Air detonated around him, drier than the rank humidity of Skywatch. He had only a moment to register tall tree trunks covered in dry, dead moss and wilted vines before gravity yanked at him again—he could almost hear it snarl,
Stay
down
there, will you?
He landed on his feet, bent kneed and not alone. The other magi were all around him, with Jade at the edge of the group, near a thick stand of brownish vegetation. He caught an impression of a blighted rain forest, with tall tree giants forming an overhead canopy protecting wilted air plants, with their long, ropy roots. Vines hung in limp tangles, and sad-sounding parrots called desultorily from up above.
Climate change
, he thought.
The cloud forests are dying
. But even as that clicked in his brain, he saw the brittle ferns sway with the passing of a large creature. Then another. “Jade,” he shouted as adrenaline spiked.
“Behind you!”
As she spun, the greenery parted beneath paws the size of a man’s palm, and a big, black shape emerged, joined seconds later by another. The fur bristled between their shoulder blades; their hackles were raised.
The companions of Kinich Ahau had come to earth!
Michael shouted and the magi converged on the creatures. Lucius lunged in front of Jade, and lifted his hand stone. Then he hesitated, because the companions weren’t attacking. The creatures were just standing there, with their eyes locked on Jade. “Don’t move,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t even breathe.”
She touched his arm. “I think it’s okay. Remember, they defended me before.”
“Now
I’m
defending you.”
“I know.”
He glanced back at her, saw the decision in her eyes, and grabbed her arm before she could do something impulsive. “Oh, no, you don’t.”
“They came from Xibalba,” she pointed out. “They must have come through the hellmouth. Maybe they can lead us back there. If it’s still closed, I might be able to manipulate the magic hiding it, like I did with Vennie’s cave.”
The other magi were gathered close in support, but he saw only her, feared only for her. “Jade—” he began.
She touched his mouth, silencing him. “Shh. We’ll talk about it later,” she said. And this time, the “later” was a promise.
Lucius knew he didn’t have a choice. She was a warrior, with or without the mark, and she needed to do what the gods intended, both for the Nightkeepers and for herself. He stepped slowly back and gestured for her to do her thing.
The moment she started forward, the dogs whirled and plunged into the undergrowth. Without looking back or hesitating, she plunged after them, with Lucius right on her heels. If anything bad wanted to get at her, it was going to have to go through him to do it.
But it wasn’t that the magic had quit on her, she knew. She’d quit on it. Or rather, she was blocking the hell out of it.
Damn it, Lucius
, she thought, but even as she did, she knew it wasn’t entirely his fault, or hers. They had both screwed things up the night before. She should’ve told him about her theory of the connection between their emotions and their magic, and she should’ve come clean to him that she was falling hard and fast for him despite all her best intentions. Even admitting it to her inner self brought a lick of panic. He’d turned her down, said that wasn’t what he wanted,
she
wasn’t what he wanted.
Granted, his behavior on the ball court and the way he’d worn her scarf as a knight’s Dark Age favor suggested he’d been doing some rethinking too, and the way he was following close behind her now had all the hallmarks of a male warrior- mage protecting his mate. But they hadn’t said the words, hadn’t had the conversation.
More talking?
she asked herself, irritation spiking. Therapy might be a two-way conversation, but she was getting sick of it. She was tired of talking herself into trouble; she wanted to
act
, to react, to make a difference, damn it.
Up ahead, the big black creatures crossed a wide clearing and then stopped dead, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing nothing in particular. Then they sat, still staring at that same nothingness. Only it wasn’t nothing, Jade knew. It was the hellmouth . . . or it would be if she could figure out the magic.
Lucius moved up beside her while the other magi fanned out, waiting for her to do her thing. None of their talents was compatible with the task—fire could level the forest but it couldn’t uncover what had been hidden; a shape-shifted hawk could fly a search pattern, but the Volatile could see only what was visible. Mind-bending wouldn’t help; Strike couldn’t ’port blind; and invisibility wasn’t their problem—visibility was.
“It’s all yours,” Lucius said, his thoughts paralleling hers. He took her hand, squeezed it. “You can do it. I have faith in you.”
That jarred against his recent behavior. “Maybe,” she said softly, “but what if I’m not strong enough?”
He looked down at her, his eyes intense. “The harvesters believed in the importance of their work; Shandi believed in the value of the harvesters. The stars believed in the prophecies, Vennie in her own brilliance. You’re a part of each of them. What do you believe in?”
She didn’t answer right away. She knew that the clock was ticking, that everyone was waiting for her. But she was stuck on Lucius’s question. What did she believe in? She believed in the magic, in the Nightkeepers and the war. She believed that she was stronger than she used to think she was, and that she and Lucius . . . what? Did she believe they could make each other happy in the long run?
