Blood Spells

by Jessica Andersen

  Holy. Shit.

  His blood hammered as he held out his hand, cupping it palm up, and whispered the spell to call a foxfire. There was no surge in the magic, no kindling of the blue-white glow he had tried to summon, but in the wan illumination of Patience’s tiny, dying flashlight, he saw her eyes go wide.

  She eased away from him. But she didn’t go far.

  He sat up, conscious of the way the red-gold sparkles followed the motion, swirling on unseen currents. He held his breath, barely daring to hope, afraid that there was—had to be—some other explanation.

  Hell, for all he knew, he’d gotten trashed and this was a really vivid dream. She could easily be his subconscious’s projection of his dream girl, all blond and blue, with a kick-ass, can-do attitude wrapped in a glossy package. And ever since he’d been a kid, he’d pictured himself wielding the magic of his ancestors, and imagined finding someone else like him.

  The shock in her expression was giving way to speculation . . . and hope. She moistened her lips. “You’re not NA, are you?”

  NA? Oh, she’d guessed he was Native American from his name. He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Then what are you?”

  Her quiet question hung on the air, echoing in the vaulted cave and counterpointed by the slow drip of water falling from stalactites to the water beyond them. The world seemed to hold its breath—or maybe that was him, because he had the sudden sense that what he said next was going to change both of their lives. This was no dream, he knew; it was the real thing.

  He said, “I’m the sole mage-born survivor of the Solstice Massacre.” He paused. “At least I thought I was.”

  Tears shone in her eyes. “Me too.”

  An unfamiliar pressure expanded in his chest. This was real; it was actually happening. Patience was a survivor, just like him. “What’s your bloodline name?”

  “Iguana.” The word wasn’t even a whisper, more a shaping of the lips. “My winikin changed it after the massacre, in order to keep us safe.”

  His voice rasped when he asked, “Are there others?”

  “Hannah thought we might be the only ones. The way the drop box for contact info is set up, she couldn’t tell.”

  He nodded. “Woody said the same thing. I wanted him to crack the box and see if there were others, but he refused. Said he was sworn to keep us hidden until he was convinced it was time to reunite the Nightkeepers.”

  It was the first time either of them had said the word, and it hung in the darkness, echoing in the sacred space.

  Nightkeepers. Their people. Their magic.

  He’d been programmed from birth to believe in the unbelievable, to take it on faith that he had a higher destiny and the potential for magical skills that might or might not be needed, depending on whether the barrier stayed shut through the end of 2012. But belief and faith suddenly seemed insubstantial now that he was face-to-face—and naked—with another full-blood survivor, one who knew what he knew, who’d been raised, as he had, by an actual winikin.

  It was impossible. Unbelievable.

  But somehow it was true.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, speechless. Finally, he swallowed hard. “I—” Wow, he didn’t know what to say to her, how to deal with the sudden realization that they were connected far more deeply than by the sex they had just shared.

  Patience’s eyes darkened. “Gods. This must mean that the massacre didn’t seal the barrier after all.”

  “Maybe.” He cupped his palm and watched red-gold swirl. “Maybe this is just . . . I don’t know. An anomaly.” But he had a feeling neither of them believed it.

  She exhaled slowly. “I was supposed to leave this morning for a two-day island hop to Cozumel. Something told me I shouldn’t go.”

  “I was supposed to leave yesterday for Chichén Itzá. Didn’t feel like it.”

  “The gods wanted us to meet.”

  It was a tempting thought—very tempting—but he shook his head. “I think it was more the equinox magic pulling us here. The gods aren’t my biggest fans.”

  Her brows drew together. “For real?”

  “For real.” He rubbed the numb patch of scar tissue high on his inner calf. “I’ll tell you about it, but not here, not now.” He paused. “I think we should try to jack in. If the power is back online and pulled us here together . . .”

