“A man can’t be himself when he’s fighting something inside him,” Michael said from up in the kitchen.
“You would know.” That wasn’t a joke, either. Michael had fought through his own hidden demons not long ago.
“Yeah. And I’m here if you ever need to decompress.” The other man grinned evilly. “We could go out to the range. That usually works for me.”
The offer was strangely appealing, though there was no question that Michael would kick his ass on the target course. “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.” Aware that the others had gone back to their conversations, Brandt lowered his voice and said to Patience, “How are you doing?”
She looked away. “I’m okay. Hoping we can figure something out.”
He scanned the room. Nate and Alexis were still off guarding Anna, and Rabbit and Myrinne didn’t seem to have made it up yet. The others were all present and accounted for, though. “Anybody had any brilliant ideas yet?” he asked.
“We’re still at the pancake stage. I only just got out here myself.” She still wasn’t looking at him.
“I figured you’d been up for a while.”
“I took a cup of coffee out on the patio and watched the sunrise.” She hesitated. “It’s part of my morning routine.”
It was also something they used to do together. Now she did it alone. More, he thought he knew why she hadn’t woken him. There had been too many fresh starts over the past two and a half years, too many times when he’d promised to be there for her, only to revert. Was it any wonder she hadn’t wanted to wake him, in case he’d turned back into that guy overnight? Gods knew it’d happened before.
“Maybe I could meet you out there tomorrow morning,” he suggested casually.
Her lips curved. “It’s a date.”
It was also, he thought, a start.
“Sit,” Michael ordered, coming up behind him. “Unless you’d rather wear this?”
Seeing that he was balancing two pancake-piled plates and a couple of cups of coffee—one light, o n e black as tar—Brandt relieved him of a plate and the non-paint-peeling coffee, and followed Patience to the love seat.
As Michael and Sasha settled themselves, Strike asked Brandt, “Anything you want to add to what you told us last night?”
“Wasn’t that enough?” But Brandt knew what the king was asking. He shook his head. “I’ve got all the memories. Now it’s going to be a case of figuring out what we can do with them. If anything gels, I’ll tell you.”
“Do that.” Strike turned to Lucius, who was hacking away at something on his laptop, fingers flying. Seeing that he was in full-on glyph-geek mode and oblivious to the outside world, the king threw a balled-up napkin, bouncing it off his forehead. “Yo, Doc.”
Lucius straightened and looked around, blinking in surprise. “What? Oh, sorry. This glyph string is .
. . right. Never mind. And don’t call me Doc. My thesis defense was a train wreck.”
“Largely because the head of your committee was Xibalban.” But Strike waved the point off. “What have you got for us?”
“Is Rabbit coming?”
Strike shook his head. “He and Myrinne didn’t crash until like an hour ago. He was up late working on disguising the classified stuff in his head.”
Lucius said, “Well, send him my way when he wakes up. I think we found something that’ll help him block the mind-link.” He dug under his chair, came up with a wrapped bundle, and shook off the T-shirt wrapping to reveal a circlet of pale jade that was worked so thin that it was almost translucent.
Patience leaned forward. “What is it, some sort of necklace?”
“You’re about a foot too low.” Holding the delicate artifact carefully between his palms, Lucius said, “Turns out the tinfoil-hat wearers aren’t that far off; they’re just using the wrong material to protect their brain waves. They should be wearing jade. With this”—he set the circlet on his head, where it perched awkwardly—“the hellmagic shouldn’t be able to get through to him.”
“Nice work,” Brandt said.
Lucius removed the diadem and stared at it for a moment. “I’m still figuring out how to be an effective Prophet, obviously. Now that I’ve got this thing, it seems ridiculously obvious. You guys use jade-tipped bullets and jade grenades to neutralize creatures of dark magic, so it makes sense that something like this could work.” He paused. “We’ll need to field-test it, of course. I can’t guarantee it’ll work against Iago, given that he’s got a demon riding shotgun in his skull.”
“We’ll set something up once Rabbit’s awake,” Strike confirmed. “How did you guys do on the Akbal oath?”
