This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. Oh, gods. Her heart had started up again, but it was bumping off rhythm, fluttering against her ribs like it was trapped and trying to break free as the second shoe dropped. Sven had brought up the subject. He had said he would take the job. Which meant he had known about this. Worse, it meant he was the guy. Her liaison.
Oh, hell, no.
She was on her feet without having realized she had stood, though somehow Dez and Sven still seemed to tower over her, their presences expanding well beyond their physical bodies, part of the magic of the magi.
Refusing to feel puny, she balled her hands into fists and glared at the king. “What’s my other option?”
“I’d rather not go there. I hope you’ll take the offer instead.”
“But the politics—”
“Have to be secondary to the success of the war.”
“They…” Damn it. “You’ll be undermining me, crippling me as a leader. Worse, you’ll be running the risk of losing the rebels. We need them, damn it. They’re the younger generation, the fighters.”
“So you’ll find a way to spin it so they stay,” Reese put in. “Make this into a positive, not a negative, maybe even a concession you’ve squeezed out of the king.” That got a grunt out of Dez, making the queen’s lips twitch. She stayed focused on Cara, though, with eyes that weren’t unkind, but said simply, Deal with it.
“Not him.” She turned on Sven, teeth bared. “Not you.”
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness belied by the smooth shift of his bulky muscles and the aura of leashed wildness that surrounded him. “Think it through. Now that you’re wearing my mark, the winikin are going to put us together in their heads no matter what you say. Rather than trying to ignore it, let’s use it instead.”
It didn’t help that he had a point. “How long have you known this was a possibility?” Tell me you found out this morning, that it was a surprise to you too. Except that she’d been closeted with the king for an hour and Sven had just gotten out of bed. Maybe Carlos told him. Maybe…
“Since right after I came back.”
Fury pounded through her. “Five days ago. He talked to you about being the liaison five days ago, and you didn’t say anything?” Not even after they hooked up, after he’d told her he cared about her. Which made her wonder how, exactly, he defined caring. Was it when he was horny? When things were convenient? What?
“Originally, Dez asked me to take a good, hard look at the winikin right after Aaron’s funeral went so wrong. He was afraid it was an inside job.” When she did a double take, attention caught, he shook his head. “I didn’t see anything that made me think it was… but then again, I didn’t catch wind of what Zane and Lora were up to, either, partly because I didn’t like him to begin with, and partly because I refused to use you or Carlos for information.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But Dez asked me to keep things under wraps.”
Which had to trump her feelings, damn it. But that didn’t make it okay that he’d gone behind her back, or that he and Dez had been making decisions about her winikin without her knowing there was even a discussion going on. And Sven? Gods, she couldn’t work with him on a day-to-day basis. It would be… impossible.
“It’s a good offer,” Dez put in. “What’s more, it’s the only one you’re going to get, so I suggest you take it.”
In other words, she was getting a liaison whether she liked it or not; it was up to her whether it happened smoothly and with a prayer of spinning it to the winikin as a positive, or happened with her kicking and screaming, and making things even worse on the solidarity front.
“We can make it work,” Sven said quietly. “We know how to get along… we just haven’t had much practice over the past bunch of years.” And the damn thing was, he didn’t seem at all uncomfortable with the idea. He was acting like their teaming up was the most logical solution, like it should be on some late-night top-ten list of great ideas, despite their having all but agreed last night that they should steer clear of each other.
“For how long?” she asked, hating that the answer mattered too much. “A week? A month?”
“As long as you need me.” Which wasn’t really an answer, because undoubtedly he’d be the one to decide when that ended.
“I don’t need you. That’s the point.” Go away, she thought almost desperately. The longer you stay, the harder this is going to be. She didn’t want to get used to having him around, because it would only hurt worse when he left. She didn’t want to have him filling the shadow Zane’s absence would leave, didn’t want him beside her at meetings and strategy sessions, didn’t want him going over all her plans, arguing with her, throwing his weight around and making her defend decisions that should’ve been hers alone.… And if a small part of her wanted exactly those things and so much more, she stuffed it deep down inside where all her other stupid fantasies lived. Shaking her head, she turned to Dez. “This isn’t going to work. We’re going to spend so much time butting heads and contradicting each other that we’ll never get a damn thing accomplished.”
“Who else did you have in mind as second in command?” Sven asked unexpectedly.
“I… Shit. Natalie, I guess. She’s got ties to the rebs through JT, but she’s also got a huge appreciation for the traditions. And the others understand why she’s working with Lucius, so there wouldn’t be a problem there.”
“And she doesn’t have an iota of combat experience,” he countered. “Not to mention that it doesn’t make any sense to take one of our few trained Mayan scholars out of the library. I’m not assigned anywhere right now, though, and the winikin might not like me all that much, but they like me better than most of the magi.” He rose from the chair so they were standing facing each other, with the carved coffee table between them. “I don’t need to be in charge, and I’m not going to challenge you or make you look bad. I just want to help you.” His eyes softened slightly. “Call it payback, call it guilt, call it whatever the hell you want, but let me do this, okay? I won’t let you down this time.”
