And nobody knew about it except the two of them.
He wanted to invent an excuse and send her back up to the cave, but knew she wouldn’t go. More, that was the man and the human talking. A true Nightkeeper would never put a lover above his duty.
“I’ll take point,” he announced, and moved past her.
She caught his arm. “Wait. What do we do if it is . . . you know. Them?”
Her eyes were wide with mingled excitement and nerves. She wasn’t going to back down from this fight, or any other. And in another lifetime, she would have been his mate. Damn it all to hell.
Ignoring the warnings that blared from his subconscious, he went in for a kiss. She met him halfway, gripping a fistful of his shirt to hold him close. His lips slanted across hers; their tongues touched and slid as the kiss went from hot to gentle and back again. He gathered her against him, trying to imprint the feeling in his sensory memory just in case.
Hard, hot pressure built in his chest and tightened his throat, and for a moment the buzz changed pitch and red-gold sparkled in the air.
Then he broke the kiss and eased away to meet her eyes, which had gone stormy with passion. “The gods put us here, right? I’m willing to have faith that they’ve got a plan for us.”
Or, rather, for her. They wouldn’t sacrifice her for his sins.
He hoped.
She released his collar and touched his lips with her fingertips, with a brush reminiscent of their kiss. “Then why did that feel like good-bye?”
“Not good-bye,” he lied. “Good luck.” As in, they would be damned lucky to both walk away from this if their worst fears were confirmed. But if only one of them was going to make it out, he’d make sure it was her. Given his status with the gods, she was the one the world was going to need. Not him.
She didn’t believe him; they both knew it. But they also knew this wasn’t the time for their first fight.
Instead, they got moving. She led the way, walking soft-footed. He did the same, and they ghosted along in silence for a few minutes, carefully watching for booby traps as the strange, oily-feeling magic grew stronger with every step.
In the back of his head, he was thinking, What the fuck are we doing? There’s no way that two untrained, unmarked college kids can take on a Banol Kax with a couple of five-inch blades, two torches, and a piece of flint.
But the rest of him was entirely in the moment, testing the limits of his senses, the placement of each footstep. That part of him knew that their lacking bloodline marks wasn’t entirely a negative. It meant that whatever was pumping out that strange power wouldn’t be able to sense them, at least not on the magical level.
In theory, anyway.
The tunnel curved, then curved again, and they saw a light up ahead, beyond the next bend. Brandt snuffed his torch against the tunnel wall, working not to sneeze against the puff of incense-laden smoke. Patience did the same, plunging them into a near blackness that made him acutely aware of how long the tunnel stretched behind them, and how late it was getting. How far past the actual moment of equinox would the doorway stay open? He didn’t know, didn’t have any basis for guessing, but they couldn’t turn back now.
Patience’s hand found his in the darkness. He squeezed back, trying to let the gesture convey affection, attraction, respect, reassurance, and all the other things he wanted to surround her with. The handclasp stung, then flashed sudden warmth up his arm as his sacrificial cut aligned with hers and blood spoke to blood.
Mine, he thought as he had earlier in the day when he’d first laid eyes on her. You’re mine.
Except she wasn’t. Not in this lifetime.
Pulling away, he got ahead of her as they moved on. He might not be able to claim her or keep her, but he damn sure wasn’t letting her be the first one into a fight.
As they silently closed in on the corner, and the light beyond, his heart beat double time while his brain churned. Even if it wasn’t one of the Banol Kax up ahead—and he hoped to hell it wasn’t—the dark lords commanded many ur-demons, like the boluntiku, six-clawed lava creatures that moved as vapor and went solid the instant before they attacked, and the makol, damned souls that could possess human hosts, turning their eyes a luminous green.
Without warning, a man’s voice rose over the humming buzz of magic, chanting in the old tongue. It sounded human, but how could they be sure? This wasn’t exactly a “know thy enemy” situation—they were making it up as they went.
