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.
Elsewhere, the younger winikin were herding all the kids into the Great Hall; the grown-ups were all pretending like it was a party—a movie first, dancing later, with pizza and cake. But their eyes were worried, and Dez’s mother and father had hugged him too tightly just now. They had done the same to baby Joy, making her cry. She was still sniffling as Keban tucked her into her bouncy chair.
“Son.”
Dez craned around, but it wasn’t his dad, it was Keban’s father, Keru. The two winikin hugged briefly, looking very alike, though one was old and the other young.
“We’ve got everything packed like you said.” Keban kept his voice very low. “If things go wrong, Breese and I are out of here with the kids.”
Dez sat up straight. Breese was his winikin—she was soft and nice, and smelled like strawberries. Were they all going somewhere? He wanted to ask Keban, but didn’t dare. He was nice to Joy, not always so nice to everyone else.
“Be strong,” Keru said. “And whatever you do, preserve the bloodline. Because gods help us if we have to go into the war without a serpent king.”
The men hugged again, and Keru went off toward the warriors, where Dez’s parents were helping each other with their gear. Keban turned, found Dez staring at him, and started to scowl. Then he seemed to catch himself, and sighed. “Come here, kid. Let’s go find Breese. The four of us need to stick together, okay? No wandering off on your own tonight.” Dez nodded, but the winikin looked unconvinced. He hunkered down and gestured for Dez to come closer. “Hold your sister’s hand for a second.”
Dez complied, sticking out a finger and letting Joy curl her chubby fist around it. She smiled at him, sniffles forgotten.
“Do you know what an oath is?” the winikin asked.
Surprised, because Keban didn’t usually say much to him, Dez nodded.
“Okay, I want you to say, ‘I swear I’ll watch out for my sister tonight. I won’t leave her, no matter what.’”
Dez stammered his way through the oath, feeling very grown up and protective all of a sudden. His father had told him Joy was his responsibility before, but nobody had ever made it his job to stay right with her. It all seemed very important, and a little scary, but it gave him the courage to ask, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing you need to worry about as long as you stay right with your sister. Because if you don’t, bad things are going to happen.” Keban looked up when someone called his name. “There’s Breese. Come on.” He picked up Joy, bouncy chair and all, grabbed Dez’s hand, and headed for the doors to the Great Hall. At the stairs, though, he stopped and looked back. It seemed like a lot of the winikin were doing that.
Dez looked back, too, his eyes zeroing in on his parents. His mother’s laughing eyes were very serious, and his father′s face was drawn, his serpent-bare scalp hidden beneath an armored helmet. He was saying something to Keru, who was his winikin. Dez’s stomach gave a funny shimmy, and he called out, “Mom! Dad!”
They didn’t hear him, and Keban tugged him to keep going, but just as they went through the doors, Keru looked straight at Dez, meeting his eyes. He touched his heart and then his wrist, letting his fingers linger where rows of serpent glyphs sat above the image of a hand cupping the face of a sleeping child.
The vision dissolved, leaving Dez floundering for a moment as his perceptions shifted back to those of his adult self, the one who knew that the glyph was the aj winikin, and the gesture meant “I serve you, serpent.” Keru had been swearing fealty—not just his own but that of all the serpent winikin, who had guessed that the attack would fail and had made clandestine plans to save Dez and Joy.
Staring into the fire, Dez tried not to think how different his life would have been if Breese had made it out, or if Keban had been able to save both him and Joy. If it had gone down like that, the winikin’s mind wouldn’t have gotten fucked over by the magical backlash of him having sacrificed his blood-bound charge. He would’ve been a normal winikin instead of what he had become, and Dez would’ve come out a better man, maybe even a man fit to be a king. Now, though . . . the gods might have done their best to patch him back together with Triad magic, but that didn’t make him the man he should have been. Which made it damn lucky—or the will of the gods—that the Nightkeepers had Strike.