That was the problem, she realized suddenly, or one of them. She’d seen the end of so many relationships that she entered each new affair preparing for its end, creating a self- fulfilling prophecy that made it easier, safer, and less dramatic to not bother trying to keep it going. What would happen if she threw herself into it heart and soul?
She might be crushed, she realized. But she might also succeed.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that inner peace is highly overrated.” While he was trying to puzzle that one out, she stepped into him and kissed him, hard. What was more, she opened herself fully to her own emotions and damned the consequences.
The magic shimmered within her, in the air around them, and a hidden door opened inside her, letting in the power of the solstice, and the power that was hers alone. She stepped away from Lucius, taking her place directly between the companions, facing nothing.
Only it wasn’t nothing, she saw now. It was everything.
The bright sparks she’d seen as part of the shifting pattern of power in Rabbit’s sublet had come from sex or emotion, maybe both; the fluid magic she’d sensed covering the hidden tunnel at Skywatch had been an ancient spell imbued with modern hopes and fears. But seeing those things was just half of her magic. The other half was in the spell words themselves, and her ability to morph them from one thing to another. She had created ice magic, it was true, but she hadn’t been able to use that part of her talent since.
Now, as she laid herself open to the magic, to the possibilities, she saw it. In front of her, rising from the dried-up cloud forest floor to the wilted canopy above, stretching the width of the clearing in either direction, was a wall of magic. It was bright sparks and flowing power. It was the code beneath the chatter, the structure underlying the fabric of the earth. At the same time, glyph strings crawled across the undulating surface of the spell, morphing and mutating as she watched. How in the hell was she supposed to alter a spell that was altering almost faster than she could follow it?
Gods
, she thought, stomach twisting. It was too complex, too mutable. She could see the structure but she couldn’t get a grip on it. The spell was a slippery ball of power, sliding through her grasp each time she thought she had it.
She stared at the nothingness, sweat prickling on her brow.
“Jade.” It was Lucius’s voice, low in warning. On either side of her, the companions were growling, their shoulder fur ruffling.
“They won’t hurt me. I think they’re worried. The magic of the game brought them through, and now they can’t get back to him. Unless . . .” She trailed off as a glyph glinted in the flowing string. It glowed, floated off the spell surface, and locked itself into a single pictograph. As she watched, a second followed. Then another. Her magic churned and spun, but she wasn’t quite there yet. The magic wasn’t quite there.
Without another thought or hesitation, she opened herself to the task, to the power and the potential for failure and drama.
Take what you need
. Something shifted inside her, a sharp lurch beneath her heart, and she gasped. Then it was there: The counterspell flared in front of her, burning itself into her mind’s eye.
She reached back for Lucius’s hand, felt their fingers twine and link. Whispering a small prayer in her heart, she recited the counterspell.
The shimmering curtain of power and spell words disappeared as though it had never existed. There was no explosion, no power surge. One moment all she saw in front of her were more trees, more dying vines. In the next, she was staring at a mountainside with a terrible skull carved into it, jaw gaping wide so it screamed the dark, ominous entrance to a cave. Just inside its mouth, a skeleton hung skewered to the cave wall, still wearing the remains of what had been a purple velour tracksuit.
Overhead, heretofore silent monkeys screamed in fear, and parrots took wing in a thunder of brittle feathers. For a second, nobody moved. Then, without warning, an unearthly shriek split the air and terrible creatures with twisted, humanoid bodies and the heads of animals boiled out of the blackness of the tunnel. Snakes, jaguars, eagles, hawks, crocodiles, every sacred creature was mocked in twisted Egyptian parodies arising from dark magic. Their human parts were gnarled and gray skinned, with some parts grown too large, others shrunk to vestiges.
Jade screamed; she couldn’t help it. These were the creatures that had captured her and Lucius before, only now they were damaged even worse and pissed about it. She could feel their rage as a palpable force against her magic, and instinctively tamped down her power, her vulnerability.
Strike roared an order and the warriors let fly with a fireball salvo that detonated against the front line of animal-heads, sending body parts flying in a spray of blood, fire, and flame. Their screams were terrible; the smell was worse. Gagging, Jade reeled against Lucius. He grabbed her. “Back to the trees!” he yelled over a roar of fire as flames napalmed from Rabbit’s outstretched palms, turning the second rank of attackers to a pyre. “We need to take cover!”
Jade was turning to comply when sharp teeth seized her arm and dug in, pulling her the other way.