When they reached the corner, Brandt’s pulse thudded in his ears as he took in the scene: Beyond the curve, a straight section of hallway ended in a sheer wall with an arched, open doorway that was set at a right angle, giving them some hope of approaching without being seen right away. Both the chanting and the light—flickering yellow-orange firelight—were coming from within.
Holding up a hand to warn Patience back, Brandt eased down the last straight stretch and popped his head around the corner, staying low.
His brain snapshotted the scene: Beyond the door was a circular chamber that looked natural, as if there had been another lagoon, now gone dry. There were two other entrances. The one opposite their position opened to another tunnel, while the middle doorway was shut with a carved stone panel. Torches set into holes in the wall provided light and incense, and a plain altar sat against the wall, little more than a square block of stone with a shallowly curved top.
A lone man stood before the altar.
A . . . Nightkeeper?
Brandt risked another look, confirming his first impression. The guy was tall, wide-shouldered, and fair-haired. Wearing black, insignialess paramilitary gear, with a carved stone knife stuck in his leather belt, he could’ve stepped right out of one of Wood’s stories. From the looks of him, he was a good decade older than Brandt . . . and he knew his shit. He was holding his bleeding palms out over the altar, letting the blood fall in the shallow depression. His chant rose and fell with ancient intonations, the syllables seamless.
Yet the power pumping out of the room jarred dissonantly against the red-gold hum within Brandt.
His mind raced as he returned to Patience and briefly described the room and the stranger. Were they wrong about the rattling power being dark magic? The Nightkeepers were the only earth-borns capable of using the barrier’s power, and this guy sure as shit looked earth-born, not Banol Kax or boluntiku. Which left only two options.
So what was he, mage or makol? Please, gods, let him be a mage, Brandt thought, mind plunging ahead to the hope of there being more survivors, older warriors who could teach him and Patience what they lacked . . . and who might know how he could fix his cosmic fuckup.
Behind him, the chant switched to English, startling him. Brandt turned as the stranger said, “By nine times nine chants and our shared blood, I call on Werigo, son of Okom, father of Ix and Iago.”
Magic rattled in the air, hard and abrasive, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He saw Patience’s eyes widen, saw the understanding dawn.
Because oh, holy shit, nine wasn’t a sacred number of the Nightkeepers. It belonged to the underworld.
“Lords,” the stranger continued, “release my father’s soul, so he can continue working on your behalf.”
Brandt’s gut twisted as his fantasy of more Nightkeeper survivors imploded beneath the realization that this was no mage. It had to be a makol, a possessed human whose demon rider was trying to bring another like it through the barrier.
Kill it! his gut screamed. Acting on instinct, not fully aware of what he was doing, he summoned the red-gold power from the thin barrier connection he and Patience had formed.
“Wait!” she said urgently.
But it was too late. Like a striking rattlesnake, the dark magic lashed out into the tunnel and struck sparks off the red-gold. The makol howled a curse as it sensed the intruders.
Brandt didn’t hesitate. He lunged through the doorway and swung his torch like a Louisville Slugger, aiming for the thing’s head.
He had a bare second to
register that its eyes were a murky hazel, not luminous green. It was a man, not a makol . Was he a Nightkeeper after all?
Shit! He pulled the blow and deflected the swing. The other man ducked; the bone torch glanced off his shoulder, smashed into the limestone wall, and splintered at its end.
“Who the hell are you?” Brandt demanded.
Without any change in expression, the stranger yanked a nine-mill from his belt and fired at Patience.
She dove out of the way, but her torch and knife went flying as the other man tracked her with his weapon.
No! Rage poured through Brandt, possessed him. He teed off and swung again, and this time he didn’t pull a godsdamned thing.
The splintered end of the torch hit the guy in the temple. The impact sang up Brandt’s arms and left his hands vibrating.
The blond man staggered, gun hand sagging. He cursed when Patience kicked his wrist, sending the weapon flying. Brandt wasn’t thinking or planning, didn’t have any thought in his mind aside from stopping the bastard. He roundhoused the torch and slammed it into their enemy’s skull with a sickening crunch.
