She read the single word at the bottom: “Lamat.” A quick search through the book revealed that Lamat was the card of the One Who Shows the Way. Okay, then, it symbolized leadership. She didn’t think it referred to Strike, though. She didn’t see how the king could be at the core of Brandt’s inability to become a Triad mage.
Moving on to the light aspects, she read: “‘Lamat indicates harmony, clear perspectives, and the creation of beneficial combinations.’ Meh.” She shrugged and moved on. “‘The shadow aspects of Lamat are disconnection and the belief that there is only one right way, one exclusive system that can bring harmony.’” That resonated. More, when she added it to the concept of leadership, she came up with the distant, rigid, system-based former architect who had been prophesied to lead the magi against Cabrakan. Brandt.
Unfortunately, identifying Brandt as the core of the problem wasn’t news either. Disappointment gathered as she skimmed through the rest of the information, finding little of note except for the animal and elemental associations of Lamat: the rabbit, and fire. That suggested that Rabbit was involved with the core issue, or maybe its solution. But beyond that, she wasn’t seeing anything nearly as concrete as the mirror card had been, in terms of giving her a clue of what she was supposed to do next.
“Have faith,” she murmured. And she flipped the third card.
The image was unfamiliar, and very different from the first two, done in a watery blue green, with white accents, showing none of the yellows and blacks that were on the other cards. It was a moon card, with a white disk in the background. In the foreground was an arrangement of lines and shapes, just as on the others. But on this one, the combination of downward-arching lines at the upper corners and a circular pattern at the lower center combined to form the image of an angry, scowling face with a strange twinkle in its eyes.
“Chuen.” She flipped to the proper page in the book, and frowned when nothing connected. Chuen was the Monkey Trickster. Its light aspects were celebration, innocence, joy, and laughter; its shadow aspects were the destruction of old, useless patterns, the upending of known life, and the creation of a new one. Disappointment kicked. Frivolity sure as hell wasn’t going to connect Brandt with the Triad magic, and she didn’t see how mixing things up would help either. “Come on. Give me something to work with here!”
Frustrated, she paged to the front of the book, where it described the spreads. Maybe she had missed something, or made a mistake.
But when she figured out what she’d done, she just stared for a long moment. “Oh. Oh, gods.” This wasn’t good.
The tree-of-choice array was supposed to be laid out in a line from top to bottom, canopy to roots.
She had laid her cards from left to right, which wasn’t the tree-of-choice spread. It was the past-
present-future spread, which had nothing to do with the question she’d asked, and had everything to do with the person who had pulled the cards—namely, her.
The Divine Mother was her past.
The rigid, rule-following leader was her present, and he had put her world in disharmony. Brandt.
And her future was chaos and upheaval . . . leading to a new life.
She didn’t want a new life, she thought on a surge of pure self-pity. She wanted her old life back, damn it. She wanted to be a wife and mother first, with everything else coming after that. She wanted to be back in the pretty kitchen of the Pittsburgh house, with Brandt snoozing in their shared bedroom, the boys napping down the hall. Or, rather, with Harry napping and Braden planning world domination, toddler-style. She wanted to know that if she headed into the bedroom, her sleepy-eyed husband would snag her hand and pull her back into bed with him.
But that life was already gone, wasn’t it? She wasn’t just a wife and a mother anymore; she was a warrior. And even if the magi won the war and everything went back to so-called “normal,” she wouldn’t ever get her old life back. On some level she knew that. But that didn’t mean she wanted to think about what her new life was going to be like.
“Did the oracle work?”
She jolted at the sound of Brandt’s voice, the sight of him filling the pool house doorway. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come in.”
He wore black cargo pants and a black tee with square-toed boots. The outfit was almost, but not quite, combat gear, suggesting that it was time for their next and almost last option. Her heart thumped, but with an aching wistfulness rather than surprise. When he raised an eyebrow, she realized she hadn’t answered his question about the oracle.
“No. It didn’t give me anything.”
