He’d gone two steps when Rabbit’s feet finally came unglued and his lungs and throat started working again.
“Hey!” he called. And launched himself at his king.
Strike caught him on the fly and they hugged like they hadn’t since . . . shit, Rabbit didn’t remember. Since back before he’d gotten too cool to do crap like hug the big brother who wasn’t really. They both ignored Rabbit’s stifled sob and the way Strike hung on a beat too long, and when they separated, they both stared into different parts of the forest rather than at each other. But the air between them was clearer than it had been in weeks, maybe longer.
“We should get back,” Rabbit said finally. “There’s a shitload left to do.”
But when they stepped through the archway together, he saw that the others had been seriously busy while they’d been gone. Either that, or he and Strike had been gone longer than he’d thought.
The bodies from the forest and village had been stacked beside the fire pit and layered with wood that had been stripped from Saamal’s hut, leaving the structure’s skeleton behind. The central pole was gone; a hole in the bloodstained sand marked where its base had stood.
Myrinne crossed to Rabbit and held out her hand. “Here.”
From Lucius’s tendencies toward verbal diarrhea when he was working in the library, Rabbit knew that “eccentric” was a catchall term for the small, flat objects the ancients had made from stone, imbuing them with ritual significance—and sometimes even power—through their choice of shape and stone. Some had holes so they could be worn as pendants or carried in pockets, while others had been sacrificed or buried in a house or village to ward off evil.
Leah, Nate, and Alexis each wore one given to them by the king, signifying that they were members of the royal council; those eccentrics were abstractly curving shapes that made Rabbit think of Chinese dragons.
The one that Myrinne held out, in contrast, was a flat, flared quatrefoil.
He stared at it. “Well, hell.”
“Literally,” she quipped, but her eyes searched his. “What can I do to help?”
“You’re already doing it.” He took the eccentric and held it flat on his palm; it was heavier than it looked. He didn’t see any markings on it, didn’t catch any power buzz. It seemed to be nothing more than a carefully knapped piece of waxy gray flint. “Ten bucks says I slice myself every time I stick my hand in my pocket with this thing.”
“You could wear it around your neck.”
He was pretty sure she was kidding. “Yeah. That’ll happen. Not.” He wasn’t even sure he should carry it day to day. “What if it—I don’t know—attracts dark magic or something?”
“Like the hellmark doesn’t already?”
She had him there. “I’m just wondering if I should leave it here. Nothing says I have to accept it. You heard Saamal—they weren’t our allies at all, and they were operating on a whacked theology. I mean, sky demons? Seriously?” He shook his head. “No. Even if this branch of the order was threat-level yellow compared to Iago’s, they opposed the gods.” He rubbed a thumb over the eccentric, which had warmed in his hand. It was soft to the touch. Appealing. “I shouldn’t carry it, or even keep it.”
Myrinne thought for a moment. “How about you hang on to it for now and ask Lucius to check it out? Once you’ve got more info, you can make the call.”
“Yeah.” He nodded, exhaling. “Yeah, that’ll work.” He went to slip the eccentric into his pocket and was startled to realize he already had.
“They’re waiting for you.”
“I know.” He was all too aware that Strike had helped the others finish their grisly work. Now he and the other members of the team stood loosely ringed around the large stacked pyre that contained the village inhabitants, and another, smaller one next to it, where Saamal lay on a crisscrossed pyramid of poles, with a brightly colored swath of fabric covering his gaping chest. Strangely, his color looked better now than it had at the end of the reanimation spell. Was that a sign that dark magic took a toll on the user?
Catching Rabbit’s eye, Strike said, “You okay to do this?”
“No. But I’ll do it anyway.” Fire was cleansing. It was traditional. And although he’d never tested out the theory, he had a feeling that on some level, it tapped into both light and dark levels of the magic.
