”

  Using one leaden arm to paddle, he turned the deadfall, angling to hit the shore pretty far upstream of the dock; he was too damn weak to fight the current, so he would have to use it instead.

  Making sure that the floating bodies were securely snagged on the trailing branches, he looped his arm around a sturdy protruding branch and gave a huge frog kick.

  He screamed hoarsely, and nearly passed out when his bad leg awakened from warm numbness to raw agony. His cries echoed off the water and the high riverbanks as he convulsed against the deadfall. He clutched the worn branches to keep his head above the water, but his struggles shifted the floating tree, causing it to spin in the frigid current, seeking a new balance.

  The branch he’d been holding on to snagged his shirt and dragged him under as the log rolled, taking him with it.

  No! His heart hammered as he yanked with fingers weakened by cold, shock, and pain. The fabric tore and gave, and then snagged again, pulling so tightly that there was no way he could get free. He was trapped, pinned helpless mere inches away from air. Flailing, he tried to roll the tree, snap the branch, tear the fabric, to do something, anything , to break free.

  Please gods, please gods, please gods! The mantra cycled in his head, though with a sick sense of inevitability now that he knew what the gods were capable of.

  His lungs ached with the now-familiar pain of oxygen deprivation. Adrenaline flared through him, giving him a final, desperate spurt of strength that he used to twist himself into a painful knot. He brought up his good leg, jammed it against the tree trunk, and pushed with everything he had left.

  The shirt cut into him; the collar tightened across his windpipe with a pressure that made his instincts say, Stop. You’re choking. But chokin
g didn’t matter when there was no air left to breathe, so he bore down and wrenched against his bonds.

  For a second nothing happened. Then the shirt tore, and he was free!

  He tumbled away from the deadfall, spinning head over ass underwater, not sure which way was up.

  Terror clawed at him alongside pain and the reflexive need to breathe. Then his head broke the surface, more by accident than anything. Cold air slapped his face as he sucked in huge gulps of air, keeping his head above water with spastic churns of his arms and one good leg, while the other hung useless, dragging in the current.

  He wasn’t going to be able to tread for long. He had to get out of the water.

  He blinked into the darkness, taking too long to focus, then even longer to comprehend the sight of the deadfall some twenty feet farther downstream, with Dewey grotesquely snagged and pulled partway out of the water, so his arms were draped over a couple of branches, his head cocked the way it did when he was about to fire off one of his killer put-downs.

  Brandt’s heart lunged into his throat and even though he knew it was an illusion, he yelled, “Dewey! Hey, Dewey!”

  There was no answer, of course. Dewey was dead. Which was what he was going to be if he didn’t get his ass out of the water.

  He was just upstream of the boat landing now, and would pass within twenty or thirty feet of the dock. From his vantage, it looked like a mile.

  You’ve got to do it, Woody’s voice said inside him. Brandt hesitated, looking downstream at the deadfall and the pale splash of Dewey’s face. Then he turned away and started struggling for the dock with weak strokes of his leaden arms and feeble kicks from his one working leg.

  He almost didn’t make it.

  The current nearly pulled him past the dock, but he closed the distance with a last violent, muscle-

  tearing surge. His fingers banged into the cold, slimy wood of the dock pilings. He grabbed, missed, grabbed again, and this time got a good grip on the slippery wood.

  He just hung on for a minute, breath burning in his lungs as he absorbed the feeling of being attached to something solid once more. Then, muscles screaming, he dragged himself up onto the dock.

  Once he was on solid ground, he collapsed, went fetal, and just lay there, shirtless, banged up, and stunned.

  What little he knew about first aid said he was fucked unless somebody drove down to the boat landing and found him, because there was no way in hell he was going to make it up to the road. But even as he thought that, he felt the strength of his heritage trickling back through him, warming him a few degrees and getting some of his systems back online.

  With those inner reserves came a thrum of basic survival instincts that drummed through him with the beat of his heart, a throbbing refrain of, Get up. Get moving. Get help.

  Rolling partway up with a groan of pain and effort, he took stock in the light of the single overhead bulb. It was solar powered and threw off dim, half-charged illumination. But that was enough for him to see that his right foot stuck out at an odd angle from his jeans, which were chewed back to his knee on the inside, leaving the limp, wet fabric plastered over his calf.

  He didn’t want to look. But he had to. Steeling himself, he pulled back the fabric. And stared.

  It wasn’t the deep, swollen slash in his leg that fixed his shocked attention, though. It was the sight of a strange marking a couple of inches above the injury: three curved triangles inside a round-

  cornered rectangle. It was stark black and looked like an inch-by-inch-and-a-half tattoo he didn’t remember getting.

  It was a glyph like the ones Wood wore on his right forearm.

  A hypoxia-jumbled memory leaped out at him, that of the god’s voice saying, “Two will be taken as tradition holds, but one will come later. The last sacrifice will have both power and your love, because there is no sacrifice without pain. . . . Take the oath mark and carry it willingly until the triad balance is restored.”

  Horror dawned. He still owed another sacrifice. And it would be someone he loved, someone who carried a connection to the magic.

