Spellfire n-8

by Jessica Andersen

  And, without warning, the rasp of his voice reminded her of him saying her name as he came deep inside her, whispering praises, reverent curses. Lust surged suddenly, twisting inside her core and making her want. This isn’t the same, damn it, said her better sense. This isn’t about sex.

  But that was a lie, because the magic was almost always about sex. Lovemaking was a way to tap into the magic, and the magic invariably sparked arousal between lovers . . . or ex-lovers.

  And, oh, shit, she was in trouble. Sweat prickled along her body at the sudden understanding that the mental connection wasn’t the worst of the danger. I can’t do this. Not if she was determined to stay away from him. The raw ache was too potent, too tempting.

  They had been good together, physically. Very, very good.

  Rabbit reached out with his mind and caught the bullet, then sent it spinning between them, faster and faster until it whined in the air and threw off red-gold sparks. His potent, masculine magic vibrated between them, reaching into her and making her yearn.

  Oh, no, she thought as their eyes met and she saw the rising heat in him. Hell, no. She tried to block the arousal, but couldn’t. It was coming from inside her, a sensual energy that curled in her core, pulsing and shifting, seeking an outlet. She wanted to close the distance between them, wanted to flatten her hand on his chest again and feel his heartbeat. She wanted to rub her thumb along his jaw, where last night’s shave had missed some bristles. She wanted—

  “No!” She yanked back a step, instinctively slamming the mental blocks into place.

  The magic winked out and the bullet fell to the floor, pinged off the hardwood, and skittered under a cloth-covered chair. That was the only sound, though. That, and the two of them sucking ragged breaths as the heat leveled off, then faded.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the silence. “Shit. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Of course not. It was the magic. Sex magic.” There, she had said it.

  “It . . . yeah.” His eyes held a sheen of power, making his expression unreadable. She didn’t know what he was thinking, which put a stir of new nerves in her belly.

  “This is a bad idea,” she said. “There has to be another way for you to use your talents. Maybe your father . . .” She trailed off. “It won’t work, will it?”

  “No. You’re the one I need.”

  I don’t want to be.

  “You’ll be in control of the link. You can pull the plug any time you want.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” Not after the way the magic had reached out to him. Not after the way her body had wanted to do the same damn thing.

  He looked away. “I hate putting this on you.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Bullshit.”

  That startled a laugh out of her, though it quickly threatened to head toward hysterical territory. “Well, when you put it that way.” But this wasn’t about blame, wasn’t even about the two of them, really. And it wasn’t like they had a choice. “Okay,” she said finally, “we can do this. We can find a way to work the magic together.” She could learn to block the sexual stuff, maybe. Probably. “But that’s it. Nothing else is going to happen.”

  She wasn’t sure which one of them she was trying to convince.

  He nodded, though. “Agreed.” He held out a hand. “Deal?”

  They shook on it. “Deal.” She pulled away as quickly as she could, wondering whether she was talking herself into something that would be a big mistake. But there was no running away from the end of the world, was there? And as for the sex magic . . . gods, she didn’t know how she was going to stop it—or, worse, endure it. “We’ll need to experiment, like Dez said. We need to figure out whether the connection has a cutoff range and how it really works . . . and we need to see whether we’re stronger if we work together.” She didn’t want to think about the possibility, not when she used to fantasize about being his true mate and fighting at his side, their powers joined.

  He searched her face. “You want to hold off until tomorrow, give it all a day to sink in?”

  Yes. “No.” That would be the coward’s move. “I’ll meet you out at the firing range in an hour.” She needed breakfast, needed to pull herself together. And most of all, she needed to find a way to armor herself against the sex magic. Because she and Rabbit might’ve had their problems before, but sex had never been one of them. And now, with the added connection of the magic . . .

  Gods. She didn’t know if she could handle this, not really.

  She would have to find a way, though. Somehow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Chichén Itzá, Mexico

  Anna could’ve told Dez that finding more info on the crossover was going to be far easier said than done. She and Lucius had already combed the Nightkeepers’ library for references, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Google could help with. So they were back to the drawing board.

  In a more perfect world, the Nightkeepers could’ve asked their itza’at seer to tell the future for them . . . but Anna was their only itza’at, and her inner eye was busted.

  Sighing, she eased back on her heels and let the skull-shaped seer’s pendant drop back below the neckline of her tee. The magic flowed out of her, dissipating quickly because she hadn’t managed to call a vision, hadn’t managed to summon any of the old, blocked-out memories that she suspected were clogging her magic. Hadn’t managed to do anything, really, except waste her energy teleporting to the ancient ruin in the hopes that being there would shake something loose.

  Granted, there wasn’t anybody around to see her fail yet again . . . but, really, that wasn’t a good sign either. Up until four or five weeks ago, the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá had been crawling with sightseers pretty much from dawn until after dusk. Now, though, the region was in the throes of an infectious outbreak, the area quarantined and the park off-limits.

