Blood humming, feeling back in control, he toed off his sandals, dropped to the makeshift bed, and stretched out on his side, head propped up on one hand. Looking up at her, he patted the wide empty space beside him. “You want to at least get horizontal this time?”
He meant as opposed to their rushed coupling in the archive, when they’d stayed partially dressed and gone at it hard, starting up against the wall and finishing on one of the study tables in the inner sanctum. But they both knew that he was also saying,
Last chance . . . you going to go through with this or not?
Entirely conscious of his eyes on her, imagining herself silhouetted against the fiercely elegant painting projected on the big screen behind her, she caught the hem of her floaty green shirt in both hands, gave a little shimmy as she skimmed it up and over her head, then stretched sinuously to let the garment fall beside his discarded tee. Leaving her soft, lace-edged bra—the same jewel green as the shirt—in place because it made her feel wholly feminine, she toed off her sneakers and socks into a small pile. The cool air tightened her skin, though the blood pumping through her veins still sizzled with desire.
He was wholly focused on her, hot for her. The knowledge added an extra wiggle to her walk as she crossed the short distance to where he lay waiting for her. She lowered herself to the comforter, coming down on her knees with the thought of touching him, enticing him, letting the hum of magic lead the way. The moment she knelt, though, he reached out and snagged her wrist, overbalancing her and then rising up to cover her body with his own. She gasped, her senses revving to flash point as he pressed into her, the sensation of skin on skin heightened by the chafe of their remaining clothes. He caught her other wrist, bracketing her hands together in one of his, holding them captive above her head in the pillows. Nearly helpless in the face of the heat that speared to her core at the move, Jade gave herself up to his kiss.
She was peripherally aware that the bedding carried his scent, bringing some of the intimacy she’d hoped to avoid by keeping them out in the main room, with its glowing scene of ritual and magic as a pointed reminder of their goal. But she wasn’t thinking of ritual or magic as she dragged her fingernails lightly down his sides, then stroked his ass, his hips, and the long columns of the thighs that lay alongside hers, slightly bent to take some of his weight. As she did so, he shifted, moving the line of his kisses from her mouth to her jaw, her throat, all the while touching her breasts through the thin fabric of her bra, stroking her, bringing her nipples to twin peaks beneath the lace, then popping the clasp of the bra and tugging the wisp of fabric away, baring her breasts. She arched into him on a gasp when he touched her next; she wasn’t heavily endowed, but she was exquisitely sensitive there.
As though her soft cry had broken through whatever small restraint had kept him in check up to that point, he growled something in his new, rasping voice, and plunged into the next kiss, letting go of her wrists and dragging his hands down her body in a rough, inciting stroke. He used his tongue, teeth, and hands on her with ruthless intent and an edge of anger that demanded a response. Barely breaking the kiss, he stripped her out of the rest of her clothes with impatient movements, then came back to cover her naked body with his own, his jeans making an arousing contrast against her skin.
Lust slammed through Jade, revving her system from zero to
holy shit
in two seconds flat.
Gods
, she thought, latching her fingernails onto the solid muscle on either side of his spine as he rolled fully atop her and pressed her into the piled bedding, making her even more aware of the feel of him, the scent and taste of him, the
fact
of him. Moaning as the world went white-hot behind her eyelids, she clung, knowing that this was what she’d wanted, what she’d come back for. Not just the chance to make a difference, but to feel the burn of lust and chemical combustion she’d found with him before. More, this time there was no
makol
, no one-sided hopes or expectations of more than she was willing to give; there was only the plunge and surge of raw, unabashed sex, and the buzzing hum of magic. The heady flow of power swirled around them, inside her. Urgent yet formless, the energy made her feel that her low- level skills were straining toward an unknown destination . . . and falling short.
A hollow kick of disappointment threatened to break through the sensual spell when she realized it wasn’t working, that she was too weak—or Lucius too human—to force the gathered magic to detonate. But then he slid a hand between them to touch the place where their thighs twined together, and the sensation of his strong fingers rhythmically stroking her core blotted out all other thought or logic.
Arching into his touch, she grazed his earlobe with her teeth, making him groan, then whispered hot incitements until he shuddered against her. Her inner muscles locked around the long fingers he slid inside her; she surged against him as he set a hard, fast rhythm, then mimicked it in a deep kiss until an orgasm rolled through her, shattering her remaining thoughts in a wash of sensation. She came hard and fast, fisting around him with a long, wordless cry as the whiplash pressure released only to quickly recoil within her, tightening her to a waiting, wanting knot that demanded more than his fingers and his kiss.
Gods
, she thought.
Just . . . gods
.
