Spellfire n-8

by Jessica Andersen

  He didn’t need to borrow his magic from her anymore—the spell had severed their connection, setting her free and making her a mage in her own right, having apparently decided that both of them were the rightful owners of the magic. More, he had brought the dark magic under control, shoving it into the mental vault it used to inhabit, and locking the fucker down tight. But what if the vault cracked? Hell, what if it ripped wide open? Just now, it’d felt like the magic wanted to behave, as if it had gone meekly into confinement.

  He didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust himself with it. But he couldn’t refuse it, either. Not if he was going to become the crossover. Which meant that whatever had happened between him and Myr over the past ten days, including their kiss—especially their kiss—was gone now, nullified.

  “Fuck me.” Feeling like his soul was hollowed out and his damn bones were creaking, he headed to his Jeep, fired the engine, and aimed the vehicle back along the dirt track to Skywatch.

  He braced himself to find a not-so-welcoming committee waiting for him at the gate, looking to protect Skywatch from the dark magic. But the front parking area was deserted and nobody flagged him down as he rolled past the mansion toward his cottage. He’d intended to suck it up and go make his report, would have if there’d been any sign that it was a command performance. But the lack of an armed guard tempted him to keep on driving . . . and made him wonder what Myrinne had told the others.

  “Doesn’t matter.” She might’ve played things down in her report, but he’d seen the way she’d looked at him.

  The memory tightened his chest, making him feel restless and hemmed in. Suddenly he couldn’t handle the thought of being inside the mansion, or even his cottage. Instead, he floored it, headed for the back of the canyon.

  The others could come after him if they wanted to.

  Gravel spurted beneath the Jeep’s tires as he bounced along the dirt track, and again when he skidded to a stop at the base of the narrow trail that led up to the ancient pueblo. The footpath was overgrown, as was the wide ledge in front of the pueblo’s lower level, showing just how long it’d been since he’d last been up there.

  Before, when he’d first come to Skywatch, he had hung out at the ruins for hours, sometimes even days, listening to his iPod and getting high on weed, hard liquor, pulque, and anything else he could find that came under the heading of “shit that alters consciousness.” Now, as he tugged aside the dusty serape that covered his stash, he saw there wasn’t much left. It should be enough to fog things out for a few hours, though. And right now, he’d take what he could get.

  CHAPTER NINE

  December 12

  Nine days until the zero date

  Skywatch

  Rabbit grogged his way to consciousness near daybreak and stared at the mud-daubed ceiling of his hideout, which had two round openings that let in the light and smelled of the animals that used it for shelter when he wasn’t around.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in the pueblo, wrapped in the musty-smelling serape, with his head pounding with the “hey, hello” of a hangover. It also wasn’t the first time he’d lain there studying the mud daub, with its ancient handprints and carved zigzag lines, and wishing like hell he didn’t have to go back down to the compound. But it was the first time he dreaded going back because it would mean facing Myrinne.

  “Damn it.” He dragged himself vertical anyway. He needed to report in and see how the others were taking the whole dark-magic thing.

  At the moment, it was buttoned up safely in the vault, behaving itself. But as he picked his way down the trail, he wasn’t so sure he was in the clear, or even that he should be. If the things that’d happened with Phee were any indication, the dark magic wasn’t good for him. Or maybe it was that he wasn’t good with it, that he wasn’t strong enough to control it, his grip on Nightkeeper magic too weak, his moral compass too fucking imprecise. And if some of that started sounding like his old man—you’re not smart enough, not tough enough, not worth my time—maybe that wasn’t an accident.

  “Fuck him. You can handle it this time.” He’d learned his lessons the hard way, and he was determined not to screw up again.

  Still, the whispers dogged him as he drove the Jeep back to his cottage, grateful that he hadn’t seen anyone coming or going. Right now, he didn’t want to have any conversations that started with “Hey, how are you” or even “What the fuck happened to you yesterday?”

  “Damn it.” With irritation riding him hard, putting his gut into a knot of what-ifs, he shouldered through the kitchen door . . . and stopped dead at the sight of Red-Boar sitting at the kitchen table, scowling at a couple of Cokes.

