Magic Unchained n-7

by Jessica Andersen

  “Big good, or big bad?”

  The smile got real. “That’s the ‘wild’ part.” The king paused. “Do you gamble?”

  Sven thought of winter nights, a fire in the hearth, and an ancient wagering game spread out on the kitchen table: the patolli, which was an ancestor of the modern Parcheesi, with rolls of the dice, figures moving around the board, and strategies of defense and offense. Carlos had used it to teach him war games; Cara had used it to win her way out of chores; and her mom, Essie, had just liked having the four of them together in one place. When the memory threatened to hit the nostalgia button, he set it firmly aside and shook his head. “Not for a long time.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time to give it a shot.” The king stood. “Think about it and let me know.”

  But as Sven strode away from the royal suite, with Mac at his heels and no real destination other than “away,” he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do. If there was a problem—or worse, a traitor—it needed to be dealt with, and fast… but if there wasn’t, and it came out that he’d been getting close to Cara and Carlos to spy on the winikin, it wouldn’t be worth trying to fix those relationships. In fact, if that happened he might as well just hit the road and keep on going, because they—and especially she—would never speak to him again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Lame, lame, boring, meh, lame…” Near dusk on the day of the funeral gone awry, in a dark corner at the rear of the long, narrow stone room that housed the library, Rabbit rifled through yet another box of carefully labeled artifacts. The brain trust had culled the pieces as being more or less related to the boar bloodline, so he was going over them in the hopes that he’d get a vibe. So far, though, there was a whole lot of nothing going on.

  Okay, the artifacts themselves were pretty cool—he had come across a set of spear-thrower missiles that were made out of intricately carved peccary-tusk ivory and weighted with slivers of stone, and he had been tempted to swap out the ceremonial knife he wore on his belt for a longer, thinner blade made of pale green stone and carved with repeating boar motifs. But a MAC-10 loaded with jade tips—or better yet a fireball—kicked ass over a spear-thrower any day, and the knife he wore had been his old man’s. And although Red-Boar had been a miserable son of a bitch, tradition said you used the weapon that got handed down, like it or lump it. Besides, he wasn’t browsing for some “ooh, shiny” shit to take with him just because it appealed. The magi all had boxes to go through, because the Nightkeepers badly needed some new tricks.

  “Boring, boring…” He paused to pick up a weird-ass clay statue that was about the length of his forearm and covered with a red pigment that had faded to Pepto pink. Although the glyph incised on the bottom was a boar, the thing itself looked like some sort of waterbird. Eyeballing it, he muttered, “Shit, glad you’re not giving me any tingles.” He could just picture himself going up against the dark lords wielding a Death Flamingo, or whatever the fuck it was. No frigging thank you. He shook his head and put it back down. “Sissy, boring, lame, lame…”

  Gods, there was a ton of stuff from the boar bloodline. Then again, the boars had been the royal bloodline prior to the jaguars, reigning during the first millennium, when the library was established, so he guessed it made sense they would figure heavily in the archived material. And he didn’t mind some quiet time alone in the library, really. It was peaceful, and he’d been pretty damn short on peace lately.

  The cluster-fuck with the xombi virus had taken something out of him, plain and simple. He had gone down there thinking he, Sven, and the others would be able to handle the outbreak, save the villagers, and block the magical pipeline that was causing the problem. Instead, he’d found himself razing the very villages he’d gone there intending to protect, then helping Sven track and kill the xombis, napalming dozens of them, hundreds.

  He still woke up pretty much every morning with the stink of it lodged in his sinuses.

  “No buzz, no buzz, boring, boring…” He moved to a nearby rack, stopping at a carved bone miniature of five warriors wearing ceremonial garb, toting spear chuckers and stalking a wild peccary. Beside that was an incense burner painted to show a boar-bloodline warrior offering his heart to a woman who turned her face away.

  That one pinged, though not because of any magic.

