He couldn’t remember. He just knew that they couldn’t stay in the park after dark, so he followed the path out the back way, and trudged up the beach, past a scattering of motionless partyers who had passed out after the fireworks.
When he hit the street and a couple of guys loped up to make sure they were okay, gut instinct had him playing “still drunk from last night.” He wobbled and slurred, “I’ve got to get us both back to the hotel.”
One of the guys—red-eyed and hovering on the borderline between last night’s drunk and tomorrow’s hangover himself—offered to help.
By the time Brandt and the blonde were up in his room, and he’d thanked the Samaritan with a twenty to buy himself a few rounds, he was barely conscious. It was all he could do to strip them both, crawl into bed beside her, and fall the hell asleep.
If he was lucky, everything would make sense when he woke up.
CHAPTER TEN
December 19
Two days until the solstice-eclipse
Cancún, Mexico
Patience awoke with her cheek pillowed on Brandt’s shoulder and one leg thrown over his. As always, his body temperature had crept up to “furnace” overnight, making her too hot, but she hadn’t moved away as she slept, didn’t want to move away now. Instead, she cuddled into him, pressing her lips to the smooth, tough skin of his upper arm as she slid her leg higher along the satin-slick sheets and—
Satin?
Pulse jolting, she opened her eyes to find herself looking into a wall of mirrors that showed her initial surprise, then the way her eyes clouded as memory sledgehammered her with so many long-forgotten truths that she wasn’t sure what to think about first.
She made herself roll away from him, not letting herself feel the loss of warmth. “Wake up, big guy. We fell asleep.”
“We wh—? Huh?” He blinked awake and locked on their reflection over the bed, and his face went through the whole surprised-then-remembering sequence she’d just been through. He cleared his throat.
“Oh. Well.”
“We should get dressed,” she said too quickly, latching on to the practical details when the thought of dealing with the other, larger pieces of the puzzle made her palms sweat. “Jade and the others will be here soon.”
Taking the slippery top sheet with her, she headed for the shower, trying not to make a big deal about snagging her scattered clothes along the way.
“Patience.”
His quiet word stalled her in the bathroom doorway. Taking a deep breath, she turned back.
She lost the breath she had just taken.
He sat cross-legged in the center of the mattress, bare-chested, with the bedspread tossed casually over his lap. His hair was tousled, his eyes still carried a blur of sleep, and the mirrored reflections behind him showed the strong curve of his spine. Her body still hummed from their raw sex of the night before; the thought of it brought a clutch of desire low in her abdomen, a blush of moisture to her cleft.
But last night hadn’t been about them; it had been about the place, the magic, and the memories. Loving him now, in the light of a new day, would be something entirely different.
He held out his hand, but she took a step back, shaking her head.
“I can’t,” she whispered, the words little more than a breath.
His expression tightened. “I just want to talk.” But he let his hand drop.
Her heart twisted. “We knew,” she said softly. “From almost the very beginning, we knew we were both Nightkeepers.”
“Yeah, we did. Until Werigo blocked the memories.”
She told herself to focus on the pieces that mattered to the next forty-eight hours. But the words slipped out. “It was such a relief to think that I wasn’t going to be alone anymore.”
“We were together after that,” he pointed out. Which was true—instead of an awkward morning-after walk of shame, they had ordered breakfast. Three months later, they were married.
“Not the way we should have been.” As magi. Partners.
“Maybe not. But they were good times.”
It hit her then, what knowing all along would have really meant. They would’ve come clean to their winikin right off the bat, might’ve even gotten married, not in the furtive-feeling ceremony they’d had, but with full Nightkeeper pomp. Then after that, they would’ve been in training, fully immersed in the world of the magi. And, knowing firsthand that the barrier wasn’t completely sealed and the end time was a real threat, she probably wouldn’t have gotten pregnant . . . and Harry and Braden wouldn’t exist.
