The Nightkeepers’ numbers were dwindling rather than building, Nate realized with a shimmer of unease.

They waited in the deep darkness that held on to the rain forest in the final hour before daybreak while Michael checked the surveillance system in the small house near the temple. When his all-clear signal came through Strike said, “Okay, gang, it’s more than twelve hours before the equinox and eleven or so before the tunnel inside the temple opens up. Let’s start with just a couple of people on watch outside the temple, and rotate through every two hours. Volunteers?”

Nate raised his hand, figuring that if he had to stay cooped up in the little house with the rest of them for very long, he was going to go batshit crazy. From the number of hands showing, he wasn’t the only one.

Strike snorted. “That’s about what I thought. Okay, it’s me and Nate on first shift. The rest of you duke it out for the next one. We’ll add one extra person per two-hour block, with everyone on station by midafternoon.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Leah said, pressing Strike’s hand. She patted her hip, where she wore a medium-range walkie-talkie. “Call us if you see anything.”

Each of them had one of the radios, tuned to lucky channel thirteen. The walkies wouldn’t do much good down in the tunnels, but should be a simple, effective method for staying in contact during the aboveground portion of the stakeout.

Strike dropped a kiss on his mate’s lips. “Count on it.” They stood together for a moment, leaning into each other, and a faint golden glow sparkled, haloing them as their strong love reached out and touched Kulkulkan’s power.

Unable to do otherwise, Nate glanced at Alexis, who stood beside him. She caught the look and her lips turned up, as though she were determined to keep it light between them after what’d happened the night before. “Special effects courtesy of the equinox,” she whispered.

He should’ve said something smooth and equally light, but what came out was a soft, “You look tired.”

“Gee, thanks. You too.”

“Didn’t sleep worth shit.” As he’d lain awake in the cottage, staring at the ceiling, Nate had told himself it was better to spend that final night alone, that he’d be sharper and more rested without Alexis in his bed. It’d turned out he wasn’t very good at lying, even to himself.

“Ditto,” she said, and lifted a shoulder. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything the other night about . . . you know. Sorry.”

“No.” He caught her hand, unable to leave it like that. “No, never. I’m . . .” He trailed off, unable to find the right word.

Her eyes narrowed. “If you say ‘flattered,’ I’ll fireball you in the nuts.”

Strike’s voice interrupted. “Come on, Blackhawk. First shift’s leaving.”

“Lucky save,” Alexis murmured. But then her anger drained and she said simply, “Take care of yourself, okay?”

“Yeah. You too.” There wasn’t anything more to say after that—at least nothing he could say truthfully, or that would come easily and feel real, so Nate followed his king out of the cottage and didn’t look back.

Strike led the way, carrying a small flashlight that reminded Nate of the miners’ lamps he and Alexis had used in the ATM caves. The beam was just as pitiful, their surroundings just as dark. As they entered the path to the temple, the rain forest closed in on either side of them, pitching the darkness even blacker. Nate tried to shrug off the feeling, which was pretty close to a certainty, that this was the last time he’d be traveling along the narrow path, the last time he’d be glancing back and seeing only the glimmer of light through the dense vegetation, though the safe house was only a few hundred yards away.

It’s nerves, he told himself. Nerves and the equinox. When they reached the temple, and the point where they would split up to stand watch, Strike lifted a hand. “Wait.”

Nate looked up, surprised. “Nochem?”

“I want you to take this.” The king held out his hand into the thin flashlight beam. On his palm rested something long, narrow, and flat, and glittering black. It was a knife, Nate saw, then realized that it wasn’t just a knife; it was the knife of the Volatile prophecy. His knife.

Everything inside him went tight on a single, greedy word: Mine! It was the same way he felt about Alexis, the same way he’d always felt about her; it was just as simple as that, and as complex. He took the knife and balanced the weapon on his palm, staring down at the polished black stone and trying not to feel how well it fit in his hand, how natural it felt, in a way that no other ceremonial knife had done before. He knew the blade with a deep, thrumming possessiveness that seemed to originate from just above his breastbone. He wanted to keep it, to wear it, to blood himself with its blade.