Shaking his head, he added more gas to the fire, and watched it burn. When it was over and the winikin was little more than a smudge of ash and some shitty memories, he scattered the embers and headed back to the parking area, strides purposeful. He had given Strike and the others enough time to hash things over without him, and now it was time to step up and defend himself, make whatever promises they wanted him to.
He didn’t know if the vision had come from Anntah or his own head—but it had brought home that they were all on the same team. It wasn’t the serpents against the other bloodlines, or him against the world; it was about the Nightkeepers against Iago and the Banol Kax. And the Nightkeepers needed all the help they could get, even if it came from a guy like him. Which meant there was no way in hell he was quitting the team; he was there to stay, and they were going to have to find a way to believe that he didn’t want the throne, that the serpent prophecy—if it had ever been anything beyond a serpent-fueled dream—no longer applied. The same went for Reese—he wasn’t letting her go without a fight. He just had to figure out a way to convince her of that, convince her to give him another chance to prove that they were meant to be together.
His steps faltered slightly when he came out from between two high stone walls and saw the remaining Jeep Compass parked next to Keban’s pickup. Reese was sitting on the hood of the Compass, waiting for him, a silhouette in black leather highlighted by the oranges and reds of the setting sun. As he drew closer, he tried to read her expression, but failed. He wasn’t sure if her poker face had gotten better, or if his perceptions had gotten worse, fouled up by how much this mattered. How much she mattered.
Swallowing past the fist-sized lump in his throat, he moved to stand in front of her, caging her in, yet leaving himself wide open, his defenses down in more ways than one. He took her hand and turned it over to trace the nearly healed cut. Without preamble, he said, “I was afraid you would leave if you knew about the serpent prophecy. Or that you would tell Strike and . . . well, things would blow up.”
Her expression was lost in the shadows. “And now that it’s happened?”
“They learned to trust me once. Hopefully I can convince them to give me another chance.” He paused. “And, yeah, I should have told them everything right up front.” If he had, they wouldn’t be up Hell’s creek without a scepter.
He expected her to tell him he’d been an idiot, which he couldn’t argue. Instead, she turned her hand and twined their fingers together, giving him a jolt. “They’ll forgive you eventually, because they’ll see what I see in you.”
Th
e heat that had flared at her touch was joined by something strange and unfamiliar. He thought it might be hope. “What’s that?”
“They’ll see a man who, even after everything Keban did wrong, still does the right thing for him in the end.” Her gesture encompassed the ruin. “You did good here, Mendez.” And coming from Reese, that was high praise.
He exhaled, letting it go. “In his own way, he was obeying the gods.”
“Um. It wasn’t the gods talking to him. It was Anntah.”
“It was . . . What?”
“I saw him in a dream, talked to him.” She briefly described her vision. “He told Keban what to do, though not how, which was his mistake. I don’t think he realized how badly losing Joy had damaged him.” She paused. “He gave me a message for you. He said to tell you that you need to fulfill the prophecy or Vucub will reign. Which isn’t news, but it underscores what Anna said.”
They were out in the open, but invisible walls seemed to press in on him from all directions, hemming him in. He tightened his grip on her hand. “The man the prophecy was talking about doesn’t exist.” But he knew that wasn’t good enough; the messages suggested that what mattered was fulfilling the serpent prophecy, period. “I won’t challenge the king and I sure as hell won’t kill him.”
Though back in Denver he had done exactly that, and history repeated. Could he really promise that he wouldn’t backslide straight into being the bastard he’d once been?
Yes, he decided, he damn well could.
When Reese was silent on that point, his heart sank a little, but he said only, “Was that it for Anntah’s message?”
“Not exactly.” She turned away so the setting sun lit her face. “I’m supposed to tell you what he said and leave, because you’re supposed to fulfill the prophecy alone. And”—her voice got a little smaller—“we’re not destined mates. We never were.”
Storm Kissed n-6 Page 24