  When he trailed off, she nodded. “Yeah. We’re here for a reason. Which means I’ll let you get away with the not-so-subtle subject change. But don’t think you’re going to get out of explaining that little comment about the gods.”

  “I won’t.” He’d never told another soul the whole wretched story, not even Woody, but he had to tell her. That was suddenly very necessary.

  Reaching for her piled clothing, she dug in a pocket and withdrew a matte black handgrip that flipped open to reveal a five-inch combat knife. “You have a blade?”

  He nodded, excitement sparking at the sight of the knife, and the challenging gleam in her eyes. “You didn’t check that with your luggage, did you?”

  “Bought it when I got here. You?”

  “Ditto.” He fished through his clothes and pulled out a butterfly knife that had looked cool at the pawnshop where he’d picked it up, but had taken some practice getting used to. Now, though, he was able to open it with decent flair to reveal a blade about the same size as hers, though his was edged on both sides and narrowed to a wicked point, while hers was wide and serrated on one side.

  It wasn’t their potential as fighting weapons that mattered, though; it was their ability to draw blood sacrifice. No Nightkeeper walked around without a knife. It just wasn’t done—at least according to Woody. And apparently according to her Hannah as well.

  He grinned at her and she grinned back, and magic hummed faintly in the air.

  It hit him then, that his life had changed forever the moment he’d caught a glimpse of her coming out of that bar with her friends.

  They weren’t just lovers. They were about to become teammates. And to a Nightkeeper, a fighting partner was so much more than lover.

  Setting their knives aside, they dressed in unspoken accord, staying close to each other, not seeming to need words to communicate the basics. He was achingly aware of her, attuned to the way she moved like both a fighter and a woman, capable yet feminine, and entirely at home in her own body.

  The fading penlight emitted a muted glow that made her look like an angel, while the fact that she carried a combat knife, and the suppressed excitement he saw in her eyes, called to something inside him.

  Red-gold power flared, this time inside him, filling him with hot, hard purpose and an unfamiliar, almost atavistic possessiveness. We’re meant for each other, said something deep inside him, with a certainty that swept aside all other considerations.

  Closing the small distance that separated them, so they stood toe-to-toe at the edge of the underground lagoon, he took her hands and lifted her knuckles to his lips in a gesture that should have seemed foolish, but didn’t.

  “Before I saw you, I didn’t believe in—” Love at first sight, he was going to say, but the “L” word jammed in his throat, blocked by the part of him that knew he couldn’t go there.

  Fuck me, he thought as his emotions revved. What the hell did he think he was doing?

  On one level, his analytic self knew he’d been caught by a surge of sex magic, and that he needed to freaking watch himself. On another level, though, he wished, more than ever before, that he could go back and undo what he’d done. But he had scoured the myths and magic of a dozen cultures looking for a way, and come up empty. There was no way out. And if the magic was coming back online, that was going to be a big fucking problem.

  “You don’t believe in what?” She was gripping his hands, forming a link he didn’t want to break . . . but had to.

  He lowered their joined hands, easing his hold. “I don’t think I really believed I would ever meet another mage, or that the barrier might come back o
nline. We don’t know what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next . . . but I want you to know that I’ll do my damnedest to get us both through it safely.” Because the two of them being there together, on that night, couldn’t be a coincidence.

  They both knew that wasn’t what he’d originally intended to say. She didn’t call him on it, though. Instead, she crouched to retrieve their knives, which lay side by side on the sand. Straightening, she offered him the butterfly knife, holding it by its two-edged blade. “That goes both ways, bucko. You’ve got my back. I’ve got yours. Deal?”

  Their eyes locked and he nodded. “Deal.” But he intended to make damn sure he took the brunt of whatever came next. He’d been raised human enough to want to protect his lover, whether or not she wanted to be protected.

  His lover. Gods.

  He moved to take the knife from her, but instead of letting go, she closed her grip around the blade as he pulled it back.

