“She changed the rules.”
“She changed herself. And she did it because of how she feels about you.”
That brought Lucius’s head up. He turned to face the winikin more fully, but scowled. “Not until I got buff.” He didn’t know the resentment was there until he’d said it aloud.
“Reality check. You don’t get to talk down about the old you and then get pissed when you think she likes the new-and-improved version better. And besides, I wasn’t talking about the past few weeks, or even the past few months. Think about it. When did she start standing up to Shandi and the others?”
“While I was gone.”
“It was because you were gone, dipshit. Anna had more or less checked out, and everyone else was concentrating on their own problems. Jade was the one who kept your name out there. Why do you think Michael put his own life on the line to get you out of the in-between?”
“Because it distracted the boluntiku and bought him enough time to cast the spell he needed to free himself of the Mictlan’s magic.”
“Screw that. He did it because he knew Jade wanted you back, and he owed her one. He did it for her. Because he knew how much she cared about you, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it at the time.”
A dull rushing noise built in the back of Lucius’s head, and a heavy weight settled on his chest. “I thought about her all the time. It was the only thing that kept me going.”
“So why are you pissed at her now?”
Lucius looked up at her, catching her eye. She glanced away, her chin high and her features tight. “I’m not. I’m . . . Shit, I don’t know. I think it was easy for us to care for each other when we were apart; we could remember the good stuff and forget the rest. How can I be sure we won’t go through the same pattern over and over? What if chemistry and friendship aren’t enough? She’s the one who says people don’t change, but I think they do. I mean, just look at her. She’s getting stronger every damn day, whether she realizes it or not. How do people make it work when they can’t control what they’re going to get from day to day?” He thought of his parents, locked in a thirty-year stalemate between football and Tupperware, thought of his brothers and their interchangeable, silent girlfriends, and his sisters and their husbands and lovers, who could have been swapped out for his brothers without anyone noticing or caring. Who the hell wanted to live like that?
“If two people truly want to stay together, then they grow in the same direction. Not accidentally, but because they work at it.” The winikin gestured at the picnic tables, where the mated pairs sat close together, sharing intimate looks and private smiles. “Doesn’t that look like people making it work?”
“Those are magi, not people. The gods care for humans, but they don’t give them destinies.”
Jox tapped Lucius’s wrist, right above the hellmark. “Don’t be so sure of that.” The winikin collected his plate and rose to his feet. “Break’s almost over, but like I said, go ahead and sit out the first shift if you want to.”
Lucius dumped his leftovers and headed toward the playing field, where the teams were assembling, the players looking steely eyed and rested, determined that one side or the other was going to get the upper hand. But when he reached the edge of the playing field, he paused and looked back to the tables, where Jade was helping Shandi clean up. As though she felt his eyes on her, Jade looked up, their gazes connecting.
He saw the hurt beneath the calm. More, he saw her determination, her refusal to give up on the people who needed her, even though she might have preferred to be somewhere else, doing something else. Duty, dignity, decorum; she’d said it was the harvester way, and she had all of those qualities. But she was also brave and intelligent, quietly fierce and loyal. And none of those things, he realized, jibed with her being shallow or manipulative. She was a kind person, a healer, not of the body like Sasha, but of the mind and spirit. She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything; she’d been trying to do what she thought was right, trying to let him find his own way rather than control him, because she knew he needed to not be boxed in.
Which left them . . . where? Hell, he didn’t know, but he suddenly knew one thing for certain: They weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
He tried to convey that in a look, but her face went blank and confused at first, and then gained an edge of anger beneath. That anger reminded him too strongly of his own, of the green flash and the echo of the makol ’s voice inside his skull. He couldn’t go to her, not yet. He needed to deal with the darkness inside him first . . . and pray to the gods it was possible to break free, finally, from his past mistakes.
Then Jox blew the conch shell and tossed the heavy rubber ball to Nate for the first serve, and Lucius told himself to get the hell on the field.