“I—” She broke off, pressing a hand to her stomach. “Oh, gods.” She was sorely tempted to take the bathroom escape route, but they owed each other better than that. She didn’t look at him, though, as she said, “If it hadn’t been for Werigo’s spell, we probably wouldn’t have had the boys. And, gods forgive me, sometimes I think it would’ve been easier if we’d come into this as strangers, or as lovers but not parents. I don’t regret having Harry and Braden, never that. I just wish . . .” She trailed off. “I wish I knew which parts have been pieces of the gods’ plan, and which have been our choices.”
“I would’ve picked you out of the crowd with or without the magic,” he said softly. “You dazzled me then, both as a man and a mage. I’m still dazzled by you now. More so, even, because you gave us Harry and Braden.”
Patience swallowed against the hard, hot lump of emotion that narrowed her throat. “But will you still feel that way back home?”
To his credit he didn’t lie. But the regret in his eyes hurt just as much as the lie would have.
The burble of her phone was almost a relief at that point. She pawed through her clothes, pulled out her cell, and checked the new text message. “Jade and the others are downstairs.”
“They’re early. You want to tell them to grab a table someplace quiet and we’ll debrief while we eat?”
She shot off the return text and fled to the bathroom, where she took a quick shower and pulled herself together.
Ten minutes later they left the room with only a messy bed and steamed-up bathroom to show that they had been there. She paused for a last look back as he held the hallway door for her. The mirrored decor wasn’t any less cheesy than it had been the night before, but she felt a pang at leaving it behind.
“We won’t forget this time,” Brandt said quietly.
“No, we won’t.” But as they headed downstairs to meet the others, she found herself wondering whether it would be enough for them to remember that first night. She felt so far removed from the person she’d been back then, so far away from the awestruck wonder of discovering the magic and fighting at her lover’s side, that she couldn’t see how the memories could help fix a damned thing.
Their teammates had snagged a private room at the back of the hotel restaurant, which was mercifully low-key on the themed-wedding kitsch, instead leaning toward a trellised indoor-garden feeling, with skylights that were wide-open to the sunny morning.
Patience hesitated slightly at the sight of not only Strike, Jade, Rabbit, and Myrinne, who she’d been expecting, but also Alexis, Nate, Sven, Lucius, and Leah. “Wow. The gang’s all here. Almost, anyway.”
It shouldn’t have made her claustrophobic to step into the room or take one of the two empty chairs and have Brandt’s arm bump hers as he did the same. But the walls closed in on her nonetheless.
“Sasha stayed with Anna, and Michael’s on Mendez duty,” Leah said. “The rest of us figured we’d tag along and boost Jade, on the theory that the cardinal-day spell concealing this doorway of yours could be tough to unravel on a noncardinal day.”
And also, Patience knew, because the Nightkeepers were one-hundred-percent adventure junkies. Just look at how easily she and Brandt had talked each other into exploring the tunnels below El Rey.
The good news was that, in doing so, they had discovered something the Nightkeepers badly needed. Without preamble, she said, “The doorway leads to an intersectio
n.”
There was a short pause; then Sven whooped and the others started firing questions, the mood in the room shifting abruptly to one of “Oh, holy shit. Finally something might be going our way!” Ever since Iago had destroyed the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá, the magi had been searching for another skyroad, a place where the barrier was thin enough to allow the gods to contact them directly.
Rather than trying to field the questions, Patience held up a hand. “Hold on. It’s complicated. I think we should start at the beginning.” She glanced at Brandt. “Do you want to tell it, and I’ll jump in where I’ve got a different perspective?”
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.” He didn’t look at her, but beneath the table, he shifted, looping his foot around hers and pressing gently in an unseen half hug. “We used a mirror in our hotel room to trigger the etznab spell,” he began, then went on to summarize the events of that long-ago night, with her adding details as they seemed relevant. They were forced to pause several times as the waitstaff filled their orders. By the time he had described Werigo’s banishment by the gods, and the final spell he’d cast, the room was dead quiet.