Brandt was aware that Patience’s fork hesitated halfway to her mouth, then slowly lowered to her plate. He almost said, Don’t get your hopes up. Now that the memory block was fully demolished, he remembered the hours he’d spent online and in the library, researching all the religious oaths he could find, looking for a way to break them.
Lucius shook his head. “Sorry.”
Patience let out a long, slow breath. “Did you find anything?”
“No. And that doesn’t make any sense.” Lucius patted the laptop fondly. “Think about it: Akbal is an incredibly common glyph—it’s a day name, and the ancestors were all about their calendars. So going into the library search, I was figuring on getting Google bombed like whoa and damn, because even specifically asking about the ‘Akbal oath’ should’ve pulled hits from most everything related to the concepts of fealty and the calendar.” He paused and spread his hands. “Instead, I didn’t get shit, not even a bunch of random hits. Nothing in the library appears to have the words ‘Akbal’ and ‘oath’ together.”
Strike narrowed his eyes. “Does that mean the oath magic postdates the hiding of the library?”
Because their ancestors had folded the library into the barrier to keep its contents safe from the conquistadors, its knowledge cut off in the mid-fifteen-hundreds.
Lucius tipped his hand in a yes-no gesture. “Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of random hits.”
“You think the ancestors actively avoided using the term ‘Akbal oath,’” Brandt guessed.
“Yeah. Sort of a ‘he who shall not be named’ thing.” Lucius paused. “Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t help us figure out how to deal with the oath.” He paused. “I’ll keep looking.” But his voice warned, No guarantees.
Brandt grimaced. “Thanks for trying.”
Patience threaded her fingers through his and squeezed. “Don’t give up.”
“I’m not—” His voice broke, went ragged. “Damn it.”
“We have today and part of tomorrow,” Strike said. “Something’s got to break. It doesn’t make any sense that the gods came to Patience’s aid against Werigo only to turn their backs on her now.”
Brandt badly wanted to get up and pace, but he made himself stay put, next to Patience, the two of them forming a team within the team, as it should have been all along. Gripping both of her hands in his, he took a deep breath and looked at Strike. “Okay, we’ve got a day and a half. What’s the—” Plan, he was going to say, but an air-raid whoop split the air, drowning him out and kicking his adrenaline level to red alert in an instant.
The loudest, deepest sound came from the mansion intercom, but each of their pocket units emitted smaller, shriller versions of the alarm, which was keyed to the panic buttons carried by each of the residents at Skywatch.
All of who were in the room . . . except for two.
As the others flew to their feet, Jox lunged for the intercom cutoff, killed the alarms, and slapped the button to activate alarm device’s two-way feature. “What’s wrong?”
Myrinne’s voice came over the system, edged with hysteria. “You’ve got to hurry. Something’s wrong with Rabbit!”
Oc Ajal was burning.
The yellow-orange bloom of fire, usually so beautiful to Rabbit, was monstrous as it clawed at the pole buildings, eating away the thatch roofing and c
arved markings, then down through the skeletons of the structures, to the bones of the village itself.
The flames curled horribly around blackened human shapes. Other bodies were sprawled where they had fallen: A brightly dressed woman lay facedown, clutching a blood-spattered grindstone that suggested she’d died fighting. Several men lay unmoving in front of the central dwelling. A boy’s foot stuck out from behind it, and a half-grown pup lay dead nearby.
Six Aztec makol were spread around the village, carrying shields and long buzz swords across their backs as they hunted their prey.
Dark magic spat in the forest, followed by a scream that cut off abruptly. The makol didn’t react to that, just as they didn’t seem interested in the female sobs and harsh rutting noises coming from inside Saamal’s hut.
Rabbit writhed in his bed. It’s a dream, he told himself. Wake the fuck up! This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream. Iago couldn’t mind-link him through Skywatch’s wards.
Only he wasn’t seeing the carnage through Iago’s eyes.
