Blood Spells

by Jessica Andersen

  That’s right, Patience thought now. They can’t see you if you make yourself disappear.

  Slowly the image faded, leaving her alone in the pool house. Everything was clean and neat, but the air smelled sterile and unloved, like she was in a guest room rather than an integral part of the compound. Which she supposed was true now. The magi had more important things to do these days than hang out by the pool.

  The room looked the same: The daybed was there with the same pillows and throw, and the same woven rug covered the floor. The half-open bathroom door revealed a large mirror, fresh towels, and a loaded soap dish. Another mirror hung in the main room, this one full-length and showing her wide-eyed reflection. Logic said the big mirror was a hold-over from when the little playhouse had functioned as a changing area, but still . . . There’s no such thing as coincidence; it’s all just the will of the gods.

  “Okay.” She blew out a breath. “I get it.”

  She closed the door and crossed to the daybed, where she sat cross-legged with the pillows at her back. She didn’t let herself dwell on the knowledge that Harry and Braden had napped on those pillows and wrestled on that bed. Still, the knowledge warmed her with a gentle ache of sorrow. She opened herself to the emotions, knowing that it was all too easy to block the flow of magic, and that foretelling was one of the most fickle talents of all.

  She fanned the large purple-backed deck, and set the accompanying book off to the side, in case she wanted to check herself on anything. She had memorized the major connections for each glyph card, but there were also subtler associations listed for each: symbols, numbers, flowers, scents, stones, and elements. In addition, each glyph had a shadow aspect, a darker set of foretellings. She would need the book for those readings.

  Figuring more magic was better than less, she used her ceremonial knife to nick her palm, and murmured, “Pasaj och.”

  The power link with the barrier formed instantly; the magic skimming across her skin was far stronger than it had been even three months earlier, during the autumnal equinox. Things were changing so fast, and they were still two years out from the end time. What would the world look like in a year? Two years? Three? Gods help us get this right so Harry and Braden will have a world to grow up in.

  Feeling the power wrap around her, warming her and making her yearn—for her sons, for the future—she whispered, “How can I help Brandt become a Triad mage?” Then she selected three cards from the fan, held them for a moment, then laid them side by side in front of her.

  There were numerous types of spread, ranging from the single-card quick-and-dirty reading she had done when she pulled the etznab cards, to a full array of stars, lenses, and oracles, placed in intricate patterns of meaning. For this reading, she had chosen a simple three-card line called the “tree of choice.” Trees were sacred; their roots tapped the underworld, their trunks lived in the realm of mankind, and their canopies touched the sky and protected the villages. In the oracle spread, the three cards represented, in order from right to left, the root of the problem implied by her question; the core—and potentially flawed—beliefs surrounding the problem; and the branches through which the answer could be achieved.

  At least that was the theory.

  Taking a deep breath, she flipped the first card. On it, four parallel yellow curves crossed a maroon square that was outlined in black. Behind the square rose a yellow, rayed sun. “Imix,” she said, pronouncing it “ee-meesh” in the ancient tongue. The Divine Mother card, it symbolized trust, nourishment, maternal support, and receptivity.

  Her stomach flutter-hopped, because she pulled Imix almost every time she did a reading for herself. It was her totem card.

  But pulling the card now made her grimace with twisted amusement. “Great. I’m the root of the problem.”

  She couldn’t sustain the self-directed humor, though, because that seemed all too likely. Brandt had tried to get her to back off the family stuff and focus on her magecraft, but she hadn’t been able to make that switch. Loving him and the twins wasn’t something she could step away from, and it pissed her off that he’d done it so seamlessly. If they needed to work together to regain his lost memories, then it was certainly possible that her negative emotions could be blocking things.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached for the book. Flipping through the worn pages, she found Imix, and read down its associations. Most of them didn’t seem related to the issue at hand, but one pinged: Imix was connected to the earth element, and they were racing to counter the earthquake demon. It wasn’t exactly a neon sign, but it was something.

  Then again, in the outside world she’d been a champion at reading deep meanings in her fortune cookie fortunes.

  Moving on, she skimmed over the light aspects of Imix, which she knew by heart. The card was a call for her to look below the surface of her life, to give and receive love. She was trying to do that, damn it.

  She paused, though, when she got to the first line of the next section.

  “‘The shadow aspects of Imix are issues of trust and survival, feelings of being unsupported or unworthy, and the need for outside validation,’” she read aloud, feeling a tingle run through her body. Except for the validation part, that described the person she’d been during her depression, and the temptations she still had to fight against.

  The reading seemed to say that her thought processes were at the root of the problem. Which sucked. But at least that was something she might be able to fix. “Okay, fine. Be that way. So what’s the core belief I need to use or get past in order to move forward?”

  Not letting herself hesitate, she flipped the second card. It showed a royal blue square in the middle, with yellow circles at each corner. In the center of the blue square, a diamond-shaped cutout showed a starscape beyond. Behind all of that was the same yellow sun as on the first card. The continuity of pulling two sun cards in a row seemed to point at the involvement of Kinich Ahau, which played. This particular card, though, wasn’t familiar. She didn’t think she’d ever drawn it before.

