Suddenly, Iago’s voice carried from the other side of the shields, “Give it up. Drop the shield and I’ll spare the winikin.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” Brandt called back. “You’ve got me and Patience. Let the others go.” Inwardly, he sent, He’s got us cornered. He wouldn’t make an offer like that unless he’s weaker than he wants us to think.
He used himself up regenerating, Patience agreed. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still dangerous.
“You want to save your winikin or not?” Iago demanded.
Brandt hesitated just long enough for it to be believable. “Okay. Shield’s coming down.” Ready?
Ready.
Together, they spun up the jun tan magic and used it to shield the twins and winikin, then themselves. Beyond those shields, their battle magic painted the air a sparkling red-gold.
Now! Brandt sent.
They dropped the shield and Iago appeared, his molten-wax features distorted with rage and hatred, and haloed within a cloud of dark magic. Roaring his brother’s name, he unleashed a bolt of power at them.
The magic wrapped around them, coating their shields, which groaned but held as they lashed back, sending a massive fireball hurtling at the Xibalban.
Iago raised a strong shield and the fireball spent itself harmlessly. But he let the shield wink out again as he built his next bolt.
Understanding slashed through Patience. He can only handle one spell at a time!
Hold the shields, Brandt said. Reverse ours when I give the word, and then break right. We need to split his attention. He sent a mental image of his plan. Which she thought might work.
Gods willing.
She nodded, sweat prickling at the drain of holding two shields, one around her and Brandt, the other protecting the winikin and the twins. Stay alive, she ordered him. I love you.
You too. Ready? . . . Go!
She dropped both of the shields and used all her power to create a new one that surrounded Iago in a sphere of reflective magic, just as the enemy mage unleashed a deadly energy bolt straight at them. The dark magic caromed off the shield and flew back toward Iago, who screamed as he disappeared within a coalescing cloud of brown hellmagic.
Patience held the shield, but it drained her, sapping even the jun tan power. The sphere lasted for only a few seconds before it dissolved beneath the dark-magic onslaught and Iago roared free once again.
She dove and rolled to the right. Brandt spun, lunged the other way, and let rip with a fireball.
Iago spun and, seemingly instinctively, slashed at the incoming fireball with Moctezuma’s knife.
The red-gold magic flared and disappeared, leaving the knife glowing.
Oh, shit. The thought echoed through Patience and Brandt at the realization that the first-fire knife wasn’t just a symbol. It had powers of its own.
Iago’s eyes lit. Lifting the knife, he lunged for Patience.
She reeled back, scrambling to cast a new shield. The spell failed. The jun tan magic was depleted. Brandt shouted her name. A heavy weight slammed into her from the side, sending her flying into the wall.
Her head cracked against stone. And the world went dark.
“No!” Brandt saw Patience slide down the wall, limp and unmoving, saw Woody drop down beside her. The winikin had pushed her out of the way, but not soon enough. Iago closed on them both, raising the glowing knife. Denying what was about to happen, Brandt screamed, “Patience!”
He flung himself at Iago, slammed into the bastard’s dark shield magic, and fought to push through the faltering spell, which flayed him raw, lashing him with harsh agony. Then he was through! He went in low, tackling Iago and sending him flying backward.
They went down hard together, grappling for control of the knife.
Iago had the strength of an ajaw-makol, but Brandt was desperate. He fought dirty, ditching his martial arts moves for the “fucking get it done” techniques he’d learned from Michael. He jammed his elbow in Iago’s windpipe, grabbed his knife hand, and twisted so hard he broke the fucker’s wrist. The Xibalban bellowed in pain and Brandt wrestled the knife from him, but the enemy mage got his other hand around Brandt’s neck and squeezed hard.
“Screw. You,” Brandt grated. He reversed the first-fire knife, which vibrated with trapped Nightkeeper magic, slashed it once across Iago’s throat, and then drove the blade into the Xibalban’s gut, angling high to slice through his diaphragm to his heart. As he did so, he started reciting the head-and-heart spell, hoping to hell they were close enough to the moment of solstice that he would be able to banish the ajaw-makol .