He glanced at his king. “I swear that I’ll die before I let the Volatile hurt her.”

“I know.”

They parted without another word. Taking up his position, Nate settled in to watch the small temple, and the surrounding rain forest. Periodic check-ins via walkie-talkie all brought the same message: All’s quiet. Eventually the sky went from black to blue, then deepened through purple to a vicious red that filtered through the leafy canopy and turned everything to blood. The light pinked out quickly to day, but that violent red hue stayed with him, seeming prophetic even to a man who refused to live by prophecy.

His worries weren’t superstition, though; they were logic. How were they supposed to hold the barrier with so few magi? Not good odds, his gamer’s brain reported. We need a new strategy. Only they’d already explored all the options, hadn’t they?

He withdrew the carved obsidian knife from his belt and flipped it through his fingers a few times, becoming familiar with the perfect balance of the blade and the feel of the worn carvings as he waited.

And waited.

There was no sign of Iago as the day warmed and the birds and monkeys started doing their thing overhead. The surveillance shifts changed, and changed again, and still nothing. In fact, exactly nothing happened all godsdamned day. By dusk, all of the Nightkeepers were hunched in the forest, watching a whole lot of nothing. Nate had positioned himself very near Alexis, as he had done all day whether she liked it or not, because the equinox magic was sparking in his veins, and his skin felt tight across his bones. Close to nightfall, when she glanced in his direction and their eyes met, he saw rainbows. Then she nodded to Strike and Leah, concealed in a cluster of ferns nearby, and he turned to find them deep in conversation, with the satellite phone forming a third party, no doubt bringing Jox in on the discussion.

When Nate’s walkie crackled, calling the Nightkeepers in, he was moving before the king had finished speaking. He and Alexis converged on the royal couple’s position, and Strike said without preamble, “We’ll drop down into the tunnels now. We’ve got about an hour.”

Nate nodded. “Yeah. It’s time.” He paused. “Anything from Skywatch?”

“Nothing,” Leah reported. “It’s totally quiet there, just like here.”

“Iago’s at the hellmouth,” Nate said grimly, which meant it was going to come down to a battle of magic versus magic. And pretty much everything they knew about the Xibalbans—which wasn’t nearly enough—suggested that the Nightkeepers were going to be seriously outmatched. Add in the seven death bats and the Volatile, and they were pretty close to fucked.

Rabbit knew when darkness fell, even though he was locked in the lower level of the mansion, stuck in a windowless storeroom. He could feel the stars moving into position, feel the barrier thinning and the magic calling out to him.

There was something else calling out to him, as well. Something that shouldn’t have been able to get through the wards surrounding Skywatch, not to mention the additional shield around his room. But the whispers penetrated, tempting him at first, taunting him. Then, as the equinox drew near and the power sink opened up inside him, lighting him with magic, the whispered temptation gave way to a demand. An order.

Open your mind to me, Iago said, his mental tone vibrating with the power of a mind-bender, power he’d stolen from Rabbit in the first place. Add your magic to mine.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Rabbit said aloud. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

He didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised as shit when a chuckle vibrated along the connection. You invited me.

“Did not!” Rabbit shouted, indignant. But beneath the bluster lay the suspicion that maybe he had. He’d been lying there all day, alone, in a room he’d ordered the winikin to strip of as much of the flammables as possible. TV was boring, he wasn’t in the mood for the game-loaded laptop Nate had hooked him up with, and his IM convo with Myrinne had lost steam a few hours earlier when she’d decided to nap, still recovering from her imprisonment.

So yeah, he’d been lying there, thinking of Iago, thinking about how he’d crawled inside the Xibalban’s head. He’d mentally retraced what he’d done and how it’d felt to tell someone to die and almost have it work. And maybe, just maybe, while he’d been doing that, he’d inadvertently reached out and made contact.