Growling something under his breath, Lucius rolled aside. She heard the slide of cloth as he shucked off his jeans and briefs in a single impatient yank. Before she could gather herself to look at him, fully naked in the reflected light, he rolled back to her, covered her with his body, and kissed her long and hard. Between the disease resistance inherent to the magi and the fact that they were all using contraceptive spells now, this close to the end-time, there was no need for a condom, and skin on skin was glorious contact, an erotic contrast between his skin and hers, his body and hers. When she wrapped her legs around him wantonly, wonderfully, he reached to position his hard cock at her opening . . . and slid home.
Jade’s vision dimmed as all of her senses turned suddenly inward, concentrating on the feelings that sparked as he stretched her, filled her, invaded her, possessed her. His first thrust set off a chain reaction within her; heat slammed into greed, which banged up against a kernel of fear, not of him, but of being weak, of failing. She didn’t even know anymore what she was afraid of failing at, knew only that she existed to hold on to him as he surged into her on powerful thrusts that he counteracted with the iron grip he kept on her body, holding her in place as he took her with more lust than finesse, seeming driven beyond himself, beyond them both, by the chemistry they’d shared from the first.
Heat rocketed through her as she clung to him, dug into him, and tried to give as good as she was getting, counterpointing his movements with her own to create heady, insane friction. Air hissed between his teeth in a word that might have been a curse, might have been her name, as he drove into her again and again. Jade forced herself to keep breathing, but oxygen did little to cut the spinning that swept her up and threatened to take her over before she was ready to go. Fighting the raw, edgy pleasure that seemed certain to push her over to the other side of an orgasm that loomed large on the horizon of her senses, she bit his sweat-dampened shoulder. When he groaned harshly at the back of his throat, she turned her head to whisper in his ear: “Come with me. I don’t want to leave you behind this time.”
“Fuck
.
”
He turned his head, blindly sought her lips with his, and locked them together in a hard, deep kiss as he surged against her, swelled within her.
The added pressure—and the raw intensity of the kiss—drove her over whether she was ready or not. Her muscles clamped and pulsed, milked and demanded. He made it two more thrusts, then came, his body shuddering as he heaved into her and stilled, rigor-locked with the force of his orgasm. A long, low groan resonated from his chest as he broke the kiss to press his cheek to hers, holding on to her as the pulses of pleasure went from her to him and back again. Caught in her own ecstasy, Jade could do little more than cling and gasp while the full- body throb went on and on, seeming to cycle up instead of down. Heat poured through her, not an afterglow, but more an extension of the orgasm, a new level of passion and energy that seemed to travel through the point where their bodies merged, becoming something more than sexual gratification, until it felt almost like—
Magic
, she realized, her eyes flying open to find that the sepia tones in the room had gone to red-gold. Nightkeeper magic limned their bodies, making it impossible to tell where his skin stopped and hers began. His face was very close to hers, his eyes locked on hers as the red-gold light intensified, becoming a prickling heat that seemed to come from the last ripples of pleasure within her, centered at the point where his flesh still joined with hers.
Again, the panic of impending failure flared; the power running through her was stronger than she’d ever felt before, but she didn’t know what to
do
with it. Was there a spell? A gesture? What?
“Jade, I—” Lucius began, but then his face changed, his eyes going blank and wide as the magic changed its pitch and swirled around him in tightening spirals. “I see it!” He rolled off her without ceremony and scrabbled into his clothes. “Get dressed!”
Jade wasn’t supposed to enter the library with him, but the magic was wrapping around her too. Heart hammering, she yanked on her own clothes, knowing that whatever a mage was holding or wearing typically made it into the barrier, and they didn’t want to wind up transitioning bare-assed naked.
But I’m not supposed to go anywhere!
A sharp pain pierced her forearm, a voice—maybe a woman’s voice, maybe her imagination?—whispered, “
Beware
,” and the world suddenly jolted and spun. She felt the familiar ripping sensation of her spiritual self leaving her physical body, but she wasn’t being pulled sideways into the gray-green flow of the barrier. She was being pulled
down
. She screamed and tried to block the magic, but it was too late. She heard Lucius bellow, saw him reach for her as their physical bodies collapsed to the floor. She lunged her metaphysical self toward him; their hands caught and held, feeling solid and real as the world blurred around them. And disappeared.
Heart hammering, she rolled onto her back, conscious of the way the surface beneath her yielded and crunched, sandlike in its texture. She cracked her eyelids and blinked until the light resolved itself into a pale reddish brown overhead that shone brighter than the dull orange days she’d gotten used to on earth. The span was cloudless and sunless, radiating a uniform wash of light and heat; she wasn’t sure if it was a strange sky, or a ceiling far above them. There was no breeze, no sound, and the dry air smelled faintly of foreign spices, or maybe overdone barbecue. Wherever they were, it wasn’t the barrier.