He crossed to the picnic table instead.
When he drew Jade aside, her eyes went stormy. “No,” she said firmly. “You don’t get to apologize. You were right about some of it, and so was I, but what’s said is said; what’s done is done. I don’t—” Her voice broke; she looked away, visibly trying to hold it together. “I don’t like feeling this way. I want my peace and quiet back.”
“Too late.” Not sure what possessed him, he tugged the scarf from her hair. Looping it around his arm, he tied it above where the ballplayers’ asymmetrical armor attached. Leaning in, he dropped a quick, hard kiss on her lips. “We’ll talk later.”
He retreated before she could respond, before she could insist that no, damn it, they were going to talk now. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to her, didn’t know what he wanted from her, but he knew it wasn’t what they had right then, and it wasn’t for them to go back to where they’d been before. They needed to go forward.
Moving fast, impelled by a sudden, fierce sense of urgency, he raced onto the playing field. Now, as he spun and pivoted, throwing hips and elbows, feet and shoulders as the scrum boiled from one side of the narrow pavilion to the other, there was nothing rote or mechanical in his actions. He was entirely there, entirely in the moment and the game.
He instinctively knew when Jade climbed the stairs and joined the audience, knew when she saw him, locked her eyes on him and didn’t look away. He played for her, trying to make his case without the words he couldn’t find just then. A faint note hummed on the air, high and sweet. It sounded like it might have come from Jox’s referee’s pipe, but the winikin stood off to the side, arms folded.
“Nightkeepers onto the field! Everyone, now!” Strike bellowed suddenly, and Jade and the others raced to join the game. The pace shifted, grew frenzied as the high, sweet note intensified and the orange light coming from up above seemed, for a moment, to brighten and turn white and warm.
Lucius was barely aware of these peripherals, though; his whole focus was on the ball and the play. Sven served to Nate, who returned to Alexis, who bumped back to Sven. Action and reaction, arc and flow. Over there, Lucius knew, and headed for a clear spot at the edge of the action. Seconds later, the ball flew straight toward him. So did Strike and Michael, their eyes locked on the arcing sphere.
Michael crouched; the ball hit his shoulder guard and deflected straight upward, when all physics said it should have ricocheted to Strike in the pass they had undoubtedly intended. Lucius didn’t slow or swerve; he barreled straight at Michael. He saw the other man’s eyes go wide, saw him brace for impact.
Only Lucius didn’t hit him—he jumped, spring-boarded off the other man’s shoulder, and went vertical.
The ball reached its apogee and descended, hurtling toward a ball court that represented imprisonment in the underworld. Lucius flew up to meet the sun ball, slammed his armored forearm into its yielding irregularity, and sent it hurtling through the heavy air. The ball shot sideways, not toward the underworld court now, but toward the sacred stone ring. Toward the future.
Gravity grabbed Lucius, yanking him earthbound as though pissed that he’d broken free for a brief and glorious moment. He slammed into the ground and rolled to li
e flat, staring up, as the sun ball passed through the sacred ring without touching the sides. For a moment, the earth went still, and he imagined he could hear the cosmic swish of his sideways slam dunk.
Then the sweet note went to a scream, a brilliant red-gold flash split the air, and the world lurched around Lucius. Adrenaline slashed through him. This wasn’t his magic, whatever that was. There was no green haze, no feeling of inward pressure; this was entirely external, a greater force taking him somewhere. Then he was moving, accelerating, the world whipping sideways past him and going to a gray-green blur.
Air detonated around him, drier than the rank humidity of Skywatch. He had only a moment to register tall tree trunks covered in dry, dead moss and wilted vines before gravity yanked at him again—he could almost hear it snarl, Stay down there, will you? He landed on his feet, bent kneed and not alone. The other magi were all around him, with Jade at the edge of the group, near a thick stand of brownish vegetation. He caught an impression of a blighted rain forest, with tall tree giants forming an overhead canopy protecting wilted air plants, with their long, ropy roots. Vines hung in limp tangles, and sad-sounding parrots called desultorily from up above.