Iago’s body arched and he gave a high, keening cry. Dark magic broke over them both, in a shock wave that was like being inside a thunderclap. Power surged as the Xibalban overrode the energy cost that normally prevented teleportation through rock.
’Port magic rattled and the bastard vanished.
In the sudden silence, Brandt knelt on the bloodstained stone, gripping the first-fire knife white-knuckled.
Failure drummed through him. He had beaten Iago. But he hadn’t killed him.
“Son of a bitch!” Furious with Iago, with himself, he heaved the knife, which skittered across the stone floor and banged off the far wall.
“Brandt.” Patience’s voice brought his head up; the look on her face got him on his feet.
“What’s—” He broke off at the sight of Wood lying halfway across Hannah’s lap. The twins were glued to either side of Hannah, seeming unsure of whether they should pay attention to their parents or the winikin . Wood’s eyes were closed, his skin sickly pale. Patience was leaning over him with her hands overlapped, applying direct pressure to his upper chest.
Blood streamed between her fingers.
Oh. Shit.
Brandt stumbled over. “No. Oh, no. Please, no.” The whispered plea bled from his lips in a jumbled almost-prayer. He dropped down beside Woody, his knees cracking into the stone, and took his winikin’s hand. “Shit. Woody!”
The winikin stirred and cracked his eyes. “Is Iago gone?”
“Yeah.” Brandt had to work to get the word out. “He’s gone.”
Wood’s eyes went to Patience, then up to Hannah and each of the boys in turn. His expression eased slightly. “You’re all okay.”
“We couldn’t have done it without you.” Brandt gripped his hand, voice going thick. “Hang on. We’ll get you to Sasha. She’ll take care of that scratch.”
So much blood.
The winikin met his eyes. “Remember how I always said that you should trust your instincts, that you’d know what to do when the time came? Well . . . it’s here.”
Brandt froze. The air left his lungs, left the universe. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know. I always knew.” The winikin shifted painfully to put his forearm beside Brandt’s, so the eagle glyphs lined up and the warrior’s emblem matched up with the aj-winikin glyph. “I serve,” Woody said softly. “Not just because it’s my blood-bound duty, but because I love you, and because I believe that you’re what this world needs.”
“Oh,” Patience breathed, closing her eyes so they spilled tears.
Emotions thundered through Brandt: guilt, grief, remorse, regret . . . and an aching sorrow for the years they had lost, the sacrifices the winikin had made for him. The one he was prepared to make now.
When a warm, quivering body pressed against his side, he looked down into Harry’s face, suddenly seeing not just himself and Patience but also the parents and brothers he barely remembered. Yet at the same time, the features belonged entirely to the boy who slowly reached to touch his and Wood’s joined hands, linking three generations.
On Woody’s other side, Braden mirrored his brother, leaning against Patience and touching the place where her hands were locked over Woody’s wound. At the winikin’s head, Hannah’s single eye was awash, but her face was soft with acceptance. With, he thought, faith.
“Do it,” Woody whispered. “
Retake your oath. And remember that I love each and every one of you, whether in this life or the next.”
Heart heavy, Brandt looped his free arm around Braden. Taking solace from the small, sturdy body, he whispered a brief, heartfelt prayer for his winikin’s next life, and then recited the oath that had been burned deep in his memory: “Kabal ku bootik teach a suut.”
He lifted his head to meet Patience’s tear-drenched eyes, and said, “As the gods once paid for my life out of the balance, now I repay that debt, three for one. A triad for the Triad.”
Pain seared the numb spot on his scarred leg. He didn’t look; he didn’t need to. He knew that he once again wore the Akbal glyph.
Wood’s breathing hitched, then hitched again. Brandt was peripherally aware of a clamor in the tunnel that rose as teammates arrived, bloody and battered but alive, then fell silent when they saw what was going on.