Before he started, though, he moved around the pyres and pulled Strike away a few paces. “I just wanted to run this by you.” He showed the king the hellmark-shaped eccentric and went through his and Myrinne’s thought process. “If you don’t like the idea of me holding on to it, though, tell me now, because I’d like it to go into the pyre.”
“Keep it. We found a cache of codices and a couple of modern notebooks in the elder’s place. Lucius and Jade are going to go through them as soon as we get back. Maybe one of them will have something about the eccentric.”
Rabbit hadn’t realized he’d tightened up until the tension eased. “Okay. Good. That’s good. Thanks.”
“No problem,” the king said, like it was no big deal, but as Rabbit turned away, he caught Strike’s almost imperceptible nod.
The thing was, he also caught Myrinne’s fleeting scowl. She lost it the moment he turned back to her, but he was sure he’d seen it. That brought back some of the tightness, because he sure as shit didn’t want to wind up caught between her and Strike. He’d let her jealousy ease him away from Patience—he’d even kind of liked that she’d cared enough to be territorial—but Strike was family.
“Myr?” he asked. You’re everything to me, he wanted to tell her, but you can’t be the only person I care about. At the same time, though, he didn’t know if he could’ve coped just now if she hadn’t been there.
She smiled, though the warmth didn’t make it all the way to her eyes. “Time to do your thing, Pyro.”
He nodded, feeling none of the anticipation that usually accompanied the prospect of fire magic.
“Yeah.”
He took his place in the circle, with his back to the stone archway that would long outlive its builders. He refused to call on the dark lords, but knew the villagers’ souls wouldn’t appreciate him praying to the sky gods. So in the end he blanked his mind of everything but the magic as he called fire . . . and finished burning Oc Ajal to the ground.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Skywatch
It was early afternoon before the teammates reassembled in the great room, showered, changed, and more or less recovered from the morning’s ordeal. Physically, anyway. Brandt had a feeling that the Oc Ajal massacre was going to stick with all of them in one way or another.
Whatever had gone down between Strike and Rabbit had cleared the air between the two of them, but that didn’t come close to offsetting the pall cast by the villagers’ slaughter. The magi drooped, tired in body and soul, tended by somber winikin.
Sitting beside him on the love seat, Patience said, “I don’t care who they worshipped. That was . . .” She trailed off.
“Yeah.” Horrific, inhuman, vile, evil, and a hundred other words applied, yet none could fully encompass what had happened to the almost forty victims. There had been at least ten bodies in the village itself, and twenty-eight more in the surrounding forest, probably cut down as they had run toward the village, no doubt called by the screams.
Maybe a dozen of them had been kids, including twins a few years older than Harry and Braden; they’d been lying just beyond the elder’s hut, near a pair of dead coy-dog pups.
At first, Brandt had tried not to wonder whether the woman in the elder’s hut had been their mother. Then he decided their memories deserved his pain, so he let himself picture the boys trying to get to her, hearing her screams and calling her name as the makol shot them down. Or had the makol shot the boys and pups first, while their mother watched, and then dragged her into the hut, lashed her to that damned pole, and gone to work on her?
He could still smell the smoke and blood, as if it had leached into his skin and
hair, permeated his soul. He hadn’t known any of the victims. Hell, they were the enemy. But it was far, far too easy to imagine his family in that village. He kept picturing Patience in the woman’s place, Harry and Braden lying in the dirt near those pups, Woody cut down defending his charges, Hannah sprawled facedown with a grindstone near her outstretched fingertips.
Even worse, he could picture the scene there at Skywatch, with bodies scattered in the mansion and out near the picnic area.
Was that how it would happen? Would the Nightkeepers be cut down in their homes, ending the war before it truly began?
The villagers had hidden behind glamours rather than wards, he reminded himself. And they had been priests and acolytes, not warriors.
“So why kill them?” he said. “How the hell were they a threat to Iago?” When the room went still, he realized Strike had been talking, that he’d totally zoned out on the start of the meeting. Way to engage, dickhead. “Sorry,” he said with a guilty look at Patience. “I was thinking out loud. I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop thinking,” Strike said wryly. “You could, however, work on the timing.”
