Then Brandt muttered, “Cabrakan was testing the barrier even back then.”
She nodded. “I think so. Only the massacre had sealed it tight, and kept it sealed for the next twenty-some years, so Cabrakan couldn’t do anything. Then, last spring, a five-point-nine tremor hit, followed by the one the other day. All under Mexico City.” She paused. “I think there must be a weak spot in the barrier right there, maybe one that’s specific to Cabrakan himself.”
Lucius said, “Moctezuma reportedly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of captives, trying to appease the dark gods when the conquistadors arrived. That sort of sacrifice, along with the geologic makeup of the place, with the dry lake bed amplifying even the smallest tremor, could certainly attract Cabrakan. And the map fits: The city was originally an island in the middle of the lake, and the Aztecs built four causeways connecting it to the mainland.”
Brandt turned to him. “Tell me you know where there’s a wall of carved eagles in Mexico City.”
Lucius nodded, suppressed excitement firing in his eyes. “Five centuries of Mexico City are layered over the top of Moctezuma’s palace, but archaeologists started seriously excavating the site in the late seventies. One of the buildings found near the palace has been identified as the barracks of Moctezuma’s warrior elite . . . who were called the Eagles.”
“That’s where we need to be,” Patience whispered.
Gods willing, they wouldn’t be too late.
Mexico City
The ruins of Moctezuma’s palace—the Templo Mayor—were set up as a tourist attraction, complete with a museum and clearspan roofing that stretched across the excavated areas, including the warriors’ barracks. Little remained of the original structure except for a long wall that had been intricately carved with bas-relief eagles, repeated over and over again.
The Nightkeepers had detoured to Skywatch in order to drop off Hannah and the boys and grab calories, which meant it was almost exactly fifteen minutes before the moment of solstice when their boots hit the ground near the eagle-carved wall.
The ground hit back.
The earthquake tossed the world around, making the surface beneath them undulate and heave. Out in the street things crashed and people screamed. The Nightkeepers had materialized with Patience’s magic in full force, rendering them invisible to any humans who might be nearby, but although the Templo Mayor and surrounding buildings were popular attractions, the place was deserted. The locals and tourists were far more concerned with either getting out of the city or hunkering down someplace reinforced to ride out the quakes.
Brandt landed and locked his knees, and when Patience nearly went down, he hooked an arm around her waist. They hung on to each other while the quake went on far too long, the earth rippling with unnatural liquidity.
“It feels like the barrier,” Patience said against his chest, and she was right, except that instead of a soft, yielding surface and harmless fog, they were standing on stone slabs that threatened to crack and buckle, and there were steel girders all around them, arching overhead to support the flapping expanse of plastic.
“Hope the roof doesn’t come down on our heads,” he muttered. Even as he said it, a section of clearspan tore free and swung down in a ghostly flutter, to reveal the night sky. The stars seemed unnaturally bright in contrast to the eclipsed full moon. The moonlight was orange red, painting the carved eagles with light the color of old bloodstains.
The solstice-eclipse was almost on top of them. They needed to hurry.
Even when the tremor was past, the ground seemed to hum with a low, tense vibration that put Brandt on edge. The others felt it too; they muttered and traded looks as they started moving into place, forming an uplink circle with their knives at the ready. Rabbit didn’t move, though. He stayed off to one side, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, breathing heavily.
Myrinne bent over him. “What’s wrong?”
“I hope he didn’t use himself up back at El Rey,” Brandt muttered, low enough that only Patience heard him. “We’re all dragging ass, and we’ve still got a demon to fight.” Even without the hellmark, Rabbit was their strongest fighter.
“It’s this place,” Rabbit said, his voice sounding thick and strange. “Gods. What’s with this place?”
“Violence,” Lucius said. “According to some of Cortés’s men, more than a hundred thousand skulls were displayed, and the carved idols in here were fed with hearts and covered with five or six inches of clotted blood.”
“I can smell it,” Rabbit grated. “Shit. I can taste it.” But his color was getting better, his breathing coming back to normal. “Give me another second to finish blocking it out. It’s not dark magic, really, or at least not the way I used to sense it. This is . . . pain. This whole place is soaked with pain.”
“We’ve fought through pain before,” Strike said grimly. “We’ll do it again.”
Working fast, the magi uplinked. Brandt joined the circle last, taking Rabbit’s hand on one side and Patience’s on the other. He felt his powers expanding and deepening, taking sustenance from the solstice-eclipse, the teamwork of the Nightkeepers, and wide-open jun tan bond that linked him and Patience, feeling vibrant and alive.
But it wasn’t enough. The low-throated vibration of old pain and violence threatened to drown out the hum of Nightkeeper magic, and the ground shuddered beneath their feet. Worse, there was no sign of the streaming red lights his ancestors had shown him.
Brandt’s chest went hollow as he forced himself to say it. “In the painting there were dozens of magi near the wall, and more in the distance. Hundreds, maybe.” He paused. “What if there just aren’t enough of us?”
The ground shifted beneath them. In the street, something crashed.
“We’re going to have to be enough,” Michael said bleakly. “We’re all there is.”