  The quarantine had allowed Anna to teleport directly to the ancient site rather than try to sneak in through the Nightkeepers’ hidden tunnels. And it had given her the run of the place, so she could climb up inside the Pyramid of Kulkulkan, touch the ancient carvings of the Skull Platform, and dangle her feet over the edge of the Cenote Sagrada and feel the power that wafted up from the perfect circle of green water a hundred feet below, where the ancient Maya had made untold sacrifices to appease the gods.

  Now, though, as she wiped the blood off her nearly healed palms and tucked her knife away in the tough cargo pants she had worn with a cobalt blue T-shirt that nearly matched her eyes—fieldwork garb just in case someone saw her—she was too aware of the echoing emptiness of the ruins, where it seemed not even the ghosts were stirring.

  Damn it all.

  Exhaling, she folded her copies of the three torn pieces of notepaper that contained all that was left of the super-secret itza’at seer’s ritual and tucked them into her battered knapsack. An old friend, the knapsack had been with her since grad school. It had seen her through countless digs and field studies, and nearly two decades at the university, along with marriage, divorce, magic, the Triad spell and onward, all the way to now, with the Nightkeepers running out of time.

  As she slung the battered knapsack over her shoulder, she tried not to think that it had been her companion more consistently than anything else in her life.

  Well, that and the crystal skull amulet. But it wasn’t as if she’d had a choice when it came to the seer’s skull. “Keep it with you,” her mother had said right before leaving to attack the intersection, her eyes bright with what Anna had thought was excitement but had probably been tears. “I’ll show you how to use it when I get back.”

  Only she hadn’t come back—none of them had. They had all died in the tunnels below Chichén Itzá, leaving behind a dozen surviving children, one grumpy-assed old mage, a handful of winikin, and the mandate to save the world in 2012 but no clue how.

  Instead of reaching for the amulet or begging for help—been there, done that—Anna sighed and
turned to head back the way she had come.

  She found herself facing a man who most definitely wasn’t a ghost, but seemed like he’d appeared out of thin air without any magic.

  “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” Her words trickled off when her instincts kicked in, telling her not to say too much to the guy, who just stood there, eyebrows hitting his shaggy hairline.

  At about six foot and one eighty, he wasn’t much taller than she. With brown hair, faded hazel eyes and an aquiline nose that had a bit of a once-upon-a-time-broken left-hand crook to it, he looked reassuringly forty-something and human. His bush pants and scarred boots were much like her own, and his open-throated shirt had a medical logo embroidered on the pocket.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” His voice was smooth and mellow, with the faintest hint of an accent—British? Australian? She couldn’t quite place it, but it tagged him as nonlocal, while the logo said he was part of the outbreak response. Which made him official, and therefore someone she needed to handle carefully.

  She was tempted to say she was a Red Cross volunteer or something, and use the opportunity to pump him for info on the progress—if any—the humans were making against the xombi virus. Gods knew the Nightkeepers hadn’t been able to make a dent against this wave of the cursed disease, which was part magic, part biochemical and wholly vile. They had tried, but there had been too many hotspots popping up all at once, warning that the barrier was on the verge of collapse, the demons amassing to pounce. The Banol Kax had sent their hellspawn virus to create a chaos that would be ripe for their plucking, and damned if it wasn’t working.

  Dez had pulled the magi off the virus and made a few calls, tipping off the CDC to the disease and what little the humans could do to manage it—which amounted to quarantining the hot zones and restraining the infected people so they couldn’t pass the soul-stealing disease, rabieslike, by biting others.

  Since then, the Nightkeepers’ info on the virus had been limited to news crawls, blogs of varying degrees of hysteria, and the occasional stealth drop-in, and Anna had heard the king muttering just the other day about needing some on-the-ground intel. But something about this guy warned that she didn’t dare try pretending to be part of the volunteer force and risk getting caught in the lie. Better to go with the truth.

  Or part of it, anyway.

  “I snuck in,” she admitted. “I’m a Mayan studies—”

  “Well, shit. You’re one of them.” His eyes hardened and he raked her head to toe with a withering look. “Those big blues aren’t going to get you anywhere with the militia, lady. You should get the hell out of here while you still can.”

  Australian, she thought. A pissed-off Aussie, and one who wasn’t making much sense. “Wait. What?”

  “They’re shooting looters on sight, you know.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Seriously, what the hell? These people are being slammed with a disease that wipes their minds and turns them into vicious, greedy shells that can’t live off anything other than human flesh. So we restrain them, tie them, gag them, whatever it takes to keep them from chewing on us, each other, even themselves while we try everything we can think of to cure them. Only it doesn’t work, so they starve to death . . . and in those last few seconds before they die, you can see their souls come back into their eyes. And they die screaming, not because of the fear or the pain, but because they suddenly realize what they’ve become.”

  Stomach knotting—she had seen that exact look, time and again, right after she struck the fatal blow—she held up a hand. “Look, I—”

  He took a step toward her, seeming to loom, though they weren’t far off in height. “And you people sneak in as slick as you please, figuring this is your chance to do some digging without bothering with permits, or maybe pop the locks on some of the tunnels and pull down a carving or two.” He made a disgusted noise. “You’re just as bad as the docs who come down here just to get data for some paper they’re planning on jamming through the review process, not giving a shit about the actual patients they’re supposed to be treating.”