The realization brought a tremor of fear, but she squelched it as best she could.
You wanted to be involved? Here’s your chance
.
“Are you hurt?” Lucius’s face crossed her field of vision, his head casting a shadow over her. His eyes held concern, but behind that was a layer of reserve, of battle readiness. The old Lucius would’ve been jittering with a combination of fear and exhilaration, resolved to do his best but not sure it would be good enough. The man he’d become seemed to be waiting for additional intel before panicking, or else he’d gotten better at hiding his feelings. Maybe both.
Either way, it was comforting solidity, especially given that neither of them had the warriors’ skills of shield or fireball magic, and they didn’t wear warriors’ knives or automatic weapons loaded with jade-tips. With them unarmed, she could only hope that wherever they were, it was safe. Considering that Lucius hadn’t taken one look around them, grabbed her, tossed her over his newly massive shoulder, and taken off at a dead run, she was hopeful. For the moment, at least.
“I’m okay.” As the churn of the strange barrier crossing subsided, she found it was true. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually; despite the mad rush to yank on their clothes as they’d been vacuumed into the magic, her body still hummed with deep satisfaction. Her skin was acutely sensitive, open-pored and prickling in the heat, giving off the faint, shared scent of sex. Some of that realization must have shown in her face, because his eyes suddenly locked onto her with new intensity, bringing a heightened curl of sensual awareness, an added kick that notched her temp up even further. In an instant, she wanted him inside her, though he’d been there only minutes before. Or maybe that was why the desire was so much more acute now; she knew what it could be like, how his big body felt against hers, inside hers.
She had reached for him before she was aware of moving, cupping his angled jaw in her palm, then sliding her hand around to the softer skin at his nape, up into the thickness of hair that had gone from unruly to luxurious with the magic-wrought changes that had taken him from the man she had known as a friend and pleasant diversion, to one who compelled her, fascinated her. She wanted to strip him naked and stare at him, wanted his solid weight pressing into her, grounding her. Pounding into her. Caught in a spell of heat and sensation, she levered herself up as he leaned down. Her heart raced; her eyelids eased shut even as her lips parted on a low moan of anticipation.
The sound emerged very loud in the strange silence around them, shattering the moment. Jade froze, and felt Lucius’s neck go tense and tight beneath her caressing hand. When she opened her eyes, she found him staring back at her, his expression mirroring her own inner shout of,
What the hell are we doing?
They were in a completely unknown situation, brought there by a type of barrier magic she’d never experienced before. Gods, she hadn’t even looked around. One glance at Lucius, one touch, and she’d lost all sense of rationality and self- protection.
Love isn’t a miracle
, she remembered writing once in a patient’s notes;
it’s a damned mental illness
. Here was her proof, and this wasn’t even love. It was just good sex.
Okay, really,
really
good sex. But still.
Lucius’s face went shuttered, but one corner of his mouth kicked up. “I think I’m starting to understand why sex magic is such a driving force for you Nightkeepers. If that’s what this is, it’s powerful stuff.” He eased away from her, shaking his head. “Somebody should’ve warned me it’s like hammering a double Red Bull with a Viagra chaser.” He cut her a look. “Not that I’ve ever tried that, mind you. I’m just saying.”
Jade didn’t say anything; she wasn’t sure she could’ve managed to meet his wit, given the sudden hollowness that had opened up inside her. It wasn’t that she minded his attributing the intensity of what had happened between them to sex magic—she was relieved by the explanation, though a little embarrassed that she hadn’t figured it out first. No, what had her breathing deeply to fill the emptiness was the knowledge that she’d bought into it so quickly, so thoroughly. And that she’d been helpless in its throes, vulnerable in his arms, without the slightest thought for safety or the job at hand. For all that she had bragged inwardly about not losing herself to the sex magic before, she had come damned close this time.
You’re a mage
, she reminded herself.
Use the magic. Don’t let it use you
. But deep down inside, she couldn’t escape the fact that she wasn’t much of a mage, and didn’t know bupkes about using the magic, not really.
Shit.
“Well,” she said, blowing out a breath that did little to settle the churning in her stomach, “the magic got us here. Let’s see where ‘here’ is.” Though even as she straightened to look around, she remembered the strange downward lurch of the magic. Had it been her imagination, or had someone really whispered, “Beware”? And if so, who? The only true occupants of the barrier were the
nahwal
, a group of strangely withered ancestral ghosts that spoke with many voices all in synchrony. This had been a single female voice. At least, she thought it had.