Patience squeezed Brandt’s hand. “Try the Triad magic again. There has to be something more, something we’re missing.”
Needing the contact, he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers, taking her warmth, her strength, as he concentrated on the inner question, How can we fight Cabrakan?
He got only the image of Patience’s face, lit from within with love.
Panic and despair spiraled through him. He couldn’t lose her. Not now. Please, gods, help me out here.
He saw Patience again, this time studying a spread of cards. And for all that he had come to accept that the Mayan Oracle wasn’t the crock of shit he had once believed, it seemed odd that he would picture her like that.
Which meant it wasn’t an accident.
Adrenaline kicked. “You’re the answer,” he told her. “You or—”
“Love,” she interrupted. “Maybe love is the answer.” She turned to Lucius. “Neither the Aztecs nor the Xibalbans use sex in their rituals, do they?”
“Not the way the Nightkeepers do.”
She looked back at Brandt. “Which I’ll bet means there isn’t a dark equivalent of sex magic. What if we can use that to break through the layer of pain that’s covering this place?”
“Etznab,” he said, making the connection. At her look of confusion, he said, “Think about how our jun tan works: It creates a feedback loop that lets each of us mirror what the other is feeling. If we can do the same thing with power . . .”
Her eyes lit. “It’ll amplify. Maybe even enough to override Cabrakan’s dark magic.”
Rabbit stepped forward. His eyes were stark hollows in his angular face, but intensity burned at their depths. “If you can show me how your jun tan works, I can transmit it to the others.” He glanced at Strike. “Okay?”
Overhead, through the torn spot in the roof, the last sliver of white moon disappeared. “Do it,” the king said implacably, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line. “We do whatever it takes. That’s why we’re here.”
But it wasn’t the only reason they were there, Brandt thought as he held out his hand to Patience. Because what was the point of the wa
r if they weren’t also fighting for the smaller, equally important parts of themselves? Love, family, a personal future . . . it was all worth fighting for.
It had taken him a long time to see that. Almost too long.
Patience took his hand and they closed for a kiss, with Rabbit tapping in via touch link. Brandt put everything he had into the kiss and their jun tan connection, not just giving her his body, strength, heart, and soul, but taking hers in return, until it wasn’t his strength versus hers anymore—it was their combined power that fired his bloodstream and lit him from within with a level of power he’d never before experienced.
The magic came from the solstice-eclipse, and from the way the stars and planets were beginning to align as the end time approached. But it also came from him and Patience, and the new level of connection they had forged from the ashes of their old lives.
Thank you for not giving up on me, he sent through the jun tan.
He got a wash of love and acceptance in return, and a whisper of, I might’ve given up on you . . . but I couldn’t give up on us.
And thank the gods for that.
He slanted his mouth across hers and took the kiss deeper, hotter, harder, until sex magic sparked and crackled around them and his body tightened with the need for privacy, the need to bury himself inside her. The need, quite simply, for her.
Red-gold power responded, washing from him to her and back again. His jun tan heated, activating; he could feel her pleasure and his own, along with Rabbit’s discreet contact as he fed the jun tan pattern to the others, showing them the feedback loop. Then he felt the incremental increases in his power as the mated pairs came online, each adding their own distinctive flavor to the burgeoning mix of magic.
The power cycled higher and higher, until, without warning, a soundless detonation slammed into him and then out again, down through his feet and into the earth itself.
And the Nightkeeper magic took on a life of its own.
Brandt broke the kiss as the power surged beyond sex magic to something incandescent. It wasn’t coming from the jun tan connections anymore; it was using them, flowing through them and drawing light magic from the survivors and the strength of their gods-destined pairings.
The ground heaved beneath them in a tremor that was far stronger than any of the others. A roaring noise welled up from beneath them, sounding less like a subway now and more like the cry of an angry creature, a demon trying to fight its way to freedom, bent on revenge and destruction.
Out in the street, the screams intensified, and Brandt heard the first few ominous cracks and rumbles of major structural damage. He flashed on the TV images of the big earthquake: crumbled buildings, ash-coated figures, and child volunteers crawling through narrow gaps to pull babies out of a collapsed hospital wing. The threat of failure tunneled his vision. This wasn’t going to work. They didn’t have enough people, enough power, enough—
Focus! The word echoed in Woody’s voice. And for fuck’s sake, have a little faith.
The memory—or was it something else?—snapped Brandt out of his downward spiral. He blinked, clearing his mind of the noise out on the street, and the TV images. Within the relative calm that followed, an image formed: that of a huge lake with an irregularly shaped island rising out of the center, connected to the mainland by four causeways built up out of stone and rubble.
And he freaking got it.
“I’m not an island,” he said, “but this piece of Mexico City used to be.”
He opened his eyes to find Patience, limned in sparks of magic, staring at him in wonder. “Your eyes are gold,” she whispered.
He caught her hands, using her to anchor him as he reached out with his mind and found the inner filing cabinet where he had put the scariest, most tempting and terrifying part of the Triad magic: his ancestors’ powers.
