And right now, they needed a Triad mage.
He took his place beside Patience and nodded. “Ready.”
The torches filled the small space with the scent of ritual incense, and the flickering light outlined their reflected images in a haze of orange yellow that made them look like negatives projected onto the sacred black stone.
She glanced at him, and he had the sense that she was waiting for him to say something, only he didn’t know what.
Then the moment passed and she said, almost to herself, “I think we’re supposed to try the etznab spell here partly because it’s a power sink, and partly because it’s a place I associate with the twins. And it’s tied to me too, I guess, because breaking in here was me hitting rock bottom. After that, I knew I had to change what I was doing, who I was becoming.”
Brandt’s throat was tight. “I’m sorry I didn’t help you more. I should have . . . I don’t know. Done something.” Even now, with guilt gut-punching him, he couldn’t reach out to her the way she needed him to. What the hell was wrong with him?
Dull agony pounded behind his eyes. Fucking headache.
“I had to figure things out on my own, I think.” She paused. “Before, someone else was always around to tell me who I was. Hannah taught me that I was a Nightkeeper, and the color of my belt told me how far I had gotten as a fighter. In school, depending on who you asked, I was a straight-A student, a princess, a tease, or all of those things. Then I met you, and I became a girlfriend, a fiancée, a wife, a mother . . . but at the same time, I was still a Nightkeeper, which made me unique, at least as far as I knew. Special.
“Then, when we came here, I got a whole new set of labels. I wasn’t the only Nightkeeper anymore, but I was part of the only mated mage pair, and the mother of full-blood twins. My talent manifested before most of the others’, and it was my job to teach everyone hand-to-hand combat skills. . . .” She trailed off. “But then Hannah left with Harry and Braden, and you and I drifted apart. Over time, my talent didn’t prove all that useful, and the fight training petered out. Suddenly I wasn’t special anymore. I was just me.”
He couldn’t argue the chronology, but she was mistaken about one thing. “If you don’t think you’re special, you’re dead wrong. Trust me. . . . You’re special. You’re—” But he couldn’t do any better than that. All the love words he’d once used freely with her stayed jammed in his throat.
She didn’t seem to notice that he’d locked up. Or more likely, she was way too used to it. “I’m starting to figure it all out,” she said. “The good news is that I don’t need your sympathy or your help. I’m doing okay on my own.” She shook her head. “And I didn’t mean to get into any of this right now. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He met her eyes in the mirror, and wished with all his heart that he could snap his fingers and make everything better between them. “I’m the one who’s sorry. For all of it.”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything more. Instead, she pulled her knife and bloodied her palm, then held out her hand for the uplink. Being sorry isn’t enough, the action said. Not if you can’t be what I need.
And it wasn’t like he could argue with that either. So he drew his knife, slashed his palm, and took her hand.
“Focus on the accident,” she said. “But keep your eyes open. Keep looking into the mirror.”
Werigo’s magic made the memory slippery and hard to pin down, but he made himself remember the sinking Beemer, the blaring horn, and the sound of his own voice screaming for help. His skin crawled with a sudden chill and the imagined press of frigid water. Swallowing hard, he nodded. “Let’s do this.”
They chanted the spell together, as they had in the mirrored hotel room. But this time as the world spun around him and his consciousness lurched sideways, he was acutely aware that she wasn’t with him, not even as a tingle feeding through the jun tan bond.
He was entirely on his own, which wasn’t nearly the relief his warrior self thought it should be.
Then even that sadness disappeared.
The world went black and cold.
And he was dying.
He crowded up near the roof of the sinking car, tilting his head into the remaining air, which was leaking away by the second. He watched the bubbles rise up, silver in the darkness, and longed to follow them. On his next breath, he sucked water along with the air, and had to fight the gag reflex that threatened to double him over.