Sasha pushed through and knelt beside Woody, but after touching him for only a moment, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m too drained.”
“It’s okay. The sky is calling me,” Woody said with a soft smile, his eyes going faraway. “Emmeline’s waiting. She looks just like I remembered.”
Brandt swallowed hard. “They couldn’t marry because they were both fully bound winikin, but they were lovers when their duties permitted. She died in the massacre.” And now Woody was seeing her. Brandt didn’t know whether that was real or a trick of the mind. But as he watched Wood’s face soften, his breath slow, he hoped to hell it was real.
The winikin’s lips moved. Brandt leaned in to get closer. “What?”
“Two years and one day from now, when it’s all over, I want you and Patience to work on making the boys a little brother. Woodrow’s a good name. It should stay in the bloodline.”
“Yeah.” Brandt’s throat closed on the word. “You’re right. It should.”
He straightened away. Even before he saw Wood’s eyes go glazed, he knew his winikin was gone. He knew it from the laxity of the winikin’s hand in his, from the sudden hollow emptiness in his soul . . . and from the burn on his calf, which said that the Akbal glyph was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
But even as the Akbal magic faded, another spun up to take its place. A big fucking something that stirred atavistic horror deep inside him, even through the numbing grief.
Son of a bitch. The Triad spell was back online.
“Woody—” he began, but the power closed in on him, shutting him down with a churning whirl of thoughts and memories that weren’t his own. Fear flared, but he didn’t keep it to himself this time. Instead, he met Patience’s wide, scared eyes, and reached for her hand.
I need you. He wasn’t sure if he said it aloud or not, knew only that she met him halfway.
Then the lights went out.
The barrier
The transition wasn’t like any other Brandt had ever experienced. One moment he was in the cave, hunched over his winikin’s body. In the next, he stood in the gray-green mists, surrounded by dozens of strangers who were all looking at him, their faces lit with hope and welcome.
Oh, holy shit, he thought. They were the ancestors. His ancestors, his bloodline’s strongest talents, who had been gathered into the nahwal and were now reborn, thanks to the Triad magic.
Their clothing came from a mix of eras, weighted heavily toward the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, as if the older souls had faded away over time. He couldn’t process anything beyond that, though. He could only clear his throat and rasp, “Tell me what to do. We don’t have much time.” The solstice was approaching fast.
There was a stirring in the crowd, and two men pushed to the front.
Brandt’s throat closed as he recognized his brothers, Harry and Braden. They looked exactly the same as they had twenty-six years earlier, at the time of the massacre. Exactly the way he had remembered them, though no longer bigger and older than him. Instead they were ten years or so younger, frozen at the moments of their deaths.
“Hey,” he said, voice gone so thick with emotion that he couldn’t get out anything better.
They didn’t say anything, not in words. But the cool mist warmed around him, bringing a deep thrum of magic and a sense of awesome power hovering just at the edges of his consciousness.
Braden held out his hand in invitation.
Brandt hesitated. Then he heard Wood’s voice whisper at the edges of his mind: Have faith.
He took a deep breath. Clasped his brother’s hand. And became a Triad mage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
El Rey
Patience tried to catch Brandt as he fell. Instead she wound up pinned beneath him, with his head in her lap, in a position that was too close to the way Hannah had held Woody as he died.
She leaned over him, held on to him as her pulse beat so heavily in her ears that she could barely hear anything above the drumbeat throb.
“Please, gods, not now. Not like this.” She was barely aware of whispering the prayer aloud as the others gathered close, Jade taking the boys off to one side while Hannah wept silently.
Then, without warning, the jun tan bond flared to life and Patience could see what Brandt was seeing, feel what he was feeling, as the skills, thoughts, and experiences of dozens of eagle warriors whirled through him in a maelstrom of power. But it wasn’t the terrifying possession she had expected, the one the library had warned against. Instead, it was more like the downloading Rabbit had described, a transfer of information rather than the loss of free will.