  Woody.

  “No.” He didn’t scream it this time, didn’t rail against the gods or the cruel bargain they had demanded. Instead he went cold, deep down to his very core.

  The answer crystallized in his brain, coming from that cold, rational place: The god had said for him to carry the oath mark willingly until the balance was restored . . . which implied that if he rejected it, the oath would be broken.

  His entire universe suddenly contracted itself to the sight of the god-mark on his leg and the burning need to get rid of it. He didn’t know how the knife got in his hand, hadn’t even fully grasped that it’d been in his pocket, shoved there after he’d cut his way free from his seat belt what now seemed like a lifetime ago.

  All he knew was that the blade was there. His bloodied leg was there. And he had to get that fucking mark off.

  “Son of eagles, do not shame your ancestors.” The voice was familiar, yet not. It could have been a delusion; it could have come from the sky.

  “You killed them,” Brandt grated.

  “You made the oath.”

  “Now I’m breaking it.” Clenching his jaw, he set the knife point to his flesh, nearly an inch beyond the border of the mark, like it was a cancer and he had to take enough to be sure he got all of it.

  “Do not do this, or the gods and your ancestors will be lost to you until you willingly retake the oath.”

  “Fuck that.” Brandt’s consciousness grayed around the edges, tunneling until all he could see was the stark black mark.

  And he started to cut.

  Without warning, the images kaleidoscoped inward, contracting to a point, and the royal shrine took shape around him once more; he sensed torchlight and incense first, then the pressure of Patience’s fingers twined through his. He blinked and swayed, then turned and sagged back against the altar, partly so he wouldn’t fall, partly so he would be looking at Patience, not her reflection, when he told her everything.

  But then he met her eyes and saw shock. Grief. Maybe even revulsion. She knew. She must have followed him into the vision after all, though he hadn’t sensed her there.

  He would’ve thought he couldn’t possibly get any colder inside. But he could. “Patience.” He reached out.

  She backed away, expression stark. “Oh, gods.” A trembling hand lifted, pressed to her mouth.

  The walls of the tiny room closed in on him; the world telescoped to her horrified expression. “I—” He broke off as he got it—he fucking got it. His legs gave out; his ass banged down on the altar. His mouth worked, but he couldn’t get out the words that would make it better, because there weren’t any.

  Oh, holy hell. The thick incense burned his throat, his lungs. “Werigo made me forget.”

  And in doing so, the Xibalban had unknowingly struck a hell of a blow for his team.

  “Why didn’t Woody say anything?” she whispered almost soundlessly.

  “I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t. He would’ve been . . .” Horrified. Disappointed. Worse, he would’ve insisted that Brandt retake the oath and finish it. That was how deeply Wood’s faith ran. Brandt gripped the edge of the altar so hard his fingers shook. “I made a blood vow to tell him all about it if the barrier came back online and the countdown rebooted.”

  Only he hadn’t, because Werigo had made him fucking forget it.

  “You knew.” Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying, even though she hadn’t shed any tears.

  “That first night, you knew that you were under this, this curse. And you didn’t warn me, not even once you realized I was a Nightkeeper.”

  Things had been so crazy that night. He’d been wrapped up in the magic, hooked on the adventure.

  “I would have told you later.”

  “Right. Just like you were planning on telling Woody later.” She took a step toward him, eyes flashing. “You came up to me, made love to me, knowing that we cou
ldn’t be together.”

  It was just supposed to be a spring-break hookup, he thought, but didn’t say, because she was right.

  He’d done what he wanted to do that night. But his decisions back then weren’t the point. Once again she was getting stuck in her emotions when they needed to be dealing with the practicalities.

  Frustration knotted his gut. “Don’t you get what this means? You’re at the top of the fucking list now.”

  His throat locked, but he got it out. “You and the boys.”

  Her expression iced to the “don’t mess with my sons” look he had seen only once before, when Strike had told her they had to send Harry and Braden into hiding. “I’m not an idiot. I get that. But what I also get is that this has all happened because you’re so godsdamned convinced you know everything, that you have the right to make decisions for the people around you.”

  “Bullshit.” His head hammered with his pulse. “That’s just bullshit. And can we please focus on what’s important here? We’ll deal with the relationship stuff later.”

  “On your schedule.” Her voice was chill, but her reddened eyes were full of pain.

  “Patience.” He held out a hand. “Please. Let’s not do this right now. We need to concentrate on figuring out how to get at the Triad magic safely.”

  To his surprise, she took the hand he’d offered. But instead of twining their fingers together, she turned his palm up, so torchlight shone on the half-healed sacrificial cut. “Don’t you get it?

  Everything’s connected.” Something new moved in her expression, a hint of grief existing beneath the anger. “None of this has been a coincidence.”

  “You want me to have faith.” He said the last word like a curse.

  She tightened her grip on his hand. “I want you to let me in. I want you to tell me everything, and listen to what I have to say. I want you to trust me. I want you to trust all of us.” Her voice went low and urgent. “You’ve got to stop making decisions for other people. And you’ve got to let us be your teammates. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to figure out how to fix this. As a team.”