When he was done, there was a moment of silence that wasn’t so much stunned as it was a case of nobody knowing what to tackle first.
“Are you guys okay?” Leah said finally.
“We’re coping,” Patience said, not wanting an open forum on her and Brandt’s relationship, then or now.
Leah’s nod seemed to accept the evasion more than the answer.
“If it’s an intersection—” Strike began.
“There isn’t any question about that,” Brandt said, “at least not in my mind. It channeled both light and dark magic, and let both demons and gods reach through. Hellroad plus skyroad equals intersection.” He paused. “But there’s a problem. Given that Ix knew about the El Rey intersection, then we have to assume that Iago does too.”
Patience hadn’t really been thinking in that direction, but now her mind leaped ahead. “But if he had access to a functional hellroad six years ago, why didn’t he use it back then?” A cold knot twisted in her stomach as she answered her own question. “Unless what happened that night destroyed the El Rey intersection.”
Brandt nodded. “There has to be some reason why the site hasn’t pulled anyone else in since then.”
“But we—” She broke off as disappointment tugged. “Damn it, you’re right. We’ve scoured the area. We wouldn’t have missed something pumping that much magic.”
“You might if it’s not using the power you’re looking for.” That came from Lucius. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. You said there were two other doors leading out of the chamber, right? What else was different from the old intersection beneath Chichén Itzá?”
Brandt said, “This one was very plain, unadorned. The outer doorway was carved, but not the tunnel or the chamber itself. The sconces were strictly functional, and the altar was just a square chunk of stone, not a chac-mool.” He paused. “Anybody got a pen?”
When Nate tossed him a ballpoint, he got busy sketching a napkin schematic. Meanwhile, Patience put in, “The torches we found just inside the tunnel were carved, but not with glyphs. Patterns, mostly.” She went on to describe the slow-burning resin and unfamiliar incense.
When they were both finished, Lucius studied the napkin map, added a couple of notes from her description, and then lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “No guarantees, but based on the lack of carvings, and there being none of the tricks that were part of the intersection at Chichén Itzá—the sliding doors, the elevator-type mechanism, and such—I’d guess that this is a very early site, maybe the first few centuries after the Nightkeepers came to this continent.”
Understanding shivered through Patience. “Back when they were still using muk, you mean?” That was what he’d meant about it not being the power they were looking for: Muk was the ancestral magic that combined the light and dark aspects of the power. Among the magi, only Michael could use muk, and at that, he wielded only a small piece of its total power. Yet even that much was devastating.
Lucius nodded. “Up until the Nightkeepers came to this continent, they managed to maintain the balance between light and dark spells, but something about being here ramped everything up.” He made a boom noise and pantomimed an explosion. “The magic increased by the century, permeating the emerging Mayan culture.”
Jade put in, “Which is why the culture on this continent resembles that of the original Nightkeepers so much more closely than any of the civilizations our ancestors lived with before or after.”
“Right,” Lucius said. “Eventually the boar-bloodline king couldn’t maintain the balance anymore, the darkness corrupted a dozen of his strongest magi, and”—he snapped for emphasis—“the wielders of light and dark magic split into the Nightkeepers and the Order of Xibalba.” He paused. “Before that, though, the biggest rituals were split between light and dark . . . sometimes even with separate entrances to the ritual sites.”
“That would account for two of the doors,” Patience said, hope kindling at the inner click of connection that suggested they were on to something. “The one we came through was keyed to light magic, while Ix came in through the other one. Which probably means there’s a dark-magic entrance hidden somewhere in the ruins of El Rey. But that doesn’t account for the third door.”
“You said it was a closed stone panel.” Lucius thought for a moment. “Maybe it’s not even a doorway at all, just carved into the stone, which would mean it would be more of a symbolic entrance . . . maybe for the gods?” He frowned. “Except that if that’s the case, then there should be one for the dark lords as well, in order to keep the balance.”
