Final Prophecy 05 - Blood Spells (22 page)

“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.”

“Oxymoron alert. But, yeah. I’m willing to bet that your near death by drowning could have had enough magical oomph to punch through the barrier, even that far back.” Lucius paused. “Did it happen the night of the winter solstice?”

“It was early during winter break, before Christmas. It could’ve been. . . .” Brandt trailed off, frowning. “Yeah, it was the night of the solstice. But . . . I didn’t remember that until you asked, just like I never thought about the accident.”

Patience’s thoughts raced. “Werigo’s spell blocked us from remembering that the magic works. If the gods intervened that night and something happened to create a debt and make them turn against you, the spell would’ve blocked all of it.”

And deep down inside her, a new thought exploded through her mind: What if Werigo’s magic had also messed with their mated bond? It wouldn’t have bothered them out in the human world . . . but the effects could have manifested once she and Brandt were bound to the magic and started functioning as mates within the Nightkeeper milieu. Which was exactly when things had started going wrong between them.

Question was, would that change now that they had broken at least part of the spell? Gods, she hoped so.

“Regardless, the central issue remains,” Brandt said. “I can’t fix the problem until we know what I did wrong.”

Patience caught the bleakness at the back of his eyes. She touched his hand. “The gods didn’t shut you off because you somehow sacrificed your friends to save yourself. That’s not what happened.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you,” she said firmly.

“Michael’s magic got screwed up because he came into his powers with too much of a sin burden on his soul. The same thing could be happening to me.”

“There’s a fundamental difference between being in an accident and being an assassin.” She didn’t think she would’ve had the guts to put it quite that bluntly if Michael had been there.

For a second she thought he was going to pull away from her. But he didn’t. Instead, he nodded. “I hope to hell you’re right. But hoping and theorizing aren’t going to be enough here. I need to see the rest of that vision.”

Sharp relief kicked through Patience when he didn’t go back into shutdown mode on her. But it didn’t count until they managed to keep things working back at Skywatch, where loving each other wasn’t nearly so easy.

Telling herself to deal with one crisis at a time, she said, “It seems to me that the
etznab
spell doesn’t just need the words and props; it also needs the right atmosphere. I don’t think it’ll work again here at the hotel.”

“Maybe not. But what about our cave?”

At the thought of going back down there—with him—her stomach tightened. “That might work.”

He stood and offered her his hand. “Then let’s see if we can find the way in.”

As the others headed out of the restaurant, Rabbit hung back and signaled for Strike to wait up. Myrinne stalled too, so the three of them wound up alone just outside a pair of restroom doors bearing sombrero-wearing stick figures of either sex, and labeled SE-NORS and SENORITAS in case the pictures weren’t obvious enough.
Duh.

“Problem?” Strike asked, cutting a look between them.

Rabbit hesitated, but then went ahead and said it: “I’ve been feeling funky ever since we touched down here, kind of itchy, or like I’m coming down with something.” That wasn’t likely, though; the magi didn’t get sick, at least not from germs.

Strike stilled. “You didn’t feel it when you were here two days ago?”

“No. Just this time. I wasn’t even going to say anything, just figured I was tired from all the running around.” After leaving Oc Ajal, he and Myrinne had driven to three different ruins that had included sacrificial skull platforms—
tzomplanti
—dedicated to Cabrakan, but had come up dry in the clue department. Since they’d needed to do the two-day trip in one, in order to make up for the time they’d spent up in the mountains, they were both pretty short on sleep. “But between Brandt saying that this place buzzes different for him and Patience, and then us figuring out that there might be a dark-magic intersection entrance somewhere in the area, I figured you should know.”

“Does it feel like dark magic?”

Rabbit glanced at his forearm, at the scarlet quatrefoil above the black glyphs. “It doesn’t feel light or dark, really.”

“Please tell me it’s not
muk
.”

“Nah. I’m not even sure it’s magic. It’s more like—I don’t know, an itch between my shoulder blades, maybe. Like something’s going to happen soon.”