Don’t panic. Think! But all he could think about was Woody’s stories about the Nightkeepers, and the end-time war, and how important it was for him to work hard, train hard, and have faith. As the final string of silvery bubbles escaped, his mind locked on the last of Woody’s expectations. Faith, he thought. When all else failed, that was what it came down to, didn’t it?
Tasting his own blood in the water he’d inhaled along with the last half breath of air, he searched for a prayer in the old language. When nothing seemed right, and the grayness started to telescope inward from the edges of his consciousness, he went with his heart, and used the last of his oxygen to say: “Gods. If you can hear this, please help me.”
He spat blood into the water, though that seemed redundant given how much he’d already lost from his leg. Then he thought, deep down inside, I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything. I swear it on my soul. Just get me out of here.
A soundless detonation ripped through him in a shock wave and the world exploded around him, lighting the blackness with a rainbow flash that coalesced to fiery white light.
A voice boomed in his head, somehow sounding like flutes, drumbeats, and a man’s voice all at once. “Son of eagles, your offer is accepted because the earth cannot lose a Triad mage in this era. But to keep the Triad intact, a triad must be sacrificed. Two will be taken as tradition holds, but one will come later. The last sacrifice will have both power and your love, because there is no sacrifice without pain.”
Brandt convulsed as his body fought for air. He was distantly aware of movement, a rush of water and bubbles, a hand grasping his wrist. Panic clawed at him. His terror that the voice might be real was equally balanced by the fear that it was nothing more than a delusion, the light at the end of the tunnel, a final salute by his dying brain.
Which was it, a god or biological death?
“Son of eagles, do you accept?”
Accept what? He couldn’t follow, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but crave oxygen. With his free hand, he clawed at his throat, his chest. Both of his legs were pinned now, by a heavy weight that yanked at him in return, pulling until he felt muscle and tendons tear. A jolt of adrenaline cleared his perceptions slightly and he realized that Joe and Dewey were in the car with him, trying to get him out.
Gods, yes! Pull! he shouted, but didn’t make any noise. Yank the fucking leg off. I don’t care what happens. Just get me out of here!
The voice came again, saying, “If you do not care what the cost, then take the oath mark and carry it willingly until the balance is restored.”
Out of nowhere, glyphs streamed through his head, symbolizing words in the language of his long-ago ancestors. He didn’t know how to read the symbols, but somehow the syllables were right there in his head.
“Kabal ku bootik teach a suut!” he gasped, parroting the syllables that danced in his spinning brain. New pain flared in his injured leg, but he was beyond screaming, beyond caring. The white light went dim, the pain receded, and the world grayed out.
Then, blessed gods, he was breathing again!
He coughed out water, sucked in biting cold air, and shuddered as it burned his lungs. Slowly, the world came back into focus. Sort of.
He was hanging on to something solid, pointy, and buoyant, and the bitingly cold current was carrying him along. For a minute, all he could do was concentrate on breathing—in and out, in and out. Then his other senses started coming back online: He could hear the rush of the river and feel his ribs hurt with the effort of moving the air. His throat burned and h
is injured leg throbbed with dull, cold agony. But he was alive!
He went weak with relief. Hell, he was weak, period. It was all he could do to hang on.
“Fucking A,” he croaked. “I can’t believe you guys got me out of there.” His voice sounded strange in his ears.
Even stranger was the silence that followed.
Jarred fully awake by a sudden slash of fear he couldn’t pinpoint, he opened his eyes and squinted, trying to make sense of the shadows and moonlit reflections.
He was hanging on to a piece of deadfall; the nubs of broken branches dug into his ribs and stomach, but at least the thing was keeping his head above water. He was floating along, carried by the river’s current, paced by other flotsam from the wreck. He saw a couple of hockey sticks and what looked like the unopened package of gym socks he’d had in his bag.
Then the reflections shifted and the white flash stopped looking like a lumpy plastic bag and started looking like something else entirely.
His already freezing body iced further and his heart stuttered. “No.” The word came out chattering and broken. “NO!”