She screamed and swung out with her cudgel; it slammed into the shoulder of one of the big black dogs. For a second, she thought she was dead, that it was going to tear her throat out then and there. But it simply glared at her and bore down on her hand, almost—but not quite—breaking the skin. Its legs were braced, its ruff standing straight up in a vicious line along its spine, making it look like some prehistoric, spiked creature.
Lucius cursed and rounded on the companion, but she waved him off as understanding dawned. “We have to fight through,” she said urgently. “Kinich Ahau needs our help!”
At her shout, the warriors knotted together in a defensive formation. “We can’t help shit if we’re dead,” Michael said, then spun to unleash a stream of deadly silver
muk
into the horde; the death magic cut a swath as animal-heads crumbled to dust. Sasha stood behind him, her hand on his waist, her eyes closed as she fed him her lifegiving magic, balancing out the danger of using the ancestral magic that melded both light and dark halves.
The animal-heads kept coming, their ranks swelling to overrun the clearing. Some of the creatures climbed over their own dead, uncaring, while others stopped to feed on the bodies with a ferocity that made Jade’s gorge rise.
“The whole world is going to die if we don’t rescue Kinich Ahau,” Strike countered. “If Akhenaton’s ascension doesn’t spell the beginning of the end, our failure to rescue the last god remaining outside the sky plane might.” He looked from the companions to the cave mouth and back again, and Jade could see his anguish. His father had ordered the Nightkeepers to their deaths under far better odds. He didn’t hesitate long, though. Sweeping his cudgel in a high arc, he pointed to the tunnel mouth and shouted, “Go!”
The big dog released Jade’s hand, spun, and bolted away, with its twin right behind.
The other warriors picked up the cry and charged, clearing the way with fireballs and Rabbit’s humanflamethrower routine. Jade found herself screaming, “Kinich Ahau!” and running with them. Ice magic raced through her veins but she held it in, not sure whether it would douse the flames. Lucius was right with her, solid at her side, his fierce loyalty not up for question, even if their relationship remained hazy and uncertain.
The Nightkeepers’ charge carried them to the cave mouth before the animal-heads rallied. A huge creature with a crocodile’s head rose above the others, snarling something in that strange, guttural tongue she had heard before, in Xibalba. At their leader’s orders, the animal-heads reoriented and charged, surrounding the magi and killing the momentum of their charge.
“I’ve got it!” Michael shouted. He called a thick, sturdy shield spell and slapped it across the point where the cave mouth narrowed into a tunnel leading into the mountainside. A hundred animal-heads, maybe more, were trapped outside the shield, cutting the immediate threat in half. “Go!”
“Good man,” Strike said shortly as he and the others faced forward, to where a seemingly endless stream of animal-heads poured up through the tunnel. Under the next fireball onslaught, the narrow space filled quickly with burning bodies, their stench turning the air thick with an oily, choking smoke that made Jade gag. She reached for Lucius, who caught her against him, holding on tightly.
Sasha moved to her mate’s side to boost his magic and keep him leveled off. She glanced at Jade and the friends—a former chef and an ex-therapist—shared a quick
how the hell did we end up here?
look, and then returned to their tasks.
Jade and Lucius followed Strike and the others as the small fighting force slaughtered its way deeper into the tunnel, winning forward one bloody foot at a time. Jade focused on the companions; they always seemed to know where to twist and turn in order to find their way through the surging melee. Lucius cracked his cudgel to his left and right, his jaw tight, his eyes reflecting the same sharp horror that rattled through her. In the underworld, the animal-headed warriors had regenerated quickly. Up on the earth plane, they just flat-out died. And although they resembled the ancient Egyptian gods, each of the head- types was also a species that had—or used to have—a corresponding Nightkeeper bloodline. Had Akhenaton harnessed the Nightkeepers’ ancestors as an army? Was that who the magi were killing?
“Don’t think about it,” Lucius rasped against her temple. He was still holding her close, using his body to shield her as they forced their way through. “Not now. Just go.”
So she went, following in the companions’ wake. They outdistanced the fireball-wielding magi, so she lashed out with bursts of ice magic that froze some of the animal-heads, slowed others by dumping drifts of snow. Time lost meaning, becoming a cycle of spell casting and advancing, with Lucius staying strong at her back. Then the tunnel opened up around them and they were standing in a ceremonial chamber with ritually carved walls and a wide altar. Jade didn’t process the details, though. Her attention was immediately commanded by the liquid shimmer of the far wall, which bent and flexed, seeming alive.
The companions bolted toward it.
“The barrier!” She surged after them, but Lucius yanked her back. “What—” She spun on him and broke off on a gasp. The tunnel was blocked with animal-heads and the Nightkeepers were nowhere in sight.