“It’s this place,” Rabbit said, his voice sounding thick and strange. “Gods. What’s with this place?”
“Violence,” Lucius said. “According to some of Cortés’s men, more than a hundred thousand skulls were displayed, and the carved idols in here were fed with hearts and covered with five or six inches of clotted blood.”
“I can smell it,” Rabbit grated. “Shit. I can taste it.” But his color was getting better, his breathing coming back to normal. “Give me another second to finish blocking it out. It’s not dark magic, really, or at least not the way I used to sense it. This is . . . pain. This whole place is soaked with pain.”
“We’ve fought through pain before,” Strike said grimly. “We’ll do it again.”
Working fast, the magi uplinked. Brandt joined the circle last, taking Rabbit’s hand on one side and Patience’s on the other. He felt his powers expanding and deepening, taking sustenance from the solstice-eclipse, the teamwork of the Nightkeepers, and wide-open jun tan bond that linked him and Patience, feeling vibrant and alive.
But it wasn’t enough. The low-throated vibration of old pain and violence threatened to drown out the hum of Nightkeeper magic, and the ground shuddered beneath their feet. Worse, there was no sign of the streaming red lights his ancestors had shown him.
Brandt’s chest went hollow as he forced himself to say it. “In the painting there were dozens of magi near the wall, and more in the distance. Hundreds, maybe.” He paused. “What if there just aren’t enough of us?”
The ground shifted beneath them. In the street, something crashed.
“We’re going to have to be enough,” Michael said bleakly. “We’re all there is.”
Patience squeezed Brandt’s hand. “Try the Triad magic again. There has to be something more, something we’re missing.”
Needing the contact, he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers, taking her warmth, her strength, as he concentrated on the inner question, How can we fight Cabrakan?
He got only the image of Patience’s face, lit from within with love.
Panic and despair spiraled through him. He couldn’t lose her. Not now. Please, gods, help me out here.
He saw Patience again, this time studying a spread of cards. And for all that he had come to accept that the Mayan Oracle wasn’t the crock of shit he had once believed, it seemed odd that he would picture her like that.
Which meant it wasn’t an accident.
Adrenaline kicked. “You’re the answer,” he told her. “You or—”
“Love,” she interrupted. “Maybe love is the answer.” She turned to Lucius. “Neither the Aztecs nor the Xibalbans use sex in their rituals, do they?”
“Not the way the Nightkeepers do.”
She looked back at Brandt. “Which I’ll bet means there isn’t a dark equivalent of sex magic. What if we can use that to break through the layer of pain that’s covering this place?”
“Etznab,” he said, making the connection. At her look of confusion, he said, “Think about how our jun tan works: It creates a feedback loop that lets each of us mirror what the other is feeling. If we can do the same thing with power . . .”
Her eyes lit. “It’ll amplify. Maybe even enough to override Cabrakan’s dark magic.”
Rabbit stepped forward. His eyes were stark hollows in his angular face, but intensity burned at their depths. “If you can show me how your jun tan works, I can transmit it to the others.” He glanced at Strike. “Okay?”
Overhead, through the torn spot in the roof, the last sliver of white moon disappeared. “Do it,” the king said implacably, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line. “We do whatever it takes. That’s why we’re here.”
But it wasn’t the only reason they were there, Brandt thought as he held out his hand to Patience.
Because what was the point of the war if they weren’t also fighting for the smaller, equally important parts of themselves? Love, family, a personal future . . . it was all worth fighting for.
It had taken him a long time to see that. Almost too long.
Patience took his hand and they closed for a kiss, with Rabbit tapping in via touch link. Brandt put everything he had into the kiss and their jun tan connection, not just giving her his body, strength, heart, and soul, but taking hers in return, until it wasn’t his strength versus hers anymore—it was their combined power that fired his bloodstream and lit him from within with a level of power he’d never before experienced.
The magic came from the solstice-eclipse, and from the way the stars and planets were beginning to align as the end time approached. But it also came from him and Patience, and the new level of connection they had forged from the ashes of their old lives.
Thank you for not giving up on me, he sent through the jun tan.
He got a wash of love and acceptance in return, and a whisper of, I might’ve given up on you . . . but I couldn’t give up on us .
And thank the gods for that.
He slanted his mouth across hers and took the kiss deeper, hotter, harder, until sex magic sparked and crackled around them and his body tightened with the need for privacy, the need to bury himself inside her. The need, quite simply, for her.
Red-gold power responded, washing from him to her and back again. His jun tan heated, activating; he could feel her pleasure and his own, along with Rabbit’s discreet contact as he fed the jun tan pattern to the others, showing them the feedback loop. Then he felt the incremental increases in his power as the mated pairs came online, each adding their own distinctive flavor to the burgeoning mix of magic.
The power cycled higher and higher, until, without warning, a soundless detonation slammed into him and then out again, down through his feet and into the earth itself.
And the Nightkeeper magic took on a life of its own.
Brandt broke the kiss as the power surged beyond sex magic to something incandescent. It wasn’t coming from the jun tan connections anymore; it was using them, flowing through them and drawing light magic from the survivors and the strength of their gods-destined pairings.