Blood and brain spattered into the shallow sacrificial bowl as the other man slid to a heap on the floor.
Brandt froze. His pulse throbbed sickly in his ears as he stared at the gore. At the body.
He had just killed a man without really knowing why, or who he was.
“He was going to kill us.” Patience was breathing hard, her eyes wide and white. “We had to—”
A terrible rattling roar split the air, drowning her out as the wall behind the altar shimmered and went strange and flexible, turning a sickly muddy brown-green color. Brandt shouted and yanked her behind him when the surface bulged obscenely, as though something was fighting to be born through the membranelike surface of the dark magic.
Oh, holy fuck. The dark mage’s death had punched a hole in the barrier.
“Go!” He shoved her toward the doorway. “Get all the way out, call your winikin, and tell her to crack the drop box.”
She spun back. “I’m not leaving you!”
He knew she wouldn’t leave unless he made it good, so he gripped her wrists and met her eyes. “Think about it. One of us needs to make sure nothing comes through this gap. I’m bigger. I’ve got more blood to sacrifice. I’ll meet you as soon as the equinox is over. Now go!”
It was only partway a lie; he would try to hold the barrier with bloodletting. If it came down to it, though, he could only hope that since a dark mage’s sacrifice had opened the connection, the sacrifice of a Nightkeeper, even one like him, would close it back up again.
Woody would understand, even approve.
Patience hesitated, then spun for the doorway. But she was too late. The membrane tore with a wet ripping sound that amped the rattling magic to a maniacal chatter. Smoke poured through the opening, unrelieved black save for two pinpoint glints of luminous green. A makol!
The dispossessed demon soul arrowed straight for Patience, moving fast.
“Run!” Brandt dove for the billowing presence, trying to grab it and keep it away from her. He passed right through it, though, catching nothing but air. He landed hard, rolled, and lurched back to his feet just in time to see Patience dodge the smoke and make a dive for the altar.
She snagged the stone knife from the corpse’s belt, slashed both her palms and thrust her hands into the mess atop the altar, crying, “Gods help us!”
A soundless detonation rocked the chamber, thumping deep within Brandt and making his ears ring. The dark-magic rattle modulated, becoming underlain by the buzzing hum from before. The undulating membrane went from muddy brown to pure silver, shot through with rainbow hues, like the surface of a bubble seen from an angle.
Patience’s expression turned radiant; she seemed to glow from within as she turned to him. But then her face blanked with horror, and she screamed, “Behind you!”
Brandt lifted the bloodstained torch and spun—straight into a roiling cloud of black smoke. He caught a flash of fluorescent green and smelled char, and then he was seeing the world in fluorescent green, and his brain was impossibly split in two.
He was himself, but he was someone else too; he caught kaleidoscope images of terrible blood rituals designed to prepare the living for resurrection. He saw two boys, flashing images of them growing, one into the guy he had just killed, the other into a younger, auburn-haired version. He saw them carve their father’s beating heart from his chest and make the sacrifices that would ensure his immortality as a demon soul. The dead brother had been stone-faced, the other in tears.
He was Werigo, ex-leader of the Order of Xibalba, a group even more deeply underground than the surviving Nightkeepers. He was also Brandt White-Eagle. And the part of him that remained Brandt would be fucked if he was going to let a dark mage turn him into a makol.
Forcing his body to move, he lurched for the altar. “Give me the knife!”
Patience tossed it and he caught it on the fly. The second his fingers closed around the hilt, the dark magic that had been used to baptize the blade rose up within him, giving Werigo the upper hand. Seeing the light of the gods inside Patience and recognizing the power her sacrifice would generate, the makol wrested control of their shared body away from Brandt and reached for her.
Panic slashed through Brandt. Using that fear, he managed to regain enough control to shout, “Kill me. Do it now!”
Her eyes flashed. “No way. I just found you.”
She closed the distance between them, dodged Werigo’s knife slash, and grabbed Brandt’s wrist in a numbing, twisting grip. The knife clattered to the floor as she kissed him, grabbed his bloodstained hand in hers, and connected them, blood to blood.
