Spellfire

by Jessica Andersen

  “Don’t worry, no pressure. We’ll take things as slow as you want.” He paused, smile fading. “It’s not like we won’t have other things to focus on for the next eight days. And after that . . . well, there’ll be plenty of time for us to figure things out.” He looked away as he said that, though, making her think he was just saying the words, or maybe trying to believe them. Was that because he didn’t think they could work things out, or because he thought it would be a moot point, the earth destroyed? It doesn’t matter, she told herself. What matters is the next eight days. And after that, well, he was right. If they made it through, there would be time to figure out whether to stay together or go their separate ways.

  The thought made her want to scoot closer to him and cling. Instead, she pulled her hand from his, balanced a brownie on her knee and reached for a beer. “That’s true enough, I guess. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time when it comes to figuring out what to do about the gods.”

  Like it or not, it was easier to talk about battle plans than it was to talk about what was happening between them.

  He shot her a sidelong look that said he knew what she was thinking. But then he took a swig of his beer, leaned forward and braced his elbows on his upper thighs. “I’m trying not to let this be an easy choice. It shouldn’t be.”

  Before, back when she’d been pushing him to reach the full potential she saw in him, she probably would’ve jumped right in with all sorts of opinions, probably none of which would’ve been “have faith in the sky gods.” Now, though, she hesitated. Over the past few months, she had prayed to the gods for her magic and talked to them when she was alone and uncertain. It was unsettling to think that she might’ve been praying to the enemy all this time.

  “Maybe Dez is right,” she said. “Maybe we should hold off on making any decisions until we’ve looked into the info Bastet gave us.” It felt weird to call the goddess by name, but was that any weirder than the message itself? Probably not.

  “Maybe.” Rabbit flicked a couple of pebbles off the ledge, tilting his head as they clinked and clanked on the way down. “The whole Egyptian thing feels right to me, though. It makes sense. But what if that’s because I’d already talked myself out of the sky gods once before? I don’t trust myself on this one. Not after what happened with Phee.”

  “Well, for better or worse, it’s not really going to be about what we believe, is it? Dez is going to have the final say.”

  “I hope so.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s . . . nothing. Just something my old man said.” He paused. “Did you ever imagine your parents showing up one day, putting the smackdown on the Witch, and whisking you away to your real life?”

  She lowered her beer in surprise. “Where did that come from?”

  “I was thinking about what Bastet said about the kohan and kax conspiring against us, and how it would help to think that there was a reason for all the bad luck we’ve had. Not just now, but in the past, too. The rise of the Aztec, the Spanish conquest, the Trail of Tears, the Solstice Massacre . . . all those times the Nightkeepers were just starting to flourish in a new land, when wham, something knocked them back down again.”

  “Which got you thinking about being an orphan.” The word tried to stick in her throat. It was true, though. The surviving full-blooded Nightkeepers had grown up without their parents, though in most cases their winikin had filled in as best they could. And Rabbit himself might’ve been better off if both his parents had been out of the picture. “What about you?” she asked him. “Did you ever imagine your mother showing up and taking you away from Red-Boar?”

  “Not really.” But then he sighed. “Okay, maybe. More over the past couple of years than when I was a kid, though. Back then, I more or less believed that I was a disaster, good for nothing, all the stuff my old man kept telling me. So why would my mother—who, of course, I pictured being gentle, kind, generous and the exact opposite of him—want anything to do with me? Worse, what if she actually did come, and was disappointed?”

  “Rabbit . . .”

  “No.” He took her hand, threaded their fingers together. “No sympathy necessary, no pity requested. I haven’t been that kid for a long time. That didn’t stop me, though, from chasing after her ghost over the past few years, thinking there was no way she could be as bad as Red-Boar.” He snorted, though his fingers tightened on hers. “Just my luck she turned out to be worse.”

  “Luck,” Myr said softly.