Anger kindled within Rabbit. Fury, and a burning need to protect what was his—his family and home. Myrinne.

Well, guess what? he thought, burning with the magic. Two can play this game.

He lay back on his cot, closed his eyes, and fisted his hands, digging his fingernails into his palms until blood flowed. Rather than fighting off Iago’s mental touch he sought it, grabbed on to it, followed it to its source. Whereas before it had been difficult to find his way into the Xibalban’s mind, it was easy this time, as though he were following the same path he’d blazed before.

I’ve got you, you son of a bitch, he thought, keeping the flare of triumph to himself as he slid smoothly into Iago’s brain. Then, suddenly, he was looking through Iago’s eyes, seeing what Iago saw.

And damn it, the Xibalban wasn’t anywhere near Chichén Itzá. The vegetation was wrong, the temperature and heavy cloud cover were wrong. And the temple Iago was facing looked like nothing Rabbit had ever seen before—all soaring stone arches cut directly into the side of a mountain, framing a godsdamned cave that was carved to look like a screaming skull.

It was the fucking hellmouth. The entrance to Xibalba.

Like what you see, Bunny-boy? Iago jeered, having yanked the nickname from Rabbit’s brain somehow. Good, because you’re not going anywhere.

Mental shackles clamped down on Rabbit, and the pathway he’d followed into the Xibalban’s brain vanished in an instant. He turned to run, to flee, to fight, but couldn’t. He was cut off from his body, cut off from Skywatch and any ability to warn the others, cut off from Myrinne and any hope of escape.

He couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except scream inside his own soul as Iago pressed his palms flat against the edge of the cave mouth and said a quiet spell, drawing on Rabbit’s power and his own to open the ancient hellroad, which had been locked tight more than a thousand years earlier, when the ancestral Nightkeepers had driven the demons from earth in the wake of the slaughter that had leveled an empire. Those Nightkeepers had trusted their true descendants to hold the barrier, and they had, for more than a thousand years.

It’d taken a half-blood to fuck everything up.

Lucius’s journey back from death seemed much quicker than the trek out to the archway; one minute he was on the roadway, putting one boot in front of the other. Then suddenly he was at a set of double doors. There was no wall or anything, just the doors, sitting in the middle of no-frigging-where.

Taking a deep breath, he grabbed one of the door-knobs, twisted, and opened the panel slowly, so he could stick his head through and take a look.

Without warning the door, the road, and the world around him vanished, and he was falling. There was blackness all around him, the sensation of gravity and air whipping past him, but no sound or smell. He opened his mouth and screamed but nothing came out; there was only silence. He couldn’t even hear his own rapid heartbeat or his pulse.

Then he hit bottom, landing sprawled out on a giving, yielding surface. It was still dark but he could hear again. There was pain too. Monstrous, crushing pain that split his head and made him scream in pain, the howl coming out alien, like that of an animal, not a man.

He writhed, digging his fingers into his scalp, tearing at his hair, trying to make the agony stop, make it all stop. Oh, sweet Jesus. If this is what living feels like, send me back to death!

Slowly, though, the pain leveled. His skull felt overstuffed, but he could think now, could almost focus his eyes. He blinked, saw a fluorescent light overhead, and realized that it wasn’t really dark after all; it had all been in his mind. A nightmare, maybe, or a warning. He was in a bare room, lying on a cot. And wonder of wonders, he was seeing normally, with no luminous green haze obscuring his vision.

He looked around, recognized his surroundings from his first night in New Mexico, and thought, I’m still in Skywatch, back in the dungeon, or whatever they want to call it. Which meant the Nightkeepers hadn’t sacrificed him, after all. They’d locked him up until the green haze passed. That must be why the voice had sent him back; it’d known that he wasn’t quite dead yet. Gratitude washed over him. He hadn’t wanted to die; he wanted to live, wanted to help the Nightkeepers in the battle ahead.

