“I’m going back.” He said it aloud, daring the nahwal, the gods, or the universe to tell him different. Then, not waiting for an answer or caring what it might be—this was his life, his choice—he spun and bolted back the way he had come.
No lightning struck him dead; no demon appeared to drag him to Xibalba as he raced through the rain forest on his own two feet. He didn’t feel the slashing branches, didn’t stress about his magic, Mac, or anything else he couldn’t control right now. The one thing he could control—the thing he should’ve been in better control of all along—was himself. Starting now.
As he ran, he prayed that Cara would give him one more chance to apologize, one more chance to prove that he wanted her, that he was willing to make whatever amends she wanted, whatever sacrifice would prove that he was committed to her the way she wanted, the way she deserved.
He didn’t know yet how he was going to do that. But he would do it. That was a promise.
The way back seemed shorter than the trip out; he was there within minutes, chest heaving and legs burning from the sprint. He’d made it!
But as he neared the edge of the clearing at the mouth of the tunnel, a terrible rattle split the silence and the air shimmered in a smudged gray curtain across the cave mouth. The surface bulged and rippled obscenely, warning that the barrier was almost breached at that point, which wasn’t something they had planned for. If the demons came down that tunnel and caught the Nightkeepers unprepared… “No!” Sven surged toward the breach. “Cara!”
A blur came hurtling at him from the side, too fast for him to defend. It slammed into him and he went down beneath a huge projectile of fur, muscle, and sinew.
He hit hard and rolled, shouting, “Mac, godsdamn it, stop!”
But the coyote that faced him in an aggressive crouch wasn’t Mac, he saw with sudden shock. It was a sable-coated female with dark, frantic eyes. She lowered her head and snarled, then jerked up with an utterly canine look of surprise as Mac burst from the undergrowth with a roar.
The bigger male hurtled over Sven and thudded to the ground in front of the female with his teeth bared and a low growl revving in his chest. The female’s snarl ratcheted up and the two tensed to spring, to fight, to—
“Hold it!” Sven surged to his feet. “Mac, hold! Look!” He pointed to the cave entrance, where the dark curtain was folding in on itself and curling around to enter the tunnel, moving fast. “She was protecting me!” As the bigger coyote subsided, Sven repeated in an oh, holy shit tone, “She was protecting me.”
Moving around Mac, he put himself right in front of the female, who was still crouched, but had stopped snarling. She watched him with wary eyes and her whole body shook, but she held her ground as he hunkered down.
“Dear gods. You’re real, aren’t you? Where did you come from, sweetheart? What are you doing all the way down here?” Mac had appeared unexpectedly, but at least they could theorize that a pack of the coyote bloodline’s carefully selected hybrids had escaped after the massacre and gone feral. Down here… he didn’t have a clue.
But she was real, all right. And she was powerful enough that her visions had reached him all the way up in New Mexico.
Heart thudding with sudden excitement, he tried to think of how it felt when the visions came, how he’d run after Mac seeing double, once as himself and once as another coyote. And, seeking those feelings, he sent a pulse of magic, along with a thought-glyph. Friend.
The female barked, high and excited. Friend! Talk! Where? Man where? Searchsearchsearch, where?
The “man” concept was one he knew from when Mac had been trying to track him down, their mental link somehow activated before Sven really understood what was happening to him. It was gender neutral, and meant the one particular human being that the coyote was meant to bond with. The female was a familiar in search of her person.
And there was only one other person on the planet who wore the double-dotted coyote glyph.
Excitement flashed in his veins like wildfire. “In there!” He pointed to the cave, where the dark, roiling shimmer had entirely plugged the tunnel. “She’s in there! Is there another way to get inside?”
His mind filled with scattershot images coming in a suddenly very familiar mental tone. Running. Searching, searching. A cave. Enemy! The enemy is in the cave. A back way. Another tunnel. Run. Hurry. Fast-fast.
He didn’t know how she had learned thought-glyphs or come to be in the Guatemalan rain forest, or how she’d managed to contact him, but right now none of that mattered. All that mattered was getting into that cave.