He was right, she realized; she didn’t have an obvious choice for Zane’s replacement, and she’d proven all too well the day before that she didn’t do her best thinking when she was under pressure and didn’t have someone else backing her up with a reality check. Maybe the answer would have been obvious… if it hadn’t been for what had happened in the coyote cave.
It wasn’t just the sex—she thought they could have chalked that up to the magic and the moment, and walked away from it. But all the things he’d said after, and then their argument last night… that had been them, not the magic. At least, it had been for her, and that’d had her reacting from emotion rather than logic. As for him… well, she didn’t actually know where he was coming from. It didn’t make any sense to her that he would be spouting words of almost-love one night, and then the next morning be ready to work side by side with her like it was no big deal. There wasn’t any trepidation in his eyes, no silent plea that she go with it and he’d explain later. Had he pushed his emotions behind the wall of his warrior’s talent? Or had he set them aside that quickly? If he had—
“How about you give it a chance?” The suggestion came from Reese. “Just the two of you on a trial run outside of the compound, a two-person op you can work without feeling like your every move is being scrutinized.” She shot a meaningful look at Dez. “Sometimes things get simpler when you take some time away.”
“I don’t want…” Cara began, but then trailed off, because this wasn’t about what she wanted, hadn’t been in a long time. If she agreed to this, she’d be buying Zane’s and Lora’s lives, not because she sympathized with them, but because they had become political currency. She didn’t think Dez understood just how much they mattered, or how much resentment would be stirred up if they were executed, spell-frozen, or even simply imprisoned. With the wounds o
f the massacre still too fresh in many of the winikin’s minds, they needed to know that there was a way out of Skywatch somehow. So finally she said, “I take it you’ve got an op in mind?”
It was Dez who nodded and said, “You know the screaming skull the nahwal mentioned? Well, Lucius tracked it to the Playa Maya Museum in Monterey. We want you to steal it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Zane’s brain was a seriously weird place, and Rabbit felt right at home. The twists and turns made sense, like he was driving in a strange town but somehow knew exactly where to find the gas stations and fast food, as if he’d been there before in a previous life. Or, more accurately, as if he’d recently spent time in a very similar town. Zane might’ve been misguided and far too ready to buy into his own self-serving interpretations, but he’d honed some of the same skills Rabbit had found himself needing more and more lately, as he tried with increasing frustration to reconnect with his mother’s spirit, while hiding those efforts from everyone, including Myrinne. Especially Myrinne.
Secrecy. Suspicion. Righteousness. Contempt. Rabbit sent his consciousness through Zane’s mind, passing memories and signpost-bright emotions, picking through the labyrinth until he found what he was looking for.
When he did, he brought his perceptions closer to the surface, to the point where he could feel his own body sitting hunched over beside Zane, and could sense Dez, Sven, and Cara sitting nearby, waiting tensely for the intel that could make or break the winikin’s life. Lora was already free and clear; she hadn’t known anything, and had been painfully easy to reprogram. She was the kind of person who would always look for a pack leader to tell her what to do, how to feel. As far as she now knew, she had spent the past ten months or so as part of a whack-job cult, which she’d been lured into by a guy she met online. She was ashamed of the guy and the cult, and didn’t want to talk about either of them. She just wanted to get back to her life, and shouldn’t present any further problems for the Nightkeepers.
Zane, on the other hand… well, they would have to see.
“He thinks he’s part Nightkeeper,” Rabbit said, channeling the info he was getting from the winikin. “It was a family legend that his twice-great-grandmother had a child with either her own Nightkeeper charge or another member of his family, putting mage blood into the mix. That’s why Zane was trying to sacrifice Cara—he was looking to activate his supposedly latent Nightkeeper powers. It looks like when he first got here, he had a couple of dreams that reminded him of the coyote cave and gave him delusions of grandeur mixed up with some sort of divine plan. He fixated on Cara, first as his mate, then as his sacrifice.”
“Did he talk about it to anybody other than Lora?” Cara asked at almost the same time Sven said, “Did he have anything to do with those creatures showing up at the funeral?”
“Give me a minute.” It took Rabbit longer than that to find the information on Lora, whom Zane had barely registered as more than a spare set of hands. The attack was easier to dial into. “I don’t think you’ve got any other traitors to worry about; it was just him most of the time, with Lora helping out at the end, once she really started cracking under the pressure. As for the attack, he didn’t know anything about it beforehand, but decided it was a sign telling him to act now.”
After a few more questions and answers that didn’t really add anything to the mix, Dez sighed and said, “I think he’s tapped out. Rabbit, what do you think about reprogramming him?”
“Same as with Lora, I can change his memories of the past ten months so he thinks he fell in with a doomsday cult that was pretending to be the Nightkeepers, and scramble it around enough so he won’t come looking for us.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there,” Dez commented.
“Not intentionally.”
“But…”
“Shit.” It felt way hypocritical to rat out a guy whose brain felt more than a little familiar, but Rabbit told himself it was the differences that mattered. “Using Lora was easy for him, and so was leaving Cara in that cave to die. He’s not a full-on sociopath like Iago, and not crazy like Iago was at the end, either. But he’s not hooked into an ethical code, either human or Nightkeeper. I can change his memories, but I can’t promise he won’t do something else if we let him go. He’s… predatory. Hungry. I don’t think that’s going to go away.”
