The elder’s face was slack, his skin gray. But there was something strange about the body’s waxy stillness. Who had he been, really? He had denied using dark magic, but he had put himself inside Rabbit’s mind despite the protective wards around Skywatch, and now his corpse was enshrouded in power.
A quiver ran through Rabbit. Had the elder somehow left him a message using the dark magic?
“I need to take a closer look at the spell,” he said into the strained silence that surrounded the grisly scene.
He halfway expected the king to no-fucking-way him. But Strike just looked at him for a moment, expression unreadable. Then he nodded. “Go ahead. But be careful, and pull the hell out if it feels wrong.”
“Will do.” He glanced at Myrinne. “You’ll keep an eye on me?”
She smiled crookedly. “Always.”
But Rabbit didn’t tap into the strange-feeling dark magic right away. Instead, he took a deep breath and faced Strike squarely. “We were wrong to go behind your back, and we’re going to have to live with the consequences of that. But you’re wrong to put the rest of it on us. Iago sent the soldiers. He’s the enemy. Not Myrinne and me.”
A muscle pulsed at the corner of Strike’s jaw, but he said only, “You went looking for Xibalban magic in the highlands. You found it. Now fucking do something useful with it.”
Raw, hurting anger flared deep in Rabbit’s gut, but instead of lashing out, he tamped it down, nodded stiffly. “If that’s the way you want it.”
Taking a deep breath, he centered himself, making sure his magic was turned inward rather than outward, and he wouldn’t accidentally open the hell-link. Then he stretched out his hand and laid it flat on the outer edge of the dark magic that surrounded the elder.
Power, brownish and faintly greasy, prickled along his skin and rattled through his body . . . but it didn’t invade him, didn’t force its way inside and try to take over. It was just . . . magic.
Letting his mind sink into the spell, he followed the power flow as it encircled Saamal’s body and swirled down into the open chest cavity, where it pooled, pulsing in an asynchronous rhythm.
Rabbit let his hand follow the path his mind had taken, skimming along the old man’s outstretched limbs, over his face, and finally to the place where his heart had been. When he touched the pulsing, discordant knot of power, it shuddered. And so did the body.
More, for a second he could’ve sworn he saw the ghostly image of Saamal, alive and well, standing beside it.
“Fuck me. It moved!” Strike jerked Myrinne back a step and brought up his shield. The Nightkeeper magic sparked red-gold where it intersected with the dark-magic spell.
Saamal’s body went limp as the dark magic drained away from the chest cavity, attracted by its opposite, dark to light, negative to positive.
“Back off,” Rabbit snapped. “You’re messing with the balance, and I can handle the dark stuff.”
What was more, he thought he knew what he was looking at, though not how the elder had managed it.
He was a little surprised when the king complied without argument, falling back and taking Myrinne with him. “Be careful,” Strike said in quiet warning. “Iago knows you inside and out, literally. This could be the trap.”
Rabbit shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think the old man used the magic to tether his soul to his body after death.” If he concentrated, he could almost make out the ghost standing beside the corpse.
“I think he sent the nightmare to summon me here, knowing I wear the hellmark but have no allegiance to Iago.”
“If he had the chops for that level of magic, why didn’t he reveal himself when you were here before?” Strike pressed.
“Beats the hell out of me.” He had a few suspicions, though, none of them good.
With Strike out of range, the dark magic flowed back into its original pattern, and the power bundle in the old man’s chest cavity began pulsing again. But it was far weaker than it had been before, as if the encounter with the Nightkeeper magic had nullified part of the spell. This time when Rabbit touched the knotted dark magic, the corpse didn’t move.
“There’s something going on here.” He described the power flow to Strike, the way it kept pulsing in Saamal’s chest, unfocused and losing steam. “I think he died before he could finish the spell. If I could just—”
“No fucking way,” Strike interrupted. “So far all I’ve heard here is a bunch of wishful thinking.”
“You saw the body move.”
“I need more than that before I let you use dark magic.”