  Damn it. He rubbed the heel of his hand over the center of his chest, which had suddenly gone hollow and achy because of how things had been between him and his human girlfriend, Myrinne, lately. He loved her one hundred percent—he’d kill for her, die for her, and anything in between—but he wished he could get her to stop pressuring him to experiment with the other half of his magic. More, he wished that it didn’t feel like more and more that when she said, I love you, it really meant, I love you when you do what I want. Especially when what she wanted him to do went against the king’s orders.

  Last year, a dying Xibalban shaman had named Rabbit the “crossover” and said that his mingled blood made him the key to winning the war using both the light magic of the Nightkeepers and the dark powers of his Xibalban half. But not long after that, their enemy Iago had managed to break Rabbit’s connection to the dark magic—and since then, pretty much every time he’d tried to make a real impact he’d just wound up making things worse, until Dez had finally ordered him to stop trying to reconnect with his darker side. These days he was doing his damnedest to follow orders and be a good mage, a good soldier. And that was driving Myrinne up a freaking wall.

  “Shit.” Letting go of the big, weighted-down box he’d just been about to open, he launched to his feet, suddenly needing to pace off the restless energy that came from inside the hollow place in his chest, along with the sly inner voice that said he was a lucky son of a bitch to have her and he’d better do whatever it took not to fuck it up. Once he was on his feet, though, he swayed and had to slap a hand out to steady himself against the nearest wall. “Whoa. Vertigo.”

  Sweat popped on his forehead and crawled down his spine, and a rush of nausea filled the hollows. He swallowed hard, then blinked to clear his eyes when they threatened to fog.

  Shit, maybe that third chili dog had been a bad idea. He’d needed to recharge his batteries, but maybe he should’ve gone with nice, safe pasta instead of five-alarm pig by-products and extra pepper jack.

  Except… His head whipped up as logic made it through the spins, reminding him that the magi didn’t usually get pukey from stuff like food poisoning. Which meant this was something else.

  Like something in that box, maybe?

  Backtracking, he dropped to his heels and tugged on the cross-folded flaps to open the box. It was more than half full of flat stones that had been carved into all sorts of weird shapes. The inner flap was labeled in Lucius’s crabbed writing: Eccentrics for our favorite eccentric.

  “Nice,” Rabbit muttered. Lucius—the Nightkeepers’ head researcher and an ass kicker in his own right—might’ve rolled his eyes a little at his request and grumbled about needles in haystacks, but he’d come through and collected a shit ton of eccentrics.

  The small, flat pieces of stone were all different shapes, from abstract geometrics to detailed images of people, animals, glyphs, gods… it was all fair game. In ancient times, they had been worn as pendants or symbols of office, tucked into pockets as charms, or even busted up as sacrifices. The small stone artifacts were as common as arrowheads farther north, and hadn’t been thought to have any real magic… until the dying shaman had given one to Rabbit and named him as its wielder, suggesting that some eccentrics, at any rate, could be important.

  But although Rabbit had been able to sense power in the small black flint carving, he’d never managed to trigger any sort of magic. Which was why he had asked Lucius to cull others for him, thinking he might need a full set, or a Nightkeeper half to go with the Xibalban piece.

  And now, sure enough, as he spread his fingers and let his hands hover above the collection, hot, sparkling magic rose up, feathered along his palms,
and flowed into his veins, sweeping along to pool at a point on his upper right thigh, where he carried the black eccentric in his pocket.

  Holy shit, he thought, pulse suddenly thundering in his ears. Holy, holy shit. He had known. Somehow, he had known it would work like this.

  Dipping into his pocket, he wrapped his fingers around the eccentric, which was all curves and points and looked a little like a flame frozen in stone. Normally it was cool and a little greasy to the touch; now it was blood-warm, echoing the heat coming from the box. And when he pulled it out, he saw that a faint skim of magic slicked the surface of the stone, picking up silver glints in the light.

  Silver! His breath hissed out as excitement kicked in. That wasn’t dark magic; it was muk—the light and dark powers joined together. Of the Nightkeepers, only Michael could wield the silver power, and he commanded solely its killing aspect, not its other facets.