  “Yeah. There’s that word again. Like I said, it’s tempting to think that a whole lot of what’s gone down has been because our so-called gods have been fucking with us. Which makes it really damn cool to think that there’s an even higher power out there somewhere that wants us to succeed, and is trying to get through and help us.”

  “Bastet as Daddy Warbucks?”

  “More like some sort of superhero who’s been blocked from the planet, and could help us out if we can manage to open up the lines of communication.”

  “In eight days.”

  He glanced up at the night sky. “Almost down to seven, now.”

  “Scary,” she said, going for wry but aware that her voice shook. It hit her like this sometimes, the knowledge that they were coming up on the end date, and that she was going to be right there on the frontlines. For all that she was a warrior and a mage, sometimes she still felt very much like a frightened little girl.

  His shoulder bumped against hers. “Yeah. Scary.”

  They sat like that for a few minutes in silence.

  “I thought about it,” she said then, surprising herself. “My parents showing up, I mean. Sometimes, I would hide out and watch customers come into the shop, and I would pretend they were my parents, and that they’d come to take me back. Now and then I would picture them having the Witch arrested, but mostly all I cared about was getting out of there.” She paused. “I guess it was one thing to picture it, another to do something about it.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of staying. Kids are programmed to believe their parents, wrong or right.”

  She toyed with her brownie. “You’re saying I stayed because of inertia, just like some of the Nightkeepers and winikin—maybe a lot of them—are going to want to stick with the sky gods because they’re familiar.”

  “What if they’re right?”

  “Was I better off letting the Witch use me as a punching bag?”

  “Ah, baby. Don’t do that to yourself.” He wrapped an arm around her.

  “I won’t. I’m not. I’ve moved on, damn it.” But she let herself lean into him for a few seconds. And, when she felt his breath on her cheek, his lips on her ear, she tipped her head to accept the kiss, then sought his mouth with her own.

  The churn of unease in her belly warmed quickly to desire, and she slid her hand up his chest to press over the steady thud of his heart. This was what she needed; it was why she had gone walking with him, why she couldn’t stay away from him.

  He made her feel important.

  He broke the kiss, to press his forehead to hers, so their breaths mingled when he said, “Will you come home with me tonight?”

  She nodded but said nothing, not sure she trusted what would come out of her mouth right now, with her emotions too damn close to the surface.

  They climbed down from the pueblo, pausing at the flat spots to kiss. And as they headed back toward the cottage, hand in hand, with her head on his shoulder, she didn’t let herself think about tomorrow. It would be enough to go home with him, make love to him. She wouldn’t let herself give in all the way like she had last night, though, and she wouldn’t stay the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  December 19

  Two days to the zero date

  With fewer than forty-eight hours on the clock, the Nightkeepers sat in the great room while Lucius used his laptop to flash pictures of Egyptian paintings and carvings on the big screen. He’d already gone over Bastet; the ram-headed creator god, Khnum, who made the bodies
of men from mud and then breathed life into them; and the sun god, Amon-Ra, who had the head of a hawk and ruled the lands of the living. All the good guys Bastet had mentioned.

  “Now for the not-so-good guys,” he said. “This is Anubis.” He clicked to a statue of a pointy-eared, pointy-nosed dog cast in gold and painted black. Lying on its belly with its front paws outstretched, it was positioned like the Sphinx and had gleaming gem eyes that seemed to scan the room even in 2-D. “And so is this.” The next slide showed a tomb painting with the same foxy head, but this time on the body of a bulky, muscular man. “Since jackals were often seen scavenging near the dead and their tombs, the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as the guardians of the dead. Anubis here is the god of death and the dying.” He hit the button again, skipping a slide and stopping on another animal-headed man. This one, though, had a strangely elongated nose, almost a beak, along with square-tipped ears, and what looked like scales. “And this is Seth.”

  As Rabbit frowned, trying to figure out what the hell it was, Myrinne leaned over and said in an undertone, “They had armadillos in ancient Egypt?”

  He exhaled a soft snort. “That’s good news for us—if we poke it with a stick, it’ll roll into a ball and wait until we go away.”

