“The charge is true?” He stared at her. “Why?”
She told him.
“Did those men deserve their deaths in the claws of that creature?”
Isa opened her mouth to snap “yes.” A glimmer of sunshine stirred within her and altered the shape of the word on her tongue. “I don’t know.”
“Those men did not die by your hand.”
“Close enough. I could have tried harder to stop the griffin,” she countered.
Jaiden canted his head as if listening to something more than her words. “You said the creature is incredibly powerful. More powerful than you?”
“Easily.” She sighed out her relief at her assured answer. “You don’t believe I’m a Skinwalker?”
“No. You may yet have to atone for those deaths, I cannot say. It isn’t my place to weigh such things, but you are not a Skinwalker. Not yet.”
“Someone in the tribe told the AMBI I was.”
“I remember. Not everyone agreed,” he said. “Besides. Truth is mutable. You know that.”
“Based on perception and wishful thinking? Yes. I do remember Henry saying that.” For no good reason, that made her smile.
“Very well,” Isa said. “I can’t stay here. The police are currently too busy to recall that I’ve tattooed a bunch of Ria’s gang members. That won’t last. It’s a matter of time before the police begin following Emanuel straight here.”
Jaiden’s eyes widened.
“You aren’t carrying a cell phone, are you?” she asked.
“Turned off,” he said. “Ria warned me it could be tracked.”
“Welcome to the fringes of criminal life,” she said.
The discordant rasp of the bolt being unlocked on the front door scraped its fingernails along the walls.
Both of them froze.
Isa didn’t hear the door open, only the deep bass gong of the metal hitting the railing outside. Someone raised the roll-up door on the back of a truck.
“Where’d they want this stuff?” a familiar masculine voice yelled.
Scowling so she wouldn’t grin, Isa peeked out the doorway of the room.
Jaiden put a hand on her shoulder, pressed his lips, and shook his head, when she glanced at him.
“That’s Troy,” Isa whispered.
Jaiden’s hand fell away. He breathed a near silent laugh.
Troy, dressed in a blue coverall, carrying a pair of cardboard boxes, came through the front door.
Nathalie, robin’s egg blue curls bobbing, followed in his wake.
Another man followed on her heels, also in blue coveralls, and hefting boxes, but Isa would have recognized the sandy brown hair and lean frame anywhere.
“Steve!” she rasped.
It had come out little more than a whisper, but all three of her friends arrowed in on the sound.
A grin split Troy’s face. He strode down the hall, driving Isa back into the room as he squeezed through the door. He deposited his boxes against one wall and crossed to wrap a hand around her arm.
“Good to see you,” he rumbled.
Nathalie rushed into the room and up to Isa as if she intended to throw herself into Isa’s arms. She drew up short, gulping and sniffling.
Troy’s hand fell away.
Isa should hug her friend. It’s what people did. Normal ones. Wasn’t it?
Steve came through the door, lines of rage and maybe worry, etched deep into his forehead. The shadows in his face lifted the moment his gaze met hers.
The cold inside didn’t thaw, but weight she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying lifted.
He dropped his boxes, closed the distance in two strides, and gathered her into his arms.
For a moment, she allowed herself to relax into his hold, to return his embrace, and imagine what it would be like to have it be everything she needed.
“Isa,” he groaned into her hair, “you’re so cold.”
And he was warm. Or should be. Shouldn’t he? He always had been before. Something else the gods of the Mayan underworld had stolen from her? She frowned and straightened.
He released her, but caught her left hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “Are you all right?”
Troy picked up the boxes Steve had dumped and lobbed them against the wall as if they had no weight at all.
Her breath escaped in a wry laugh. She couldn’t answer. Easier to reach her free hand to Nathalie, hook her arm around her friend’s shoulders, and hug her to her right side.
“Holy shit, Ice,” Nat croaked. She edged away, peering at Isa’s right hand. “That dye you were working with isn’t supposed to be permanent. It’s also not supposed to spread.”
“It isn’t dye,” Jaiden said.
“No,” Isa said, glancing around at the faces of her friends. A simple mote of contentment poked its head up through the glacial ice inside her. “Is anyone else with you?”
“No,” Troy said. “In fact, I need to go grab another set of boxes. Verisimilitude, you know.”
Steve squeezed her fingers. “Me, too.”
“I won’t go anywhere,” she promised.
It did nothing to lighten his expression, though he lifted the corners of his lips in a parody of a smile.
“We want to know what the hell happened,” Troy warned. “But not until we get back.”
“Deal.”
“Hey,” Nathalie said. “There’s pizza.”
“How are Gus and Ikylla?”
“They’re fine,” she said, opening one of the boxes and dragging a pair of pizza boxes out. “I’d totally have brought them if Ria thought we could fly them under the radar, you know?”
Pressure piled up behind Isa’s eyes and in the center of her chest. “I am sick of being prey,” she bit out.
“You can’t afford to go hunting, Irene,” Jaiden said. “Not now.”
Nathalie’s eyebrows rose.
“I’ve been playing rabbit most of my life,” she snapped.