  Well, that explained the feeling of impending doom.

  “Don’t even start,” Rabbit said, heading across the kitchen for the main room without giving his father a second look. “I need to shower and get some food in me before I can even think of dealing with you.”

  “Or you could sit the fuck down and listen.”

  “Blow me.” But Rabbit couldn’t make himself walk away. Not knowing that the king could’ve sent his old man to lay the last order of the Boar Oath on him, in the hopes of taming the dark magic. And that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing. He stopped in the far doorway, and turned back. “Fuck it. What? Did Dez give you an order?”

  “Yeah. But not for you.” Red-Boar scowled and took a hit of his soda. “When he heard about the dark magic, he leaned on me to tell him where you really came from.”

  That cut right through what was left of Rabbit’s hangover—thud, instant clarity, or close to it.

  Back when he’d first returned to Skywatch, he had given the Nightkeepers a full report on his conversations with Phee, hoping there might be something in there that could help them figure out what the Banol Kax were planning. At the time, Red-Boar had listened, stone-faced, and said it was all bullshit. Repeatedly. That was all he’d said on the subject, though. Until now.

  Thumping into a chair opposite his old man, Rabbit reached for the unopened Coke. “You going to tell me or not?” He wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to make an announcement like that, then remind him that he’d never sworn an oath to the current king—Dez had taken over for Strike pretty recently—and clam up.

  “For starters, everything the demon told you was a fucking lie. Your mother didn’t escape from the Xibalbans, and she and I didn’t fall for each other and live in some godsdamned rain forest paradise until they tracked us down and killed her. And you never had a twin brother. That was all a bullshit fairy tale.”

  Rabbit didn’t give his old man the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. “How about you tell me something I don’t already know?”

  Disappointment stung, though, warning that some part of him had wanted to think that maybe there had been a romance between his parents, a tragedy that explained why his father hadn’t ever been able to love him, or even like him just a little. And that there had been a twin brother whose absence accounted for the holes inside him, the broken, ragged places that not even Myrinne had been able to fill.

  “How much do you already know?” Red-Boar demanded.

  Frustration stirred, old and ugly, but Rabbit didn’t let that show, either. “Fine, we’ll play it your way. Fucking whatever. Jox told me that not long after the massacre you lost your shit and disappeared into the rain forest, and he gave me the name of a village: Oc Ajal. I went there and discovered that it was full of Xibalbans—not members of Werigo’s sect of wack-jobs, but peaceful dark-magic shamans led by a guy named Anntah. I met him on his deathbed.” In fact, it had been his fault Anntah and the others had been murdered. Iago—Werigo’s son and Anntah’s sworn enemy—had followed him there and razed the village.

  Voice thickening, Rabbit continued, “He said that you had stayed with them for a day or so and then moved on. You were looking for Cassie and the boys, convinced they were still alive somewhere.” As far as Red-Boar had been concerned, then or now, his real life had ended with
the Solstice Massacre, when his Nightkeeper wife and their twin sons were killed. “He thought my mother had probably been part of Werigo’s sect, either voluntarily or as a prisoner. As far as he knew, the villagers of Oc Ajal were the last of the pacifist Xibalbans.” And because of him, they were all dead now. He drained his Coke, which bit like hundred-fifty-proof pulque. “Anyway, that’s where the trail went cold for me.” He left it hanging, though he didn’t trust his old man to pick up the story. Didn’t trust him to do anything, really.

  But Red-Boar gave one of his “you’re an idiot” snorts, and said, “You’ve got it right up to the part where I visited Oc Ajal, but you’re dead-ass wrong about the rest of it. For one, the villagers were far from pacifists. And for another, Anntah wasn’t one of the good guys. Fucking far from it.”

  “But—”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Maybe not. Visiting Oc Ajal and meeting the elder had been a turning point for Rabbit. The village was where he’d learned to think twice before giving in to the impulses that had ruled his life up to that point, where he’d started to learn to control himself rather than hurting the people around him. But it was also where he’d gotten one of the two eccentrics that had summoned Phee. Anntah had given it to him, fuck it all.