The ground heaved beneath them in a tremor that was far stronger than any of the others. A roaring noise welled up from beneath them, sounding less like a subway now and more like the cry of an angry creature, a demon trying to fight its way to freedom, bent on revenge and destruction.
Out in the street, the screams intensified, and Brandt heard the first few ominous cracks and rumbles of major structural damage. He flashed on the TV images of the big earthquake: crumbled buildings, ash-coated figures, and child volunteers crawling through narrow gaps to pull babies out of a collapsed hospital wing. The threat of failure tunneled his vision. This wasn’t going to work. They didn’t have enough people, enough power, enough—
Focus! The word echoed in Woody’s voice. And for fuck’s sake, have a little faith.
The memory—or was it something else?—snapped Brandt out of his downward spiral. He blinked, clearing his mind of the noise out on the street, and the TV images. Within the relative calm that followed, an image formed: that of a huge lake with an irregularly shaped island rising out of the center, connected to the mainland by four causeways built up out of stone and rubble.
And he freaking got it.
“I’m not an island,” he said, “but this piece of Mexico City used to be.”
He opened his eyes to find Patience, limned in sparks of magic, staring at him in wonder. “Your eyes are gold,” she whispered.
He caught her hands, using her to anchor him as he reached out with his mind and found the inner filing cabinet where he had put the scariest, most tempting and terrifying part of the Triad magic: his ancestors’ powers.
The eagle magi had designed the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica using math, physics, and arcane schematics painted onto fig-bark codices. Now their combined talents expanded his senses, letting him perceive the structure of the city around him. He sensed the buildings above the surface, their cracks and stresses, and
the places where they had been shored up against earthquake damage.
Beneath them, he perceived the layers that represented five centuries of habitation, with Moctezuma’s capital city of Tenochtitlán at the very bottom.
He perceived the ghostly foundations of the ancient palaces, temples, and markets. More importantly, he saw where the causeways ran across the lake bed, two from the northern end of the island, one from the west, one from the south. The causeways had long been buried beneath the rubble that the Spanish had carted in to expand Mexico City beyond the island. But their structures were still there . . . and they were the only things holding Cabrakan in check.
The demon strained against them, drawn to the place where generations of terrible blood sacrifices had weakened the barrier enough for him to punch through during the solstice-eclipse, but held back by the four causeways, which had been built by the slave labor of captured Maya, and held the power of their sky gods.
The big earthquake two decades earlier had weakened the causeways, and the recent miniquakes had further crumbled their stone bases and compressed paving. One or two more good tremors, and the demon would be free.
Not on my watch, Brandt thought fiercely. He bore down, pulling power from his ancestors, his teammates, and Patience—his wife, mate, and partner. His forebears had once built vast cities from stone and the images in their minds. Now their knowledge, along with the combined magic of his teammates, gave him the power to rebuild the roads that anchored the center of Mexico City.
A spell whispered in his mind, coming in a man’s voice that sounded oddly like flutes and drumbeats, and brought the icy chill of river water to touch his skin.
Brandt said the words aloud. And the world turned bloodred.
Power detonated. Fiery magic streamed out of him and blasted along where the four causeways had been, going from crimson to translucent as it passed the limits of the ruin. The ground heaved and shuddered, nearly pitching Brandt to his knees as Cabrakan fought back far below them.
The magic poured out, draining Brandt and making his head spin, but he kept going, pulling strength from the depths of his soul and beyond. And the causeways responded, beginning to realign into the form they had taken a thousand years ago. The changes were infinitesimal at first—a stone returning to alignment in one spot, a fracture sealing in another—but then the alterations mushroomed, gaining speed.
Brandt sensed Cabrakan’s rage against the magi who had killed his brother and now barred him from the earth. The dark lord slammed against the earth beneath Moctezuma’s palace, which had been at the center of the bloodshed and was now the weakest spot of all.
The ground yawed and threatened to shake apart. Something crashed down from above, but was deflected by shield magic.
“Thanks,” Brandt grated, not sure who had set the shield, but understanding that the others were protecting him so he could concentrate everything he had on locking stone against rubble, rubble against sand.
Although the original causeways had ended at the island’s shores, he continued inward, reinforcing Cabrakan’s prison all the way inward to the Templo Mayor, which was the central point where all four causeways intersected, and where slave-built temples had been soaked in blood.
There, wielding the magic of love and family, of past and present, Brandt joined the causeways together, stabilizing the ground beneath Mexico City and sealing the demon into Xibalba.
And then, spent, he let himself fall, knowing that Patience would catch him and bring him home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
December 22 One year, three hundred and sixty-four days to the zero date Skywatch Woody’s funeral rites were planned for noon the day after the solstice-eclipse. His pyre was built at the edge of where the Nightkeepers’ Great Hall had stood before the massacre. Red-Boar had been sent to the gods from that spot, as had Sasha’s father. There had been zero discussion of setting up a second funerary site for the winikin even though the separation had been traditional in their parents’ generations. Winikin, Nightkeeper, human . . . they were all teammates, all equally worthy of the gods’ attention on their way to the sky.