Then she got a look around herself, and she stopped thinking about the voice, about the magic, and even about the man beside her, because all she could do was stare as her mouth fell open.
They were . . . Dear gods, she didn’t know where they were. They had materialized roughly in the center of a long, perfectly rectangular canyon—or maybe a pit? an enclosure?—that was a mile or so long, a quarter mile wide, and open to the mauve sky. Red rock walls rose up around them, sheer and unbroken, stretching several stories high before ending in perfectly straight lines. The sand underfoot was a gritty version of the same reddish stone, with something else that sparkled faintly in the unchanging light. Huge, unadorned columns sprouted from the sand, one right beside where Jade and Lucius had landed. More important, several hundred yards away from where she and Lucius crouched, in what looked like the exact center of the enclosure, sat a huge four-sided pyramid made of three tiers that descended in size from bottom to top, forming god-size steps leading upward. At each corner was carved a humanoid head, easily ten feet tall, with a fiercely scowling face that was surrounded by a halo of radiating lines. She couldn’t immediately place the image, but thought it was familiar. Each tier was painted a different color: red at the bottom, black in the middle, white at the top. As was the case with many Mayan pyramids, human-size staircases ran down the center of each of the four sides, with rectangular doorways set on either side of the staircases on the upper and lower tiers. Practically every available surface was worked with intricate glyph carvings that were the traditional blend of art and language. Unlike the other pyramids she’d seen in person or studied at UT, though, this one didn’t culminate in a ceremonial platform, or with a boxy temple built at the top. Instead, the center of the pyramid was an open, empty space crowned by a series of stone archways running parallel to one another, looking like some ancient creature had died atop the temple and gone to fossil with its rib bones bared to the bright, sunless sky.
Wonder shimmered through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.
“Do you think that’s the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels. The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier or traveling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it while he stayed on the earthly plane.
Instead, he—a human who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the title—had somehow been sucked . . . where?
When he didn’t answer her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath. “You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas. Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba, but somehow they had gotten through.
Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the
makol
demon had been in full control of his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing entrance to Xibalba.
“The library is hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the underworld already, the
Banol Kax
wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s
makol
. Which suggested the library wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were
they
there? “Do you think someone—or some
thing
—pulled us here?”
“More things are possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get weapons, maybe reinforcements.”
“You’re assuming the
way
spell is going to work.” The homing spell that was supposed to return an out-of-body mage to his or her body was notoriously fickle. “And that we’ll be able to get back here afterward.” What was more, the same skitter of excitement she saw on his face was running through her veins, urging her onward. “Let’s check out the pyramid.” The suggestion came partly from duty, partly from her growing need to
do
something . . . and also from her growing suspicion that whoever had brought them there would have to be the one to send them back. The day of the new moon wasn’t one of barrier flux, which meant she and Lucius shouldn’t have been able to enter the barrier, never mind get all the way through the hellmouth.
Beware
.
“We’re unarmed. Shit, we don’t even have a pocketknife to blood our palms.” But he wanted to do it. She saw the building excitement in his face, felt it race in her own system, as though they were daring each other without saying the words.
“We’re just going to go look around.” But he had a point; stupidity didn’t favor survival of the fittest. So she took a deep breath. “I’ll shield us.” At his sharp look, she shook her head. “I know it’s a warrior’s spell, but there’s something—”
In the air
, she started to say, but broke off because that wasn’t it, precisely. The faint glitter of red-gold magic and the hum of Nightkeeper power were right there in front of her, misting the air between her and Lucius, close enough that she thought she could reach out and grab the power if she was brave enough.
Do it
, her instincts said. She didn’t know if it was the residual vulnerability from the sex magic, the barrier crossing, or something about the strange canyon, but the magic suddenly felt as if it were a part of her, in a way that was both foreign and compelling.
Acting on instinct, her body moving without her conscious volition, she bit down sharply on her own tongue, drawing blood. Letting go of Lucius’s hands, she stepped back and spit onto the sparkling, red-tinged sand, offering a sacrifice of both blood and water to the gods. The red-gold coalesced around her, then around Lucius, as it had done before, when they had been lying together in the aftermath. Magic spurted through her like lust, hot and hard. It caught her up, spun through her, making her want to scream with the mad glory of it.
Lucius said something, but she barely heard him over the hum of magic that gathered around her, inside her.
“I can do this,” she said, or maybe she only thought it. Either way, the certainty coiled hard and hot inside her, and the shimmering magic that hovered in front of her coalesced into . . . what? She could almost see shapes in the sparkles as she reached out to the magic, touched it. A soundless detonation ripped through her, a rush of power that strained toward something that stayed just out of reach. If she could just—