Blood Spells

by Jessica Andersen

  Her strung-tight muscles reached the warm, breathless numbness that presaged climax, leaving her almost helpless in the throes, with her mouth pressed to his throat, open in a silent scream. His body was rigid, hot, and sweat-slicked; their mingled scents ripened the air with an earthy, primal musk that seemed to connect her, not just to him, but to the earth itself, and all its inhabitants. Then that preternatural flash disappeared as the tingling numbness contracted suddenly, centering itself on her moisture-slicked channel and the hooded flesh just outside it, and the slap and slide of his body into hers.

  “Gods,” she whispered.

  He responded with a groan that might have been her name, might have been a denial of the gods themselves. Then even those thoughts were lost as he thrust deep and held himself there, pressed against her inside and out, his cock throbbing within her.

  The world went still; she was wrapped around him, pierced by him, and filled with the red-gold energy of the jun tan. She hovered there for three heartbeats. Then she tipped over in a screaming rush of pleasure. Her gut wrenched on an orgasm so powerful it was almost terrifying. She cried out on a shuddering breath and clutched at him, vising her legs around his hips and digging her fingers into his back as he bucked against her, groaning her name.

  He pushed against her, counterpointing the rhythmic pulses of her inner flesh, which sent ecstasy radiating outward, washing the world behind her eyelids red-gold. His pleasure rushed through her, and hers transmitted to him in return, echoing between them through the Nightkeepers’ mating magic, as they clung shuddering together, her face buried in the crook of his neck, his cheek pressed to the crown of her head.

  Pulse led to pulse in a magic-amplified climax that echoed long past human-normal, long past the point where it ceased being just sex and became far too important.

  Eventually, though, the waves of sensation leveled off and subsided, the jun tan bond faded to background, and they became nothing more than a man and a woman wrapped around each other, their bodies cooling together in the aftermath.

  Only they weren’t just a man and a woman. And as the seconds ticked by in silence, Patience’s postcoital bliss gave way to the knowledge that they couldn’t stay like that much longer.

  And didn’t that just suck?

  She didn’t want to go back to their real lives . . . and she really didn’t want to talk about what had just happened. The sex had gotten way too intense, made too many new memories. And she ran the risk of wanting to burrow in and cling, which hadn’t been part of the deal.

  They had gone into each other’s arms with the unspoken agreement that they were acting on the vision magic, burning off the impulse she’d created by channeling herself into the jun tan bond.

  The closer she stuck to that truce, the better it would be. They couldn’t afford to add more complications, not now.

  So she took a deep breath, channeled her warrior self as best she could, given that she was lying naked in Brandt’s arms, and said, “Okay, here’s the deal according to my nahwal. You can still become the Triad mage, but only if I help you settle some debt and make peace with your ancestors. And we’ve got four days to do it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I have to . . . Wait—what?” Brandt stared at Patience.

  In the aftermath of their lovemaking, her face was soft, her lips kiss-stung, her eyes the blue of a Caribbean lagoon. But rather than looking well loved and dreamy, she looked . . . businesslike.

  Not that he could blame her, given what she’d just hit him with. His thoughts churned. What debt? What peace with his ancestors?

  But on a far more primal level, he was aware of the warm tingle at his wrist, the tangle of their bodies, the fading echoes of the sex they had just shared, and the hint of vulnerability beneath her outer calm. She had come into the magic after him, risking herself to save his sorry ass. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to kiss her and put himself back into the jun tan connection, the one place where they still synced up perfectly.

  Before the impulse could fully form, though, his warrior’s talent came online.

  He gritted his teeth and tried to stop the shift, but the fighting magic ran so strong in the eagle bloodline—along with arrogance and egotism, at least according to Woody—that he damn well couldn’t stop the change. Which pissed him off. The other magi had found ways to balance the needs of their magic and their mates . . . so why the hell couldn’t he? Why didn’t—

  Pain lanced through his skull. Shit, he thought, pressing his fingers against his closed eyelids. The headaches had come with the talent . . . or, rather, they came whenever he thought about going against his warrior’s mandate.

  Frustration roughened his tone. “Tell me everything.”

  “The message came from your nahwal via mine . . . because apparently you and yours have a communication problem.”

  “‘A communication problem,’” he repeated. “That sounds like something you would say, not a nahwal.”

  She stilled against him. Then she pulled away from their postsex tangle and climbed from the bed. Her shoulders were tight as she collected her clothes and started pulling them on.

  He cursed himself thoroughly. “I’m sorry. That was an asshole comment. I’m . . . shit. I’m sorry.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Headache.”

  She nodded without looking at him. “Your head’s been through a lot in the past twelve hours or so.”

  Twelve hours. He glanced to the other side of the bed and saw his reflection in the glossy black bottom of a tipped-over pot. Magic. “You found a spell that could bring me back.”

  “With help from Lucius.” Her expression took on a glint of defiance. “And the oracle.”

  He stifled the instinctive wince, not wanting to get into another back-and-forth about her wasting time on a pointless hobby when they had more important things to worry about. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  It sounded pitifully inadequate, but what the hell else could he say?

  “Nobody’s keeping score. So here goes with the ‘while you were sleeping’ recap . . .” She leaned up against the bureau with her arms crossed, in a semi-casual pose that made her look like a guest in the bedroom they had once shared, as she took him through the events of the past twelve hours.

  He started getting dressed, but by the time she got to the part about Anna and Mendez being the second and third Triad magi, he was sitting on the side of the mattress in his jeans, with a T-shirt wadded in one hand, forgotten, while she described her card-sparked hunch on the etznab spell, and using it to put them both into the vision of their first night together.

  “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 thoug
ht 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 wa
sn’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?