What was more, it wasn’t chaos. As she watched, mental images of high wooden filing cabinets materialized within his consciousness. Moments later, the glowing bits of information, which had been whirling madly around, all started sailing toward the cabinets, which thrust out their drawers to snap up the information, sorting the whirl by skill, spell, subject, and whatever other filing system Brandt’s highly ordered brain could devise.
Understanding broke over her like the dawn. The sun god might have almost chosen Rabbit as the Triad mage, but whatever god had saved Brandt from the accident years ago had known the truth: Brandt had been destined for this all along. He was, for better or worse, perfect for the job.
His analytic, linear thought process, combined with the strength of an eagle warrior, had given him an almost terrifying ability to compartmentalize. And although that had caused problems before, now it would allow him to continue functioning as both a Triad mage and the man she loved. She hoped.
As if that was what he had wanted her to see, the filing-cabinet images shimmered around her, then dissolved, and she was back in her own body, blinking down at Brandt. Moments later, he stirred, groaning. He opened his eyes and looked up at her, his expression awed.
“Gods,” he croaked, finally able to call on the sky deities after all these years. “All their powers, their talents. The battles they’ve fought. The things they’ve seen . . .” He trailed off, expression clouding.
“You can handle it,” she said.
The full impact still seemed to be catching up with him, though. “If I can do almost anything an eagle mage has ever done,” he said softly, thoughtfully, “how can I tell what, exactly, I’m supposed to do?”
“You’re not alone.” She gestured to their teammates, then to Hannah and their sons. “We’re all in this together.”
His eyes never left her face. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not alone. And thank the gods for that.”
They were going to be okay, she thought. “I think—”
A train-track rumble erupted beneath them, around them, cutting her off. The teammates braced as the tunnel shook and shuddered in short, rhythmic bursts, then in one long, drawn-out shimmy before the movement stopped.
There was dead silence for a moment, as the miniquake brought home an ominous fact: The magi might have prevented Iago from enacting the first-fire ceremony, but the threat of Cabrakan remained.
And the clock was ticking.
Brandt moved to where Woo
dy lay, still and gray. Hannah sat beside him, the boys beside her. Patience joined them and burrowed in, needing to touch them, feel them, be reassured that they were there, they were okay, for the moment at least. Brandt, too, crouched to be with his family, and to reach out and touch his winikin’s face, stroke a hand along the gray-shot hair. “Woodrow’s a good name,” he said softly. “We won’t forget it.”
He reached for Patience and folded their fingers together, and she felt a surge of power, sensed a reshuffling of the cabinets. When Sven started to say something, she shook her head and mouthed, “Wait. Let him work.”
After nearly a minute, Brandt broke the contact and looked up at the others. “Okay. Triad-magic time. When I concentrate on the solstice-eclipse and Cabrakan, I get two images from my ancestors. The first is a hand-drawn map of an island with four straight causeways leading to it and a bunch of buildings on the island, like a city, or maybe a sprawled-out palace. The second is a painting from an old wall mural, or maybe part of a codex. There’s a bunch of people standing near a broken wall that has a repeated eagle motif carved into it. They’re holding hands beneath a full moon that’s painted dark orange, like it’s in full eclipse, and lines of red light are radiating away from them.” He paused. “I think we need to link up right near that wall. Problem is, I don’t have a clue where it might be.”
“I do,” Patience said. When he glanced at her, she said with some asperity, “I tried to tell you about it earlier.”
“Sorry.”
“I get a freebie on our next fight.” There would be one, of course. But this time she wouldn’t have to wonder if he loved her. She knew it—believed it—deep down inside. Feeling an inner glow at the thought, despite everything else, she continued: “What I figured out was that big earthquake in Mexico City wasn’t just the year after the Solstice Massacre. It was less than two days before the fall equinox. What’s more, there were two major aftershocks: a seven-point-five on the day of the equinox, and a seven-point-six exactly six months later, a few days after the spring equinox.” When she paused, there was dead silence.
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