Setting their knives aside, they dressed in unspoken accord, staying close to each other, not seeming to need words to communicate the basics. He was achingly aware of her, attuned to the way she moved like both a fighter and a woman, capable yet feminine, and entirely at home in her own body.
The fading penlight emitted a muted glow that made her look like an angel, while the fact that she carried a combat knife, and the suppressed excitement he saw in her eyes, called to something inside him.
Red-gold power flared, this time inside him, filling him with hot, hard purpose and an unfamiliar, almost atavistic possessiveness. We’re meant for each other, said something deep inside him, with a certainty that swept aside all other considerations.
Closing the small distance that separated them, so they stood toe-to-toe at the edge of the underground lagoon, he took her hands and lifted her knuckles to his lips in a gesture that should have seemed foolish, but didn’t.
“Before I saw you, I didn’t believe in—” Love at first sight, he was going to say, but the “L” word jammed in his throat, blocked by the part of him that knew he couldn’t go there.
Fuck me, he thought as his emotions revved. What the hell did he think he was doing?
On one level, his analytic self knew he’d been caught by a surge of sex magic, and that he needed to freaking watch himself. On another level, though, he wished, more than ever before, that he could go back and undo what he’d done. But he had scoured the myths and magic of a dozen cultures looking for a way, and come up empty. There was no way out. And if the magic was coming back online, that was going to be a big fucking problem.
“You don’t believe in what?” She was gripping his hands, forming a link he didn’t want to break . . . but had to.
He lowered their joined hands, easing his hold. “I don’t think I really believed I would ever meet another mage, or that the barrier might come back online. We don’t know what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next . . . but I want you to know that I’ll do my damnedest to get us both through it safely.” Because the two of them being there together, on that night, couldn’t be a coincidence.
They both knew that wasn’t what he’d originally intended to say. She didn’t call him on it, though.
Instead, she crouched to retrieve their knives, which lay side by side on the sand. Straightening, she offered him the butterfly knife, holding it by its two-edged blade. “That goes both ways, bucko. You’ve got my back. I’ve got yours. Deal?”
Their eyes locked and he nodded. “Deal.” But he intended to make damn sure he took the brunt of whatever came next. He’d been raised human enough to want to protect his lover, whether or not she wanted to be protected.
His lover. Gods.
He moved to take the knife from her, but instead of letting go, she closed her grip around the blade as he pulled it back.
He jolted. “Are you okay?” He reached for her, then stopped himself. “Shit. Dumb question.” He’d blooded himself dozens of times. But he’d never blooded anyone else.
She opened her hand to show the double slices where both edges of the blade had cut her, freeing blood to well up, looking black in the darkness. With her other hand, she offered her knife, this time blade first.
He shook his head and lifted the butterfly knife, which was wet with her blood. “I’ll use this one.”
Setting the point to his palm, he gouged along his lifeline. Pain flared in his hand and up his arm, morphing to a buzz of heat. There was something erotic about sharing her knife, her blood. And that was the Nightkeeper in him talking, not the human veneer.
Meeting her eyes, he grated, “Well, here goes nothing.”
“Forget that. Here goes everything .” She faced out over the black lagoon.
The flashlight had finally died, leaving them lit only by the starlight that came in from up above as he stood beside her, so they were hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. They held their hands out over the swirling pool and let the sacrificial blood fall into the water. When the first droplet hit, the buzz in Brandt’s veins altered its pitch, seeming now to hang in the air around them.
A glance at Patience showed that she felt it—heard it?—too. He nodded back with what he hoped was an expression of reassurance rather than the greasy nerves that had sprung up at the realization that this was it. This was what he’d spent his entire life preparing for, without really believing it was going to happen.
He was about to bust his magical cherry. Holy shit.
He took a deep breath, aware that Patience was doing the same thing beside him. Together, they said the magic words: “Pasaj och.”
Warmth bloomed in his chest and rocketed outward, suffusing his body. His senses expanded: He heard the imperceptible lap of fresh water against stone and smelled how it went slightly brackish near the tunnel, where a submerged conduit must run out to the ocean. His skin prickled, sensitizing to the warmth of Patience’s body on one side of him, the chill of the night air on the other. He tasted their lovemaking and smelled the tang of blood that hung between them, around them. His night vision sharpened too, making him squint against the sudden gleam of starlight. It reflected off the water and sand, and off the stones around them, where tricks of the light formed strange patterns.
But that was all that happened.
He didn’t leave his body to enter the barrier, didn’t see or feel a change in the faint red-gold sparkle.
Disappointment thrummed through him. “Shit. I guess we can’t jack in without a proper bloodline ceremony, after all.”
As babies, their lack of connection to the barrier had saved their lives. Now, though, it meant that the magic didn’t recognize them.
“Maybe not, but something happened.” Patience’s attention was fixed on the back of the cave.
He followed her gaze. “I don’t—” He broke off as the reflected starlight and shadows rearranged themselves in his mind, and excitement jolted. “Holy fucking shit.”
What had been light and shadows moments earlier had become the silver-limned outline of a doorway: two heavily carved pillars connected by a linteled archway, with stygian blackness beyond.