  Closing his fingers around the empty soda can and not letting himself crumple it, he nodded. “Go on.”

  “When I showed up in Oc Ajal, I was pretty fucking out of it, raving about the massacre, the Nightkeepers, all of it. So it took Anntah and the others about two minutes to figure out who and what I was.” Red-Boar glanced down at his forearm, which bore the distinctive black marks of a Nightkeeper warrior. “He got me to admit that I was the only surviving Nightkeeper mage—I didn’t tell him about Strike, Anna and Jox, thank fuck. I kept that much to myself. Anyway, he kept saying that the gods had sent me to him, that he could give me what I wanted.”

  “Your family.”

  Red-Boar was back to staring at his soda can. “That’s what I thought he meant, what he wanted me to think. He said I should eat and rest. My wife was out hunting, he said. She’d be back soon and she’d be so excited to see me.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t know what he put in the food, but by the time the hunting party got back, I was hammered, horny, and not feeling picky.”

  Ew. Rabbit didn’t say anything, half-afraid his old man would elaborate.

  “I didn’t know where I was or who I was with. I just went where I was told, did what I was told, and when Anntah put me together with his daughter in a hut some ways away from the village . . . well. Anyway. We did what we did, and I don’t remember any of it. All I know was that the next morning, I woke up alone, hungover and feeling like shit. And when I tried to leave, I couldn’t. The door was locked, and what I thought was a hut turned out to be a cage.” His flat, cold voice gained an edge. “Every night after that for a couple of months, it was the same fucking thing. The food, the drugs, his daughter. Turns out old Anntah had been looking for the last surviving Nightkeeper for a long time. I guess he had a prophecy to fulfill.”

  Rabbit’s Coke can was a crumpled mess, though he didn’t remember crushing it. He just stared at it—easier than staring at his old man—for the first time realizing the familiar logo was the color of blood. “He was trying to breed the crossover. Half Nightkeeper, half Xibalban.”

  Somewhere far away from his conscious mind, his stomach was knotted and his heart thudded a sickly, sticky beat. But inside his brain there wasn’t much going on except a whole lot of buzzing and a couple of neon flashes of “Does not compute.” In a way it did compute, though, which was a bitter damn pill to swallow. Because Anntah hadn’t just given Rabbit the stone eccentric, he’d been the one to tell him he was the crossover, the key to the war . . . and he was the one who’d convinced him that the demons were the true gods and the sky gods were his enemies. He’d planted the seeds.

  More lies. And Rabbit had bought into every fucking one of them. He’d been so ego-blinded, so ready to believe that he was right and everyone else was wrong, that he’d jumped on the godsdamned bandwagon.

  “He wasn’t just trying to breed the crossover,” Red-Boar said. “He succeeded.”

  All Rabbit could think was: Don’t puke. Coke in reverse hurt like a bitch, but what other response was there to learning that you’d been bred like a fucking science experiment? “Go on.”

  Maybe his old man’s eyes softened a little. Maybe not. Probably not. “After a couple of months, there weren’t any more drugs and she stopped coming around. They kept me there, though, locked up like an animal. A stud dog they were just warehousing in case they needed to rebreed their bitch.”

  Rabbit made an inarticulate noise as the last of his illusions crumbled. He’d been looking for his mother, thinking that learning about her would help, when, really, it just made shit worse. He hadn’t had a loving mother, a twin brother, or a father who gave a crap. And Anntah had been his grandfather, his creator. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?

  “At first I raved,” Red-Boar continued, “or just sat there like a godsdamned lump. Eventually, though, I started sharpening up, coming out of the place I’d been since the massacre. I finally wrapped my head around the fact that Cassie and the boys were gone. I knew I had to get away and warn the others that the Xibalbans were real, and, worse, that they were working toward their end-date prophecies even though the barrier was sealed off. So I pretended I was still out of it, and waited for my chance. And I listened. The villagers didn’t think twice about what they were saying when they brought my food. That was how I found out what Anntah and the others were trying to do. What the crossover was supposed to mean.”