  Her grin warmed him, as did the press of her thigh against his where they sat together at one end of the big sofa. Quarters were tight with the full seventy-seven-person team crammed into the mansion’s great room, but he wasn’t complaining. Ever since that afternoon up at the pueblo, he and Myr had been hanging out pretty much every day, and things had been going well. The sex was incredible and having her back in his life was even better, though she still wouldn’t spend the night.

  Even that was probably for the best, though, because it meant he didn’t have to explain why he spent almost an hour each morning sitting cross-legged in front of the altar in the spare bedroom, burning incense and staring down at the carved stone surface while he made sure the dark magic stayed contained. And it meant he didn’t have to let on that it was getting harder each day.

  “It’s called the Seth beast,” Lucius said with a “shut it” look in their direction. “Seth is the lord of chaos, thunder and the desert. He’s roughly equivalent to the Christian’s devil, though he does his damage on earth. And this is Osiris.” He clicked to a tomb painting of a sharp-featured pharaoh-type guy wearing a tall white hat and the outer wrappings of a mummy. “He rules the underworld and resurrection.” He didn’t quite glance to where Red-Boar leaned against the back wall, doing his arms-folded-scowl thing.

  The resurrected mage had spent the past week lobbying on behalf of the old gods, making it damn clear he thought the Nightkeepers were headed for disaster.

  Lucius kept going, sketching out the Egyptian’s upper-and underworlds, and finishing with, “I think it’s worth mentioning that the Mayan religion didn’t have a good-versus-bad afterlife the way that we’ve been treating it. In fact, the Mayans believed that the sky and Xibalba were two planes that were equally populated with both good and evil gods, just like there are both good and evil people on earth.”

  “Hold on,” Nate said. “You’re saying that they had it right and the Nightkeepers had it wrong? The Maya learned the religion from us in the first place!”

  “Not from us,” Lucius countered. “They learned from our many-times ancestors, long before things started evolving and the Xibalbans split from the Nightkeepers, separating the light and dark magic.”

  “So you believe Bastet.”

  Lucius spread his hands. “Experience tells me that the Banol Kax are evil and that the sky gods oppose them. But that doesn’t rule out what Bastet told us.” He paused. “Not to mention that we found a new treatment for the xombi virus . . . in an Egyptian pharmacopeia.”

  There was a restless shifting of bodies in the jam-packed room.

  Anna said, “I passed it along to my contact inside the quarantine zone a couple of days ago, and as of this morning, most of the existing cases have stabilized. In addition, there haven’t been any new infections reported in the past five days.”

  “Which suggests it has nothing to do with a treatment that started two days ago,” Red-Boar interjected. “For all we know, the demons just put the poor bastards in a holding pattern so they’ll be ready to use as a standing army when the calendar hits zero.”

  Rabbit wanted to roll his eyes, but couldn’t. Because even though Red-Boar was looking seriously strung out these days, he was still making sense. That was the problem, in fact: the arguments were almost perfectly weighted between “it’s a trap” and “it’s for real.” Which meant that somebody needed to be the one to make the call, flip the coin, or what-the-fuck-ever.

  “I guess that’s my cue.” Dez stood.

  This time the rustling was louder, lasted longer. Rabbit found himself edging forward in his seat, and Myr’s nails dug into his palm. This was what they were all there for, not Lucius’s info or Anna’s report, but to hear what Dez had decided to do about Bastet’s command that the Nightkeepers reject the sky gods.

  The king met Red-Boar’s narrow-eyed glare. “Don’t worry. We all know how you’d vote if this was a democracy.” To the rest of them, he said, “The thing is, it’s not a democracy. Our ancestors set things up with a king and a fealty oath . . . maybe because they knew it would come down to this. I don’t know. It’s a hell of a decision to put on one guy, king or not.”

  “Shades of ’eighty-four,” somebody muttered from up near the kitchen, where most of the winikin were gathered.