Brandt, Patience, and Hannah did the bulk of the work on the pyre, with Harry and Braden alternately helping and getting in the way. To Patience, their perpetual motion and piping voices brought a sense of lightness, completion, and joy that she had so badly missed . . . and one she would yearn for when they left again.
But now, more than ever, they needed to stay hidden.
Iago’s injuries would heal, and when they did, he was going to be pissed. She didn’t want the boys anywhere within his reach. If she could have sent them to another planet, another plane, she would have. As it was, she was doing the next best thing: She was entrusting them once again to Hannah, and this time she wouldn’t go looking for them, no matter what. She would love them best by letting them go. Even if it killed her to do so.
“There.” Brandt stepped back, dusted off his hands, and stuck them in the front pockets of his jeans as he surveyed the work. Braden did the same, mimicking his father so they stood side by side, both with their hands in their jeans pockets and their shoulders slightly hunched beneath black T-shirts, staring at Woody’s pyre with matching frowns.
Patience’s heart turned over when Brandt glanced down, caught Braden’s fierce scowl, and laughed out loud. It was a rusty-sounding chuckle, one forced through his grief for Woody, and his sorrow at knowing the boys would be there for only a few more hours. But instead of shutting all that away, he caught her eyes and shared it: the laugh, the grief, and the sorrow.
“You guys are going to be okay,” Hannah said softly from behind her.
Patience turned to find the winikin sitting atop one of the nearby picnic tables, with Harry cross-
legged on the picnic bench near her feet, watching his father and brother debate the placement of the three ceremonial sticks of ceiba, cacao, and rubber-tree wood.
Moving to sit on Harry’s other side, Patience propped her elbows on the table and nodded. “You know what? I think so.”
In another lifetime, when she’d been young and so caught up in being in love that she hadn’t remembered to be herself, she would have been adamant about it, would’ve made sweeping statements about love at first sight and forever. Now she was far more cautious. But at the same time, now she knew what it took to make love at first sight last forever . . . and she had a partner who knew he had to meet her halfway.
As if he’d caught a hint of her thoughts through their vibrant jun tan connection, he looked for her again, sent her a “hey, babe” smile . . . and went back to consulting with his junior contractor.
Seeing the exchange, Hannah nodded firmly. “I know so.”
Patience smiled, because she knew so too, and also because Harry gave them a disgusted look, muttered something about girl talk, and headed over to join the engineering debate.
“How about you?” Patience asked the winikin once Harry was out of earshot. “Are you going to be okay?”
They both knew she was really asking, How upset are you over Woody? Did you lose a friend, a lover, or the one and only?
Hannah’s lips curved softly. Wearing a deep purple bandanna over her missing eye, along with a black, puffy-sleeved blouse, she looked particularly piratical, though Patience suspected she’d been trying to tone down her usual peacock hues to human-style mourning colors.
After a moment, the other woman said, “Woody and I worked together better as winikin than we did as lovers. We synced amazingly well when it came to raising the boys and making family decisions. In that regard, it was a perfect match. In the other”—she lifted a shoulder—“we kept each other warm sometimes, but he wasn’t my one and only and I wasn’t his, and that was okay with both of us.” Her eye drifted in the direction of the mansion. “I’m sad about Woody, and I’ll miss the heck out of him.
He was a part of my life, and I’ll remember him until the gods call me up to the sky . . . but my heart isn’t br
oken.”
“Are you going to be okay working with Carlos?” It had been decided that the ex-wrangler would go with Hannah and the twins, in order to share the workload that came with raising a couple of bright, active boys, and—unstated but understood—to provide redundancy in case something happened to her. He had raised Sven and his own daughter, Cara, and had helped Nate through his rough transition into the Nightkeepers. He was a good choice.
But perhaps, Patience thought, not the absolute best choice.
“Carlos is a good man,” Hannah said. “A good winikin.” Which wasn’t really an answer. But before Patience could press her on it, the funeral procession emerged from the rear of the mansion and started heading in their direction.
Leah led the way, followed by most of the winikin. They carried the litter that bore Woody’s body, which had been intricately wrapped with cloth and tied into a mortuary bundle.
Hannah frowned. “Strike and Rabbit aren’t there.”
“Jox either,” Patience put in, though she suspected Hannah had noticed that first, then looked for Strike. She stood and started toward the procession. “Something’s up.” Please, gods, not something bad.
But Leah sent her an “It’s okay. Stay where you are” wave, and when she got out to the pyre, she said, “Strike and Jox will be out in a minute. They said for us to set up without them, that they’d be here for noon.”
As the winikin carefully placed the mortuary bundle atop the pyre, though, Patience noticed that Leah kept glancing back toward the mansion. When Patience caught herself doing the same thing, she made herself stop it, and focus on the ceremony.
Brandt, who had moved up to stand beside her in the loose ring of Nightkeepers, winikin, and humans surrounding the pyre, whispered, “Woody wouldn’t mind. He’d be dying to—” He faltered, then swallowed and continued. “He’d want to know what’s going on too.”
“We’ll find out when the time’s right. This is for Woody.” More, it was a way for the rest of them to say good-bye.
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