Taking hold of the rainbow, she pulled on a strand of blue, looping it and tossing it across the gap to snag one ragged edge of the sky. Magic sparked at the place where the blue strand touched the edge, and again when she looped red to the other side of the gap. Then she began to pull on the strands, tugging them together, trying to seam the sky itself.
Slowly, very slowly, the tear began to narrow.
A trumpet scream sounded behind her, and she glanced back to see a snakelike slide of motion, a glowing gold-and-crimson dragon with an elongated snout and whip-like tail. Kulkulkan.
The creator god rose up in the sky and spread his great feathered wings as he hovered above the rainbow, bugling a battle cry, becoming the serpent and the rainbow as they had been carved on the ceiling of the stone temple. Then Kulkulkan screamed again and pinwheeled in the air, locking onto the death bats, directed by the mental link he shared with Leah and Strike, who stood near the hellmouth with their warriors.
The king and queen had her back, Alexis thought, and was warmed by the knowledge, steadied by knowing she wasn’t alone, even though she felt so lonely up there in the sky, sitting on a rainbow, sewing the world back together. But the rainbow strands held. The barrier was closing. Slowly, but it was closing.
For a second she actually thought she was going to pull it off. Then there was a massive heaving on the other side of the barrier, a concerted rush as the Banol Kax sent their forces toward the weak spot, a massive battering ram of evil seeking to force its way through to earth. The creatures hit the barrier at a spot below the tear, and the fabric of psi energy bowed under the pressure, straining at the torn spot.
Shouting, Alexis pulled on the threads with both hands and hung on to the rainbow with her legs, fighting to keep the gap from widening. Then a long, squidlike tendril of evil snaked through the opening, wrapped around her, and yanked her off the rainbow.
And pulled her through the gap to hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The moment Alexis broke contact with the sacred circle and physically stepped into the rainbow, Nate knew she was in serious trouble. When he saw her shimmer and start to fade, he didn’t hesitate. He flung himself after her.
Instead of the rainbow, though, he found agony.
Flames lashed at him; lightning struck at him as he was transported someplace else, someplace between the earth and sky, another layer that wasn’t the barrier, but was so much worse. He twisted in the lashing wind and rain, suspended in the midst of a terrible storm. “Alexis!” he cried, shouting so hard his voice cracked on the word. “Lexie!”
But she wasn’t there. They’d been separated by the magic, because she belonged in the rainbow and he didn’t, never had.
He thrashed, screaming, not with the pain, but because he needed to get to her, needed to protect her. “Godsdamn it!” he shouted into the storm. “She needs me! I won’t let it end like this. I can’t. For gods’ sake, let me help her. She’ll die without me!”
And, he realized in the extreme of his panic, he would die without her. A sudden parade of impressions flashed through his mind, kaleidoscoping images of the two of them together in the past, the good times and the bad. Then he saw himself in two different futures, one that continued for many years, one that cut short in 2012, both without her in them. Both unacceptable. Lightning slapped at him, arching him double in pain as he contemplated a future without Alexis and realized that all along his so-called honesty had been a front, a terrible lie. He’d been trying to be honest with her, and in the process had lied to himself. He might not have started out wanting a life with her, a future with her, but now that he was facing one without her, he realized it was the last thing he wanted. The one thing he wouldn’t tolerate.
“Give her back!” he shouted to the storm, to the gods. “She’s mine. I love her!”
The moment he said the words, the moment he truly accepted them for what they were and what they meant, his powers bolted wildly, careening to a new level he’d never experienced before. The magic whiplashed through him, fighting the storm, fighting captivity.
Feeding on the power, he tipped back his head into the storm and roared, “I. Love. Her!”
The universe seemed to pause, seemed to take a breath. In the sudden stillness a door unlocked in his mind, and he suddenly saw his own dreams. He’d dreamed of his mother and father as his infant self remembered them. He’d dreamed of being with Alexis in the temple cave, of losing himself in her as she’d pressed back against a twin column of stalagmites and cried his name at the back of her throat.