“With reason. Even mountain lions are prey,” Jaiden said. “They just don’t realize it until they get pulled down. Rabbit’s strength is that she knows.”
“There comes a day that the only way to survive is to turn tails on the predator,” Isa said. “There are many paths to hunt. And many kinds of prey.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Nathalie demanded as Troy and Steve trooped into the room laden with a set of white banker’s boxes.
Isa retreated to one of the office chairs and lowered herself into it. Aching muscles rushed to remind her that she hadn’t slept in the past twenty-four hours.
“Daniel Alvarez had a Live Tattoo when he kidnapped me,” she said. “Short story, that tattoo was—is a monster.”
“Is?” Steve echoed, accepting a slice of pizza and napkins from the box Nathalie walked around the room.
“Is,” she confirmed, grabbing a slice of pepperoni and black olive pizza. “There’s a portal, a doorway between our world and their world.”
“Wait, what?” Troy asked around a mouthful. “Their, who?”
“Uriel’s world. He was Daniel’s tattoo. It’s the same reality Murmur came from.”
Jaiden listened, watching her face, his gaze intent.
Nathalie, Steve, and Troy stared at her, each of them frowning.
“They’re connected,” Steve surmised.
She nodded. “Uriel and Murmur are enemies.”
“Knowing Murmur, I’m not surprised,” Steve said.
Troy and Nathalie shot her apologetic grimaces.
“What?” Steve demanded, looking between them.
Isa dropped her gaze to her slice of uneaten pizza. “Uriel came off Daniel in the midst of trying to open the door between the worlds. He got sucked back into his world. I slammed the door on him.”
>
“I’m not going to like this next bit, am I?” Steve asked.
“Uriel’s gotten the door open again,” she said, “but he can’t get through into this world yet.”
“Yet?” Nathalie squeaked.
“He doesn’t have a body here. So his passage between the worlds is barred,” Isa said. “He requires blood and magic. I suspect that getting them conveniently empties a body for him to take over and enter into this world.”
Silence.
Steve, sitting atop a couple of banker’s boxes, leaned forward to study her. “He’s the reason tattoos are still coming off people.”
“Yes.”
“How do we stop him?” he demanded.
Isa met his gaze and shook her head. “You don’t. I do.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there, don’t I?” Troy prompted.
“I’m dying.”
Chapter Twenty
Protest exploded from her friends. Doctors. Ambulance? How? Why? She looked fine. Jaiden remained silent, though he met her eye, and tipped his head.
Isa took a bite of pizza, letting her friends run out of denial, waited until brittle silence solidified like thin ice over the room.
“When her tattoo came off,” Jaiden said, “Irene sustained more than physical injury.”
“Irene?” Steve asked.
“My name before I changed it,” Isa said.
“Okay. More than physical injury,” Steve said. “You’re talking about magical injury.”
Jaiden nodded. “She has suffered a tear deep within, one that cannot be healed by anything a medical doctor might do. So we turn to alternatives.”
“More magic?” Troy asked.
Jaiden hesitated.
“Partially,” Isa hedged in her cousin’s stead. “A blend of spiritualism, magic, and tradition.”
Her cousin nodded his thanks. “Ideally, we would reunite Isa and her tattoo.”
“No,” Steve said.
“The both of them are bleeding out via their souls,” Jaiden snapped. “Is that what you want?”
Wiping a hand down his face, Steve wilted. “I want Daniel Alvarez dead.”
“No,” Isa said. “You want Uriel dead.”
“I wouldn’t discriminate.”
Troy barked a laugh.
“Irene refused,” Jaiden said.
“Good,” Steve muttered.
“This leaves us to address several things at once,” Jaiden said. “I will perform a healing ceremony to close the rift within Irene’s soul. Irene must confront the cold afflicting her.”
Every eye in the room turned to her. She shook her head. “I have no idea . . .” She broke off.
“You do,” Jaiden countered. “This blue on your hands and arms. What is it?”
“Maya blue,” Nathalie supplied. “Cheri gave her the pigment as a present when Ice started painting again.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Isa said to her cousin. “It isn’t remotely possible and I am not going.”
“What? No one’s said anything about going anywhere,” Steve said.
Isa scrubbed the pizza grease from her bright blue hands. “I’ve been told that I’m in the House of Cold.”
Nathalie’s eyes widened.
Troy and Steve exchanged a confused glance.
“Part of the Mayan underworld,” Nathalie said. “One of the nine levels of Xibalba.”
“The what?” Steve demanded.
“Xibalba,” she said. “The Place of Fear. It’s the Mayan depiction of the underworld.”
“I have been marked by the spirits of that place,” Isa said, lifting her hands. “It is incumbent upon me to journey into the underworld to find out why.”
Nathalie, staring at Isa’s hands, scowled. She stepped in and tugged Isa’s right sleeve higher on her arm. The sweatshirt sleeve rode up to the middle of Isa’s blue forearm.
“That’s not good,” she breathed. “Mayans who volunteered as sacrifices dyed themselves this color.”
“You are being summoned, Irene,” Jaiden said.
