Her eyes filled as she sat.
Half filling a second wineglass for himself, Brandt handed over the one they’d been sharing, then held his glass out to her, inviting a toast. “To family.”
She blinked back the tears as she clinked her glass to his. “To family.”
They ate largely in silence, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable quiet. It was more that they were both tired of talking about the situation, tired of thinking about it. For the moment, they were both content to just be, and to do it together.
Patience suspected that the soft, intimate sense of calm probably came from a strange, delayed sort of postmagic crash, one that smoothed over the rough spots rather than making them sleepy. Or maybe this was what it felt like to be a true warrior couple, bound together in danger, yet able to compartmentalize and focus on each other when time allowed.
Later, after they had tag-teamed the dishes and showered in comfortable sequence, they met without prearrangement at the foot of the big bed in the master bedroom. He had pulled his jeans back on after his shower, and wore unbuttoned one of his old work shirts, a tailored oxford gone soft with age. She had thought about wearing one of the sexy nightgowns he used to love, but instead had gone with the silky, comfortable robe she’d bought recently to please only herself.
His eyes fired at the sight of her in the pale amber robe. His lips curved as he closed the small distance between them, and swept her up into his arms.
Letting herself fall for the moment, she sank against his strong body and slid her hands up beneath his open shirt as he carried her around to his side of the bed, bringing his lips to hers as he lowered her to the yielding mattress. He followed her down without breaking the kiss, and they twined together atop the covers partly clothed, partly naked, and fully involved in each other.
Their lovemaking was a mix of fast and slow, rough and gentle, new and old, and entirely in the moment . . . because neither of them wanted to think about the future.
December 20
One day until the solstice-eclipse
Brandt woke alone to find that Patience’s side of the bed was cool to the touch, and the sun was bright beyond the blue curtains. There was no fuzzy transition between asleep and awake, no moment of wondering what day it was or what he had on his to-do list. Instead, he snapped to consciousness acutely aware that, in sleeping as long as he had, he’d burned through hours he could’ve spent in the library, trying to find a way around the Akbal oath . . . or spending time with Patience.
It was a surprising reality check that those two options were equally tempting. He had a feeling this was what she wanted from him: not for him to subsume his duties as a Nightkeeper so much as for him to put her equal to those responsibilities.
In the outside world, she’d been fond of saying, I’m a chick. We multitask. Maybe it was his turn to figure out how to do that. If they made it through tomorrow . . .
His thought process ground to a halt, hung up on that “if.”
“We’ll make it,” he grated with the force of a vow. He didn’t know how, though, or what it might cost them.
And he wasn’t going to figure it out lying in bed.
Hauling himself upright, he hit the can, pulled on the jeans and oxford she’d peeled him out of the night before, along with his boots and knife, and headed for the main mansion. He found her in the great room, along with most of the team and the winikin , all scattered over chairs and couches with coffee cups at their elbows, wolfing down an army’s worth of chocolate-chip pancakes. Sasha and Michael were up in the kitchen, working on another batch. Michael sketched a wave in Brandt’s direction. “Go sit. I’ll hook you up.”
“Thanks. And may I say you wear your apron well? For an assassin, that is.” The apron in question belonged to Jox; it had dancing chili peppers on it and came down to approximately the level of Michael’s crotch.
“Don’t push it.”
“I take my coffee light. Keep it topped off and I’ll double your tip.”
“Here’s a tip for you: Stuff a jock in it, or you’re not getting shit.”
“Ha.” Satisfied, Brandt turned for the conversation pit. And stopped when he found pretty much everyone staring at him. “What?”
Patience set aside her plate, stood, and crossed to him, then faced the group with a sardonic grin that briefly lit the stress shadows in her eyes. “I’d like you all to meet my husband, Brandt White-Eagle.” She paused. “Brandt, this is everyone.”
He got it then. “Have I been that much of an asshole?”