He didn’t seem that upset, though, probably because they were all feeling pretty damned fragile, and the exchange eased the heavy mood in the room. Not by much, but it was something.
After a raised-eyebrow pause to see if Brandt was going to jump in, Strike said, “It’s a valid question. As far as I can see, there are three main answers that jump to mind: One, Iago wanted to finish his father’s work by destroying the other Xibalban sect, and he didn’t know where the village was until he got the info from Rabbit.” He ticked off a second point on his fingers. “Two, he doesn’t want Rabbit to get any further on his search for his mother. That’s intriguing, because it suggests there’s a weakness we don’t know about, some way the other side of Rabbit’s heritage could harm Iago.”
Rabbit unbent from the elbows-on-knees slouch he’d assumed on a couch next to Myrinne, expression pensive. “It’s possible. Iago knew her. He has to have known her. The timing—”
“Hold it,” Leah broke in using her cop voice, which was guaranteed to stop Rabbit in his tracks. “Promise me you won’t dip into his head for the answer until and unless the royal council clears it and you’ve got spotters standing by. Better yet, promise Strike you’ll wait until then.”
A year ago, asking for Rabbit’s promise would’ve been about as useful as trying to stop up the bathroom shower with a single finger—sort of effective, but not really. Now, though, he actually winced and thought about it for a second before he met Strike’s eyes, and said, “I promise I won’t connect with Iago to find out about my mother until you give me the go-ahead.” Myrinne shot him a look, but didn’t say anything.
The king considered that for a moment, no doubt looking for loopholes. Then he said, “Let’s make this a fair trade. Once this solstice-eclipse is behind us and things—gods willing—settle down a little, I promise that I’ll do what I can to help you figure out as much or as little as you want to know about that side of your family. Deal?”
Rabbit’s eyes widened. “Deal.”
Strike nodded. “Good. Now, last but not least on the list of ‘possible reasons why Iago would send the makol to attack Oc Ajal’ is because they were looking for something. Question is, did they find it or not? We can assume they were looking for the knife the elder mentioned—the Moctezuma connection is too obvious. But were they also looking for Rabbit’s eccentric?”
Lucius said, “Unfortunately, the eccentric isn’t showing up in the library, archive, or any of the outside searches I’ve done so far.” He looked over at Rabbit. “I’ll talk to some of the more out-there Aztec scholars I know, see if there are any rumors that might not’ve made it into the official press. My gut says that’ll be a dead end, though. Eccentrics were common, but we know almost nada about what they actually symbolized or how they were used.”
Rabbit shrugged. “Well, on the bright side, it doesn’t come with a ‘touch this and die’ curse.”
“At least not one the Xibalbans made public,” Lucius agreed. “The knife, on the other hand, was pretty easy to find—or rather the first fire ceremony was.”
Strike grimaced. “Yeah. Jox used to pull that one out when the Xibalban boogeymen stopped working. ‘Knock it off or I’ll use you to start the new fire,’ he’d say. Usually worked too.”
Jox flushed a little when the other winikin looked at him. “What? Like he said, it worked.”
Carlos frowned. “Never heard of it.”
“Me neither,” Brandt muttered aside to Patience. “You?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t the only one; the room seemed about equally divided.
Seeing that not everyone was up to speed, Lucius said, “There were several versions of the ritual. The basic theory was that every fire in the village—or, back in the day, the entire kingdom or the empire itself—was snuffed out simultaneously, plunging the world into darkness and essentially stripping mankind of the one big thing that separates us from the spirits and animals—the ability to use fire. Then the highest-ranking religious leader, whether a village elder or the emperor himself, would use flint and a sparker to start a new fire, and all the other fires would be relit from that one blaze. If we’re talking about a village, everyone would snag an ember and go about their business. In cases where the ritual was commanded for a kingdom or the whole empire, runners would head in all directions. Each runner would light all the village fires on his route, then pass off his flame, Olympic-style, to another runner, and another, and so on. In this way, all the fires in the land were made fresh and new again.” He paused. “One of the reasons to perform the ceremony was to encourage the sun or moon to return after an eclipse.”
