Storm Kissed

by Jessica Andersen

  “He took off right after you did. He said he was going to take care of Keban’s body, drove off in the pickup.” Lucius’s tone was carefully neutral, but she heard the question in it.

  “If that was what he said, then that’s what he’s doing. He’s not a liar.” Which was true. He omitted. He talked around issues and was occasionally guilty of some whoppers in the flawed-logic department. But he rarely lied outright.

  “Without an armband, driving a vehicle that isn’t hooked into the Skywatch system?”

  “I didn’t say he always plays by the rules. Just that he’s not a liar.” But her heart sank as she saw Lucius’s mistrust. Softening her voice, she said, “Look, I’m not saying that his motives are always a hundred percent pure, but I believe him when he says he doesn’t want the throne.”

  “Despite his history?”

  “He’s not the guy he used to be.” It wasn’t until she said it aloud that she realized she really believed it, deep down inside. She didn’t know whether the change had come from maturity, breaking his bond with the star demon, the Triad magic, or a combination of all those things, but he was truly a different person now. A better man. “He took the fealty oath and swore on his honor.” Which in his own way, he held sacred. “I think you should give him a chance.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know what I’m going to do. This is all so complicated.” She paused. “And there’s more. I had a vision, just now.” His eyes fired as she described the spirit guide and repeated his warnings. Halfway through, Lucius grabbed a napkin and started taking notes; she could see the wheels turning in his brain. Although she was tempted to leave out the parts about her and Dez not being a destined pairing, she told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when she was finished. “That sucks.”

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything.” But they both knew it did. “How about Coatepec Mountain ? Do you know where it is?”

  “Not offhand, but the name is sure as hell familiar.” He pushed away from the breakfast bar and grabbed his crutches. “I’m going to collect Natalie and hit the books. You want to come with? We could use you.”

  “Later.”

  His eyes sharpened on hers. “You’re going after Dez?”

  She blew out a breath, then nodded. “He needs to know what Anntah said . . . and that I’m not running away this time. I don’t know exactly what’s between us at this point, but whatever it is, I’m going to fight for it.”

  But first, she stopped in her room for her armband and more firepower. As she headed back to the Jeep, her armband staticked and Jade’s voice said, “We’ve got the others and are headed to Xik now. Wish us luck.”

  Luck, Reese thought. But so far, luck had been painfully short for the magi. And time was running out.

  The village of Xik

  Mayan highlands

  As Strike triggered the ’port, Sven hung on tightly to Mac’s ruff with one hand, the joined hands of Jade and Patience with the other, awkwardly touch-linking himself and the coyote into the circle. Mac whined, quivering. He knew what was coming, and wasn’t a big fan:’port magic freaked him out.

  Calm, Sven sent to the big canine using the simple glyphlike command images that Carlos had been teaching him, and got a surge of deep suspicion in return. He was still getting used to communicating with his familiar, a process that hadn’t exactly been easy, given that Mac was opinionated, quick-tempered, and a little on the flighty side. Their partnership was turning out to be less about Sven giving orders and more a constant state of negotiation, which was exhausting. Carlos had assured him that things would get better, but right now, it was all he could do not to lose track of his familiar. He’d learned his lesson, though—the last time Mac took off, it had taken Sven hours to track him down the rain forest based on oh-so-helpful thought-images like: Leaves, leaves, leaves. Jaguar poop. More leaves.

  “Hang on,” Strike said, and then triggered the ’port. Sven braced himself against the familiar sideways lurch, the whip of gray-green barrier magic flying past, and then the universe reassembled itself around him.

  Tightening his grip on Mac’s ruff as the big coyote quivered and strained, sending a sudden flow of Enemy! Run! Bite! Runbiterun! Sven checked out the scene. And saw that they were too damn late. Again.