Sven shook his head. “Not an asshole so much. You’ve just been . . . preoccupied. Or maybe ‘absent’ is a better word. You do the job and then some, but you don’t connect. Didn’t connect, I mean.”
He stood there for a moment, feeling like a complete dick, hating that the others had been affected by the disconnect, and wondering just how much he had screwed up team morale. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“A man can’t be himself when he’s fighting something inside him,” Michael said from up in the kitchen.
“You would know.” That wasn’t a joke, either. Michael had fought through his own hidden demons not long ago.
“Yeah. And I’m here if you ever need to decompress.” The other man grinned evilly. “We could go out to the range. That usually works for me.”
The offer was strangely appealing, though there was no question that Michael would kick his ass on the target course. “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.” Aware that the others had gone back to their conversations, Brandt lowered his voice and said to Patience, “How are you doing?”
She looked away. “I’m okay. Hoping we can figure something out.”
He scanned the room. Nate and Alexis were still off guarding Anna, and Rabbit and Myrinne didn’t seem to have made it up yet. The others were all present and accounted for, though. “Anybody had any brilliant ideas yet?” he asked.
“We’re still at the pancake stage. I only just got out here myself.” She still wasn’t looking at him.
“I figured you’d been up for a while.”
“I took a cup of coffee out on the patio and watched the sunrise.” She hesitated. “It’s part of my morning routine.”
It was also something they used to do together. Now she did it alone. More, he thought he knew why she hadn’t woken him. There had been too many fresh starts over the past two and a half years, too many times when he’d promised to be there for her, only to revert. Was it any wonder she hadn’t wanted to wake him, in case he’d turned back into that guy overnight? Gods knew it’d happened before.
“Maybe I could meet you out there tomorrow morning,” he suggested casually.
Her lips curved. “It’s a date.”
It was also, he thought, a start.
“Sit,” Michael ordered, coming up behind him. “Unless you’d rather wear this?”
Seeing that he was balancing two pancake-piled plates and a couple of cups of coffee—one light, one black as tar—Brandt relieved him of a plate and the non-paint-peeling coffee, and followed Patience to the love seat.
As Michael and Sasha settled themselves, Strike asked Brandt, “Anything you want to add to what you told us last night?”
“Wasn’t that enough?” But Brandt knew what the king was asking. He shook his head. “I’ve got all the memories. Now it’s going to be a case of figuring out what we can do with them. If anything gels, I’ll tell you.”
“Do that.” Strike turned to Lucius, who was hacking away at something on his laptop, fingers flying. Seeing that he was in full-on glyph-geek mode and oblivious to the outside world, the king threw a balled-up napkin, bouncing it off his forehead. “Yo, Doc.”
Lucius straightened and looked around, blinking in surprise. “What? Oh, sorry. This glyph string is . . . right. Never mind. And don’t call me Doc. My thesis defense was a train wreck.”
“Largely because the head of your committee was Xibalban.” But Strike waved the point off. “What have you got for us?”<
br />
“Is Rabbit coming?”
Strike shook his head. “He and Myrinne didn’t crash until like an hour ago. He was up late working on disguising the classified stuff in his head.”
Lucius said, “Well, send him my way when he wakes up. I think we found something that’ll help him block the mind-link.” He dug under his chair, came up with a wrapped bundle, and shook off the T-shirt wrapping to reveal a circlet of pale jade that was worked so thin that it was almost translucent.
Patience leaned forward. “What is it, some sort of necklace?”
“You’re about a foot too low.” Holding the delicate artifact carefully between his palms, Lucius said, “Turns out the tinfoil-hat wearers aren’t that far off; they’re just using the wrong material to protect their brain waves. They should be wearing jade. With this”—he set the circlet on his head, where it perched awkwardly—“the hellmagic shouldn’t be able to get through to him.”
“Nice work,” Brandt said.