  A shiver crawled down Rabbit’s spine. He’d had another of the dreams last night, where he was inside Scarred-Jaguar’s head in the minutes leading up to the Solstice Massacre. He was pretty sure it was a warning, a pointed reminder that one wrong decision by a powerful mage could make the whole fucking world go boom. It wasn’t as if he needed the reminder, though. The knowledge haunted him, gnawed at him, and had him staring at the ceiling each night while Myr’s pillow cooled beside him. And when the dawn broke, it drove him into the spare room, determined to lock his brain down tight.

  When the time came, he would use the dark magic. But he would do it on his terms, and he wouldn’t give in to the anger and chaos that came with it. The magic was just magic; the other garbage belonged to the parts of himself that he’d left behind.

  “There’s one major difference between the old king and me.” Dez shot a sharp look at the winikin, then scanned the room, so it was clear he was talking to all of them when he said, “I’m not going to force anybody to do anything.”

  There was a startled silence. Rabbit glanced at Myr, got a “no clue” headshake, and looked back at the king. His own warrior’s talent was humming, amping his senses and sending adrenaline into his bloodstream. It was time. Whatever came next, it was going to change the course of human history.

  After giving that a moment to sink in, Dez continued. “I realize that our ancestors intended for the king to order his troops into battle . . . but we’re not our ancestors. We’re the last survivors, the children of the massacre. We didn’t ask for the lives we were born into, but each and every one of us stepped up and answered the call when it came.”

  His eyes went around the room, and when they hit Rabbit, he felt a bit of the old “holy shit, this is real” that he used to get when they all first gathered at Skywatch, back when the whole save-the-world thing had felt so damn faraway. Myr’s fingers tightened on his fingers, as if she felt it, too.

  When he’d locked eyes with each and every one of them, Dez reached for Reese’s hand and brought her to stand beside him. “Now I’m going to ask all of you to step up once more, this time going against so much of what we were taught.” He paused while a murmur went through the room—one that seemed, to Rabbit anyway, more resigned than truly surprised. Then the king said, “In forty hours, Reese and I are going to ’port to Coatepec Mountain, stand at the intersection and renounce the kohan. I’m asking all of you to join us. More, I’m asking
the godkeepers to break their bonds. I believe what the goddess told us. I believe that it’s up to the Nightkeepers to defend the earth against both the sky and the underworld.”

  “You’re asking us?” Red-Boar’s eyes narrowed. “Not ordering us?”

  “You heard me.” Dez swept the crowd once more. “If you choose not to join us, you will be released from your fealty oath and given weapons, cash and a ’port wherever you want to go.” He dropped his voice. “Wherever you think you can defend yourself best.”

  From up near the kitchen, JT called, “You’re assuming the deserters—”

  “Not deserters,” Reese put in. “Just no longer allies.”

  “Whatever. You’re assuming you won’t wind up fighting them.”

  Dez shook his head. “I’m not assuming anything. I’m hoping that won’t happen, but I’ll be damned to the hell of your choice if I lock people up in the basement just because they believe differently than I do, and I’ll fucking step down before I conscript an army the way Scarred-Jaguar did.” He nodded to Strike, then Anna and Sasha. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Strike rumbled. But his knuckles were white where he gripped Leah’s hand.

  Dez continued. “It’d be stupid for me to tell you to think about it—gods know that’s all I’ve been doing for the past week and I’m sure you’ve all been doing the same. But if you figured I was going to make the decision for you, you’re out of luck. You’ve got twenty-four hours to let me or Reese know if you want us to arrange to teleport you out, forty if you don’t.”

  “Who’s going to be doing this ’porting?” Strike asked.

  Anna said, “I’m already in. The message, the skull . . . I have no doubts.”

  “This is strictly voluntary,” Dez reiterated. “But I hope you’ll all step up and keep the team intact. I believe with all my heart and soul that this is the right thing to do.”

  There were more questions after that, especially from the winikin, who seemed to be looking for loopholes in the king’s offer to release them. They might have their magic now, but some still didn’t trust their freedom.