Climate change, he thought. The cloud forests are dying . But even as that clicked in his brain, he saw the brittle ferns sway with the passing of a large creature. Then another. “Jade,” he shouted as adrenaline spiked. “Behind you!”
As she spun, the greenery parted beneath paws the size of a man’s palm, and a big, black shape emerged, joined seconds later by another. The fur bristled between their shoulder blades; their hackles were raised.
The companions of Kinich Ahau had come to earth!
Michael shouted and the magi converged on the creatures. Lucius lunged in front of Jade, and lifted his hand stone. Then he hesitated, because the companions weren’t attacking. The creatures were just standing there, with their eyes locked on Jade. “Don’t move,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t even breathe.”
She touched his arm. “I think it’s okay. Remember, they defended me before.”
“Now I’m defending you.”
“I know.”
He glanced back at her, saw the decision in her eyes, and grabbed her arm before she could do something impulsive. “Oh, no, you don’t.”
“They came from Xibalba,” she pointed out. “They must have come through the hellmouth. Maybe they can lead us back there. If it’s still closed, I might be able to manipulate the magic hiding it, like I did with Vennie’s cave.”
The other magi were gathered close in support, but he saw only her, feared only for her. “Jade—” he began.
She touched his mouth, silencing him. “Shh. We’ll talk about it later,” she said. And this time, the “later” was a promise.
Lucius knew he didn’t have a choice. She was a warrior, with or without the mark, and she needed to do what the gods intended, both for the Nightkeepers and for herself. He stepped slowly back and gestured for her to do her thing.
The moment she started forward, the dogs whirled and plunged into the undergrowth. Without looking back or hesitating, she plunged after them, with Lucius right on her heels. If anything bad wanted to get at her, it was going to have to go through him to do it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jade’s nerves revved high as she followed the companions, who were moving fast through the dying cloud forest, their heads and tails low as though they were on a mission. Which she supposed they were: Save Kinich Ahau, and get him back in the sky where he belonged.
One thing at a time, she reminded herself. First we need to find the hellmouth. As she chased after the long-legged black hellhounds, she sought the magic, called it to her, but nothing happened. Panic flickered. Don’t you dare quit on me now.
But it wasn’t that the magic had quit on her, she knew. She’d quit on it. Or rather, she was blocking the hell out of it.
Damn it, Lucius, she thought, but even as she did, she knew it wasn’t entirely his fault, or hers. They had both screwed things up the night before. She should’ve told him about her theory of the connection between their emotions and their magic, and she should’ve come clean to him that she was falling hard and fast for him despite all her best intentions. Even admitting it to her inner self brought a lick of panic. He’d turned her down, said that wasn’t what he wanted, she wasn’t what he wanted.
Granted, his behavior on the ball court and the way he’d worn her scarf as a knight’s Dark Age favor suggested he’d been doing some rethinking too, and the way he was following close behind her now had all the hallmarks of a male warrior- mage protecting his mate. But they hadn’t said the words, hadn’t had the conversation.
More talking? she asked herself, irritation spiking. Therapy might be a two-way conversation, but she was getting sick of it. She was tired of talking herself into trouble; she wanted to act, to react, to make a difference, damn it.
Up ahead, the big black creatures crossed a wide clearing and then stopped dead, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing nothing in particular. Then they sat, still staring at that same nothingness. Only it wasn’t nothing, Jade knew. It was the hellmouth . . . or it would be if she could figure out the magic.
Lucius moved up beside her while the other magi fanned out, waiting for her to do her thing. None of their talents was compatible with the task—fire could level the forest but it couldn’t uncover what had been hidden; a shape-shifted hawk could fly a search pattern, but the Volatile could see only what was visible. Mind-bending wouldn’t help; Strike couldn’t ’port blind; and invisibility wasn’t their problem—visibility was.