He got points for not even hinting at an “I told you so.” Or maybe her success with the etznab spell had made an impression. Instead of commenting on the cards at all, he said, “Strike’s ready to ’port us down to El Rey. He’ll leave us there to poke around for as long as we need.” He paused. “Jox suggested we should try getting a room at the same hotel or one like it. We could spend the night and see if it jogs some memories.”
“That makes sense.” It also made her want to weep. Instead, she carefully gathered her cards, stacked them atop the book, and cradled the small pile against her as she unfolded herself from the daybed. She didn’t look back at the pillows or the memories they brought.
She did, however, catch sight of herself in the big mirror beside the door. And for a second, she didn’t recognize the person staring back at her.
The Patience who had come to Skywatch with her sons and been shocked to find her husband there already—instead of on the business trip he’d claimed—had looked younger than her twenty-three years, soft-faced and bouncy despite her fighting credentials and Nightkeeper upbringing. The woman in the mirror had lost the softness and gained an edge that said she wasn’t just trained to fight; she had fought for real and emerged, if not victorious, then at least alive.
On some level, though, “alive” was about all she could claim. She wore jeans and a practical shirt, sturdy shoes, and a ponytail. And all she wanted to do was get through the next solstice, the next year, the next two years, and hope that tomorrow would be better than today.
Gods. Was that the person she had become?
“Patience? You okay?”
There was honest concern in Brandt’s eyes, but that was it. Chest gone suddenly hollow, she nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
She headed for the door, but instead of giving way, he caught her hand. And pulled her into his arms.
As she stiffened in shock and fought the too-tempting urge to burrow into him, he wrapped himself around her, enfolding her within the curve of his body and the strength of his arms. He splayed his hands, one spanning her waist, the other buried in her hair, holding her face tucked into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, with her lips almost touching the sensitive spot at the base of his throat.
She tried to pull away, but he held her fast, not squeezing too hard, but not letting her go either.
“Hush,” he whispered into her hair, though neither of them had made a noise. “Just give me a moment here, and take one for yourself.”
If she fought, he would let her go, she knew. And she should fight. She should yank away and tell him that it wasn’t fair for him to reach for her now, when he’d pushed her away so many other times before. She should tell him to make a godsdamned choice, that he either wanted her or he didn’t, that she couldn’t handle seeing desire in him one moment, distance the next.
She should tell him that she would be his partner in whatever way he needed her in order to gain the Triad magic, but only because it was her duty, that if it were up to her, she would walk away, not look back, because he was the root of her problem, not the branches of its answer.
Instead, she burrowed in. And for a minute, she let herself hang on tight.
Chiapas Mountain Highlands Mexico Rabbit whooped and grabbed the holy-shit strap as Cheech—his and Myrinne’s driver-slash-guide, who was in his midteens and drove like a death bat out of hell—gunned the battered Land Rove
r over a mogul-sized bump and caught some air. The dirt track flattened out on the other side, and Cheech revved along the one-laner, which was barely holding its own against the fuzzy undergrowth and the vines that hung down from the overarching trees.
In the cramped backseat, Myrinne cheered.
They flashed past scatterings of goats and pigs being herded among ancient stone stelae by little kids wearing everything from T-shirts and hip-hanging denim cutoffs to hand-loomed textiles in a dizzying array of bright colors and loud patterns. When they turned a corner and Cheech eased up on the gas, so they rolled past a cluster of homes at slightly under warp speed, Rabbit saw the same juxtaposition of modern and traditional materials, with some of the round pole buildings capped with huano thatch made of palm fronds and grass, others roofed in tin.
“Upgrades?” he said, nodding to the metal roofing.
“Nonoptional,” Myrinne corrected. “The contractors building the so-called ‘green’ resorts have clear-cut so much of the native vegetation that several of the major palm species have wound up federally protected.”
“Thank you, Fodor’s Guide to Mayan Villages,” he intoned, but grinned at her from the front, where he rode shotgun.