“Bingo,” Brandt murmured.
Patience nodded. “We knew Iago would try to harness the solstice-eclipse. Maybe this is how he intends to do it.”
“Which means all we’ve got to do is figure out how to stop him and keep Cabrakan where he belongs.” Brandt exhaled. “No problem.” Inwardly, he added, And we’ve got to do all that without me retaking the Akbal oath.
But that didn’t sit right either. Not after what they’d seen in the village.
Lucius went on to describe the harder-core Aztec versions of the ceremony, in which the new fires were started in the open abdominal cavities of living, eviscerated victims. He paused, clearing his throat. “There’s one more thing. I wasn’t going to mention it because we’re all pretty raw right now, and I don’t really see that there’s anything we can do about it, but . . .” He took a deep breath. “The strongest of the new-fire rituals used children. Young boys, especially.”
“Used them for wh—,” Patience began, then broke off, her face draining of color. She grabbed on to Brandt like she was drowning, digging her fingernails into his skin.
He covered her hand with his own. His stomach clutched sourly, but he said, “The twins are safe. Iago knows they exist, but there’s no way he can find them. Hannah and Woody are pros at staying hidden.”
Lucius held up his hands. “Sorry. My bad. I was more wondering about the villagers.”
“You think the makol took prisoners,” Brandt grated.
Lucius nodded. “The Aztecs were big on it. They even used to set up mock battles with neighboring kingdoms, as a way of capturing each other’s culls for use as human sacrifices.” He paused. “We don’t know how many kids were in the village. They might’ve captured a dozen, or none. There’s no way of knowing.”
Brandt shook his head, hating the thought, and what it meant. “Iago is escalating. He started with individual murders, and more often than not, he took the time to do something with the body, either posing it like the first old lady, or—” He broke off with a look at Myrinne, because his second example would have been the Wiccan who had raised her. “Then the kidnappings started—Sasha first, then Rabbit and Myrinne, Lucius. . . . We got all of them back, but Sasha and Lucius both saw other pri
soners. Then last year, he started leaving his own people to die, first the human acolytes, then other Xibalbans. And now . . .”
“What happened today was different,” Patience agreed.
“The profilers would call it overkill,” Michael put in. And he would know.
“That’s Moctezuma’s influence,” Lucius said. “We’re not just dealing with Iago anymore. He’s something different now, something far more powerful, far more violent.”
Brandt tipped his hand in a ‘maybe’ gesture. “I’m sure that’s part of it, but the pattern was in place before he summoned the demon.” He had watched his fair share of crime-solving TV back in the outside world. “I think he’s been learning as he goes.”
“Iago was the second son,” Patience said, catching on.
He nodded. “Think about it. Werigo was usurped by his younger brother—Saamal—so he probably harped on the ‘trust no one, especially your little brother’ theory when he was raising Ix.” Adrenaline kicked deep down as it came together for him. “But then Werigo died and Ix found himself in charge of a group of dark magi and nasty-ass humans, feeling his little brother breathing down his neck. I’m betting Ix wouldn’t have given Iago any details on anything he didn’t have to. So when Ix died, the information chain was broken. Iago didn’t know all of the magic or plans.” He paused. “I think that up until now he was making shit up as he went along.”
“And now he’s got Moctezuma helping him,” Patience murmured.
“Yeah. Which means it’s only going to get worse from here.” Brandt tightened his grip on her hand. To Lucius, he said, “Unless you see a problem with that theory.”
“Only that I didn’t think of it first,” the human said drily. Then his expression shifted. “The question is whether we can use it to—” He broke off at the burble of a digital tone.
Patience shot to her feet, fumbling an unfamiliar cell phone out of her back pocket. Flushing, she flipped it open and glanced at the display.
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