  The magi had materialized in an open courtyard surrounded by twenty or so thatched-roof huts, several damaged, most untouched. Cooking fires still hissed and popped, one burning a pan of corn to shit, mute testimony that the place had very recently been inhabited. A radio played somewhere, Madonna crooning about being a virgin. And that was it. There was no other sound, no signs of life. The village was empty.

  Rabbit cursed, yanked away from the circle, and strode away, boots ringing on the travel-packed ground. Myrinne followed him, but he waved her off with a sharp motion, then disappeared into the nearest hut. She stood for a moment, undecided, then unholstered her autopistol with a smoothly practiced move and headed into the next dwelling down. But she sent a long look back at the hut Rabbit had gone into, and it didn’t take a mind-bender to sense her confusion.

  Sven was staying out of it—being relationship-defective and all—but he had found himself way more aware of those nuances than he normally would be. Then again, he didn’t used to wake up in a cold sweat, hard and aching, with his heart racing in the face of an overwhelming conviction that he was supposed to be looking for something, doing something, only he didn’t know what. Carlos said that, too, would go away eventually. But he’d avoided Sven’s eyes when he said it.

  “Split up and search,” Strike ordered, though there seemed little hope of survivors.

  “I’ll take the perimeter,” Sven offered, and got a nod, which was a good thing. He needed to move, and he didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to hold the coyote back in the face of all the run-kill-bite-enemy stuff going through his furry head. “They’re gone,” he said in an undertone. “We’re too late.”

  Mac growled deep in his chest.

  “Yeah,” Sven agreed as he headed out of the village, keeping a tight mental leash. “I feel the same way.” The Nightkeepers couldn’t continue chasing Iago’s tail like this. Something needed to change . . . but it needed to be the right something. Strike had given him, Rabbit, and Myrinne a clipped report of what sounded—reading between the lines, anyway—like a major shitstorm of Mendez proportions going down at Skywatch. But as far as Sven was concerned, prophecy or no prophecy, he and the others could—and would—take Mendez if it went that far. Strike was their king. Period and no discussion.

  He let Mac range a little farther once they got a distance from the village and started making a wide loop around it. Their passage flushed out countless bright, flashy birds and sent squadrons of butterflies into the air. Ignoring them, Sven kept his eyes on the ground, searching for tracks while staying attuned to the coyote’s thought stream, which had gone from warnings about the enemy to a growing sense of edgy frustration.

  Or was that coming from him? Gods knew he’d been hair-trigger lately. Carlos said the new restlessness and aggression—like the dreams and the hormone surges—came from his magic getting used to the impulses of his familiar, that he would level off soon and go back to being the guy he was. But Sven had a feeling it was the other way around, that he was finally coming into his true self and would stay that way. It felt like he had been sleepwalking for so long, and was just now waking up, just now—

  Mac yowled and exploded, diving into a cluster of bushes nearby. Enemy!

  Adrenaline hammered through Sven. Yanking his knife and calling up a shield, he hollered and plunged after the big canine. Branches whipped at him, deflecting off the shield as he burst out of the middle growth and into a small, sun-dappled clearing.

  There, Mac stood over a villager. For a second, Sven’s heart leaped at the thought that they had found a survivor, but then he got closer and saw otherwise. The man’s body was twi
sted unnaturally, unmoving, but his face was animated and his eyes shone luminous green as he hissed at Sven, face alight with bloodlust.

  “Nice job, Mac,” Sven said, reaching for his knife and prepping himself for the head-and-heart spell. But he paused when something nagged at him. It took him a second, but then he got it: The makol wasn’t regenerating. Something was wrong with it.

  He started to crouch down for a closer look, but Mac pivoted over the makol and stood with his legs braced, head lowered, and teeth bared. A bloodcurdling growl rumbled in the coyote’s throat.

  Sven froze. “Mac? What the hell?”