  She read the single word at the bottom: “Lamat.” A quick search through the book revealed that Lamat was the card of the One Who Shows the Way. Okay, then, it symbolized leadership. She didn’t think it referred to Strike, though. She didn’t see how the king could be at the core of Brandt’s inability to become a Triad mage.

  Moving on to the light aspects, she read: “‘Lamat indicates harmony, clear perspectives, and the creation of beneficial combinations.’ Meh.” She shrugged and moved on. “‘The shadow aspects of Lamat are disconnection and the belief that there is only one right way, one exclusive system that can bring harmony.’” That resonated. More, when she added it to the concept of leadership, she came up with the distant, rigid, system-based former architect who had been prophesied to lead the magi against Cabrakan. Brandt.

  Unfortunately, identifying Brandt as the core of the problem wasn’t news either. Disappointment gathered as she skimmed through the rest of the information, finding little of note except for the animal and elemental associations of Lamat: the rabbit, and fire. That suggested that Rabbit was involved with the core issue, or maybe its solution. But beyond that, she wasn’t seeing anything nearly as concrete as the mirror card had been, in terms of giving her a clue of what she was supposed to do next.

  “Have faith,” she murmured. And she flipped the third card.

  The image was unfamiliar, and very different from the first two, done in a watery blue green, with white accents, showing none of the yellows and blacks that were on the other cards. It was a moon card, with a white disk in the background. In the foreground was an arrangement of lines and shapes, just as on the others. But on this one, the combination of downward-arching lines at the upper corners and a circular pattern at the lower center combined to form the image of an angry, scowling face with a strange twinkle in its eyes.

  “Chuen.” She flipped to the proper page in the book, and frowned when nothing connected. Chuen was the Monkey Trickst
er. Its light aspects were celebration, innocence, joy, and laughter; its shadow aspects were the destruction of old, useless patterns, the upending of known life, and the creation of a new one. Disappointment kicked. Frivolity sure as hell wasn’t going to connect Brandt with the Triad magic, and she didn’t see how mixing things up would help either. “Come on. Give me something to work with here!”

  Frustrated, she paged to the front of the book, where it described the spreads. Maybe she had missed something, or made a mistake.

  But when she figured out what she’d done, she just stared for a long moment. “Oh. Oh, gods.” This wasn’t good.

  The tree-of-choice array was supposed to be laid out in a line from top to bottom, canopy to roots. She had laid her cards from left to right, which wasn’t the tree-of-choice spread. It was the past-present-future spread, which had nothing to do with the question she’d asked, and had everything to do with the person who had pulled the cards—namely, her.

  The Divine Mother was her past.

  The rigid, rule-following leader was her present, and he had put her world in disharmony. Brandt.

  And her future was chaos and upheaval . . . leading to a new life.

  She didn’t want a new life, she thought on a surge of pure self-pity. She wanted her old life back, damn it. She wanted to be a wife and mother first, with everything else coming after that. She wanted to be back in the pretty kitchen of the Pittsburgh house, with Brandt snoozing in their shared bedroom, the boys napping down the hall. Or, rather, with Harry napping and Braden planning world domination, toddler-style. She wanted to know that if she headed into the bedroom, her sleepy-eyed husband would snag her hand and pull her back into bed with him.

  But that life was already gone, wasn’t it? She wasn’t just a wife and a mother anymore; she was a warrior. And even if the magi won the war and everything went back to so-called “normal,” she wouldn’t ever get her old life back. On some level she knew that. But that didn’t mean she wanted to think about what her new life was going to be like.

  “Did the oracle work?”

  She jolted at the sound of Brandt’s voice, the sight of him filling the pool house doorway. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come in.”

  He wore black cargo pants and a black tee with square-toed boots. The outfit was almost, but not quite, combat gear, suggesting that it was time for their next and almost last option. Her heart thumped, but with an aching wistfulness rather than surprise. When he raised an eyebrow, she realized she hadn’t answered his question about the oracle.

  “No. It didn’t give me anything.”

  He got points for not even hinting at an “I told you so.” Or maybe her success with the etznab spell had made an impression. Instead of commenting on the cards at all, he said, “Strike’s ready to ’port us down to El Rey. He’ll leave us there to poke around for as long as we need.” He paused. “Jox suggested we should try getting a room at the same hotel or one like it. We could spend the night and see if it jogs some memories.”

  “That makes sense.” It also made her want to weep. Instead, she carefully gathered her cards, stacked them atop the book, and cradled the small pile against her as she unfolded herself from the daybed. She didn’t look back at the pillows or the memories they brought.

  She did, however, catch sight of herself in the big mirror beside the door. And for a second, she didn’t recognize the person staring back at her.

  The Patience who had come to Skywatch with her sons and been shocked to find her husband there already—instead of on the business trip he’d claimed—had looked younger than her twenty-three years, soft-faced and bouncy despite her fighting credentials and Nightkeeper upbringing. The woman in the mirror had lost the softness and gained an edge that said she wasn’t just trained to fight; she had fought for real and emerged, if not victorious, then at least alive.