  He jolted. “Are you okay?” He reached for her, then stopped himself. “Shit. Dumb question.” He’d blooded himself dozens of times. But he’d never blooded anyone else.

  She opened her hand to show the double slices where both edges of the blade had cut her, freeing blood to well up, looking black in the darkness. With her other hand, she offered her knife, this time blade first.

  He shook his head and lifted the butterfly knife, which was wet with her blood. “I’ll use this one.”

  Setting the point to his palm, he gouged along his lifeline. Pain flared in his hand and up his arm, morphing to a buzz of heat. There was something erotic about sharing her knife, her blood. And that was the Nightkeeper in him talking, not the human veneer.

  Meeting her eyes, he grated, “Well, here goes nothing.”

  “Forget that. Here goes everything.” She faced out over the black lagoon.

  The flashlight had finally died, leaving them lit only by the starlight that came in from up above as he stood beside her, so they were hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. They held their hands out over the swirling pool and let the sacrificial blood fall into the water. When the first droplet hit, the buzz in Brandt’s veins altered its pitch, seeming now to hang in the air around them.

  A glance at Patience showed that she felt it—heard it?—too. He nodded back with what he hoped was an expression of reassurance rather than the greasy nerves that had sprung up at the realization that this was it. This was what he’d spent his entire life preparing for, without really believing it was going to happen.

  He was about to bust his magical cherry. Holy shit.

  He took a deep breath, aware that Patience was doing the same thing beside him. Together, they said the magic words: “Pasaj och.”

  Warmth bloomed in his chest and rocketed outward, suffusing his body. His senses expanded: He heard the imperceptible lap of fresh water against stone and smelled how it went slightly brackish near the tunnel, where a submerged conduit must run out to the ocean. His skin prickled, sensitizing to the warmth of Patience’s body on one side of him, the chill of the night air on the other. He tasted their lovemaking and smelled the tang of blood that hung between them, around them. His night vision sharpened too, making him squint against the sudden gleam of starlight. It reflected off the water and sand, and off the stones around them, where tricks of the light formed strange patterns.

  But that was all that happened.

  He didn’t leave his body to enter the barrier, didn’t see or feel a change in the faint red-gold sparkle.

  Disappointment thrummed through him. “Shit. I guess we can’t jack in without a proper bloodline ceremony, after all.”

  As babies, their lack of connection to the barrier had saved their lives. Now, though, it meant that the magic didn’t recognize them.

  “Maybe not, but something happened.” Patience’s attention was fixed on the back of the cave.

  He followed her gaze. “I don’t—” He broke off as the reflected starlight and shadows rearranged themselves in his mind, and excitement jolted. “Holy fucking shit.”

  What had been light and shadows moments earlier had become the silver-limned outline of a doorway: two heavily carved pillars connected by a linteled archway, with stygian blackness beyond.

  The carved details were obscured by distance, but there was no doubt that the doorway was Mayan-Nightkeeper in style . . . and it hadn’t been there before. Even as lost in each other as they had been, they would’ve seen it by the light of the fireworks. Which meant they had called it with the spell words, even though they lacked their bloodline marks.

  The magic—at least that much of it—was working. Wonder thrummed in his veins. Anticipation.

  He stared at the doorway, wanting more than anything to get his ass through it and see what was on the other side. “What do you think?”

  Her teeth flashed, reflected starlight. “Stupid question.”

  “Sorry.” And she was right; it was their duty as Nightkeepers—trained or not, bloodline marked or not—to figure out what the hell was going on, and whether it signaled the beginning of the end. More, they were programmed for this shit, bred and born for it. No way either of them was turning away from the adventure.

  Given his choice under human ethics—and, hell, as a Nightkeeper male whose body was still warm from hers—he would’ve left her behind in the cave. But he didn’t have any reason to think she wouldn’t be able to handle herself. So despite his natural inclination to protect the shit out of her, he nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Excitement kindled in her eyes. “I’ve got your six.” She patted his ass. “And a delightful six it is.”