  The coyote sent a stream of glyph images that spelled out friend-enemy-friend, which didn’t make any more sense than him protecting the makol. But Carlos had impressed on Sven that he needed to trust his familiar, and experience had shown that Mac would get in a snit if ignored. And a hundred-pound coyote having a temper tantrum was not a pleasant experience. So think it through, Sven told himself. Analysis had never really been his thing before, but he’d been getting better at it lately. The coyote had saved Reese’s life by attacking a makol back at Skywatch, but he wouldn’t let Sven near this one, and was even acting protective of it. So what was different? Did it have something to do with how this one wasn’t regenerating?

  Friend-enemy-friend came again, this time along with a sharp, mossy smell.

  Moving slowly, Sven crouched down again, sending peaceful, nonlethal thoughts. Mac’s growls subsided and he gave way.

  The makol’s human host had been a young man, maybe early twenties. He was wearing jeans and a grayed-out wife beater, and had a small, new-looking leather pouch hanging around his neck. The mossy smell Mac had noted was coming from the pouch. With a mental flick that would have been ten times more difficult before his familiar had come into his life, Sven translocated the pouch into his outstretched palm. But the second it vanished from around the makol ′s neck, the creature shuddered and arched, and a terrible, screaming keen ripped from the host’s throat.

  Luminous green flashed, blinding Sven, who dove back and yanked up his shield. When his vision cleared, though, there didn’t seem to be any danger. Instead, the other man’s eyes were those of a human once more, filled with pain and grief. He looked at Sven and his lips moved, but no words came out. A second later, his eyes dulled and a last breath leaked out of him.

  For a moment, Sven just stood there, clutching the leather pouch that was still warm from the other man’s body.

  “Holy shit,” Alexis said from behind him—softly, reverently. “Did you just cure a makol?” He hadn’t heard the others approach, but they were there now, staring down at the corpse, which hadn’t gone to greasy ash, hadn’t required a head-and-heart spell.

  “He died,” Sven said hollowly. “That’s not much of a cure.”

  “But he died human, and he was killed—or at least fatally wounded—in battle. He’s destined for the sky now.” Which was far better than staying a makol and being automatically consigned to the ninth layer of Xibalba.

  “Yeah.” Sven held up the pouch, let it dangle. “The demon flashed out when I took this off him.”

  “Shield it and bring it with you,” Strike ordered. “We’re getting out of here. There’s nothing more for us to do here, and work to do back home if we’re going to find Iago and neutralize the fucking serpent staff before the solstice.” To Rabbit, he said, “You want to take care of the body?”

  The younger man nodded tightly, and made short work of the ritual cremation. Moments later, he joined the loose circle where the others were linking up for the dispirited ’port home. Sven made sure he had a really good hold on Mac, who was squirming and whining even harder than usual as Strike took a deep breath, tapped into the uplink, and triggered the ’port. And the magic went haywire.

  “No!” Heart hammering, Strike lashed out with his mind, trying to recover the fat yellow thread of magic that connected him to his destination during a ’port.

  He couldn’t believe he’d lost the fucking thread. One moment it was there, waiting for him to grab on with his mind and give a tug. The next it had slipped through his mental muscles, whipped past the mental blockades Rabbit had set up, and got sucked into a whirl of thoughts and feelings he didn’t recognize. Instead of the usual order, his head was a whirlwind of half-understood images—men and women dancing in ritual robes; warriors locked in battle with dark terrible creatures that breathed fire and bled acid; a huge house in flames.

  Forcing himself to focus through the maelstrom, he thought of the great room at Skywatch, pictured it, tried to connect with it . . . and failed. Adrenaline pounded through him as, instead of the familiar sideways lurch and grayish blur of teleportation, the world spun and dropped, doing some sort of crazy carnival shit while magic sparked and flared red, gold, and gray, and wind tornadoed around them.

  “Don’t let go!” he shouted to the others over the wind noise, and he clutched the hands linking him on either side—Rabbit on the left, Leah on the right, linked from there to the others. Jesus gods. He was going to kill them all and wipe out mankind’s last and best hope. And Leah. Oh, Leah. My love. I am sorry.