“Go!” Heart hammering, he waved her off. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Following her thought stream like a beacon, he and Mac chased the sable female through the trees and up a nearly vertical cliff face, to where a crack led to a narrow, twisting tunnel. And, gods willing, all the way inward to the cavern of Che’en Yaaxil.
“What the hell is that?” Natalie cried. But she knew. They all did. The chatter of dark magic coming from the tunnel was just as the magi had described it: like the noise made by an Amtrak-size rattler.
“They’re coming,” Brandt confirmed. He and Patience were helping the winikin with the shield stones that Lucius and Jade had magicked up for the winikin to use for protection. They worked either singly or as an overlapping domed defense, which was what they had in place now.
“Stand your ground,” Cara called to her teammates, amazed that her voice stayed steady. The rattling noise shifted and slithered and made her want to claw at her own skin. She held it together, though, just as she’d held it together up to this point in the op, by focusing on the immediate situation and dealing with whatever small piece of the whole needed to be dealt with.
The big picture was too damn scary right now: The Nightkeepers were having zero luck activating the screaming skull, there were nasty things coming up that tunnel, and it was her job to make sure they didn’t get to the Nightkeepers.
So she concentrated on the pieces that needed to work. “Breece,” she directed, “go help Sebastian.” The shield stones had their own power sources, but they used a blood-link as the catalyst. The more a winikin hated magic and the magi, the harder they found it to link up, even if they were honestly trying, as if something deep inside them still rejected the connection.
Trying very hard not to think of the parallel to Sven, she made a couple of other moves, shoring up faltering spots in the shield-stone dome, which was visible as a pale blue glow all around them. Through it, she could see a dark mist gathering at the tunnel mouth, then thickening to an opaque fog that began to roil and spin.
The rattlesnake hiss amped, but she held her ground, all too aware of the magi in the center of the dome. They were blood-linked and deep in the magic, nearly insensate as they focused all their energies on the skull and the resurrection spell. They were trusting her people with their lives, and she wasn’t going to let them down.
She had their backs, even if nobody had hers.
“Weapons ready,” Brandt called out, his voice ringing over the din. “Wait to fire until we see—”
A vicious rending noise tore through the cave, and the fog split in half, gaping to either side as terrible creatures poured through into the cave. At first she saw only a roil of dark body parts, glimpses of clawed hands and feet, and wickedly barbed tails, but then the creatures fanned out and she saw the demons for real.
They were human shaped, eight or nine feet tall, with wingspans of twice that, made of dark skin stretched across fingerlike bones. Their faces looked like they’d been caught in the middle of a shape-shift between human and pug, with squashed-in noses and beady eyes that kindled and glowed red as they solidified. And if that wasn’t enough to warn her that these were the bat demons JT and Natalie had once faced, barely escaping with their lives, then the ID was sealed by their whiplike tails and grotesquely oversize penises, which had flat, leaflike scales at their tips.
“Camazotz!” JT shouted,
confirming her guess and sparking new fear, because the powerful demons could be killed only up close and personal—cutting off their penises puffed them to smoke—and because where he and Natalie had fought a nest of newborns, these camazotz were fully mature.
As they came through the tear in the dark barrier, their burning red eyes locked onto the winikin and their mouths split in terrible screeches that started in the audible range but then ran up from there to a supersonic whine that made Cara’s bones ache.
Someone screamed, snapping the terrified silence of the winikin line and unleashing a chain of cries and shouts that warned of a stampede.
“Hold your shields!” she shouted. “Stay open to the magic! For the love of the gods and tomorrow, don’t lose those shields! And get ready to shoot!” She checked her weapon—an M-16 modified to handle the new exploding-tip jade bullets—with hands that shook so badly it took two tries to get the clip back in.
The camazotz poured through the rip. There were twenty of them, then thirty. And then, as if they had reached some critical mass or were answering some command given outside human hearing, they raced to surround the shielded circle.
