Blood Spells

by Jessica Andersen

  Then, as quickly and unexpectedly as the convulsions had begun, they ended. Rabbit went limp and utterly still.

  Too still.

  “He’s not breathing,” Myrinne cried.

  Patience’s heart clutched at the sight of Rabbit’s sharp features gone lax, his bristly haircut and beard shadow forming a dark contrast against his too-pale skin.

  Without a word, Brandt shouldered his way through the small crowd and dropped down beside Rabbit. Moving with grim efficiency, he checked vitals and then started CPR, snapping, “Myrinne, get in here and breathe for him. Pinch his nose. On my count, breathe.”

  Patience’s initial surprise quickly morphed to the realization that he must have learned the first aid after the accident, thinking that maybe he could have saved his friends if he’d known how.

  She dropped to her knees opposite him. “What can I do?”

  “Pray,” he said raggedly.

  Almost before the word was out of his mouth, Rabbit jerked and shuddered. She gasped, afraid it was the beginning of another seizure. But then he rolled partway onto his side and dragged in a rattling breath. He tried to say something, but the words devolved into a painful hacking cough.

  “Thank the gods,” she whispered, and the sentiment was echoed by several of the others.

  Brandt didn’t call on the sky, but he did rock back on his heels, his expression easing slightly. When Rabbit struggled to speak, he pressed on the younger man’s shoulder. “Take it easy. There’s no rush.”

  But Rabbit shook his head furiously, finally managing to get out, “It was Iago. He came right through the blocks and saw everything. He knows exactly what we’re—”

  A rattling roar split the air, drowning him out.

  A millisecond later, twenty warriors materialized within the confines of the chameleon shield.

  The men were in their twenties and thirties, lean and muscled, their arms and legs marked with scars and tattoos that ranged from crude letters to intricate, high-tech art. But although the ink was modern, their outfits and weapons were pure Aztec.

  They wore bulky quilted shirts and intricately wrapped cotton loincloths that were knotted at the front, leaving the decorated ends to dangle at knee level. Most of them carried long, flat wooden staves that had rows of sharpened obsidian blades inset along the edges, turning them into crude but effective swords. The lone exception carried a long, obsidian-tipped spear and wore a blue-painted wooden helmet that left his face visible through the gaping mouth of a terrible horned creature with a pug nose and sun-disk eyes.

  Their eyes glowed luminous green.

  Strike roared, “Makol!”

  The Nightkeepers reacted instantly. Red-gold magic sang in the air as the magi brought their talents online and ranged themselves around where Brandt, Patience, and Myrinne still crouched over Rabbit.

  At first the obsidian-edged staves didn’t seem like much of a threat, but then the demon-helmeted leader barked an unfamiliar spell, dark power rattled in the air, and the obsidian blades spun into magic-wrought motion, whizzing chain-saw-like. At a second command, the sword tips became spear throwers that launched spinning, razor-sharp blades toward the Nightkeepers.

  “Shields!” Strike ordered, though most of the warriors already had their protective spells online. The first barrage bounced off those shields, except for a single blade that caught Sven in the shoulder, sending him to his knees as blood splashed the rock behind him. He clamped his lips on a cry.

  Alexis dropped down beside him, yanked his shirt off, and worked it into a passable field dressing as the others launched a salvo of fireballs and jade-tipped bullets. Within the core of the defensive formation, Patience brought up her shield magic and spread it out, forming a protective globe that encompassed a groggy Rabbit, and Myrinne, who hadn’t left his side. Brandt did the same, so together they cast a double layer of protection as Rabbit struggled up, eyes wild. He pointed to something behind them. “The doorway!”

  Patience’s heart lurched as she spun and saw that two of the Aztec makol were headed straight for the tunnel mouth, both loaded with heavy satchels. They are headed for the cave!

  As one, she and Brandt started after them. Behind them, Rabbit shouted, “Iago got right into my head. He knows about the light-magic entrance.”