  In reply, love came pouring through their jun tan bond to fill him with warm understanding and support, along with an edge that was hers alone. A millisecond later, raw power came into him from the other side as Rabbit opened the floodgates, not trying to mind-bend him or anything, but just being there and offering himself up. I love you, whispered in his mind, coming from Leah, who hadn’t believed in magic before she met him. I trust you, said Rabbit, who didn’t trust anyone, not even himself.

  Gathering his magic, focusing it when it wanted to scatter, Strike thought again of Skywatch, visualizing the great room where so much had happened over the past few years, good and bad. It was where the Nightkeepers had first met as a team, where they had bonded and mapped out their plans. And it was where they needed to be now.

  The world spun, the wind tore at him. Then, finally, a thin thread appeared in his mind’s eye. He reached for it, touched it, wrapped his mind around it. And pulled.

  Crack! The great room took shape around them as the magi materialized right where they belonged. Unharmed.

  Thank the freaking gods. Strike went limp as relief poured through him and his power cut out, drained by whatever the hell just happened. He would have sagged if it hadn’t been for Leah on one side, Rabbit on the other. They kept him up, made it look casual, steered him through the crowd.

  Incredibly, none of the others seemed all that shaken up. He heard a few jokes about turbulence and barf bags, and Sven’s coyote actually was barfing, but nobody seemed to realize how close they had just come to dying, or that their king had almost lived up to his father’s legacy by finishing off the Nightkeepers. But once Leah and Rabbit got him to the royal suite and into bed, he stared through the glass ceiling of the solarium they used as the master and cursed himself bitterly because he, at least, knew how close it had been. And he knew something else: He couldn’t keep going on like this. He had been gutting through the fogginess in his brain and rearranging things to minimize the number of ’ports he needed to do in a given day, but this . . . shit. What the hell was happening to him?

  And it couldn’t be a coincidence that the jaguar king was losing it just as a challenger was stepping up. Dez claimed he didn’t want the throne, and Strike sure as shit didn’t want to lose his kingship—never mind his life here on Earth, with Leah—but there were prophecies in play, just like Anna’s message said. What do you want from me? he sent into the sky, envisioning Kulkulkan, the god that had been his and Leah’s special guardian before the destruction of the skyroad. What am I supposed to do?

  There was no answer. Just the slant of the afternoon sun that should have been pleasant but instead was a reminder that their time was running out.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Pueblo Bonito

  It was sunset by the time Dez was finally finished with Keban. He had refused to
cremate him on the sacred ground of Skywatch—and suspected that the others, particularly the winikin, would object if he had tried—but when it came down to it, he hadn’t been able to just dump the bastard in a ditch, either. So he had come up to Bonito, the Chacoan castle built by their ancestors, and he had built a funeral pyre.

  The humans considered the ruins a soaring mystery, the last remnants of an elusive tribe that had lived a thousand years earlier, leaving behind a grand stone-and-timber castle with many floors, dozens of kivas, hundreds of rooms, and tricky interplays of light and shadow that could be used to tell time or plot the stars. Some scholars thought it had been a trading center, others a home for the gods. In a way it had been both, though not even his serpent ancestors would have been ballsy enough to call themselves gods. He hoped. Either way, this was the serpents’ castle, and whatever else he had been and done, Keban had served the bloodline by saving its last male descendant. So Dez built a small pyre in a sheltered spot near a curving wall and lit it with a combination of diesel and magic. He watched the smoke curl, blocked out the smell, and listened to the hiss-pop of the fire, let himself drift . . .

  It was the day of the Nightkeepers’ planned attack on the intersection, and the training compound was a beehive of activity overlain with tension.

  Dez’s vantage was all feet and knees, his perceptions those of a three-year-old, but he felt the tension in the air as the huge, battle-armored warriors and their winikin gathered in the courtyard. Knots of men and women were being kept under guard as they prepared for battle—Dez had heard them called dissy-dents; he wasn’t sure what that meant, but he could see they were mad, and most everyone else was mad at them.