The carved details were obscured by distance, but there was no doubt that the doorway was Mayan-
Nightkeeper in style . . . and it hadn’t been there before. Even as lost in each other as they had been, they would’ve seen it by the light of the fireworks. Which meant they had called it with the spell words, even though they lacked their bloodline marks.
The magic—at least that much of it—was working. Wonder thrummed in his veins. Anticipation.
He stared at the doorway, wanting more than anything to get his ass through it and see what was on the other side. “What do you think?”
Her teeth flashed, reflected starlight. “Stupid question.”
“Sorry.” And she was right; it was their duty as Nightkeepers—trained or not, bloodline marked or not—to figure out what the hell was going on, and whether it signaled the beginning of the end. More, they were programmed for this shit, bred and born for it. No way either of them was turning away from the adventure.
Given his choice under human ethics—and, hell, as a Nightkeeper male whose body was still warm from hers—he would’ve left her behind in the cave. But he didn’t have any reason to think she wouldn’t be able to handle herself. So despite his natural inclination to protect the shit out of her, he nodded. “Let’s go.”
Excitement kindled in her eyes. “I’ve got your six.” She patted his ass. “And a delightful six it is.”
“Don’t let the ogling distract you.”
“I’m a chick. We multitask.” But she was all business as they set off, skirting the lagoon to approach the silver-limned doorway, knives at the ready.
As they approached, the starlight and shadows resolved themselves into a pair of gape-mouthed serpent carvings forming the pillared uprights, with an intricate text block incised into the arch above them.
“I can’t read
the glyphs,” he admitted. “You?”
“The dots and lines are numbers.” She indicated two geometric glyphs that looked like a pair of dominoes. “As for the rest, you’ve got me. Hannah said the hieroglyphs were dropped from the curriculum a few generations ago because most of the modern-day spells were either memorized phonetically or had more to do with mental powers than spell words.”
“Woody too. Let’s hope it doesn’t say ‘abandon all hope, yadda yadda.’” Catching a whiff of something funky, Brandt narrowed his eyes, trying to make out a lumpy variation of the shadows just inside the tunnel. “No shit.”
“What?”
“Flashlights. Sort of.” He reached in, felt around, and came up with a couple of torches, a flint, and a striker. “They’re pretty low-tech, but should do the job.”
Once lit, the torches proved to be artifacts in their own right. They were made of glyph-carved bones—he tried not to wonder if they were human—that had been hollowed out and packed with a hardened, crusty substance that smelled faintly like rancid grease and flowers. The business ends were loaded with a flammable combination of plant matter he couldn’t begin to identify, glued together with a dried-out, resinlike substance.
It was all pretty crusty, but it took only a couple of tries with the flint to get the first one started, and once they were both going, they gave off decent light, very little smoke, and an earthy, not unpleasant incense.
Patience eyed hers. “How old do you think these things are?”
“No clue. Somewhere between two decades and two millennia?” There was really no way to tell right then whether the torches were ritual pieces that had been used by their parents’ generation, or if the tunnel was a relic from before the conquest. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing to think? “My gut says they’re old, though.”
“Mine too.” She lifted the slow-burning brand; the light revealed a tunnel leading away from them.
“But I’m going to file that under ‘things I can’t think about right now,’ because I’d way rather see where this goes.”
At his nod, she moved through the doorway, taking point even though she’d promised to watch his six.
No hardship, Brandt thought, and followed her in. He kept his senses wide-open, including the unfamiliar, buzzing level of the magic, and stayed focused as Woody had taught him. Beneath that, though, ran the thrill of finally doing what he’d trained for all these years . . . and the sick fear that something would go wrong and Patience would pay the price.
Not this time, he thought grimly. Never again.
The limestone walls of the tunnel were marked with softly rounded ripples, suggesting that it had originally been the track of an underground stream. The floor was wider than the arched ceiling, with tool marks showing where the surface beneath their feet had been widened and flattened. The walls were uncarved, but the ripples made them seem decorated nonetheless. A footpath was worn smooth along the middle.
“Lots of traffic,” Patience said.
“Makes you think it leads somewhere cool, doesn’t it?”
“Gods willing.” She glanced back at him, eyes firing. “What if—”
“ Sh! Wait.” He held up a hand when, at the edges of his perception, the magic fluctuated.
“I felt it.” Her eyes went unfocused. “Up ahead. It’s . . .” She frowned. “It doesn’t feel the same.”
“Like we’re experts?” But he wasn’t arguing. “It’s . . . darker. Greasy, almost.”
“You think it could be the Banol Kax trying to come through the barrier?”
“We’d better hope to hell it’s not.” The last time a couple of the dark lords had made it fully onto the earth plane, they had wiped out most of the Mayan Empire before the Nightkeepers—or rather one Nightkeeper, a member of the legendary Triad—had forced them back behind the barrier.
His gut fisted at the knowledge that if the dark lords had managed to tear a gap in the supposedly sealed barrier, the world was in very deep shit.
And nobody knew about it except the two of them.
He wanted to invent an excuse and send her back up to the cave, but knew she wouldn’t go. More, that was the man and the human talking. A true Nightkeeper would never put a lover above his duty.