The eagle magi had designed the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica using math, physics, and arcane schematics painted onto fig-bark codices. Now their combined talents expanded his senses, letting him perceive the structure of the city around him. He sensed the buildings above the surface, their cracks and stresses, and the places where they had been shored up against earthquake damage. Beneath them, he perceived the layers that represented five centuries of habitation, with Moctezuma’s capital city of Tenochtitlán at the very bottom.
He perceived the ghostly foundations of the ancient palaces, temples, and markets. More importantly, he saw where the causeways ran across the lake bed, two from the northern end of the island, one from the west, one from the south. The causeways had long been buried beneath the rubble that the Spanish had carted in to expand Mexico City beyond the island. But their structures were still there . . . and they were the only things holding Cabrakan in check.
The demon strained against them, drawn to the place where generations of terrible blood sacrifices had weakened the barrier enough for him to punch through during the solstice-eclipse, but held back by the four causeways, which had been built by the slave labor of captured Maya, and held the power of their sky gods.
The big earthquake two decades earlier had weakened the causeways, and the recent miniquakes had further crumbled their stone bases and compressed paving. One or two more good tremors, and the demon would be free.
Not on my watch, Brandt thought fiercely. He bore down, pulling power from his ancestors, his teammates, and Patience—his wife, mate, and partner. His forebears had once built vast cities from stone and the images in their minds. Now their knowledge, along with the combined magic of his teammates, gave him the power to rebuild the roads that anchored the center of Mexico City.
A spell whispered in his mind, coming in a man’s voice that sounded oddly like flutes and drumbeats, and brought the icy chill of river water to touch his skin.
Brandt said the words aloud. And the world turned bloodred.
Power detonated. Fiery magic streamed out of him and blasted along where the four causeways had been, going from crimson to translucent as it passed the limits of the ruin. The ground heaved and shuddered, nearly pitching Brandt to his knees as Cabrakan fought back far below them.
The magic poured out, draining Brandt and making his head spin, but he kept going, pulling strength from the depths of his soul and beyond. And the causeways responded, beginning to realign into the form they had taken a thousand years ago. The changes were infinitesimal at first—a stone returning to alignment in one spot, a fracture sealing in another—but then the alterations mushroomed, gaining speed.
Brandt sensed Cabrakan’s rage against the magi who had killed his brother and now barred him from the earth. The dark lord slammed against the earth beneath Moctezuma’s palace, which had been at the center of the bloodshed and was now the weakest spot of all.
The ground yawed and threatened to shake apart. Something crashed down from above, but was deflected by shield magic.
“Thanks,” Brandt grated, not sure who had set the shield, but understanding that the others were protecting him so he could concentrate everything he had on locking stone against rubble, rubble against sand.
Although the original causeways had ended at the island’s shores, he continued inward, reinforcing Cabrakan’s prison all the way inward to the Templo Mayor, which was the central point where all four causeways intersected, and where slave-built temples had been soaked in blood.
There, wielding the magic of love and family, of past and present, Brandt joined the causeways together, stabilizing the ground beneath Mexico City and sealing the demon into Xibalba.
And then, spent, he let himself fall, knowing that Patience would catch him and bring him home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
December 22
One year, three hundred and sixty-four days
to the zero date
Skywatch
Woody’s funeral rites were planned for noon the day after the solstice-eclipse. His pyre was built at the edge of where the Nightkeepers’ Great Hall had stood before the massacre. Red-Boar had
been sent to the gods from that spot, as had Sasha’s father. There had been zero discussion of setting up a second funerary site for the winikin even though the separation had been traditional in their parents’ generations. Winikin, Nightkeeper, human . . . they were all teammates, all equally worthy of the gods’ attention on their way to the sky.
Brandt, Patience, and Hannah did the bulk of the work on the pyre, with Harry and Braden alternately helping and getting in the way. To Patience, their perpetual motion and piping voices brought a sense of lightness, completion, and joy that she had so badly missed . . . and one she would yearn for when they left again.
But now, more than ever, they needed to stay hidden.
Iago’s injuries would heal, and when they did, he was going to be pissed. She didn’t want the boys anywhere within his reach. If she could have sent them to another planet, another plane, she would have. As it was, she was doing the next best thing: She was entrusting them once again to Hannah, and this time she wouldn’t go looking for them, no matter what. She would love them best by letting them go. Even if it killed her to do so.
“There.” Brandt stepped back, dusted off his hands, and stuck them in the front pockets of his jeans as he surveyed the work. Braden did the same, mimicking his father so they stood side by side, both with their hands in their jeans pockets and their shoulders slightly hunched beneath black T-shirts, staring at Woody’s pyre with matching frowns.
Patience’s heart turned over when Brandt glanced down, caught Braden’s fierce scowl, and laughed out loud. It was a rusty-sounding chuckle, one forced through his grief for Woody, and his sorrow at knowing the boys would be there for only a few more hours. But instead of shutting all that away, he caught her eyes and shared it: the laugh, the grief, and the sorrow.
“You guys are going to be okay,” Hannah said softly from behind her.
Patience turned to find the winikin sitting atop one of the nearby picnic tables, with Harry cross-legged on the picnic bench near her feet, watching his father and brother debate the placement of the three ceremonial sticks of ceiba, cacao, and rubber-tree wood.
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