And all along he’d dreamed of flying. Of being free, not of love or duty, but free of gravity. Free of the earth.
A warm, magical glow kindled in his heart. Only it wasn’t his heart. It was the hawk medallion.
Son of a bitch, he thought. The fucking thing really is magic.
Acting on instinct, on impulse, he palmed his knife from his belt. Only it wasn’t his usual knife; it was the ceremonial blade Strike had given him. The weapon felt like an extension of his own arm, cool on his flesh as he nicked first his tongue, then each of his palms in sacrifice.
Cupping both bloodstained hands around the medallion, he lifted it and pressed a kiss to the etching, where the hawk became the man, and the man became the hawk. “I love her,” he said simply. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” And, in accepting that deep down inside, he let himself go fully to the magic, relinquished control, and gave himself to destiny. He tipped his head back as the storm began anew, now rotating around him in a funnel cloud of gray-black and lightning, and he roared, “Gods take me!”
And, keeping Alexis in his mind, his love for her at the forefront, he dived headfirst into the funnel.
The winds whipped at him, ripping at his clothing, at his flesh. His skin stretched tight and tore; his whole body split apart. Pain slashed through him, beat at him, and he screamed with the pain, with the power. His clothes shredded and fell away. The wind screamed with him, and then he heard another voice, an inhuman screech that reached deep inside him and brought recognition, longing, and a sense of the freedom he’d always sought, the freedom he’d thought love was trying to take away.
He flailed his arms and legs against the whirling vortex, screaming again and again, the creature’s cries drowning out his own. His skin burned, his bones ached, his flesh and tendons sang with unfamiliar tension.
Gradually, though, his flailing gained purpose and rhythm. He waved his arms and felt them bite into the storm winds, arched his spine and felt the motion alter his course. An unfamiliar slapping noise surrounded him, filled him up, and he waved his arms harder, and started to make progress.
Then he saw a flash of color and light up ahead; a place where the storm had cleared, leaving a rainbow behind. “Alexis,” he shouted, and heard only the creature’s scream, but didn’t care about that, cared only about getting to her. He started swimming through the air, flapping arms that had become fifteen-foot wings, spreading something that felt like fingers but seemed to have sprouted out of his ass, wide and flat and feathered—a tail? what the fuck?—and letting his legs flatten out behind him, curling his talons, each the size of the forearm of his human self.
Understanding was both a shock and a relief, and a sense of rightness like he’d never before experienced.
He was the sacred black hawk-eagle, and the hawk-eagle was him.
The medallion banged against his breastbone as he flew. It was still hanging around his neck alongside the king’s eccentric, both of the chains having somehow grown to accommodate his new size and shape. He carried the sacred knife with him too; it had changed when he did, becoming an obsidian band that hung around his ankle, marking him not just as a shifter, but as the Volatile.
He wasn’t supposed to challenge the sky by fighting the gods.
He was supposed to fly.
Before, he’d rejected his destiny. Now he just freaking rolled with it, because he’d chosen the path, and the woman, and she was what matt
ered right now. She was everything.
He screamed again, this time not even trying for a human word, but going only for volume. He was a predator, a raptor calling his challenge against the enemy, a male trumpeting possession of his mate as he broke free of the funnel cloud and found himself on the earth plane, high in the sky. The air was thin, the world very small below him. With night-bright vision he saw the mountains and cloud line, the bumps of ancient pyramids, and realized with a shock that was more acceptance than surprise that he was seeing things now from the angle in his father’s paintings.
This, then, was what had kept Two-Hawk apart, what had tainted the others’ perceptions of the bloodline—the fear of shifters, and the secret he had carried for his son.
Well, shift this, Nate thought, then pressed his wings close to his body and dived. The wind whipped past and sang freedom in his ears as he plummeted from the heights where the funnel cloud had left him. He flew toward the bright spot near the cloud city, fear gathering in his chest as he saw the tear in the sky and the darkness beyond.