That wasn’t Dewey’s face, open-eyed and fixed in death. The shadows around it weren’t a body that moved limply with the current.
No. Impossible. He wouldn’t believe it. His buddies were alive, they had gotten him out, they had—
Suddenly, he heard his own voice saying, “Kabal ku bootik teach a suut.” And although he didn’t know the old tongue, the words somehow translated themselves inside his head: The gods pay; you return the price.
The ice inside him shattered as the rest of it came back—the god’s voice, the bargain it had offered. “The sacrifices will be taken as tradition holds,” it had said. He hadn’t thought about what that meant; he’d been starving for oxygen, fighting to live.
“Joe? Dewey?” His voice wobbled on the word. “Come on, you two, answer me!”
A soft touch of cloth brushed his arm as something heavy, solid, and yielding bumped into him from behind. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t not look.
A harsh sob caught in his throat at the sight of a moon-silvered face and shadowed, lifeless eyes. “Joe.” The word turned to a groan when he saw that the white splash had drifted nearer and definitely wasn’t a bag of socks. “Dewey.”
Grief broke over him like a storm, filling him with a huge, terrible anger.
“No!” He lashed out, hammering at the water that surrounded him, at the deadfall that had saved him. “Damn you, that wasn’t fair! I didn’t know! I couldn’t think!” He lost his grip and went under, then fought his way back up, screaming, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t fucking mean it!”
He thrashed and fought until he was bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, clinging limply to the floating wood as tears streamed down his face, feeling barely warmer than the water surrounding him. He sobbed for his friends, and for himself, and when his body went increasingly numb and his grip slipped, he was tempted to let go, tempted to even up the gods’ precious balance on his own terms.
He didn’t, though, because the sacrifices had already been made, and because Woody had taught him better than to quit.
The sound of a car’s engine punched through the shock and misery. He jerked around in time to see a pair of brake lights disappear around a turn in the middle distance. Adrenaline gave a cold-numbed kick at the sight of a light farther downstream, shining on a small building and a dock.
The black riverbanks rose high everywhere else, ominous and impassable.
“Okay,” he said through teeth that had stopped chattering as he passed from cold to the beginnings of hypothermia, despite his hereditary toughness. “You can do this.”
Using one leaden arm to paddle, he turned the deadfall, angling to hit the shore pretty far upstream of the dock; he was too damn weak to fight the current, so he would have to use it instead.
Making sure that the floating bodies were securely snagged on the trailing branches, he looped his arm around a sturdy protruding branch and gave a huge frog kick.
He screamed hoarsely, and nearly passed out when his bad leg awakened from warm numbness to raw agony. His cries echoed off the water and the high riverbanks as he convulsed against the deadfall. He clutched the worn branches to keep his head above the water, but his struggles shifted the floating tree, causing it to spin in the frigid current, seeking a new balance.
The branch he’d been holding on to snagged his shirt and dragged him under as the log rolled, taking him with it.
No! His heart hammered as he yanked with fingers weakened by cold, shock, and pain. The fabric tore and gave, and then snagged again, pulling so tightly that there was no way he could get free. He was trapped, pinned helpless mere inches away from air. Flailing, he tried to roll the tree, snap the branch, tear the fabric, to do something, anything, to break free.
Please gods, please gods, please gods! The mantra cycled in his head, though with a sick sense of inevitability now that he knew what the gods were capable of.
His lungs ached with the now-familiar pain of oxygen deprivation. Adrenaline flared through him, giving him a final, desperate spurt of strength that he used to twist himself into a painful knot. He brought up his good leg, jammed it against the tree trunk, and pushed with everything he had left.
The shirt cut into him; the collar tightened across his windpipe with a pressure that made his instincts say, Stop. You’re choking. But choking didn’t matter when there was no air left to breathe, so he bore down and wrenched against his bonds.
For a second nothing happened. Then the shirt tore, and he was free!