“You’re not going prescient on me, are you?” Strike tried to play it like he was kidding, but they both knew he wasn’t.

Nightkeeper males occasionally envisioned their destined mates before meeting them, but that was where Y-chromosome foretelling left off. What was more, precognition tended to have nasty-assed repercussions within the magic. So while the approach of the end date continued to increase the scope of the Nightkeepers’ powers—for example, allowing the warriors to cast shield spells at greater distances for longer times—there were some talents, like prescience, that they were hoping wouldn’t go on the rise.

Forcing aside the memory of the things he’d seen the night Myrinne had tried her foretelling spell on him, Rabbit shook his head. “It’s not prescience. It’s just . . . I don’t know. An itch.” The more he talked about it, the dumber it sounded. He wouldn’t even have said anything, but didn’t want to jeopardize the team by being a dumbass and keeping quiet about something that was probably nothing.

Strike thought for a minute. “Could you be sensing the solstice-eclipse ahead of the rest of us?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m getting paranoid because my ass is dragging.” Myrinne had pointed out—rather acerbically—that fatigue sometimes triggered his old patterns. And gods knew the whole “the world is out to get me” thing used to be one of his fallback modes.

“How are your blocks?”

“My head’s locked down tight.” He’d made damn sure of it after they left Oc Ajal, and again this morning. No way he wanted Iago breaking back through. “And I’m not trying to bag out on you. Myrinne almost never gets to see me do my thing, and I’m totally jonesing to get inside the pyramid.” At the thought, the itch between his shoulder blades got worse. “I just thought it should be your call whether I stayed behind or not.”

“Yeah. It should be.” Strike didn’t seem as grateful as Rabbit would’ve expected, though. If anything, he looked more annoyed than before, though that sort of seemed to have become
his
fallback recently. Finally, after a long enough pause that Rabbit’s stomach had started to think about sinking, the king said, “I have a feeling we’re going to need your oomph to get this doorway open. But”—he shot Rabbit an “I’m way fucking serious” look—“if the itch gets worse or anything else changes, you pull out of the link immediately, and tell me what’s going on.” Before Rabbit could nod, Strike transferred his glare to Myrinne. “Same goes for you. If you see him doing anything you don’t like, you tell me. Got it?”

She played it cool, nodding and saying, “Will do.”

Inwardly, though, Rabbit knew she was doing a boogie-woogie victory dance. She was grateful to the magi for taking her in—on Rabbit’s say-so and with Anna’s support—even though she had been raised by one of Iago’s allies. Strike had given her a place to stay, spending money, an education, and some small jobs within Skywatch. But being grateful didn’t stop her from wanting more—not financially, but in terms of getting in on the action. She was dying to be out on the front lines with the other warriors.

Rabbit sure as shit knew how that felt; he’d been there, done that, and eventually earned the king’s trust. Now it was her turn . . . he hoped.

“Was there anything else?” Strike asked.

Rabbit shook his head. “I’m good if you are.”

“Then let’s go.”

They met the others outside the hotel and headed for El Rey. There, they all went in through the main gate, paid the entry fee, and joined the scattering of other park visitors, who were being desultorily watched by a couple of attendants who wore uniforms but no sidearms.

Once they were in, Strike gave a little finger wiggle. “Let’s spread out. We’ll meet up in five at the back of the pyramid.”

Although the magi could conceal themselves with a chameleon shield or by uplinking with Patience when she went invisible, the spells would be a power drain, so they stuck to more conventional camouflage to start with, splitting up to wander into the park, flying casual.

At least most of them did. Rabbit stopped just inside the main gate and took a long look around.

Most of the old buildings were little more than stone footprints, lines in the limestone outlining where the village’s market buildings, houses, temples, and palace had once stood. It all looked exactly the same as it had two days ago . . . but the air carried a subsonic whine he didn’t remember from before, one that made him want to work his jaw and pop his ears.