“So what do you think? Should we let him go?”
“I… I’m not sure.” It felt seriously weird that he was being asked to comment on Zane’s moral character, when he himself was a half-blood screwup who had burned down several million dollars’ worth of other people’s property and fallen prey to Iago’s mind games over and over again, jeopardizing the Nightkeepers in the process. He was the Master of Disaster, the guy who gave Murphy’s Law a bad name.… There was no way he was qualified to make this call.
A little help here, gods? Rabbit thought, automatically using his magic to shape the words into a prayer, even though it had been a long time since his prayers had done anything but rattle around inside him. Instead of rattling, though, the prayer whooshed out of him, disappearing and taking some of his magic with it, and leaving stunned silence behind.
Holy shit. What just happened? Heart kicking up a dozen notches, Rabbit sought the prayer, tried to follow it, but came up against the blank walls that bounded his consciousness instead. What the hell? Where did it go? Part of his problem was not knowing whether he was supposed to be praying to the sky or the underworld, not knowing what to think or believe. Were the sky gods the saviors the Nightkeepers thought them, or were they lying schemers, like Zane here?
Hello? he called, hearing it rattle. Anyone?
In the outside world, the others were discussing Zane’s fate. Sven said, “We can’t just let him go. Not with that inside him. What if we—”
Out of nowhere, a power surge hit Rabbit, making his blood sing. It poured through the walls of his mind, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. The rattles got louder and louder, sounding like a crazed mariachi band trying to do “Radar Love” on fast-forward; they swirled around him, tightened in on him, blotted out everything except the noise and the magic.
He must’ve fogged out for a minute, because when things cleared, he heard the others still talking about what to do with Zane. They hadn’t felt the surge. How was that possible?
Because this power is yours alone, Rabbie.
Mama!? The word burst from him with such a rush of hope and joy that it almost made it all the way back to his body, to be shouted aloud.
Careful. Some secrets are better kept until you know more. Finish quickly here and then come to me.
The power snapped out of being, though its echo remained. Rabbit’s heart thudded happily in his ears; the flop sweats were gone, along with his hesitation over what to do with Zane. He was powered up, jazzed, ready to get on with things as he tuned back in to the conversation.
Cara was saying, “I don’t like it. What’s more, the others are going to be pissed if they find out your idea of ‘releasing’ Zane was to stick him in a mental institution and fake the paperwork to keep him there through the end date. You’re getting dangerously close to imprisoning winikin to avoid a mutiny.”
“Trust me,” Dez said. “I’m aware of the parallels. But not everything Scarred-Jaguar did was one hundred percent wrong. And, besides, the rumors are your problem.”
“We’ll tell ’em he was mind-bent and released,” Sven said promptly. “They don’t need to know the rest. And, Cara, seriously? Admit it. You don’t want him released all the way, either. You know what he’s capable of.”
She made a noise of disgust, but subsided.
“So I should get started?” Rabbit asked, trying not to let his real body jitter with suppressed excitement the same way his mental projection was doing inside Zane’s skull.
“Yeah,” Dez said. “Do it. We’ll deal with the logistics.”
Working fast, riding high on the power that was apparently his alone—the others sure di
dn’t seem to notice it—Rabbit slapped heavy blocks around Zane’s key memories of Skywatch and the people inside it, repressing them and installing new surface memories that turned the training compound into an encampment hidden in the Blue Mountains, the Nightkeepers into a doomsday militia that was raided and scattered.
All the while, he was acutely aware of the power flowing through him. It wasn’t dark magic but wasn’t fully light, either. It was his mother’s magic, now his own.
Gods, he had almost started to believe she’d been a dream.
“Rabbit? You okay?” The question came in Dez’s voice. “You need a break?”
“Nope, I’m almost finished.” Hurrying now, he soldered the last few blocks into place and added a couple of fail-safes, along with giving Zane a newfound craving for garlic pickles, because he liked Cara, damn it, and the bastard had messed with her. He might have done more—how’s a little erectile dysfunction sound, there, Zane, old boy?—but the magic was tugging him back toward his cottage, to the place where he’d hidden the two eccentrics.
He could feel the small carvings vibrating, yearning to be together for the first time since he’d discovered the second one. He didn’t know how or why, but the channel for communication was wide-open, waiting for him to tap into it.
“He’s all set,” he said as he started backing out of Zane’s consciousness layer by layer. Where he usually had to brace himself to pull out when he’d been so deeply enmeshed, now there was just a faint tug of conscience, a protest from the part of himself that remembered what it felt like to have his own brain fucked with, and regretted having to do it to someone else, even a traitor.
Then he was out of Zane’s mind and back in his own, blinking to clear his vision while the others talked over his head. The room spun. The magic heated, calling him, begging him.
“Gotta go,” he mumbled, shoving abruptly to his feet and heading for the door of the small storage room–slash–prison cell. “Need to…” He pantomimed barfing. “He’s fine. He’s good. Send him wherever he’s gonna go.”
Magic Unchained Page 22