“It’s all yours,” Lucius said, his thoughts paralleling hers. He took her hand, squeezed it. “You can do it. I have faith in you.”
That jarred against his recent behavior. “Maybe,” she said softly, “but what if I’m not strong enough?”
He looked down at her, his eyes intense. “The harvesters believed in the importance of their work; Shandi believed in the value of the harvesters. The stars believed in the prophecies, Vennie in her own brilliance. You’re a part of each of them. What do you believe in?”
She didn’t answer right away. She knew that the clock was ticking, that everyone was waiting for her. But she was stuck on Lucius’s question. What did she believe in? She believed in the magic, in the Nightkeepers and the war. She believed that she was stronger than she used to think she was, and that she and Lucius . . . what? Did she believe they could make each other happy in the long run?
That was the problem, she realized suddenly, or one of them. She’d seen the end of so many relationships that she entered each new affair preparing for its end, creating a self- fulfilling prophecy that made it easier, safer, and less dramatic to not bother trying to keep it going. What would happen if she threw herself into it heart and soul?
She might be crushed, she realized. But she might also succeed.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that inner peace is highly overrated.” While he was trying to puzzle that one out, she stepped into him and kissed him, hard. What was more, she opened herself fully to her own emotions and damned the consequences.
The magic shimmered within her, in the air around them, and a hidden door opened inside her, letting in the power of the solstice, and the power that was hers alone. She stepped away from Lucius, taking her place directly between the companions, facing nothing.
Only it wasn’t nothing, she saw now. It was everything.
The bright sparks she’d seen as part of the shifting pattern of power in Rabbit’s sublet had come from sex or emotion, maybe both; the fluid magic she’d sensed covering the hidden tunnel at Skywatch had been an ancient spell imbued with modern hopes and fears. But seeing those things was just half of her magic. The other half was in the spell words themselves, and her ability to morph them from one thing to another. She had created ice magic, it was true, but she hadn’t been able to use that part of her talent since.
Now, a
s she laid herself open to the magic, to the possibilities, she saw it. In front of her, rising from the dried-up cloud forest floor to the wilted canopy above, stretching the width of the clearing in either direction, was a wall of magic. It was bright sparks and flowing power. It was the code beneath the chatter, the structure underlying the fabric of the earth. At the same time, glyph strings crawled across the undulating surface of the spell, morphing and mutating as she watched. How in the hell was she supposed to alter a spell that was altering almost faster than she could follow it?
Gods, she thought, stomach twisting. It was too complex, too mutable. She could see the structure but she couldn’t get a grip on it. The spell was a slippery ball of power, sliding through her grasp each time she thought she had it.
She stared at the nothingness, sweat prickling on her brow.
“Jade.” It was Lucius’s voice, low in warning. On either side of her, the companions were growling, their shoulder fur ruffling.
“They won’t hurt me. I think they’re worried. The magic of the game brought them through, and now they can’t get back to him. Unless . . .” She trailed off as a glyph glinted in the flowing string. It glowed, floated off the spell surface, and locked itself into a single pictograph. As she watched, a second followed. Then another. Her magic churned and spun, but she wasn’t quite there yet. The magic wasn’t quite there.
Without another thought or hesitation, she opened herself to the task, to the power and the potential for failure and drama. Take what you need. Something shifted inside her, a sharp lurch beneath her heart, and she gasped. Then it was there: The counterspell flared in front of her, burning itself into her mind’s eye.
She reached back for Lucius’s hand, felt their fingers twine and link. Whispering a small prayer in her heart, she recited the counterspell.
The shimmering curtain of power and spell words disappeared as though it had never existed. There was no explosion, no power surge. One moment all she saw in front of her were more trees, more dying vines. In the next, she was staring at a mountainside with a terrible skull carved into it, jaw gaping wide so it screamed the dark, ominous entrance to a cave. Just inside its mouth, a skeleton hung skewered to the cave wall, still wearing the remains of what had been a purple velour tracksuit.
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 33