“Not if the site dates back before the Nightkeeper-Xibalban split.” Surprisingly, the comment came from Rabbit, who usually kept his mouth shut during meetings. He continued: “Back then, there wasn’t the same good-versus-evil distinction between entities that lived in the sky versus the underworld. They were all considered gods.”
Strike scowled. “Bullshit.” He inhaled to keep going, but subsided at Leah’s warning glance. Patience had noticed several such exchanges in recent days, with Leah checking Strike’s temper against not only Rabbit but Jox and Sven as well.
Rabbit bristled, but it was Lucius who said, “Actually, it’s not BS. There’s some evidence in the library that the ancients viewed the sky and Xibalba as locations rather than moral barometers.”
Strike’s jaw flexed. “There was nothing fucking balanced about what the Banol Kax did to our parents.”
Rabbit looked away and said nothing, but Patience could guess what he was thinking: Your parents, not mine.
“None of this explains why Iago didn’t use the El Rey intersection to activate the barrier,” Brandt put in. But where before Patience would have been annoyed by his overfocusing on the job rather than the people around him, now she saw it as a redirection of the conversation. The press of his foot on hers said that he too had noticed the growing tension between Strike and Rabbit, and didn’t like the looks of it.
“Maybe he knew about it but couldn’t make it work,” Lucius offered. “It sounds like Ix had connected enough to split off the dark magic he wanted to use to open the barrier—which, in turn, summoned you guys via the leftover light magic. But he hadn’t managed to punch through. . . . It took him dying to fully activate the hellroad.”
Patience nodded. “If Iago didn’t know to try a human sacrifice, he wouldn’t have been able to open the intersection.” She paused. “Will we need a full-on sacrifice?” Human sacrifice wasn’t an aspect of most light-magic spells . . . but they weren’t talking about strictly light magic anymore, were they?
“I think it’s time to find out.” Strike signaled for the check. “Let’s go. If we can reopen the skyroad during the solstice-eclipse, we should be able to take out Cabrakan even without a Triad mage.”
Brandt’s expression flattened. “Patience’s nahwal seemed pretty
certain that it’s going to be up to me. Problem is, we don’t have a fucking clue why my ancestors can’t reach me.”
Patience frowned. “Yes, we do. Don’t you remember—” She broke off at his look of utter confusion. Then her pulse started bumping unevenly as it connected. “Oh, shit. It was Werigo’s spell.”
“What was?”
“That night in the tunnel, you hinted that the gods had turned their backs on you. When I pressed, you said you’d tell me the whole story later. Then when the skyroad opened, their power came through me, not you, even though you were the one fighting Werigo. I thought it was because I was the one was touching the altar, but what if that wasn’t it? What if it was because the gods couldn’t—or wouldn’t—reach out to you?”
“I don’t remember saying anything about the gods.”
“You never do, do you?” Lucius said, eyes narrowing.
“I don’t what?”
“Call on the gods. You never say ‘gods know’ or ‘godsdamn’ or anything like that. And it’s not the ‘I’m a daddy. I don’t swear’ thing. You swear plenty, but you don’t blaspheme. What’s more, although I’ve heard you talk about the gods, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk to them.” Lucius paused. “Do you pray?”
Brandt scowled. “That’s between me and—” Breaking off, he muttered an oath that had nothing to do with the sky. “It’s not my thing.”
Surprise rattled through Patience. “Why didn’t I ever notice that?”
“Because of Werigo’s spell,” Lucius answered. “It screwed with your perceptions. He must’ve blanked not just your memories of what happened in that chamber, but all your memories of experiencing magic up to that point in your lives. In Patience’s case, that meant everything from the moment she saw Brandt on the beach. But in his case, the spell not only backtracked to earlier in the day when he first laid eyes on Patience; it also went back further to a previous event involving the magic.”
“The car crash,” Brandt said flatly. “That’s the only other missing memory I’m aware of.”
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