His internal clock said it was nighttime, but he was pumped up, invigorated, ready to get rolling. Riding that energy, he stood and headed for the storeroom door, gave it a jaunty knock. “Yo! Anyone out there? Feeling human again, here.”

There was a startled clatter from out in the hallway, then the sound of footsteps. A moment later the door opened a crack to reveal Jox’s face, pale with shock. “Did you just knock?”

Lucius frowned and almost looked behind himself, to see if he’d missed there being someone else in the room. “Um, yeah?”

“You shouldn’t have been able to reach the door. It’s warded.”

“Apparently not so much.”

“No, the ward’s working. Which means you’re back to being fully human.” Jox’s face relaxed; his whole body easing as he let the door swing a little wider. “A makol couldn’t have come through. A normal guy with a so-so academic record and a talent for getting his ass in trouble, though . . . he could get through just fine.”

Lucius grinned, feeling as if he could run a few hundred laps and bench-press a Jeep. “Guilty on all counts, though I’ll have to talk to Anna about maligning her servant.”

“Meh. Student, servant, big diff.” The winikin lifted a shoulder. “One of these days you and I can sit down and I’ll let you in on a few of the high points of the whole servant thing.” He flashed his forearm, which bore the aj-winikin “to serve” glyph, along with a pair of jaguars, one for Anna, one for Strike. “There are ways to work the bond magic, if you’re interested.”

“I’m interested. Seriously.”

“Come on.” Jox stepped back. “You’ve gotta be starving. You haven’t eaten in several days. I’ll catch you up on things while you eat.”

“That sounds . . . Hang on, how long?” Lucius shook his head, unable to believe he felt so good after being in one place for days. Never mind wondering what the hell had gone on inside his head while he’d been walking along on that big-ass Xibalban treadmill. “Whoa. Hello, mind-fuck.”

Jox snorted. “Come on, human.” He turned away and headed for the staircase.

Lucius followed, but the moment he was clear of the door, something foul shoved him viciously aside, into a small corner of his own consciousness. His bones shifted and popped, his skin stretched tight, and the world went into slow motion. And everything got real green, real fast.

He stretched out arms grown longer than normal, reaching for the winikin with fingers now tipped with pointed nails.

Jox, run! Lucius screamed, but his lips didn’t move; no sound came out; the scream stayed stuck inside his head as his body was taken over by the makol that had somehow hidden deep inside him, fooling even the Nightkeepers’ ward magic.

The winikin didn’t turn, didn’t know to defend himself. He was halfway up the stairs when the creature that wasn’t Lucius anymore grabbed him from behind, got an inhumanly strong grip on the back of his neck, and slammed him into the wall.

Jox went limp, and Lucius—or the thing that had been Lucius—let him fall. Going to one knee beside him, the creature searched him and came up with a flip-blade buck knife. Flicking the blade open, the makol grabbed the winikin’s gray-shot hair and used it to pull his head back, baring his throat.

The connection suddenly clicked in the small part of Lucius that still belonged to him. It was the goddamned equinox. A day for blood sacrifice.

The knife descended. Lucius flung himself out of the corner of his mind, mustered all the mental control he’d never had, and shouted, “Hold!”

The knife froze. Then, furious at the interruption, the makol turned its attention inward, grabbing what was left of Lucius’s consciousness and clamping down, squeezing, pressing until everything went dark and life as he knew it ended.

In the final hour before the equinox, the air inside the Nightkeepers’ small aboveground temple shimmered with gold and rainbows as the barrier greeted the Godkeepers. Alexis, Strike, and Leah joined together in the magic that would open the tunnel leading down to the intersection.