  Unable to sit still anymore, Rabbit got up, grabbed a couple more drinks—beers this time, because who gave a fuck that it wasn’t even noon?—set one in front of his old man and plonked back down in his seat, feeling like gravity was working on him harder than it ever had before.

  “Drink,” he ordered. “Then tell me. For fuck’s sake, it’s time to rip off the godsdamned Band-Aid already.” Anger fisted hard and heavy in his chest, but there was no point in being pissed that his old man had taken this long to tell him. What was done was done.

  Yeah, another beer or five, and I might even believe that. So he hammered his first while his old man was still popping the top.

  Red-Boar took a couple of swigs, and said, “Yeah. Fuck it all. Yeah. You’re right.” Which didn’t feel like the victory it once would have, especially when the Nightkeepers had been busting their asses trying to figure out the crossover’s secrets . . . and Red-Boar had known them all along. Bastard.

  But, bastard or not, he was talking now. “The way Anntah and the others saw it, the crossover was going to be their Messiah. He was going to win the war for them, lead them to the promised land, what the fuck ever. So the first thing they had to do was make sure he was born the way their prophecies said—from the union of a lone survivor with a princess of the blood. Or some such shit.” Red-Boar’s tone wasn’t nearly so dismissive as his words, though, probably because the prophecy had come true. “When I heard that, I knew I couldn’t leave you there.”

  “You . . . oh.” The beer hit Rabbit hard, making his head spin.

  “I waited until you were a few months old. Then, when the guards started to look at me with enough pity that I knew it was only a matter of time before they killed me, tying up loose ends, I decided to make my move. I saw my chance one night, and I took it. I got out, grabbed you, set a couple of the huts on fire as a distraction, and bolted.” He said it matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t in the process of confetti-ing Rabbit’s whole damn existence. “I should’ve killed them all. Would have if it hadn’t been for you slowing me down.”

  It was yet another in a long line of the “if it wasn’t for you” comments Rabbit had heard all his life, but where it might’ve stung before, now the dig was indistinguishable from the rest of the shitstorm going on inside him. How could his old
man’s version and Phee’s be so fucking different, yet both fit the evidence? Fact: Red-Boar had flipped his lid, disappeared into the rain forest, and had come out a few years later with a kid in tow. Fact: He’d never been what you’d call an affectionate father. Hell, there had been more than a few times Rabbit had been pretty sure that his own father had hated him, wished he’d never been born. Now he knew why. He hadn’t been a baby; he’d been a fucking hybrid. To the Xibalbans, he’d been a weapon, to his old man, a threat.

  Swallowing past the aftertaste of a beer he already regretted, he said, “Why didn’t you tell anybody where I came from, what I might be capable of? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The stubborn set of the old man’s jaw got harder. “That wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “You don’t know that.” Rabbit told himself not to bother, that it was enough that he knew the truth now, but the churn in his gut wouldn’t let him leave it alone. Who the hell was he supposed to be? What was he supposed to do now that he knew where he’d really come from? Ignore it? Forget it? Use it? Voice close to cracking, he got out, “Why didn’t you just kill me? Fuck knows it wasn’t like you wanted me.”

  If there was ever a time for Red-Boar to say something kind—or even uncruel—this was it. But all he managed was: “Anntah would’ve known you were gone. He would’ve tried to recapture me—or find someone else he thought might work—and breed another crossover. This way, as long as I could keep us off his radar screen, I could control things and keep you from getting your hands on the magic . . . or at least I thought I could.”

  Another piece of Rabbit’s childhood puzzle thudded into place—it explained why his old man had barred him from the little shrine he’d set up wherever they’d lived, and why he’d refused to tell him any of the old stories, though Jox and the others had. It explained why he’d refused to accept Rabbit as a magic user even when the evidence had been right there in front of him, and why he’d refused to let him go through an official bloodline ceremony. It even explained why his old man hadn’t ever warmed to him, even a little.