  Brandt cursed. “If he sent the makol to breach the inner doorway, he must not have known how to get into the intersection, after all.”

  “And watch your backs,” Rabbit said, his voice now coming from their earpieces as they crossed to the pyramid. “He knows you two killed Ix. He’ll be gunning for both of you.”

  “Roger,” Brandt said. He paused near the darkness of the doorway. The two makol were gone. When he glanced at Patience, she saw the warrior in his eyes, but there was something more there too. Something worried. “You should stay up here and make sure none of the others get through.”

  Which was logical enough. But it was also bullshit, and they both knew it.

  “You’re not leaving me behind.” This was their cave. Their intersection. She wasn’t letting Iago have it.

  But at the same time, part of her liked that Brandt was suddenly acting more like a mate than a mage. On impulse, she stood on her tiptoes and brushed her lips across his.

  When she drew back, his eyes were dark, without a hint of gold. But they weren’t cool. Not by a long shot. His voice was rough when he said, “They’ll pin us down in the tunnel if they sense us. We’ll have to sneak in. Which means no shields.”

  “Then that’s an even better reason to bring me along. They can sense spells, but not talent-level magic.” She held out her hand.

  He took it. And she turned them both invisible.

  They dropped their shields and headed through the doorway and down the stairs. As the cool darkness closed around them, Patience felt naked, partly because she couldn’t use her shield and partly because going invisible always made her feel strangely insubstantial even though her mass didn’t change. But although she didn’t need direct contact to maintain Brandt’s invisibility, he didn’t let go of her hand.

  Instead, he tightened his fingers on hers as they rounded the first curve, and whispered almost soundlessly, “I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. Deal?”

  The words echoed back to that first night, warming her and making her feel more solid. Focus, she told herself. But the warmth lived alongside her warrior’s battle tension as they continued downward, trailing the fingers of their free hands along the tunnel wall to help guide them in the pitch blackness.

  Then, suddenly, the darkness lightened: Up ahead, she could see where the tunnel opened up to the cave, which was lit from sunlight coming down from above.

  “Can you guys read us?” Brandt breathed into his throat mic, but got static back. They were on their own.

  As they moved closer, the air gained a hint of salinity and freshness. The combination was a potent memory trigger, but Patience kept the lid on her emotions as they took high and low positions and eased around the corner to check out the situation.

  “Oh, dear gods,” she whispered almost soundlessly as she got her first real look at the cave.

  It was beautiful.

  The ancient cathedral had been impressive at night, lit by fireworks and starlight. In the daylight, illuminated with yellow sunlight, it was magical. The perfectly circular skylight dripped with lush green vines that hung down from up above. Sunlight streamed through, casting the lagoon water in vivid blues and greens that contrasted with the white limestone and the richer tans and browns of soil and other stones.

  But even as one part of Patience locked on to the beauty of the subterranean pool, her inner warrior focused on the situation: There was no sign of the doorway that led to the inner chamber, but the two makol were positioned right where it had been. One of them stood guard with his buzz sword at the ready, staring through them. The other one was hammering something into the wall.

  “Looks like the bastard’s not going to bother wi
th magic,” Brandt breathed. “He’s just going to blast his way in.”

  “Not if we take out his makol,” she said, equally softly, though her stomach churned.

  She hated killing makol. Even though their human hosts were chosen based on evil, and couldn’t be saved once the possession was complete, she was all too aware that each of those hosts had once been someone’s child.

  Taking a deep breath to settle the quease, she pulled her ceremonial knife. “You’re on point. I’ve got your six.”

  He squeezed her fingers. “Stay safe.” Then he broke their handclasp, drew his knife with an almost inaudible rasp, and moved out.

  With her warrior’s talent going full blast, Patience mirrored his movements, monitoring his position by the faint sounds he made as they entered the cave and skirted the outer perimeter, where the shadows largely concealed their growing trail of footprints in the sand.