  On some level, though, “alive” was about all she could claim. She wore jeans and a practical shirt, sturdy shoes, and a ponytail. And all she wanted to do was get through the next solstice, the next year, the next two years, and hope that tomorrow would be better than today.

  Gods. Was that the person she had become?

  “Patience? You okay?”

  There was honest concern in Brandt’s eyes, but that was it. Chest gone suddenly hollow, she nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  She headed for the door, but instead of giving way, he caught her hand. And pulled her into his arms.

  As she stiffened in shock and fought the too-tempting urge to burrow into him, he wrapped himself around her, enfolding her within the curve of his body and the strength of his arms. He splayed his hands, one spanning her waist, the other buried in her hair, holding her face tucked into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, with her lips almost touching the sensitive spot at the base of his throat.

  She tried to pull away, but he held her fast, not squeezing too hard, but not letting her go either. “Hush,” he whispered into her hair, though neither of them had made a noise. “Just give me a moment here, and take one for yourself.”

  If she fought, he would let her go, she knew. And she should fight. She should yank away and tell him that it wasn’t fair for him to reach for her now, when he’d pushed her away so many other times before. She should tell him to make a godsdamned choice, that he either wanted her or he didn’t, that she couldn’t handle seeing desire in him one moment, distance the next.

  She should tell him that she would be his partner in whatever way he needed her in order to gain the Triad magic, but only because it was her duty, that if it were up to her, she would walk away, not look back, because he was the root of her problem, not the branches of its answer.

  Instead, she burrowed in. And for a minute, she let herself hang on tight.

  Chiapas Mountain Highlands

  Mexico

  Rabbit whooped and grabbed the holy-shit strap as Cheech—his and Myrinne’s driver-slash-guide, who was in his midteens and drove like a death bat out of hell—gunned the battered Land Rover over a mogul-sized bump and caught some air. The dirt track flattened out on the other side, and Cheech revved along the one-laner, which was barely holding its own against the fuzzy undergrowth and the vines that hung down from the overarching trees.

  In the cramped backseat, Myrinne cheered.

  They flashed past scatterings of goats and pigs being herded among ancient stone stelae by little kids wearing everything from T-shirts and hip-hanging denim cutoffs to hand-loomed textiles in a dizzying array of bright colors and loud patterns. When they turned a corner and Cheech eased up on the gas, so they rolled past a cluster of homes at slightly under warp speed, Rabbit saw the same juxtaposition of modern and traditional materials, with some of the round pole buildings capped with huano thatch made of palm fronds and grass, others roofed in tin.

  “Upgrades?” he said, nodding to the metal roofing.

  “Nonoptional,” Myrinne corrected. “The contractors building the so-called ‘green’ resorts have clear-cut so much of the native vegetation that several of the major palm species have wound up federally protected.”

  “Thank you, Fodor’s Guide to Mayan Villages,” he intoned, but grinned at her from the front, where he rode shotgun.

  “It’s called ‘Google’ and ‘getting the lay of the land.’ You should try it sometime.” She smiled sweetly, but her dark brown eyes sparkled in challenge.

  Her dark hair was slicked back in a twist that left her neck and shoulders bare above a skimpy tube top, though the goods were modestly covered—sort of—with a filmy white button-down that she’d tucked into a pair of low-riding cutoffs. They had started out as jeans, but she had scissored and frayed them midthigh when she and Rabbit had wound up staying down south a couple of days longer than originally planned. For today’s adventure, she had skipped her sexy woven sandals in favor of lace-up boots more suitable to bumming around the mountains, but even though Rabbit couldn’t see it, he knew she was wearing the ruby red toe ring he’d bought her the oth
er day.

  And, as always, she wore the promise ring he’d given her the year before. He got a hard charge out of that, one that was admittedly harder because of all the looks she’d been getting on their little working vacation. He knew it made him a “guy”—in his head he heard the word in her voice, with a sneer—but seeing the way other men looked at her, and knowing she was with him, heart and soul . . . that mattered.

  “Gods, you’re hot.” So hot, in fact, that he was starting to sweat in the lightweight long-sleeve shirt he’d worn to hide his forearm marks. He hadn’t exactly forgotten how flat-out gorgeous she was, but when they were at Skywatch, it was easy to lose track of how much exponentially hotter she was than most everyone else in the universe. Any second now and he’d be drooling.

  Her teeth flashed, but she raised an eyebrow and shifted her eyes in Cheech’s direction, as the Rover cleared the little village and the pedal hit the metal once again. “Going polytheistic on me?” In other words: Watch yourself. We’re supposed to be normal gringos.

  He covered the wince with a chuckle. “More like going native. This place feels . . . familiar. Like I wouldn’t mind staying for a while.”

  That earned him a tolerant-seeming “stupid-ass tourist” look from Cheech, but it was the gods’ honest truth.

  Rabbit had been to dozens of centuries-old ruin sites, ranging from tourist traps to magic-shielded Nightkeeper temples, but although he’d gotten power buzzes from plenty of the sacred sites, he’d never stepped into one and thought, I know this place. I belong here. Yet ever since they’d told Strike a couple of half-truths and set out from Cancún for San Cristóbal, and from there up into the mountains, that sensation had been growing steadily.