“I’ll take point,” he announced, and moved past her.
She caught his arm. “Wait. What do we do if it is . . . you know. Them?”
Her eyes were wide with mingled excitement and nerves. She wasn’t going to back down from this fight, or any other. And in another lifetime, she would have been his mate. Damn it all to hell.
Ignoring the warnings that blared from his subconscious, he went in for a kiss. She met him halfway, gripping a fistful of his shirt to hold him close. His lips slanted across hers; their tongues touched and slid as the kiss went from hot to gentle and back again. He gathered her against him, trying to imprint the feeling in his sensory memory just in case.
Hard, hot pressure built in his chest and tightened his throat, and for a moment the buzz changed pitch and red-gold sparkled in the air.
Then he broke the kiss and eased away to meet her eyes, which had gone stormy with passion. “The gods put us here, right? I’m willing to have faith that they’ve got a plan for us.”
Or, rather, for her. They wouldn’t sacrifice her for his sins.
He hoped.
She released his collar and touched his lips with her fingertips, with a brush reminiscent of their kiss. “Then why did that feel like good-bye?”
“Not good-bye,” he lied. “Good luck.” As in, they would be damned lucky to both walk away from this if their worst fears were confirmed. But if only one of them was going to make it out, he’d make sure it was her. Given his status with the gods, she was the one the world was going to need. Not him.
She didn’t believe him; they both knew it. But they also knew this wasn’t the time for their first fight.
Instead, they got moving. She led the way, walking soft-footed. He did the same, and they ghosted along in silence for a few minutes, carefully watching for booby traps as the strange, oily-feeling magic grew stronger with every step.
In the back of his head, he was thinking, What the fuck are we doing? There’s no way that two untrained, unmarked college kids can take on a Banol Kax with a couple of five-inch blades, two torches, and a piece of flint.
But the rest of him was entirely in the moment, testing the limits of his senses, the placement of each footstep. That part of him knew that their lacking bloodline marks wasn’t entirely a negative. It meant that whatever was pumping out that strange power wouldn’t be able to sense them, at least not on the magical level.
In theory, anyway.
The tunnel curved, then curved again, and they saw a light up ahead, beyond the next bend. Brandt snuffed his torch against the tunnel wall, working not to sneeze against the puff of incense-laden smoke. Patience did the same, plunging them into a near blackness that made him acutely aware of how long the tunnel stretched behind them, and how late it was getting. How far past the actual moment of equinox would the doorway stay open? He didn’t know, didn’t have any basis for guessing, but they couldn’t turn back now.
Patience’s hand found his in the darkness. He squeezed back, trying to let the gesture convey affection, attraction, respect, reassurance, and all the other things he wanted to surround her with.
The handclasp stung, then flashed sudden warmth up his arm as his sacrificial cut aligned with hers and blood spoke to blood.
Mine, he thought as he had earlier in the day when he’d first laid eyes on her. You’re mine.
Except she wasn’t. Not in this lifetime.
Pulling away, he got ahead of her as they moved on. He might not be able to claim her or keep her, but he damn sure wasn’t letting her be the first one into a fight.
As they silently closed in on the corner, and the light beyond, his heart beat double time while his brain churned. Even if it wasn’t one of the Banol Kax up ahead—and he hoped to
hell it wasn’t—the dark lords commanded many ur-demons, like the boluntiku , six-clawed lava creatures that moved as vapor and went solid the instant before they attacked, and the makol , damned souls that could possess human hosts, turning their eyes a luminous green.
Without warning, a man’s voice rose over the humming buzz of magic, chanting in the old tongue. It sounded human, but how could they be sure? This wasn’t exactly a “know thy enemy” situation—they were making it up as they went.
When they reached the corner, Brandt’s pulse thudded in his ears as he took in the scene: Beyond the curve, a straight section of hallway ended in a sheer wall with an arched, open doorway that was set at a right angle, giving them some hope of approaching without being seen right away. Both the chanting and the light—flickering yellow-orange firelight—were coming from within.
Holding up a hand to warn Patience back, Brandt eased down the last straight stretch and popped his head around the corner, staying low.
His brain snapshotted the scene: Beyond the door was a circular chamber that looked natural, as if there had been another lagoon, now gone dry. There were two other entrances. The one opposite their position opened to another tunnel, while the middle doorway was shut with a carved stone panel.
Torches set into holes in the wall provided light and incense, and a plain altar sat against the wall, little more than a square block of stone with a shallowly curved top.
A lone man stood before the altar.
A . . . Nightkeeper?
Brandt risked another look, confirming his first impression. The guy was tall, wide-shouldered, and fair-haired. Wearing black, insignialess paramilitary gear, with a carved stone knife stuck in his leather belt, he could’ve stepped right out of one of Wood’s stories. From the looks of him, he was a good decade older than Brandt . . . and he knew his shit. He was holding his bleeding palms out over the altar, letting the blood fall in the shallow depression. His chant rose and fell with ancient intonations, the syllables seamless.
Yet the power pumping out of the room jarred dissonantly against the red-gold hum within Brandt.
Blood Spells n-5 Page 14