  “Don’t let the ogling distract you.”

  “I’m a chick. We multitask.” But she was all business as they set off, skirting the lagoon to approach the silver-limned doorway, knives at the ready.

  As they approached, the starlight and shadows resolved themselves into a pair of gape-mouthed serpent carvings forming the pillared uprights, with an intricate text block incised into the arch above them.

  “I can’t read the glyphs,” he admitted. “You?”

  “The dots and lines are numbers.” She indicated two geometric glyphs that looked like a pair of dominoes. “As for the rest, you’ve got me. Hannah said the hieroglyphs were dropped from the curriculum a few generations ago because most of the modern-day spells were either memorized phonetically or had more to do with mental powers than spell words.”

  “Woody too. Let’s hope it doesn’t say ‘abandon all hope, yadda yadda.’” Catching a whiff of something funky, Brandt narrowed his eyes, trying to make out a lumpy variation of the shadows just inside the tunnel. “No shit.”

  “What?”

  “Flashlights. Sort of.” He reached in, felt around, and came up with a couple of torches, a flint, and a striker. “They’re pretty low-tech, but should do the job.”

  Once lit, the torches proved to be artifacts in their own right. They were made of glyph-carved bones—he tried not to wonder if they were human—that had been hollowed out and packed with a hardened, crusty substance that smelled faintly like rancid grease and flowers. The business ends were loaded with a flammable combination of plant matter he couldn’t begin to identify, glued together with a dried-out, resinlike substance.

  It was all pretty crusty, but it took only a couple of tries with the flint to get the first one started, and once they were both going, they gave off decent light, very little smoke, and an earthy, not unpleasant incense.

  Patience eyed hers. “How old do you think these things are?”

  “No clue. Somewhere between two decades and two millennia?” There was really no way to tell right then whether the torches were ritual pieces that had been used by their parents’ generation, or if the tunnel was a relic from before the conquest. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing to think? “My gut says they’re old, though.”

  “Mine too.” She lifted the slow-burning brand; the light revealed a tunnel leading away from them. “But I’m going to file t
hat under ‘things I can’t think about right now,’ because I’d way rather see where this goes.”

  At his nod, she moved through the doorway, taking point even though she’d promised to watch his six.

  No hardship, Brandt thought, and followed her in. He kept his senses wide-open, including the unfamiliar, buzzing level of the magic, and stayed focused as Woody had taught him. Beneath that, though, ran the thrill of finally doing what he’d trained for all these years . . . and the sick fear that something would go wrong and Patience would pay the price.

  Not this time, he thought grimly. Never again.

  The limestone walls of the tunnel were marked with softly rounded ripples, suggesting that it had originally been the track of an underground stream. The floor was wider than the arched ceiling, with tool marks showing where the surface beneath their feet had been widened and flattened. The walls were uncarved, but the ripples made them seem decorated nonetheless. A footpath was worn smooth along the middle.

  “Lots of traffic,” Patience said.

  “Makes you think it leads somewhere cool, doesn’t it?”

  “Gods willing.” She glanced back at him, eyes firing. “What if—”

  “Sh! Wait.” He held up a hand when, at the edges of his perception, the magic fluctuated.

  “I felt it.” Her eyes went unfocused. “Up ahead. It’s . . .” She frowned. “It doesn’t feel the same.”

  “Like we’re experts?” But he wasn’t arguing. “It’s . . . darker. Greasy, almost.”

  “You think it could be the Banol Kax trying to come through the barrier?”

  “We’d better hope to hell it’s not.” The last time a couple of the dark lords had made it fully onto the earth plane, they had wiped out most of the Mayan Empire before the Nightkeepers—or rather one Nightkeeper, a member of the legendary Triad—had forced them back behind the barrier.

  His gut fisted at the knowledge that if the dark lords had managed to tear a gap in the supposedly sealed barrier, the world was in very deep shit.