“It’s called ‘Google’ and ‘getting the lay of the land.’ You should try it sometime.” She smiled sweetly, but her dark brown eyes sparkled in challenge.
Her dark hair was slicked back in a twist that left her neck and shoulders bare above a skimpy tube top, though the goods were modestly covered—sort of—with a filmy white button-down that she’d tucked into a pair of low-riding cutoffs. They had started out as jeans, but she had scissored and frayed them midthigh when she and Rabbit had wound up staying down south a couple of days longer than originally planned. For today’s adventure, she had skipped her sexy woven sandals in favor of lace-up boots more suitable to bumming around the mountains, but even though Rabbit couldn’t see it, he knew she was wearing the ruby red toe ring he’d bought her the other day.
And, as always, she wore the promise ring he’d given her the year before. He got a hard charge out of that, one that was admittedly harder because of all the looks she’d been getting on their little working vacation. He knew it made him a “guy”—in his head he heard the word in her voice, with a sneer—but seeing the way other men looked at her, and knowing she was with him, heart and soul . . . that mattered.
“Gods, you’re hot.” So hot, in fact, that he was starting to sweat in the lightweight long-sleeve shirt he’d worn to hide his forearm marks. He hadn’t exactly forgotten how flat-out gorgeous she was, but when they were at Skywatch, it was easy to lose track of how much exponentially hotter she was than most everyone else in the universe. Any second now and he’d be drooling.
Her teeth flashed, but she raised an eyebrow and shifted her eyes in Cheech’s direction, as the Rover cleared the little village and the pedal hit the metal once again. “Going polytheistic on me?” In other words: Watch yourself. We’re supposed to be normal gringos.
He covered the wince with a chuckle. “More like going native. This place feels . . . familiar. Like I wouldn’t mind staying for a while.”
That earned him a tolerant-seeming “stupid-ass tourist” look from Cheech, but it was the gods’ honest truth.
Rabbit had been to dozens of centuries-old ruin sites, ranging from tourist traps to magic-shielded Nightkeeper temples, but although he’d gotten power buzzes from plenty of the sacred sites, he’d never stepped into one and thought, I know this place. I belong here. Yet ever since they’d told Strike a couple of half-truths and set out from Cancún for San Cristóbal, and from there up into the mountains, that sensation had been growing steadily.
It was like he could breathe up here in the mountains. Like things made sense. He’d barely needed the directions they’d gotten in San Cristóbal to reach the foothill village, not just because the road system thinned out to few options, but because he’d instinctively known where to go.
The same thing had happened in the village itself. He’d parked the rental, ensured its safety with a couple of bribes and some low-grade mind-bending, and then led Myrinne out into the strange mix of old stone and bright cloth like his feet knew where they were going, even if he didn’t.
Myrinne had gawked and lost herself in the first market they had come across. She had haggled delightedly over a brightly patterned scarf and a pair of rope-and-leather sandals, using a stumbling mix of the Spanish she’d picked up quickly at UT and the old-school Mayan trading language she’d absorbed at Skywatch, which bore zero resemblance to the modern dialects. Most of the locals had understood the Spanish far better than the other, but Rabbit had stood back and paid attention, picking out three men and one woman who had all gopher-popped their heads when they heard the ancient words.
A quick sift of their minds—very low-level, tight-beam magic he didn’t think Iago could sense—
had revealed that two of them had studied the trading language as part of the new revival movement.
The other two, both men, recognized a few of the words from a dialect spoken high up in the mountains, in a small hamlet called Oc Ajal.
It wasn’t exactly the “Ox Ajal” Jox had remembered Red-Boar mentioning as the name of the village where he’d stayed around the time of Rabbit’s birth, but it was damned close. More, some discreet questions revealed that there were rumors of dark magic connected with Oc Ajal. Which made sense if Rabbit—half Xibalban, half Nightkeeper—had been conceived there.