“Lexie!” he called. “Lexie!” The words came out as a raptor’s scream, but, incredibly, he heard an answer.
Nate. It was a whisper in his mind, a faint connection through the love bond they’d shared, the one he’d tried to sever because he’d been too set in his old patterns to see that things had changed around him, that he’d changed.
He called her name again and she answered again, and he tracked the response not to the rainbow or the tear in the sky, but to the darkness beyond.
Gods. She was on the wrong side of the barrier. And oh, holy hell. The split was getting bigger by the second. The starry night sky strained on either side of the gash, while red blackness oozed down, bleeding evil onto the earth.
He could sense the creatures on the other side more than he could see them, could sense the tentacled thing that held Alexis, draining her energy from her and using it to tear the barrier. Her strength was fading, her connection to the goddess almost lost, and all because of him, he knew. He’d been almost too late figuring out what she meant to him, almost too late accepting that sometimes the gods got it right, destiny or not.
But almost doesn’t matter worth a damn, he thought, trumpeting the attack. I’m here now, and watch out, because I’m coming for my woman!
He dived through the gap with his curved beak gaping wide and his razor-sharp talons extended in attack. In an instant, blackness enveloped him, slowing his wings and wrapping around him like a heavy, viscous oil, weighing him down and driving him away from Alexis. He could see her, a rainbow shimmer up above him, could hear her cry his name as he fell.
No! He tumbled, losing the rhythm of flight as the black goo flared to boluntiku orange, lava-hot and cloying. NO! He fought the creature’s hold as it went solid and slashed at him with a raking six-clawed hand.
Nate howled and reached for his power, calling up a fireball, shaping and throwing the fire magic with his mind because his hands had turned to wings. As he did so, his medallion heated and flashed bright white, and it was as if he’d just thrown a fucking atomic bomb. There was a deep, thrumming thump, then a pause as the world went still.
Then all hell broke loose.
The fireball’s detonation roared, vaporizing the goo in an instant and slamming Nate to the gray-black ground. The shock wave kept on going, radiating away from him, blowing the boluntiku and disembodied makol back, sending them tumbling end over end, their gods-awful screeching noises nearly lost beneath the thunder of the explosion. Then light flashed, pure, golden, and brilliant, and so bright Nate had to close his eyes and look away. When he looked again, the Banol Kax had been driven back to the horizon, and the creature that had been holding Alexis aloft was gone. She was safe from the explosion behind a rainbow barrier, but now she was falling, screaming, “Nate!”
And the gap in the barrier was even wider than before, hanging open, blown larger by the explosion. Worse—the Banol Kax had regrouped and were headed for the opening freight-train fast.
Fuck me. Nate didn’t hesitate. He turned his back on the gap and the demons, kicked hard off the ground, and arrowed toward Alexis. The king’s writ might say that Strike had to prioritize other things above his family, but Nate was bound by no such scripture. And he was damn well prioritizing Alexis, the way he should’ve been doing all along. He powered to her, got above her, and then dived, matching her free-falling speed as the rocky, gray-black surface rose up to meet them.
At practically the last second he got ahead of her and swooped up, scooping her from the air. She shrieked and grabbed on, but then started struggling, trying to bail off. He didn’t get it for a second; then he realized she had no idea who—or what—he was. “It’s me!” he shouted, only it came out as a hawk’s cry.
But she stilled, lying flat on his back, hanging on to his feathers, pulling hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to keep her in place if things got tough. “Holy shit,” she said, voice rattling with fear, with shock. “Nate?”
Which pretty much proved she could hear him through the screeching, maybe because she loved him. Or at least she had; that might be open to some debate in about thirty seconds or so, he realized with a deep clutch of dismay. She’d been raised by the most traditional winikin of them all. What if she couldn’t deal with what he was?
“Wh-what’s going on?” Her voice shook; her whole body was trembling.