She nodded, hearing the far-off clatter of rattles and the throb of drums. “I don’t understand why. But if the Mayan underworld wants me, I have no choice but to go. I’ll have to seek a vision based on the expectations of the Mayan gods.”
“Bloodletting,” Nathalie said.
“What?” Steve and Troy yelped.
Jaiden chuckled.
“You know how that went down,” Nathalie said. “Right?”
“I had a chance to do a little research,” Isa said. “I have a few vague ideas.”
“What do you want to pierce?”
“I don’t.”
“But . . .”
“First, the ritual you’re talking about is for royalty,” Isa said. “I can’t assume it’s okay for me to do that. And boiled down, the issue is an altered state brought about by blood loss.”
“They burned the blood with copal incense,” Nathalie said. “Your prayers to the Mayan gods are supposed to be carried on the combination.”
“How do you know all of this?” Isa demanded.
Nathalie flushed. “It’s a rich mythology.”
“She’s trying to seduce a Latina lady who says she’s descended from Mayan kings,” Troy offered from his place lounging against the door frame.
Isa perked up. “Yeah? She’s hot?”
Nathalie’s grin answered for her.
“She’s playing too many games,” Troy said, shaking his head while he smiled.
“It’s not like I want to marry her yet,” Nathalie grumbled. “Stop letting Isa sidetrack us. We’re talking about running twine through a hole in her tongue as a means of getting her into Xibalba.”
“I am not Mayan,” Isa protested.
“You don’t know that,” Jaiden pointed out.
No. She didn’t.
Nathalie shifted, glancing at Jaiden, then back to Isa. “Fringe theory about the fall of the Mayan Empire. Fringe, okay? Seems there are similarities between the ancient Mayans and some native people of the Southwest, including the Navajo.”
Isa clapped a blue hand to her forehead. “So I grew up in one tradition that potentially overlaps another tradition?”
“No.” Jaiden shook his head.
“I said it was ‘fringe,’” Nathalie grumbled.
“Let’s assume I carry Mayan blood in some capacity. It’s simply not credible that it’s royal blood,” Isa said.
“It may not matter,” Jaiden said. “You’ve heard the theory that when a powerful people collapses, their gods suffer, too.”
“The notion of vampiric gods—gods feeding on their worshippers—disturbs me.”
“None of us believes our relationship with our deities flows only one way,” Jaiden said. “It is an exchange. You do not step out of this reality into any of the others without taking offerings.”
Especially not if she went in wanting something from the spirits or the gods. “I’m not comfortable walking into a spirit world I don’t belong to.”
“At this point, the Mayan spirits might be relieved to see any supplicant, Irene. You’re trained. You have every right to act as a priestess.”
“I was trained in the way of the Holy Ones!”
“You trained in many spiritual traditions. Ruth, Joseph, and Henry insisted. The spirits are the spirits.”
“And there’s no safety to be found in leaving our world for theirs,” Isa said. She couldn’t go into the spirit world to quiz the spirits or the gods without an offering. A respectful guest brought gifts to her hosts. That same respect dictated that her gifts take the form her hosts craved. It would be the height of arrogance to deny them their preferred coin and still ask for answers.
“No pain, no gain,” Jaiden quipped.
; Nathalie chuckled.
“Terrific,” Isa grumbled.
“I know where I can get copal resin,” Nathalie said. “I need two hours to get to Pike Place and back.”
“Tenzing Momo?” Troy said. “Let’s go.”
“We can’t stay here,” Isa protested.
“You have to,” Steve countered. “If what you said about that door between the worlds is true—it needs blood and magic—it’ll have it. Tonight.”
“The march,” Troy said, clenching a set of keys in his fist. “Damn it. We’ll make the market run faster.”
“What march?” Isa rose, uncertainty tearing at the wounds in her psyche.
“Antimagic protesters plan to crash the march protesting all of the people who’ve disappeared without due process. Like you did,” Troy said. “It’ll end in violence.”
“Ria is leading a pair of AMBI agents all over the city,” Steve said. “He has a secure line to me. We’ll have warning if this location is compromised.”
“Hurry,” Jaiden said to Nat and Troy.
“Okay,” Nathalie said. “I’ll need charcoal and . . .”
Troy and Nat strode away, Nathalie still listing what she’d need.
Isa should be the one gathering materials. She should be the one preparing for her journey.
“You can’t go out there,” Steve said. He must have interpreted her expression.
She scowled. Of course she couldn’t go out into her own world to make the preparations to cross into a world not her own in hopes of wresting guidance from the tight-closed fists of gods she’d never known and who had no reason to know her.
So many ways for this to go horrifically wrong.
“Rest easy, Irene. You have other preparations to make,” Jaiden said.
Yes, she did.
She wanted a fire. And a sky full of stars above, rather than bare, flickering fluorescent bulbs. While she was busy feeling sorry for herself, she wanted her teachers back. In the flesh. So she wouldn’t have to face the journey alone.
Rule seventeen: You rarely get to do magic in ideal conditions. Maybe that was just her.
At least Jaiden would be present. So would Nathalie. And Troy. And of course, Steve. Not a single one of them knew more than Ruth or Joseph or Henry. Jaiden hadn’t even been trained by them.
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