  But if the magi could harness muk, they could win the war.

  Rabbit’s heart pounded. It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered if he could be the guy to rebuild the bridge—the crossover—between the light and dark magic, reuniting the halves. But it was the first time he thought it might actually happen, there and then.

  Please, gods. He wasn’t sure if he sent the prayer to the sky or the underworld; he knew only that he meant it with every fiber of his being.

  Pulse thudding, he shoved his free hand into the box and started sifting through. Pain stung his fingers and palm as the sharp edges bit in, but he didn’t stop, instead letting his blood smear the stones and mingle with the magic as he searched for the source of the heat.

  The spinning in his head shifted his perceptions, making things seem very surreal, like he was standing outside and watching himself pick through stone shapes of white, black, green, gray, with a few flashes of yellow and orange. There was even a single piece of deep, vibrant crimson stone that practically glowed from within, gorgeous and powerful, and seemed so out of place that he picked it up, cradled it in his palm, and stared at it for a long moment before he noticed that his fucking hand was burning.

  “Ow! Shit.” Instinct had him juggling the thing to his other hand.

  Power roared the second the two eccentrics touched. Brilliant, blinding light flashed from the pieces, so bright and searingly hot that he dropped the stones. They fell, fused together in a twisted shape of black and red. He didn’t hear them land, though, didn’t hear anything except the wham-bam of his heart and the scrape of his boots as he stumbled and went to his knees. He hit the box on the way down, overturning it with a rattling crash.

  Light. Heat. Gods.

  He shielded his eyes with his arm, which felt naked and singed beneath his shirt. And then, thank fuck, the heat flatlined, then faded to a glow. Rabbit gaped as the glow coalesced into a shape that got bigger—first dog size, then man. “What the fuck?”

  Within moments, he was staring at a woman’s white-cloaked figure. And oh, holy shit, he could see right through her.

  She was dark haired, fine featured and somehow ageless, rendered even more otherworldly by her eyes, which were a cloudy, opaque white that gleamed from within. She was wearing a feather-worked, embroidered ceremonial robe and a crackling aura of power like he’d never seen before. This wasn’t the greasy brown roil of dark magic, the sparkling red-gold of Nightkeeper power, or even the sliver gleam of muk; it was translucent. It wasn’t anything he knew, but suddenly it was everything, awe inspiring and overwhelming.

  If he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would’ve ended up there now. His legs were shaking; his whole body was shaking. “Are you one of the creators?” His voice cracked on the question.

  Those luminous eyes widened. Then, to his surprise, she smiled. “No, I’m not. Though in a sense, I suppose I am, from your perspective.” Her voice was soft, feminine and singular, with none of the chorus effect that came from the ancestral beings known as the nahwal. So what was she? A ghost? A goddess?

  His heart pounded even faster, though he couldn’t have said why his fight-or-flight was kicking in. Maybe it was the way the bones of her face suddenly seemed familiar, as if he’d seen them in another time and place. Or maybe it was flat-out awe. He didn’t know. He only knew that it felt like he was on the edge of something huge. And that he, who had rarely—if ever—done humility, all of a sudden felt pretty fucking humble.

  Voice dropping to a strangled whisper, he forced out: “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  “Don’t you recognize me, Rabbie?”

  “I don’t…” He swallowed hard and, then, when that didn’t move the lump in his throat, hacked a hairball clearer of a cough. “My name is Rabbit. Nobody calls me ‘Rabbie.’”

  The nickname—a shortened version of the already weird-ass name his old man had hung on him—had always made him twitch. He hated it even more than he’d hated “bunny-boy,” “Playboy,” and all the others his high school tormentors had used put together, hated the way it made him feel incomplete, alone, and very, very young.

  “No, Rabbit was your nickname. Your birth name was Rabbie.”

  “My…” A crushing pressure vised his chest, stealing his breath and putting him on his hands and knees, gasping for air. A humming whine grated in his ears, a gathering darkness crept in on his vision, and incredulity washed through what was left of his brain as he realized that he was about to fucking faint.