Brandt howled in his soul when he felt part of Werigo leave him and enter Patience through the kiss, felt the makol gather his magic and inwardly begin a spell that would kill the two Nightkeepers and use the sacrifice to reanimate the dead man as another makol. Brandt struggled to pull Werigo back but couldn’t, fought to push Patience away, but she held on to him, not letting him end the kiss.
Against his mouth, she whispered, “Please, gods.”
Without warning, power jolted into him, through him, in a screaming rainbow that flayed his soul raw in an instant, leaving him bare.
He sensed the gods within Patience, and knew they were saving her because she deserved it, and were saving him solely because he and Patience were connected. Collateral salvation instead of collateral damage.
His inner right forearm burned at the spot where the magi had worn their bloodline marks.
Then the makol howled as the gods tore it out of Patience and aimed its essence toward a rainbow funnel cloud that spun midair above the blood-spattered altar.
Werigo’s old, angry soul dug claws into Brandt’s consciousness, tearing deep furrows in his psyche. The gods might be saving Brandt, but they sure as shit weren’t protecting him from the fallout. Patience was trying to, though; she held him tighter, kissed him harder, sharing her blood, her strength, and the grace of her gods.
Brandt howled and fought to free himself from Werigo. Triumph flared when he felt the makol’s grip give and sensed the bastard’s realization that he was going to be trapped once again behind the barrier. But he also felt Werigo’s determination not to let them escape with the knowledge that the barrier was friable within this sacred spot, which had access points for both light and dark magic, or that the Order of Xibalba was real, not just a bedtime story used to frighten Nightkeeper children.
Before Brandt could block the move, if he had even known how, Werigo reached through the connection of blood and sex magic that bound him and Patience together. The demon soul locked on to both of their consciousnesses as dark magic rattled harshly.
Brandt shouted curses as oily brown power clouded his mind, blocking off memory after memory, and doing the same to Patience.
He saw the images parade past in reverse: him and Patience creeping through the tunnel;
them intertwined in the aftermath of lovemaking; his elation at finding her on the beach; the first moment he saw her. Then Werigo went back further still, to another time, another encounter with the gods. Brandt howled, tried to fight it, but he didn’t know what to do with the magic, didn’t know how to defend himself as his past was torn away from him.
Then Werigo was gone. But so were the memories.
“No!” Brandt croaked the word aloud, surprised to realize that he could speak, that he was back in control of his own body again. Deep in his bones, he felt it the moment that the equinox faded and the barrier solidified.
The air above the altar went still. Silence filled the chamber. And the magic snapped out of existence, leaving him utterly empty.
He sagged against the altar, retching against the awful, sickening spin of his head. Patience lay unmoving on the floor, but a fumbling vitals check reassured him that she was breathing, her heartbeat steady. Gray fog clouded his vision, his thoughts; it was all he could do to light her torch using one of the wall sconces. He wanted to pass the hell out, but he didn’t dare. His gut told him that their exit wouldn’t be open much longer.
He had to get them out of there.
Dizzy but determined, he picked her up, staggered out of the chamber, and started back up the tunnel.
With each step he took, the gray fog got thicker, obscuring his memories of the—what was it again?
“Doesn’t matter,” he rasped through a thick-feeling throat. Channeling Woody, he said, “Focus on your priorities.” Knowing he was losing it, that he wasn’t far from shutting down entirely, he fixed a single priority in his mind: I’ve got to get us both back to the hotel.
He repeated that over and over again as he carried her through the tunnel. By the time he reached the lagoon cave and dropped the burned-out torch at the edge of the water, he didn’t know how he’d gotten there, didn’t know the name of the woman in his arms or why they were both wearing ripped, dirty clothing that stank of blood. Instinct had him washing away the worst of the gore in the lagoon before he carried her back up the stairs and out of the pyramid, which looked solid once again when he turned back, looking for . . . what?
Blood Spells Page 15