  When they got within a few feet of the makol, Brandt moved in for an invisible attack. All Patience saw were the consequences: The guard jerked, his luminous eyes going wide and his mouth gaping in a gurgling cry as his throat opened in a gruesome line of blood that quickly became an arterial spray.

  The second makol spun and shouted, then slashed out wildly with his buzz sword. Patience ducked the attack and used an invisible foot sweep to send him sprawling, then followed him down, planted a knee in the middle of his back, and pithed him.

  Her bile surged as the cartilage, tendons, and muscle at the back of his neck resisted and then gave, and her blade slid home. She twisted, and the makol convulsed and went still.

  Exhaling, she reminded herself: Head incapacitates, heart banishes. These lesser makol didn’t require the complicated cardinal-day ritual it would take to banish a powerful ajaw-makol like Iago had become, but she still needed to make sure her enemy was dead.

  As the Nightkeepers’ powers had increased, so had those of their enemies.

  A few feet away, the other makol’s protective tunic ripped off its chest, seemingly of its own volition, revealing a heavily tattooed, thickly muscled chest and abdomen. When a long slice appeared out of nowhere, she gagged and dropped the invisibility spell.

  Brandt appeared, grim-faced and covered in blood. He met her eyes over the makol’s body. “I’ll take care of both of them. See what you can do about the bomb.”

  Adrenaline spurted anew. The bomb. Oh shit.

  Bolted securely to the stone very near where the light-magic doorway had appeared, the device was marked only with a bar of light that flashed through a building sequence from dim to bright and back again, on a repeating cycle that sped up incrementally as she approached.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs. It was a timer, but without a countdown, she didn’t have a clue how long they had left. It could have ten minutes left on it, or ten seconds. Her gut-level instincts said to haul ass out of there. Her DNA said they had to protect the light-magic intersection. An explosion wouldn’t hurt the magic, but it could block the hell out of the tunnel.

  “If we can get it off the wall—” She reached for the device, heart racing.

  Dark magic spat a fat spark, pain cracked through her body, and a booming electric shock flung her backward. Brandt lunged forward and caught her against him; she clung for a second, grateful when he called up his shield magic to protect them both.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Tenderized.” But the magic had given her an idea. “We can shield it ourselves and contain the blast,” she said quickly, pulse hammering as the light blinked faster by the second.

  Working together, racing against the barely flickering light, they cast a pair of double-thick shields, one around them, the other around the bomb and part of the rock wall behind it.

  A high whine split the air.

  “Close your eyes.” Brandt put his body between her and the danger, pressed her cheek to his chest, and buried his face in her hair.

  She wrapped her arms around him and splayed her hands across his back in a feeble gesture of protecting as much of him as she could. That wasn’t enough to stem the panic that threatened to punch through her warrior’s determination, though. She needed to do something more, say something more. Don’t say anything you’ll regret later, she warned herself, knowing that her emotions were far too close to the surface.

  So instead she rose up on her toes and locked them together in a kiss. She meant to hold herself back, to find the strength of sex magic without giving away too much of herself. But she was too aware of the sacred lagoon behind them, the drape of green vines, and the yellow warmth of the sunlight coming down from up above. Power hummed around them, coming from the shield spells, from the cave itself. And from the heat that sparked at the first touch of her lips on his.

  Yes, she thought. This was their place. This was where they clicked, where they made sense.

  He groaned at the back of his throat and answered her kiss, pulling her up into his body and sliding his tongue against hers. And she gave him everything, holding nothing back. Desire poured from her to him and back again through their jun tan connection, turning their shields red-gold, so they were surrounded with the sparkling magic that they made together.

  They twined together, held on to each other.

  And the bomb blew.

  The brilliant flash of the explosion flared through the cave, strobing her vision even through her closed eyelids. The shields muffled the roaring boom, but the spell sucked mad power as they fought to contain the shock wave, concussion, and shrapnel spray.