Lucius removed the diadem and stared at it for a moment. “I’m still figuring out how to be an effective Prophet, obviously. Now that I’ve got this thing, it seems ridiculously obvious. You guys use jade-tipped bullets and jade grenades to neutralize creatures of dark magic, so it makes sense that something like this could work.” He paused. “We’ll need to field-test it, of course. I can’t guarantee it’ll work against Iago, given that he’s got a demon riding shotgun in his skull.”
“We’ll set something up once Rabbit’s awake,” Strike confirmed. “How did you guys do on the Akbal oath?”
Brandt was aware that Patience’s fork hesitated halfway to her mouth, then slowly lowered to her plate. He almost said, Don’t get your hopes up. Now that the memory block was fully demolished, he remembered the hours he’d spent online and in the library, researching all the religious oaths he could find, looking for a way to break them.
Lucius shook his head. “Sorry.”
Patience let out a long, slow breath. “Did you find anything?”
“No. And that doesn’t make any sense.” Lucius patted the laptop fondly. “Think about it: Akbal is an incredibly common glyph—it’s a day name, and the ancestors were all about their calendars. So going into the library search, I was figuring on getting Google bombed like whoa and damn, because even specifically asking about the ‘Akbal oath’ should’ve pulled hits from most everything related to the concepts of fealty and the calendar.” He paused and spread his hands. “Instead, I didn’t get shit, not even a bunch of random hits. Nothing in the library appears to have the words ‘Akbal’ and ‘oath’ together.”
Strike narrowed his eyes. “Does that mean the oath magic postdates the hiding of the library?” Because their ancestors had folded the library into the barrier to keep its contents safe from the conquistadors, its knowledge cut off in the mid-fifteen-hundreds.
Lucius tipped his hand in a yes-no gesture. “Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of random hits.”
“You think the ancestors actively avoided using the term ‘Akbal oath,’” Brandt guessed.
“Yeah. Sort of a ‘he who shall not be named’ thing.” Lucius paused. “Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t help us figure out how to deal with the oath.” He paused. “I’ll keep looking.” But his voice warned, No guarantees.
Brandt grimaced. “Thanks for trying.”
Patience threaded her fingers through his and squeezed. “Don’t give up.”
“I’m not—” His voice broke, went ragged. “Damn it.”
“We have today and part of tomorrow,” Strike said. “Something’s got to break. It doesn’t make any sense that the gods came to Patience’s aid against Werigo only to turn their backs on her now.”
Brandt badly wanted to get up and pace, but he made himself stay put, next to Patience, the two of them forming a team within the team, as it should have been all along. Gripping both of her hands in his, he took a deep breath and looked at Strike. “Okay, we’ve got a day and a half. What’s the—” Plan, he was going to say, but an air-raid whoop split the air, drowning him out and kicking his adrenaline level to red alert in an instant.
The loudest, deepest sound came from the mansion intercom, but each of their pocket units emitted smaller, shriller versions of the alarm, which was keyed to the panic buttons carried by each of the residents at Skywatch.
All of who were in the room . . . except for two.
As the others flew to their feet, Jox lunged for the intercom cutoff, killed the alarms, and slapped the button to activate alarm device’s two-way feature. “What’s wrong?”
Myrinne’s voice came over the system, edged with hysteria. “You’ve got to hurry. Something’s wrong with Rabbit!”
Oc Ajal was burning.
The yellow-orange bloom of fire, usually so beautiful to Rabbit, was monstrous as it clawed at the pole buildings, eating away the thatch roofing and carved markings, then down through the skeletons of the structures, to the bones of the village itself.
The flames curled horribly around blackened human shapes. Other bodies were sprawled where they had fallen: A brightly dressed woman lay facedown, clutching a blood-spattered grindstone that suggested she’d died fighting. Several men lay unmoving in front of the central dwelling. A boy’s foot stuck out from behind it, and a half-grown pup lay dead nearby.
Six Aztec makol were spread around the village, carrying shields and long buzz swords across their backs as they hunted their prey.
Dark magic spat in the forest, followed by a scream that cut off abruptly. The makol didn’t react to that, just as they didn’t seem interested in the female sobs and harsh rutting noises coming from inside Saamal’s hut.