  She agreed wholeheartedly. Or at least she would if she could get a word in edgewise. “If you’d—”

  “Maybe you’re not even here to steal. Maybe you’re doing legit research and think that because you’ve got a grant application or a paper or whatever due, it shouldn’t matter that the site is on lockdown, the whole region quarantined. Hell, if you can bribe your way in, you’ll have the whole place to yourself—no paperwork, no bullshit. What could be better than . . . shit. This is ridiculous.” He finally ground to a halt, glaring at her while one hand drifted to his belt, making her wonder if he had a pistol tucked behind him, if he was pissed enough to use it on her.

  Hopefully not. She could shield herself, yes, or ’port away. Or even drop him where he stood with a sleep spell. She didn’t want to, though.

  So she stayed put, heart drumming lightly against her ribs, though she kept her voice steady as she said, “Is it my turn yet?” At his grudging nod, she continued, “Look, I swear on the deity or family member of your choice that I’m not a looter. Hell, I’ve turned in a dozen or more tomb robbers who’ve tried to sell me antiquities over the years. Hate ’em.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “For real?”

  “I collect really bad fakes, but not the legit stuff. Never, ever.” She paused, exhaling when she saw that he might not have softened, but at least he was listening. “The only thing I’m guilty of is sneaking through the quarantine to get some one-on-one time with the carvings. And I get why that probably seems really, really tacky to you, but it’s not like that.” She started to hold out her hands in a gesture of innocence, then remembered there was probably blood on them. She clasped them together instead, and said, “We’re on the same team here, Doc. I’m just trying to help.”

  “How so?” He didn’t look convinced, but he was staying put, even easing back a little, putting distance between them and decreasing the loom factor.

  “When I was here a few years ago doing fieldwork, I noticed a badly degraded stone panel inside one of the temples. I thought I saw something on it about a strange disease, a plague that swept through the kingdoms and turned brother against brother and father against son. At the time I thought it was a metaphor for a civil war or something, but when the outbreak started”—she shrugged—“I figured it was worth checking out.”

  One eyebrow went up and his accent thickened slightly with disbelief. “So you got across the border somehow even though they’ve closed it to tourists, made it through the quarantine and onto the site here, to . . . what, see if this carving mentioned a cure?”

  “Is that any dumber than electroshock therapy or partial drowning, trying to get the infected people to ‘snap out of it’?” Which, hadn’t been part of the official international response, but rumors said that both of those things—and worse—had been tried in the highland villages.

  Granted, the near-drowning thing hadn’t been the worst idea, as it came straight from the ancient Nightkeepers’ practices. She didn’t mention that part, though, because she wanted to come off as a dedicated, potentially foolhardy Mayanist, not a doomsday-nut wack-job.

  He tilted his head, considering. “You can really read the hieroglyphs?”

  “I’ve spent my whole life studying them.” Which was true. She had bolted for college without looking back, swearing she was going to make herself into something far more normal than she’d ever had a chance to be—because normal was safe, normal didn’t wake up in the middle of the night hearing screams and seeing flames and blood. But no matter how hard she had tried to get away from the Mayan stuff she had been raised on, it was no use. That was where her talents and interest lay, what her soul kept bringing her back to. So she had studied the culture and the glyphs, and made herself as normal as she could. For a while, anyway.

  “Prove it.” He waved around them. “Translate something. And no bullshit, because I’ll know if you’re lying.”
<
br />   That had to be a bluff, of course, but she nodded anyway, because if she wanted to get information out of him, he was going to have to trust her, at least a little.

  They were standing in an open courtyard enclosed by lines of rubble where walls had once been. There, generations of ancient Mayan kings had erected row after row of stelae—stone pillars carved with hieroglyphs that recorded major events. Births, deaths, marriages, wars, all the news that had been fit to chisel was there.

  Nearest them were three stelae; two were crumbled and fallen, but one still stood, tall and pale, its white limestone worn from wind and blackened with acid rain. The glyphs seemed legible enough, though, so she headed for it, aware of him trailing too close, like he thought she might make a break for it.

  She wouldn’t, of course, not unless things turned hairy. But as she got up close and personal, she hesitated, recognizing the stelae too late and wondering if this was the gods at work or just a coincidence.

  “Oh,” she breathed, tracing her fingertips along a glyph panel that wasn’t like any of the others. For one, it was in better shape, preserved by the remnants of a spell that sent shimmering tingles up her arm. And for another, it told a story . . . and gave a warning. One that her father had ignored.

  She blew out a shaky breath. What has happened before will happen again . . .

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “Can’t you translate it?”

  “That won’t be a problem.” In fact, she knew the story by heart, though she hadn’t consciously thought of it in nearly three decades. Not since her father’s advisers had tried to use it to talk him out of his plan to attack the demons on their own turf, at the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá.

  “That’s enough!” he thundered, and shook off her mother’s restraining hand. “The next person who quotes the writs or an old legend at me better have something new to add to the discussion, because by the gods I’m getting sick of repeating myself.” He glared around the royal suite, eyes skipping past where Anna had shrunk back in the hallway, out of sight.