“Pasaj och,” Alexis said in synchrony with the royal couple, and bowed her head in prayer as blood from her sliced hand dripped to the ground in sacrifice. She wore her mother’s combat shirt beneath her Kevlar, and for the first time felt at home, felt as though she belonged in the warrior’s garb, at the front of the pack. This was it, she knew; this was what her parents had wanted for her, what Izzy had trained her for. She had the power, the respect. But with it came a responsibility she wasn’t sure she could fulfill.

Rainbows against demons. It seemed impossible, even more so knowing that the Volatile was out there somewhere, waiting for her.

“Steady,” Leah murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “One step at a time.”

“Easier said than done,” Alexis replied.

“Amen to that, sister.”

Then the magic stabilized, and the tunnel was fully open. “In we go.” Strike led, with Leah and Alexis falling in behind him, Nate behind her, and then Anna, Patience, Brandt, Jade, and Sven. As usual, Michael shielded the rear.

They had debated closing the tunnel once they were inside, but that would’ve meant they could be trapped underground. Leaving it open, though, ran the risk of someone—or something—coming up behind them, which Alexis didn’t like one bit. She was coming to realize, though, that her job as an adviser wasn’t to steer the Nightkeepers’ away from risk—that was impossible. All she and Nate could do was to manage the risk as best as they could, and then pray.

Or rather, she would pray, and he would keep stubbornly pretending that the gods and destiny didn’t rule their lives, despite all evidence to the contrary.

As they passed into the tunnel, lighting their way with powerful hand lamps she’d bought to replace the lame-ass flashlights they’d been using in the tunnels up until now, she looked back and caught Nate staring at her. Granted, she was in front of him, so it wasn’t likely he’d be looking elsewhere. But the intensity in his gaze, and the way his amber eyes locked on hers, let her know that he was looking at her, thinking about her.

What is it? she wanted to say. Tell me. But she didn’t, because what would be the point? She’d said what she’d needed to say, and he’d done the same. They had, finally, reached the end of their personal debate. As he would say, “Game over.” And this so isn’t what I should be focused on right now, she thought as she faced forward and followed Strike and Leah into the tunnels that ran down to the subterranean river, and eventually to the altar room.

Yes, Nate was important to her—she was in love with him whether he liked it or not, godsdamn it—but the moment she’d learned how to call the goddess on her own, their relationship had become separate from the needs of the Nightkeepers. And right now the Nightkeepers and their magic had to be her primary concern. So she faced forward and followed the tunnel into the earth, and tried to keep her mind on the connection at the back of her brain, where the rainbows lived.

As she walked, she prayed for the strength to do what needed to be done, and the smarts to recognize what that might be. There was no ripple in the barrier energy, no sense of the goddess beyond the low thrum of color. Alexis knew she was out there, waiting. But for what?

“Frigging obscure prophecies,” she heard Nate growl from behind her, his low words amplified and thrown forward by the tunnel walls. “Couldn’t just spell this shit out, could they?”

Alexis stifled a snort, and immediately felt better. Maybe it was blasphemy—okay, probably—but she couldn’t say he was wrong. What good did it do for them to know they needed to defeat the Volatile if they didn’t know how to find it?

No doubt Leah had been right when she’d speculated in council that the sheer length of the skyroad, running through the extra four layers of heaven that hell lacked, attenuated the ability of the gods to interact with the earthly plane and compromised their ability to connect with the Nightkeepers. Even Kulkulkan had “spoken” to Leah only a couple of times, during their initial binding. Alexis couldn’t say for sure that Ixchel had ever talked to her in words; the few times she’d thought she’d caught a snippet of thought that didn’t feel like her own could’ve just been wishful thinking. Besides, as Strike had pointed out, the gods created and the demons destroyed, and creation was a much harder energy to push through the barrier than was destruction. Entropy in action, and all that. All of which pretty much left the Nightkeepers floundering with visions and gut instincts, and prophecies left by their ancestors based on . . . well, visions and gut instinct.