  Patience clung to Brandt, who tightened his arms around her, anchoring them both as they poured their combined magic into the shield, which bucked and shuddered, threatening to give way.

  It held, though, remaining intact as the conflagration within it crested and drained. The terrible pressure on their joined magic eased . . . and they opened their eyes, still nose to nose, their lips touching.

  Although their cave visions had skipped the interval between their first kiss and the end of the lovemaking that had followed, those memories filled her now as she looked up and saw tenderness in the gold-shot depths of his brown eyes. And now, as then, she was filled with the utter certainty that the two of them had been meant to find each other that night, that they had been meant to fall in love.

  Now, though, she realized that she didn’t know whether they had been meant to stay together.

  A deep-seated fear that the answer was no had her wanting to hold on too tight. So instead, she made herself step away from him, drop her shield, and take a look at the damage.

  She stared. “Holy crap.”

  The shield had contained the explosion exactly within its sphere, carving a scoop out of the stone behind where the bomb had been attached. If the wall had been solid, there would have been a missing half-moon of limestone.

  Instead, there was a perfectly circular opening, with darkness beyond.

  “The tunnel,” she whispered as her heart stuttered in her chest. They had punched through to the tunnel. “We can get to the inner chamber before the solstice-eclipse.” And maybe—hopefully—call on the gods.

  A sudden blast of static made both of them wince, and then Strike’s voice, broken up by interference, said, “Almost . . . we’re . . . shit.”

  Patience and Brandt exchanged a look and bolted for the surface.

  By the time they got topside, though, the fight was over, the makol gone. The air stank of char and vibrated with magic, but the coast was clear.

  Patience’s adrenaline flagged quickly, fatigue threatening to take over, but there was triumph, too, as she said, “The cave is clear . . . and the tunnel is open.”

  The announcement was met with a ragged cheer. The magi were beat-up, dirty, and fight-worn, but they had won the intersection.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Rabbit warned in a low voice from the edge of the group, where he sat on a boulder, slumped and boneless. Myrinne stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Patience hadn’t always loved how m
uch influence the younger woman had over Rabbit, but now she was glad to see her there, the two of them forming a united front against Strike’s scowl.

  “The blocks didn’t work,” Rabbit continued. “Iago got everything. He knows what I know about Ix’s death, the Triad spell, Anna and Mendez being chosen, how Brandt is linked to Cabrakan. . . .” He trailed off and looked at Patience, eyes hollow. “Once he realized you and Brandt killed Ix, he focused on you guys. He pulled everything he could about you. . . . I’m not sure what he got out of me, but he has to have seen the twins.”

  “The—,” she began, then broke off when the oxygen drained out of her lungs. She wasn’t even aware that she’d started swaying until Brandt grabbed her arm to keep her from going down. “No,” she whispered, leaning on him. When he started to say something, though, she held up a hand to stop him, and then pushed away to stand on her own when she repeated, louder: “No.”

  Rabbit looked suddenly eighteen again. “I’m sorry—”

  “I mean ‘no’ as in ‘I’m not going to let this screw me up,’” she interrupted. “The whole point of having Hannah and Woody take them away was so nobody—not even Iago or the Banol Kax themselves—could find them if our enemies learned of their existences, right?” Strike had even gone so far as to have Rabbit use his mind-bending to make it impossible for a teleporter to lock on to any of them. They were off the grid. Safe. Please, gods, let them be safe, she thought, knowing she was beyond lucky that Rabbit didn’t know the one vital clue that Iago could have used to find them.

  “She’s right,” Brandt said, stepping up beside her so their fingertips brushed. “How much does it really matter that Iago knows who was chosen for the Triad? I’m already watching my back, and the other two are protected. He wants a piece of me and Patience because we killed Ix? Well, we want a piece of him right back. As for the intersection, we won the first round of that fight.” He gestured to the tunnel entrance. “So I vote we get down there and see about protecting our newest asset.”