Trust me, Rabbit wanted to say, but didn’t, because he had a feeling he and Strike might’ve passed the point of no return on that front. But while he had betrayed Strike’s trust by not telling him about the visit to Oc Ajal, he’d done way worse to Saamal and the villagers.
“You want proof? Fine. Keep your eyes on the left side of the body.” Fixing his attention on the barely perceptible ghost image, he sent what little dark magic he had left into the wavering shape.
Nothing happened. Then, slowly, Saamal’s ghost became visible as a translucent shadow standing beside the open-chested corpse.
“Holy. Shit.” Strike stared, jaw working. Then he nodded stiffly. “Okay. What do you need? You want an uplink?”
“Not with you guys. I want Michael.” At the king’s sharp look, Rabbit turned up his palms in a
“What the hell else can I do?” gesture. “I need dark magic, not light, and he’s the only one who comes close. Lucius said the old rituals used to split the muk into its dark and light halves, right? Well, I’ve got both bloodlines in me, and I wear both marks. I might be able to take Michael’s magic, divide it into light and dark, and funnel the dark half into Saamal.”
“Might be,” Strike repeated ominously.
Rabbit met his eyes and did something he almost never did. He said, “Please.”
The king stayed silent for a long moment. Then he nodded. “Fine. We’ll try it.” He got on the radio and recalled the entire team, his body language stiff and annoyed.
While they waited for the others, Rabbit met Myrinne’s eyes. She gave him a covert thumbs-up and the special smile she reserved just for him, which smoothed out some of the nerves that were digging into him harder by the minute. He sent her a wink of thanks. And as the others converged, he said a small, directionless prayer: Please, gods, don’t let this be a trap.
He didn’t think it was, but Iago knew him too well. Better, it seemed some days, than he knew himself.
“I need a ten-foot radius,” he said. “Except for Michael. I need you in here.” Quickly, Rabbit explained what was going on, and what he was going to try. As he did, Saamal’s ghost faded entirely; he hoped to hell it wasn’t all the way gone. When Michael came up beside him, he said, “I need you to boost me with the smallest trickle of muk you can manage.” Which was a little like trying to plug a reading light into a nuclear power plant—it might work . . . or it might blow the lamp right the fuck up. And he was the lamp.
“You’re sure about this?”
“Yes.” No.
At a nod of agreement from Strike, Michael moved around behind Rabbit and gripped his shoulders, the way he did when he balanced Sasha’s chu’ul magic. “You ready?”
Rabbit nodded. “Bring it.”
Michael brought it, all right. Silver power slammed into Rabbit, searing from his shoulders to the ends of his fingers and toes and back again. Pain ripped through him and he hissed out a breath.
“Too much?” Michael asked, his voice rocky with the effort of squelching the power to a thin trickle.
“I’ll deal.” After the first sledgehammer blow the pain leveled off, then warmed to something closer to pleasure. Magic twined through Rabbit, the silver becoming braided strands of brown and red-gold, dark and light magic intertwined. “Okay,” he breathed, peripherally aware that the others were fixated on him, waiting for him to do something amazing.
Well, he was go
dsdamned well trying.
Slowly at first, and then with growing confidence, he separated the strands with fingers of thought; he sent the light magic into the back of his brain, where his Nightkeeper talents resided. Then he put his hand once more inside Saamal’s open chest cavity, where his heart should have been, and channeled the dark magic to that point.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the dark power curled around his hand, taking the shape of his fist and becoming almost tangible. Within the bundled magic, he felt a flutter. A pulse. Another.
The throbbing gained in rhythm and intensity as he channeled more dark magic into Saamal. He could almost hear the pulses become a twofold beat: lub dub, lub dub. It was fucking working.
What was more, the ghost became visible once more as a dark shadow beside the body. And, as Rabbit continued to feed the dark magic into the half-finished spell, the ghostly image started drifting down to align with the corpse.
“Come on, old man,” he said under his breath. “You must’ve stuck around for a reason.”