He tumbled away from the deadfall, spinning head over ass underwater, not sure which way was up. Terror clawed at him alongside pain and the reflexive need to breathe. Then his head broke the surface, more by accident than anything. Cold air slapped his face as he sucked in huge gulps of air, keeping his head above water with spastic churns of his arms and one good leg, while the other hung useless, dragging in the current.
He wasn’t going to be able to tread for long. He had to get out of the water.
He blinked into the darkness, taking too long to focus, then even longer to comprehend the sight of the deadfall some twenty feet farther downstream, with Dewey grotesquely snagged and pulled partway out of the water, so his arms were draped over a couple of branches, his head cocked the way it did when he was about to fire off one of his killer put-downs.
Brandt’s heart lunged into his throat and even though he knew it was an illusion, he yelled, “Dewey! Hey, Dewey!”
There was no answer, of course. Dewey was dead. Which was what he was going to be if he didn’t get his ass out of the water.
He was just upstream of the boat landing now, and would pass within twenty or thirty feet of the dock. From his vantage, it looked like a mile.
You’ve got to do it, Woody’s voice said inside him. Brandt hesitated, looking downstream at the deadfall and the pale splash of Dewey’s face. Then he turned away and started struggling for the dock with weak strokes of his leaden arms and feeble kicks from his one working leg.
He almost didn’t make it.
The current nearly pulled him past the dock, but he closed the distance with a last violent, muscle-tearing surge. His fingers banged into the cold, slimy wood of the dock pilings. He grabbed, missed, grabbed again, and this time got a good grip on the slippery wood.
He just hung on for a minute, breath burning in his lungs as he absorbed the feeling of being attached to something solid once more. Then, muscles screaming, he dragged himself up onto the dock. Once he was on solid ground, he collapsed, went fetal, and just lay there, shirtless, banged up, and stunned.
What little he knew about first aid said he was fucked unless somebody drove down to the boat landing and found him, because there was no way in hell he was going to make it up to the road. But even as he thought that, he felt the strength of his heritage trickling back through him, warming him a few degrees and getting some of his sys
tems back online.
With those inner reserves came a thrum of basic survival instincts that drummed through him with the beat of his heart, a throbbing refrain of, Get up. Get moving. Get help.
Rolling partway up with a groan of pain and effort, he took stock in the light of the single overhead bulb. It was solar powered and threw off dim, half-charged illumination. But that was enough for him to see that his right foot stuck out at an odd angle from his jeans, which were chewed back to his knee on the inside, leaving the limp, wet fabric plastered over his calf.
He didn’t want to look. But he had to. Steeling himself, he pulled back the fabric. And stared.
It wasn’t the deep, swollen slash in his leg that fixed his shocked attention, though. It was the sight of a strange marking a couple of inches above the injury: three curved triangles inside a round-cornered rectangle. It was stark black and looked like an inch-by-inch-and-a-half tattoo he didn’t remember getting.
It was a glyph like the ones Wood wore on his right forearm.
A hypoxia-jumbled memory leaped out at him, that of the god’s voice saying, “Two will be taken as tradition holds, but one will come later. The last sacrifice will have both power and your love, because there is no sacrifice without pain. . . . Take the oath mark and carry it willingly until the triad balance is restored.”
Horror dawned. He still owed another sacrifice. And it would be someone he loved, someone who carried a connection to the magic.
Woody.
“No.” He didn’t scream it this time, didn’t rail against the gods or the cruel bargain they had demanded. Instead he went cold, deep down to his very core.
The answer crystallized in his brain, coming from that cold, rational place: The god had said for him to carry the oath mark willingly until the balance was restored . . . which implied that if he rejected it, the oath would be broken.
His entire universe suddenly contracted itself to the sight of the god-mark on his leg and the burning need to get rid of it. He didn’t know how the knife got in his hand, hadn’t even fully grasped that it’d been in his pocket, shoved there after he’d cut his way free from his seat belt what now seemed like a lifetime ago.
Blood Spells Page 21