“Steady,” Patience called. She and Brandt were blood-linked, adding their magic to that of the shield stones, and they each had a pulsing, glowing fireball conjured and ready to hurl through the one-way shield, which would let things out, but not in.
The camazotz moved closer, eyeing the shield as if trying to figure out whether it would burn them. But the shield stones gave off only a passive force field, and one that hadn’t yet been truly tested.
Please, gods, Cara whispered inwardly, but then didn’t know what she dared ask for, or even if the gods were listening. For a few brief days, she’d felt like part of the prophecies, part of the war. Now, though, it seemed like she’d been talking herself into the impossible-seeming logic. What were they doing here? Was this even the right place, the right spell? On some level, she had expected the Banol Kax to send the shadow creatures to attack: the hellhound, the eagles, all the other beasts that had erupted during Aaron’s funeral. Those were her enemies, hers and the winikin’s, and would have meant something.
The camazotz, though, were pure killing machines, an army sent to wipe out the resistance. Which meant… what? That her signs that the winikin were crucial to the equinox hadn’t been signs at all, just wishful thinking? Or, worse, had she and Sven gotten it wrong, after all? Because something wasn’t right; that was for sure. The Nightkeepers didn’t seem to be making any progress; they were uplinked in a circle, heads bowed, with Dez leading a chant. He had the skull artifact in front of him; faint smoke rose from it where they had burned their blood offerings. But aside from that, nothing was happening. All the magic was dark, the newcomers demonic. And they were closing in.
Focus. It was way too late to turn back now. All she could do was concentrate on the task at hand. Hold the shield. Protect the Nightkeepers.
“Ready,” Brandt said in the same calm tone as his wife, the two of them working together with a seamlessness that put a lump in Cara’s throat.
A huge, burly bat demon grabbed a smaller one standing nearby and shoved it into the shield. The nearest winikin shouted and stumbled back, but the shield held. It held!
But it also didn’t fight back. Unlike some of the Nightkeepers’ shields, it couldn’t deliver an electric shock or slash of fire. It was a forcefield, not a weapon.
The camazotz roared in triumph, and attacked.
“Now!” Patience shouted, and let rip with her fireball. It slammed into the surging churn of demons, grazed one, and hit another squarely, engulfing it in flames. A nanosecond later, Brandt’s fireball hit a huge male nearby.
“Fire!” Cara ordered, and let rip with a burst from her machine pistol. The rest of the winikin started shooting a nanosecond later, and for a moment the only thing she could hear was the chattering hail of automatic weapons followed closely by the crack-booms of the explosive-tipped rounds detonating to drive shards of sacred jade deep into the demons’ flesh.
The world outside the shield erupted with bestial screams and oily sprays of black ichor. The creatures reeled as their blackish flesh peeled away under the searing, magic-wrought fire or was shredded by the jade shrapnel. Within seconds, nearly a third of the camazotz were on the ground, writhing, but a dozen or so had reached the shield. They scaled the sides like spiders, wings outstretched so they blocked the light and made it hard to see what they were doing. They were moving like they had a plan, though, which wasn’t good.
“Get them!” Cara ordered, gesturing. “We don’t want them to—”
Suddenly JT shouted, clutched at his chest, and dropped to his knees. Natalie cried out and raced to him, only to fall partway there with her hands over her heart. Above them, a pair of camazotz clung to their sections of the shield and were regurgitating a dark ooze onto the surface of the magic. It burned where it hit, eating through the shield-stone spell and somehow knocking down the stones’ wielders.
“No!” Cara unloaded her clip into the first of the bat demons, which fell back with its face gone to pulp, leaving a gaping opening in the shield. Sebastian and Breece took aim at the second breach.
“I’ll patch the gaps!” Patience said to her. “Help them!”
Cara raced to Natalie as several others converged on JT, who was normally their medic. His kit lay beside him, but in the terrifying moment when she leaned over Natalie and couldn’t find a pulse, breath, or hint of life… Cara couldn’t remember who was next on call for medical emergencies. Suddenly everything was jumbled up inside her head, competing for space. Panic lashed through her. Don’t lose it. Don’t you dare lose it.