“Ho-ly shit,” Patience whispered from the other side of the fire pit, where she and Brandt stood shoulder to shoulder.
There was enough of his old crush left that he got a buzz off her gasp. But in the split second he was distracted, the magic built inside him too quickly, threatening his control. A shimmer of red-gold magic leaked through the connection, making the ghost writhe with a soundless scream.
“Shit!” Rabbit yanked back the light magic and tried to send it toward his talents, but his usual reserves were already beyond full.
“Let off some steam,” Michael warned in a low voice. “You’ve got to keep the balance between light and dark.”
“Right.” He couldn’t pour dark magic into the elder without bleeding off an equal amount of light magic. But where was he supposed to put it?
Fire, came the immediate instinctual answer. Light this place up in a pyre that all the gods will see.
But the thought brought a twist of nausea and the image of the pole buildings burning with people inside. Smoke clogged his throat and sinuses, smelling of charred flesh. No, he thought. Not fire. Too much had burned there already. With his mind-bending blocked by the circlet, he was left with his smallest talent, that of low-level telekinesis, but what—
“Give it to me,” Jade said unexpectedly. When Lucius no-fucking-way’d her, she waved him off.
“Hear me out. There’s a strange sort of pattern here, some sort of concealment spell. I can’t get a handle on it, though. I need a boost to get a better look.”
Rabbit held out a hand. “Free magic,” he rasped. “Onetime offer, first come, first served.”
At Strike’s nod, Jade moved forward. The moment she took his hand, Rabbit felt a huge rush of relief as the light magic left him and headed for her, and the painful pressure inside him eased.
Then something strange happened: The air around them all took on a gleam of red-gold, then a hint of silver.
“Jade?” Strike said in soft warning.
“There’s a cloaking spell permeating the village,” she said, voice tight with effort. “It’s not the normal sort of magic, but I think that I can reverse it if I just—” The light magic surged through Rabbit and then drained away to almost nothing as she leaned on their link. “There it is. I think if I . .
.”
A psychic shock wave rolled through Rabbit, and both the dark and light connections winked out of existence. Boom, gone. Like they had never been.
“Jade, no!” he cried, but it was already too late. Whatever she had done, it had cut his connection to Saamal. He couldn’t sense the dark-magic spell anymore, couldn’t hear the lub-dub heartbeat that had been going strong only moments before.
But something was happening.
“What the hell?” Michael breathed, staring out into the forests, where a shimmer of magic moved in the distance, working its way around the village, spiraling inward.
Rabbit turned to follow the movement, aware that the others were doing the same as the incandescence became more visible, skipping from one place to another, getting closer.
“It’s coming from the bodies we found in the woods,” Sven said. He pointed ahead of the moving shimmer. “The next one is right about there.” Seconds later, magic flared near where he’d just indicated.
After that, the spell—or whatever the hell it was—entered the village, hazing the air around the burned-out pole buildings where human remains were mixed with char. The magic moved one to the next, ever inward, until it reached the men lying near the central pole building and the woman with the blood-spattered grindstone. When the shimmer cleared, the woman was taller and paler, with honey-
colored hair where it had been dark a second earlier. The men too were bigger and burlier, and had lighter hair.
Before Rabbit could even begin to comprehend what he’d just seen, the shimmer coalesced around Saamal’s body. The air around the corpse shimmered and shifted, and then the body grew, its limbs and torso elongating with strange, Gumby-ish plasticity, then thickening with ropy layers of muscle gone soft with old-man flab. The elder’s face broadened and paled slightly, while the skin of his unmarked forearm darkened in a familiar pattern.
When the air stabilized, the dead man was well over six feet tall, big and tough looking. And he wore a black quatrefoil on his inner right wrist.
“Fuck. Me,” Rabbit said.
He turned away from Saamal, trying to stem the tide of grief, guilt, and anger. He’d found the right village, after all, but he hadn’t realized it. How had the old man tricked him? How—shit. It didn’t matter now, did it?
