Blood Spells

by Jessica Andersen

  It was her darkest unvoiced fear, that one day he would decide that, with the twins gone and the two of them living mostly separate lives, he didn’t want to bother with a shared suite and matching rings, that he was sick of their strained politeness and the way both of them tried too hard to pretend things were getting better.

  Once, their mated bond had been so strong that he would have heard her whispered thoughts even without the bloody handclasp of an uplink.

  Not now, though.

  She looked over at him, and their eyes locked, her sky blue to his gold-spangled brown gone dark and forbidding in the torchlight. The skin was tight across his high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and wide brow, and shadows ringed his eyes, but his hair was neat, his shaved jaw smooth, his eyebrows the matching curves of a gliding eagle’s wings. She felt sweaty and desperate in comparison.

  “Don’t do it,” she whispered into the silence that had fallen as the others waited for her and Brandt to complete the circle.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice rasped slightly, though she didn’t know if the roughness came from impatience or something else. She couldn’t read him when he was this deep in the magic.

  The magic fizz went flat inside her. Everything’s wrong, she wanted to say, but that was the answer of the woman she’d been for too long, the one who had turned inward and self-pitying, becoming depressed after he and Strike had sent the twins away. She wasn’t that person now, though, which meant the quick, knee-jerk answer didn’t fit anymore.

  The woman inside her, the one who still loved the memory of the man she had married out in the human world . . . that part of her wanted to tell him to be careful, to stay strong, and even—gods forgive her—to reject the Triad power if he was chosen. She wanted to tell him to think of the twins, of her, of the future they had once imagined.

  The warrior inside her, though, refused to go there. The spell wasn’t about being careful; it was about fulfilling a three-thousand-year-old prophecy and maybe—hopefully—gaining the power they would need to defend the barrier during the upcoming winter solstice, when a total lunar eclipse would destabilize the hell out of the barrier.

  What was more, both the warrior and the woman inside her knew that she couldn’t turn her back on the war. Between now and the end of 2012 the Nightkeepers needed to hold the rapidly weakening barrier against the Banol Kax. If they didn’t, her future plans wouldn’t matter worth a damn because there wouldn’t be a future, not for her, and not for mankind. The lucky ones would die outright in the first wave, when the dark lords broke out of the underworld. The rest would be horribly trapped as the Banol Kax first fed on their souls, and then used their half-animate bodies to create new armies aimed at conquering the sky itself.

  She hadn’t let herself imagine marching as part of that army, had forced herself not to think about the fact that twins were sacred to the old legends, and therefore a threat to the dark lords. But the knowledge haunted her nightmares with shifting shadows and luminous green eyes.

  And because of all that, there was only one answer she could give Brandt.

  Calling on her warrior self, letting the magic blunt her emotions and bring determination, she stretched out her hand to him, palm up, so the bloody sacrificial cut glistened dark in the torchlight. “The only thing that matters today is calling the Triad. The rest can wait.”

  It was the proper answer, the dutiful one. And the warrior within her meant every word of it, even as the woman yearned to turn back the clock.

  “We need to—”

  “Uplink,” she interrupted.

  He exhaled. “Patience . . . ,” he began, but then trailed off and reached out to her in return, pausing just before their fingers touched. Magic curled between them, hazing the air red-gold. The hum changed pitch, inching upward as their eyes locked.

  Desire flared, coming from the inextricable link between magic and sex, and the power of the jun tan marks that still joined their souls even though the connection of their minds and hearts had waned. She didn’t feel the added power that had once come when the jun tan link opened fully, joining them heart and soul. But there was heat and need, and an ache of longing.

  “Don’t shut me out.” She hadn’t meant to say it, not in front of the others, and certainly not in the middle of the Triad spell.

  Always before when she had talked to him about how he put up walls between them, she had gotten blankness edged with frustration, and his reminder that they had a job to do. This time, though, she caught a gleam of gold and a flash of pain.

  The sight surprised her, leaving her slow to react when he leaned into her, whispered her name, and kissed her.

  And oh, holy crap, what a kiss. The soft warmth of his lips was a shocking contrast to the hard control of the man who’d been facing her only moments earlier. They touched just at that single point of contact, with nothing holding her in place; she could pull away, should pull away.

  Instead, she leaned in and kissed him back.

  Their tongues touched and slid, and his flavor caromed through her, lighting neurons that had been dim for months now. Years. She felt the vibration of his groan, though the sound was lost beneath the escalating hum of power that surrounded them as heat raced through her veins. Excitement heated her blood, coming both from sex magic and the thought that something had changed, that he was finally seeing her, finally connecting with her the way the other mated pairs joined up within the magic. Psi energy flared as he shifted against her, lifting an arm as if to pull her closer.

  Instead he took her hand, pressed their bleeding palms together, and completed the circle of ten.

  Power zinged through the uplinked magi, and the red-gold buzz of magic went to a bloodred shriek that drowned out Patience’s cry of surprise. Frustration slashed through her, coming less from the interrupted kiss than from the fact that he’d used it—used her—to provide the final power surge they had needed to trigger the spell. The kiss hadn’t been about them at all. It had been about necessity. Damn him.

  The world lurched, and suddenly she was moving without going anywhere, her spirit-self peeling out of her corporeal body and caroming sideways into the barrier. Then there was a final wrench of magic as the Triad spell took hold, gripping her with an inexorable force that warned her there was no going back. Not now. Maybe not ever again. Gods.

  She tried to take the anger with her, knowing that it was better to be pissed than depressed. But as gray-green mist raced past her, laced with lightning and the smell of ozone, all she could do was close her eyes and launch a forbidden plea. Please, gods, don’t pick us.

  You’re a dick. The growl came in Woody’s voice, filtering out of the blur of transition magic. Even though Brandt hadn’t seen his winikin in two years, Wood remained the voice of his conscience. And it had a point.

  He shouldn’t have kissed Patience in the middle of the Triad spell, shouldn’t have touched her beyond the necessity of the uplink. But for a second there, he’d felt a flash of their old connection, a spark not just of chemistry but of the simpatico they used to share, back when they made each other stronger rather than nuts.

  And damn, it’d felt good, like old times. Problem was, she wanted old times all the time, and he couldn’t promise that anymore.

  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 work
ing 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 younger 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, vo
ices 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.