With fear of rejection lodged deep inside, knowing there was no time for fancy explanations, Nate put himself into a glide, his body somehow knowing just what to do even though his brain didn’t. “It’s a long story, obviously,” he said, “but the short version seems to be that I’m an asshole and a shape-shifter, in whichever order you prefer. I’m the Volatile. And I love you.”
She went very still, letting him know she’d translated from “hawk” to English just fine. Then, moving slowly and keeping a death grip on whatever piece of him she could get hold of, she sat up and straddled his shoulders, hooking her legs into the thickened chain holding the medallion, and using the eccentric’s chain as a handhold. Then she leaned into him, getting out of the whip of the wind as she said, “Let’s do our job, Nightkeeper. We’ve got a barrier to seal and some demons to kick back to hell. It’s like we agreed before: The other stuff doesn’t belong mixed-up with the gods.”
It wasn’t what Nate had hoped to hear, wasn’t what he’d said, and the hollow opening up inside his gut warned that he might not get what he wanted. Not being what he was. But she was right that they had a job to do and not much time to do it, so even though her response cut deep inside his soul, he screeched a battle cry of agreement. “Hang on!”
Then they were arrowing up toward the tear in the barrier, toward where the creatures of the underworld had gathered, waiting for the rip to reach the surface of their world, setting them free on the next.
Trumpeting the attack, Nate gathered his fireball magic, felt Alexis lean on her rainbow magic, and then together, as one, they dived into the battle they’d been born for.
Alexis was Ixchel and the goddess was she. They were one, woven together, the ancient entity working through her, guiding her magic as they neared the tear in the fabric of the universe and the enemy attacked.
The boluntiku lunged, snapping with razor-sharp teeth and claws, their lava-hot bodies vapor one moment, solid the next. But their form didn’t seem to matter to the magic; Alexis spread a loop of cool blue light and threw it at the one nearest the gap. The lasso whistled into the creature, impacted, and clung, burning cool against hot. The boluntiku arched and screamed in pain, clawing at the tether, alternating between vapor and solid as it thrashed. Steam rose, along with a hissing noise and a terrible smell as the light ate into the lava creature, cooling it to stone.
Within minutes there was a statue where the thing had been.
“Score!” Nate shouted. “Hang on; we’ll get those others out in front!”
Though the words were an avian screech, she hear
d them in her skull, her head translating what her heart wasn’t sure it could cope with. Even as she formed another loop, tightened her knees on her mount’s warm, solid neck, and they banked to meet the next attack, part of her struggled to deal with the fact that her mount and Nate were one and the same. He was a shifter. He was also the Volatile, who was her protector, not her enemy. And he’d said he loved her.
A day ago, even a few hours ago, she would’ve given anything to hear him say that. Even now, the words thrummed through her heart like a melody of color. But there was a discord within that song, a splash of warning, of fear and knowing that Nate’s being a shifter fit too well. It explained his fierce independence and dislike of following orders. It explained his need for freedom, for privacy, for his own space.
“Alexis, look out!” Nate’s shout warned that she’d been thinking too much, fighting too little. She jolted to awareness just as a fanged creature rose up out of nowhere and grabbed at her, getting an edge of her shirt before falling free. Nate jammed a wing tip down and spun, so his belly faced the demon as it screamed and slashed. And scored.
Nate howled in pain and they tumbled for a second before he recovered and beat for the sky once again, gaining altitude, though obviously laboring.
Alexis leaned into him, calling, “That bomb thing. Can you do it again?”
I’ll try. This time his response was purely mental, traveling along a bond she wasn’t yet ready to fully acknowledge or accept. She wrapped herself around him, following the link and opening herself to him, offering up to him all of the goddess’s power, and her own.
The fire magic spluttered to life around them, hissing and spitting and simultaneously gleaming with all colors and none. Holding on to the magic, he flew a wide arc around the five boluntiku closest to the barrier, and she tossed a loop of blue light that encompassed them all. Then, together, they threw his fire magic. White light flared, though softer than before, not a detonation so much as a firecracker. And when it cleared, the creatures had all turned to stone. The power drain, though, had been incredible.
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