  Rabbie. My Rabbie. My baby boy. The memory came out of nowhere, singsong words that reached inside him, grabbed his heart, and squeezed.

  “No,” he grated in between wretched gulps of air. “No fucking way. That’s not… you’re not… no way.”

  No. Impossible.

  “Rabbie.” The word was a sigh that prickled his skin.

  But was it impossible? No, not really. The shaman had said his mother had probably been one of the handful of his village’s women who had joined—either willingly or by abduction—Iago’s dark, vicious sect of Xibalbans.

  “You’re her.” It burned to say, agonized to think, yet when he lifted his head to look at her, he saw his own face. “You’re my mother.”

  “Yes.” Her colorless eyes glittered. “You didn’t forget.”

  He had, though; his memories began entirely with the strange blended family he’d grown up in. Red-Boar might not have given him affection, acceptance, or even the fucking time of day, but he’d had the good sense to eventually go live with Jox, Strike, and Anna. Even then, Rabbit had grown up a little wild and a lot rebellious, outcast and unhappy until the magic came along and gave him a reason to grow the hell up. It wasn’t until after his old man was killed, though, that he had gone looking for his mother, trying to understand the other half of his magic, the other half of himself.

  And now she was here… only she wasn’t. She was see-through and wreathed in magic, clearly not a creature of this plane anymore. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only say, like a dumb ass, “You’re a projection, aren’t you? A spirit from the dark barrier.” The barrier, like the magic itself, had long ago been split into its light and dark aspects. Where the Nightkeepers could visit the light barrier to gain wisdom—and occasionally confusion—from their ancestors, the Xibalbans could do the same with its dark, shadowy half. His eyes went to the eccentrics, which were locked together in a shimmering swirl of red and black. “Those things summoned you.”

  “I’m sending my image through them, but yes, they’re the catalyst.” Her voice went soft. “And, yes, I reside in the dark barrier. We both do.”

  “You and Red-Boar?” Rabbit frowned, because it didn’t play. His father had been firmly entrenched in the light magic, and he had always and forever mourned the Nightkeeper wife and sons he had lost in the massacre. As far as Rabbit knew, he hadn’t wanted another family, certainly hadn’t wanted his half-blood son. Then again, it had never been clear how he’d wound up siring Rabbit with a Xibalban in the first place. Which meant… Shit, he didn’t know what it meant. Only that he’d been waiting
for this for a long, long time. A million questions raced through him, but beneath the roil was a huge, excited warmth. Because while his cynical, battle-hardened self said this could be a trick, the image a fake, he knew, deep down inside, that she was real.

  “I speak of Tristan. Your brother.”

  “I don’t…” Rabbit trailed off, eyes widening, then filling as the singsong memory came again, this time caroling, Trisss-tan and Rabbie climbing in the trees. Laughing and playing, and chasing honeybees… “Gods,” he whispered, forcing the syllable past a surge of nausea. “Tristan. Turtle. You called him Turtle.” He couldn’t see faces, only the outlines of a woman and a little boy who wasn’t him, but was so very familiar that it hurt, deep down inside.

  “Yes, Tristan. Turtle. He was so cautious, where you were always on the move, hopping from place to place.” She paused, face going achingly tender and heart-rendingly sad. “You two were—”

  “Twins,” he whispered, knowing it with the same bone-deep certainty that recognized her. I had a twin. Not just a brother, but another half of himself—not identical, but rather complementary, filling in the gaps and making a perfect, powerful whole.

  Harsh noise roared in his brain and then downward to fill his throat and chest, tearing him with a single wrenching sob. No. Gods, no. Please. It hurts. But he couldn’t escape the memories now; they crowded him, banging against a barrier he hadn’t even realized existed in his mind. He’d had a brother. A twin. And Red-Boar had never told him. Never even hinted that there might be a reason that he’d so often felt jagged and incomplete, like he was missing part of himself.

  Son of a bitch.