It might’ve seemed like a terminally stupid idea for him and Myrinne to travel alone to a remote village that could be enemy territory. But although Rabbit’s old man might’ve been a PTSD-zonked asshole, he’d been a company man. He wouldn’t have visited the place—or left it standing—if it had been dangerous or against the tenets of the Nightkeepers.
And besides, Rabbit had already mentioned Oc Ajal to Strike—not in relation to Red-Boar, but because of the potential connection between the Triad magic and the village’s name, which meant
“thrice manifested.” He’d even passed along the rumors that the villagers worshipped Xibalba.
Strike had filed the info with a “thanks, we’ll put it on the to-do list,” and Rabbit had figured his ass was covered. He and Myrinne were just going to look around, anyway. If there was anything doing up at Oc Ajal, they had promised each other they would call for backup, pronto.
Of the two men who had known of the village, one had been far too interested in Myrinne. The other had been Cheech, who had been perfectly happy to overcharge a couple of gringos to take them up to Oc Ajal and play translator.
Rabbit had stuck pretty close to the truth, saying that his father had recently died, and in going through his things they had discovered notes suggesting that he might have family up in Oc Ajal.
Technically, Red-Boar hadn’t kept any souvenirs of that period of his life, unless Rabbit counted himself. But the rest was pretty accurate. And it had a fist of nerves riding low in his gut, tightening with every passing mile.
“Hey.” Myrinne leaned forward against her seat belt to give his arm a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t freak. Whatever happens next is out of our hands. We’ve just got to let it play out, you know?”
He took a deep breath that did zilch to quell his urge to have Cheech pull over so he could barf in the undergrowth. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Cheech had been following the exchange but staying discreetly silent. Rabbit knew it was intentional because he’d kept a light link with the kid, so he could pick up big thoughts and emotions but not details, and hopefully get some warning if their driver—or his friends—were planning to roll the gringos for their wallets. So far, so good, though. There was no hint of duplicity as Cheech said, “We will reach the village soon, in five or ten minutes.” His English was schoolroom-perfect and a little stilted, but it was still way better than Rabbit could do in anything other than English. He knew a few dozen spell words by heart, and that was about it.
“Thanks.” Rabbit glanced at Myrinne, and took a deep breath. “Well, here goes nothing.”
“I’ve got your back.”
“That’s one of the few things I’ve never doubted.” The backup was way more than figurative too; her shoulder bag held a pair of lightweight nine-millimeter ACPs loaded with jade-tipped bullets, along with spare clips. One of the many benefits of ’porting over the border rather than flying was the ease of getting arms down south. Granted, it meant they would have to ’port back, because customs tended to get pissy when U.S. citizens tried to reenter the country without there being any evidence of them having ever left. But he and Myrinne both had their satellite phones and panic buttons, so they were covered there too.
He’d done his best to think things through and be smart about this. Now, like she said, they would just have to let things play out.
A few minutes later, Cheech eased up on the gas as they came to a bend in the narrow dirt track, then braked to coast into a wide, tree-flanked circle of packed dirt where the road dead-ended. Two seventies-era F-150s and a VW Bug—the old kind—were parked in a neat row. Cheech added the Rover onto the end.
When he cut the engine, the world seemed to go preternaturally silent for a few seconds. Then there was a series of birdcalls—not the parrot screeches typical of the lowland rain forests, but rather the high, challenging cries of raptors: hawks, maybe, or even eagles.
The sound shivered along Rabbit’s skin, kindling his blood and touching his warrior’s talent. His surroundings snapped into clearer focus as his senses expanded.
He could feel Myrinne’s nervous optimism on his behalf, Cheech’s idle musing on whether he could soak his passengers for a second fee to drive them back down to the market village . . . and in the near distance, a few dozen people he perceived as pinpoint glows of consciousness.
To his surprise, he didn’t feel the hum of energy that would indicate the proximity of a power sink, whether natural or man-made. Both dark and light magi tended to live near power sinks; Skywatch itself was built near the remains of a Chacoan pueblo, and Iago’s hideouts had gravitated to well-
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