“Let me go!” he shouted, railing against the nightmare’s grip as his vision went bouncy with forced motion. But the words came out in a stranger’s voice, in a stranger’s language, shocking Rabbit into the realization that he was seeing things through Saamal’s eyes, experiencing the attack through his perceptions.
Four makol dragged the village elder to the fire pit at the center of the village, pulled him spread-
eagled, and dumped him on the coals from the morning’s cooking fire.
He screamed as the hot embers burned through his tunic and into his skin, then again when the makol lifted the heavy mortar stones from the corn-grinding stations and dropped them onto his hands and feet, pinning him in place. But those physical agonies were far eclipsed by the agony of knowing that he’d failed his people, failed his gods. Failed his destiny.
Movement flashed in his peripheral vision as the soldiers’ leader, wearing the blue demon mask and a red-feathered cloak, moved into his line of sight and lifted a carved ceremonial knife—
“Rabbit!” The sound of his name in Myrinne’s voice was followed by a jolt of chu’ul magic, a lifeline that lassoed his consciousness and dragged him out of Saamal’s head, out of the nightmare.
He came awake screaming, “No!”
He lay spread-eagled, but his hands and feet were suddenly free of the crushing weight of the mortar stones, his back unburned.
Heart hammering, he lunged upright, saw a flash of blue and red, and hurled himself at the makol leader. He hit the bastard hard; they went down in a tangle, smashed into something wooden and sharp-cornered that didn’t jibe with the fire-pit image that was locked in his brain, and landed on a hard, flat surface that wasn’t highland dirt.
As Rabbit grappled with the disconnect, his enemy flipped him onto his back. And sat on him.
The familiarity of a move that had ended untold wrestling matches during Rabbit’s youth—and the sudden lack of oxygen as all the air left his lungs under pressure from two-hundred-plus pounds of Nightkeeper—cracked the barrier between nightmare and reality and brought him slamming back into himself. He lay still for a moment, gasping through sinuses that were full of the stink of smoke, charred flesh, and blood.
Strike’s face swam into view, looking concerned as hell.
Rabbit managed to get out a word: “Uncle.”
The king’s expression eased some, though it stayed worried as he shifted his weight off Rabbit’s torso and rose to crouch over him. “What the hell happened? That was no dream. We had to send Sasha in after you.”
Vision clearing as oxygen scrubbed away the last lingering shreds of confusion, Rabbit saw that most of the magi and several winikin were crowded into his and Myrinne’s bedroom.
Urgency beat through him with the cadence of running feet and the screams of the hunted as he blurted, “We have to get our asses to Oc Ajal, right fucking now.”
A strangled, startled noise came from Jox.
Strike turned on him. “You know what he’s talking about?”
“Not exactly.” But the winikin’s face flushed.
“We’re wasting time,” Rabbit interrupted. He held out his hand to Strike. “I’ll show you.” When Strike hesitated, he pressed, “No tricks, no lies. I promise.”
“Which means you’ve tricked and/or lied to me recently.” The king’s expression darkened, but he reached out and took his hand.
“You need to see this.” Through the touch link, Rabbit sent a compressed thought stream straight into Strike’s head.
He started with Myrinne pointing out that his old man wouldn’t have slept with the enemy and suggesting that his mother’s people might be a different sect of the Xibalbans, that they might be potential allies. Then he showed Strike how Jox had dropped the name of the village, moved on to his and Myrinne’s visit to the village and the whole-lot-of-nothing they had found. He finished with the images of the burning village, the bodies, and the village elder spread out for sacrifice in the central fire pit that symbolized the entrance to the underworld.
When the download ended, Strike blinked at Rabbit for a few seconds. Then his features flooded with a rage so profound that Rabbit flinched away from him, ducking a little.
Strike’s voice went deadly cold. “I’m not going to punch you out. I’m tempted as all hell, but I want you awake for this . . . and I want you to remember, every fucking second, that whatever happened in that village was your fault.”
“Hey!” Myrinne got right in his face, eyes flashing. “Back off. He was trying to do the right thing.”