She automatically turned and said, “Who—”
There wasn’t anybody there to ask.
“It’s the blood-link,” called the man who was bent over JT’s unmoving body. “You’ve got to break the blood-link!” It was a sandy-haired winikin with steady blue eyes. Cara couldn’t remember his name or anything about him.
“Wait!” Brandt snapped. “Let me take over their shields first. The punctures aren’t affecting me or Patience, and we can hold the spells.… Okay, go!”
The guy stripped off JT’s wristband, breaking his link to the shield stone. The second the band was off his flesh, JT arched up off the ground and sucked in a harsh, rattling breath. “It’s working!” the guy barked. “Get Natalie’s band off!”
Fumbling, Cara yanked off the device, which burned her fingers with cool fire. Natalie convulsed and then rolled over, gagging wretchedly. But she was alive. Blessedly alive.
Thank you, gods! “Ritchie,” Cara called, remembering his name as her brain unlocked, then went into overdrive. “Over here. I want you to—”
“Here they come again!” Brandt warned. “They’re regenerating faster than we can blast them back.”
“You’ve got to get out there and cut their dicks off.” The pained rasp came from JT. “It’s the only way to banish the fuckers. At least it was a year ago.” Which was an ominous caveat, as the magic was stronger now.
“Fire at will!” Patience cried, and let rip, driving back the front line once more.
But Cara heard additional screams, shouts, instructions, and knew that other sections of the shield had been breached, other winikin taken down. Any minute now, the camazotz would break all the way through, and they’d be fighting for their lives, and for those of the Nightkeepers.
The huge, burly bat demon that had started the charge rose up from behind the line, screeching at the edge of her hearing, driving the others on as they got blown back, regenerated, and rushed forward again and again.
“Transfer all the shields over to me and Brandt,” Patience shouted. “Then get over here and give us your blood-links. We should be able to hold it that way.”
Cara didn’t move, though. She stayed staring at the huge camazotz leader. As if feeling her glare, it pivoted and glared back with burning red eyes, then jerked its chin as if
to say, You and what army, bitch?
But that was the thing. This was her army. These were her people, and it was her responsibility to get them out alive. That might not have been her priority the day of the mock battle back at Skywatch, but it sure as hell was now. She couldn’t hang back or hide out, not when there was something she could do to help.
Her hands shook as she scooped Natalie’s wristband off the ground and added it to her own, then activated the shield-stone spell links of both, not as part of the larger shield, but to create a tough shell of magic surrounding her. Protecting her. Heart drumming a quick rhythm that was half terror, half determination, she slung her machine pistol on its harness and pulled her combat knife in its place. Then she headed for the shield.
Brandt caught sight of her. “Cara! What are you—”
His words went muffled as she plunged through, striking sparks where shield met shield.
The noise on the outside was worse than she had expected, even through two layers of shield-spell. Her pulse hammered in her ears, and she wanted to double over and puke with terror, but she didn’t let herself give in to the fear, didn’t let her determination waver. Instead, trusting the others to cover her with whatever firepower they had left, she bolted for the bat demons’ leader.
Before, she had used her people as a distraction to save her own ass and get the win. This time she would do the reverse. Please, gods.
A dark shape closed on her from the left, another from the right. No! She dodged, tripped, and nearly went down, and then a roar of magic exploded behind her with a shock wave that nearly flattened her. She didn’t look back, just kept racing across the sandy surface until she was within range of the huge camazotz, which was standing there with its hands out to its sides in the apparently universal gesture of, Bring it on, bitch.
But although she was five-foot-nothing and weighed a hundred or so pounds soaking wet, she hadn’t grown up on a cattle ranch for nothing. And the fight training at Skywatch had been brutal but effective. She went in low, dodged the bat demon’s first swipe, ducked under the return, and felt the whiff of a wing slash right above her. The thing’s second blow caught her squarely on the shield and sent her flying back to crash into the cavern wall.
Magic Unchained n-7 Page 33