Which just sucks beyond sucking, Alexis thought as she hiked in her queen’s wake. And there she went with the blasphemy again, which probably wasn’t a good thing to be coming from a Godkeeper on one of the cardinal days. But it had already been a long day of waiting, and the silence in the tunnel was getting to her, raising the hairs at her nape and puckering goose bumps on her arms. The empty quiet, broken only by the sound of their breathing and the scuff of boots on the stone, seemed to be waiting for something. Or someone.

Then Alexis saw Leah glance from one side of the tunnel to the other, and Strike scrub a hand down the back of his neck. Which meant Alexis wasn’t the only one feeling it.

“Something’s coming,” she whispered as unease shivered through her and took up residence in her gut. “Something bad.”

“I know,” Nate said. He’d moved up close, so close that she could feel his body heat and his energy. She didn’t reach back to him, but knowing he was there steadied her. Whether or not he was her lover or mate, he was a warrior she could count on. She only hoped he could count on her in return, hoped they all could.

The air remained tense as they worked their way deeper into the tunnel system. Soon Alexis could hear the drip of water up ahead, signaling that they were near the subterranean river that would lead them to the altar room. They took the narrow pathway beside the waterway, then turned away from the river to the sacred chamber. There was no sign of pursuit or ambush. The only thing menacing them was the heavy feeling in the air, a sense of something watching them, waiting. The grating edginess of it served only to exaggerate the hum of magic in Alexis’s blood as the stars and planets aligned, inching into position in the final thirty-minute countdown to the equinox.

Then they turned the final corner and came to the arched doorway leading into the altar room. The tunnel widened, allowing Leah to move up and walk at Strike’s side. Nate joined Alexis, and the others paired up behind them, with Michael forming the rear guard alone.

They went in with their autopistols drawn and fireball magic at the ready, but the chamber was empty. There was no sign of Iago, no sign of anything out of place. Only there was something, Alexis realized as Strike lit the ceremonial torches around the perimeter of the room and the Nightkeepers extinguished their hand lamps, letting the room fall to firelight.

In that firelight, she could see a shimmer walk all the way across the back wall behind the chac-mool altar.

Without thinking, she reached for Nate’s hand and tugged him up beside her. “Do you see that?”

He frowned. “See what?”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Alexis turned to the others. “Does anyone else—”

Anna screamed suddenly, cutting her off midquestion. The king’s sister dropped to her knees and grabbed her right forearm in pain. “Lucius, no! Don’t do it! Don’t—” Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp and toppled over onto her side, convulsing.

“Anna!” Strike bolted to her side and dropped to his knees beside her as she writhed.

Bowing her body in an arc, she shrieked, “Nooo! Not Jox! Not the winikin! Please!”

Shock and horror rattled through the Nightkeepers as they realized that the makol must have fully overtaken Lucius and had somehow escaped its warded room and attacked the winikin.

Panic jolted Alexis, alongside magic and a howl of grief. She grabbed instinctively for Nate’s hand. “Izzy!”

Strike lunged to his feet, snapping, “Join up!”

Nate pulled free of her hand and got in the king’s face. “No! You know we can’t go back.”

And the hell of it was that he was right, Alexis knew. The goddaughter inside her screamed for them to return to Skywatch immediately, yet the warrior in her knew that whatever was going on back there, it wasn’t their main battle. The more important fight was the one that reached for her even now, as the rippling curtain of light darkened and solidified along the back wall of the stone chamber, and she began to see movement behind it, the imprints of huge bodies pressing against what could only be the barrier.

Strike grated, “Stand aside, Blackhawk. You may not give a shit about anybody but yourself, but I’m not leaving them to die. Rabbit is my responsibility. Jox is mine. They all are.”

Leah moved up to stand at Strike’s side, her face pale and drawn. “We have to go,” she said. “Skywatch can’t fall a second time.”

“The Nightkeepers are your priority, and mankind,” Nate insisted, refusing to give way. “Not the winikin or Rabbit. As much as it sucks to say it, the immediate future rests on us and what we do here today.”