“Oh? And what’s your excuse?” But then Strike held up a hand. “Fuck it. Later.” Refocusing on Rabbit, he grated, “That dream punched through the compound’s wards, but it wasn’t Iago sending it.
How could you see all that through the old man’s eyes?”
“How can I do half of what I do?” Rabbit said, voice raw. “I’m a freak.” His stomach churned on a sharp-edged mix of grief and anger, coated over with a huge, crushing load of guilt—because, godsdamn it, Strike was right. Iago must’ve found out about the village from being inside his head.
But why bother to send the makol? There hadn’t been anything in the village worth the effort.
Unless there had been, and he’d missed it.
Shit. Making himself meet Strike’s glare, he said, “Are we going or not?”
“We’re going. Let’s hope to hell it was just a nightmare.” But Strike’s expression suggested that he didn’t think they were going to get so lucky.
Rabbit didn’t hold out much hope either.
“It could be a trap,” Michael pointed out. “We can’t be the only ones thinking in terms of using something—or some one—as bait.”
“Then we spring the trap,” Strike said, expression grim. “And we give Iago hell.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Oc Ajal, Mexico It wasn’t a trap. In fact, by the time the Nightkeepers ’ported in, wearing full battle gear and armed to the teeth, there was no sign of the makol. But it wasn’t a false alarm either.
The village didn’t just look as bad as Rabbit had feared; it looked worse.
All but two of the pole buildings had collapsed to smoldering cinders of wood and flesh, and the stench of charred meat permeated the air. The village was silent save for the sputter of smoke and ash.
Even the surrounding forest seemed to have been struck dumb by the slaughter. And there, in the center of it all, Saamal lay splayed out in the fire pit with his hands and feet weighted by millstones, his head lolling on one of the large rocks that had probably been used for seating, and his chest laid open, ghastly and broken-ribbed where the makol leader had ripped out his heart.
Myrinne made a sound of distress and moved closer to Rabbit’s side. Strike hadn’t suggested leaving her behind; he was punishing both of them.
Michael, Sasha, and Sven moved off to secure the perimeter and search the forest, while Patience, Br
andt, Lucius, Leah, and Jade headed off to search the few buildings that remained intact.
Strike started toward Saamal’s body, gesturing to Rabbit and Myrinne without looking at them.
“Come on.”
Rabbit wished he could overload to numbness, as he had done when he’d stumbled over his father’s body lying in the tunnels beneath Chichén Itzá. Instead, he remained painfully aware of the sound of Myrinne’s quiet sniffles, and the heavy weight of grief and guilt that pressed on him, making it hard to breathe.
Breathing got even more difficult when they got close enough to the corpse to catch the stink of blood, entrails, and fear. The funk made Rabbit’s skin itch. Flies had found the corpse; the rattle of their wings sounded like— Shit.
“Stay back,” he snapped. “The body is covered with dark magic.”
Strike, who had been reaching out to close the elder’s half-mast eyes in a gesture of respect, yanked his hand back, then scowled. “I don’t feel anything.”
For that matter, Rabbit hadn’t caught on until he was practically on top of the corpse. Concentrating on the faint rattle, he stretched out his hand to probe the spell. “It’s not the same as the stuff Iago uses,” he said after a moment. “It’s . . . I don’t know. Softer, maybe. More passive.”
“I thought Lucius said the thing on your head was supposed to block hellmagic.”
Startled by the reminder, Rabbit touched the circlet Lucius had given him just before they all left Skywatch. He’d forgotten he was wearing it, largely because the moment he’d put it on, light magic had flared and the stone had gone fluid and soft. When the magic faded, the crown had become a thin, flexible strand that was shaped perfectly for his skull and lay almost invisibly along his buzzed-down hairline.
“He said the circlet blocks mind-bending at a distance,” he said. “I can use my other talents, but Iago can’t get through to me as long as I’m wearing it.”
“We hope.”
“Yeah.” Rabbit stared down at the corpse. I’m so fucking sorry, he thought. I didn’t mean . . . Shit, this was no time for excuses. It was time to respect the dead. And, gods willing, avenge them.
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