Rabbit writhed in his bed. It’s a dream, he told himself. Wake the fuck up! This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream. Iago couldn’t mind-link him through Skywatch’s wards.
Only he wasn’t seeing the carnage through Iago’s eyes.
“Let me go!” he shouted, railing against the nightmare’s grip as his vision went bouncy with forced motion. But the words came out in a stranger’s voice, in a stranger’s language, shocking Rabbit into the realization that he was seeing things through Saamal’s eyes, experiencing the attack through his perceptions.
Four makol dragged the village elder to the fire pit at the center of the village, pulled him spread-eagled, and dumped him on the coals from the morning’s cooking fire.
He screamed as the hot embers burned through his tunic and into his skin, then again when the makol lifted the heavy mortar stones from the corn-grinding stations and dropped them onto his hands and feet, pinning him in place. But those physical agonies were far eclipsed by the agony of knowing that he’d failed his people, failed his gods. Failed his destiny.
Movement flashed in his peripheral vision as the soldiers’ leader, wearing the blue demon mask and a red-feathered cloak, moved into his line of sight and lifted a carved ceremonial knife—
“Rabbit!” The sound of his name in Myrinne’s voice was followed by a jolt of chu’ul magic, a lifeline that lassoed his consciousness and dragged him out of Saamal’s head, out of the nightmare.
He came awake screaming, “No!”
He lay spread-eagled, but his hands and feet were suddenly free of the crushing weight of the mortar stones, his back unburned.
Heart hammering, he lunged upright, saw a flash of blue and red, and hurled himself at the makol leader. He hit the bastard hard; they went down in a tangle, smashed into something wooden and sharp-cornered that didn’t jibe with the fire-pit image that was locked in his brain, and landed on a hard, flat surface that wasn’t highland dirt.
As Rabbit grappled with the disconnect, his enemy flipped him onto his back. And sat on him.
The familiarity of a move that had ended untold wrestling matches during Rabbit’s youth—and the sudden lack of oxygen as all the air left his lungs under pressure from two-hundred-plus pounds of Nightkeeper—cracked the barrier between nightmare an
d reality and brought him slamming back into himself. He lay still for a moment, gasping through sinuses that were full of the stink of smoke, charred flesh, and blood.
Strike’s face swam into view, looking concerned as hell.
Rabbit managed to get out a word: “Uncle.”
The king’s expression eased some, though it stayed worried as he shifted his weight off Rabbit’s torso and rose to crouch over him. “What the hell happened? That was no dream. We had to send Sasha in after you.”
Vision clearing as oxygen scrubbed away the last lingering shreds of confusion, Rabbit saw that most of the magi and several winikin were crowded into his and Myrinne’s bedroom.
Urgency beat through him with the cadence of running feet and the screams of the hunted as he blurted, “We have to get our asses to Oc Ajal, right fucking now.”
A strangled, startled noise came from Jox.
Strike turned on him. “You know what he’s talking about?”
“Not exactly.” But the winikin’s face flushed.
“We’re wasting time,” Rabbit interrupted. He held out his hand to Strike. “I’ll show you.” When Strike hesitated, he pressed, “No tricks, no lies. I promise.”
“Which means you’ve tricked and/or lied to me recently.” The king’s expression darkened, but he reached out and took his hand.
“You need to see this.” Through the touch link, Rabbit sent a compressed thought stream straight into Strike’s head.
He started with Myrinne pointing out that his old man wouldn’t have slept with the enemy and suggesting that his mother’s people might be a different sect of the Xibalbans, that they might be potential allies. Then he showed Strike how Jox had dropped the name of the village, moved on to his and Myrinne’s visit to the village and the whole-lot-of-nothing they had found. He finished with the images of the burning village, the bodies, and the village elder spread out for sacrifice in the central fire pit that symbolized the entrance to the underworld.
Blood Spells Page 23