“You were right,” Strike said, his tone indecipherable. “They were dark magi. They’ve been hiding up here all this time.”
“Until I led Iago straight to them,” Rabbit said bitterly. “They must’ve deserted from the Order of Xibalba and broken their links to the magic.”
“Then who cast the cloaking spell?” Strike asked.
“I don’t know. But why else would their marks be black if they weren’t deserters?”
“You’ve got it backwards,” said a rasping voice, coming from behind Rabbit.
The only one back there was Saamal.
Blood draining from his head, leaving him woozy, Rabbit turned and looked down at the body. Oh, holy hell. The spell had worked, after all.
The elder’s eyes were lit with a parody of life. His body remained pale and motionless, his chest open and full of congealed blood, but the pumping throb of oily brown magic had returned his soul to his body.
But any victory Rabbit might have felt deflated at the sight of the terrible pain and soul-deep loss that clouded the elder’s eyes. His soul might have returned to his body, but no amount of magic could undo the villagers’ murders and the destruction of Oc Ajal.
Rabbit’s chest suddenly felt as hollow as the empty splay of Saamal’s ribs. He was aware of the others gathering close, of Myrinne gripping his shoulder in support, but those inputs were peripheral.
He sank to his knees beside the dead man, started to roll the nearest mortar stone off him, only to stop when he realized that the stones were woven into the reanimation spell, that they were part of what was keeping him alive.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words emerging through lips that felt numb and strange, like they weren’t part of him anymore. “I didn’t mean to tell Iago where—” He broke off. “Wait. You speak English?”
Saamal’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you want to know right now?”
“Christ, Rabbit.” Strike crouched down in the elder’s line of sight. “I’m Striking-Jaguar.” He paused a beat, testing.
The elder glanced at Strike’s forearm, then at the edge of the circular hunab ku visible beneath the sleeve of his dark tee, which marked him as the Nightkeepers’ king. “Names aren’t important right now, nor is rank. What matters now is that you listen to me, and believe what your ancestors would not. That is why I called the young crossove
r here.” His eyes went to Rabbit. “And used the last of my power to keep my soul tethered beyond its mortality.”
“Crossover? Oh, you mean half blood.” Actually, Rabbit decided he liked “crossover” better.
“Because I can use light and dark magic.” When the elder nodded shallowly, he pressed, “If you know who and what I am, then tell me about my mother. Who was she?” Oh, gods. His eyes tractor-beamed to the woman with the grindstone. “Was she here? Did the makol kill her? And why didn’t you tell me who you were?” His voice rose, edging toward his boyhood tenor. “We could’ve brought you in, could’ve protected—” Strike cut him off. “Let him talk. I’m guessing his clock is ticking.”
“That is true, jaguar king. My time on this plane is limited.” The elder closed his eyes, as if composing himself. When he opened them again, some of the grief and pain was blocked behind a warrior’s focus. To Rabbit, he said, “I did not reveal myself to you because my people are your enemies, and vice versa. Or rather, we were your enemies. This village housed the last members of the true Order of Xibalba, users of dark magic and guardians of the sky barrier on behalf of the dark gods.”
Rabbit didn’t care about sides right now—he wanted to know what happened when Red-Boar visited the village, damn it. But he held himself in check as the elder described how the members of the order were the Nightkeepers’ opposites, dedicated to preventing what they called the “sky demons” from tearing through the barrier and overrunning the earth plane during the end time.
Strike said bluntly, “No offense, but since there’s no fucking way you’re converting us, we don’t need a philosophy lesson except and unless it pertains to what we’re dealing with right now. Tell me about Iago. He’s one of yours, isn’t he? Or he was.” The king was strung tight, his expression flat and unreadable.
“His father, Werigo, was one of us, yes.” The elder’s voice was thinning, but when Michael started forward, the old man shook his head. “No, muk wielder, no power on this plane can keep me soul-
Blood Spells n-5 Page 24