Of them all, Alexis thought she might be the only one to see what it cost Nate to say that, the only one to hear the pain in his voice, see the horror in his too-controlled expression. He glanced at her, a mute plea for some backup against the furious king, and Alexis stepped up to add her voice to his.

Only her feet didn’t move at first. Then, when they did, they carried her away from the argument, toward the rippling barrier, where she saw colors and darkness battling one another for the upper hand, and achieving only a stalemate. Come, the colors seemed to say. I need your help.

“Alexis, what’s wrong?” Nate’s voice held sharp worry, but he sounded suddenly far distant, his tones wavery and indistinct.

The fabric of the universe dominated her vision, reaching out and drawing her inward. “Call your god,” she said to Strike, only it wasn’t her voice; it was the goddess speaking through her, expending enormous energy to push the message down the skyroad to earth. “The hellroad is open at the city of the clouds. The battle is there.”

Alexis’s mind was suddenly filled with an image of great, soaring mountains. Bare and snow-covered at their tops, lush and green at their foothills, they wore thick clouds of mist halfway down, where the cold mountain winds met moist tropical air and formed rainy, cool bands of precipitation. High conical mounds speared through the canopy, green-covered and with a hint of square-edged stone here and there. Lost pyramids rising up from the jungle floor.

Her voice shaking with the effort of the magical contact, which was draining her quickly, Alexis described the scene as best as she could. When she started to sway, she felt a strong arm loop around her waist and knew it was Nate.

“Strike needs a ground-level image to ’port,” Nate said. “We can’t zap in midair.”

His voice didn’t seem so far away now, as she leaned into his strength, his warmth, and felt her own energy drain. She was aware of Strike and Leah leaning over Anna, who had gone silent and still, aware of the awful tension in the room as the Nightkeepers awaited the decision. Skywatch or the hellmouth? The battle for home or the battle for the world?

Strike’s choice was, she realized, very like what his father must have faced in the moment the Banol Kax broke through the intersection and sent their lava creatures to kill the winikin and children back at the training compound. What had happened before was happening again.

Alexis concentrated, sending her need along the skyroad link, and was rewarded with a second, ground-level picture, one that grew dim and gray as her energy faded. Then there was a rasp and a hiss of pain, and Nate was clasping her hand in his bloodied grasp, boosting her power with his own. The image clarified, one of carved stone and a gaping skull mouth wreathed in gray-white vapor.

“It’s high in the mountains,” she said, “just below where the clouds begin. There’s a river flowing in and down, and a dark, deep tunnel.” She kept going with the description of the screaming skull and surrounding cloud forest, trying to give her king enough for the ’port link. When she ran down, when there was no more left that she could think to add, she sagged against Nate, feeling his energy as her own, his fatigue as her own.

With the message passed, the wall behind the altar returned to stone, and Alexis’s Godkeeper connection returned to a baseline shimmer at the back of her skull. The room stopped spinning, and some of her energy returned—thanks, she suspected, to the blood link with Nate.

Knowing he would need his own strength, she pulled away and forced herself to stand on her own two feet, unswaying, as she faced Strike. “We have to go where the battle is.”

Expression stony, the king glanced at Nate. “What do you think?”

“I agree with Alexis.”

“Fuck.” Strike gestured for the others to link up. “Let’s go.”

Alexis knew he never would’ve done it based on their say-so, knew that he recognized it as the right course too. But even so, she felt a sharp bite of responsibility, of worry. As the ’port magic revved up around them, she tried not to imagine what was going on back at Skywatch . . . and failed miserably. The stories of the prior massacre were too ingrained in her mind, her worry for Izzy and the others too sharp. So as the world slid sideways and went gray-green, she sent a prayer into the barrier: Gods protect our winikin. They’re the only family we have left.

The Nightkeepers materialized in the place she’d described to Strike, the vapor-laden air snapping away from them with an audible pop. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of death and decay, but thin with altitude and cold. The clearing they had landed in was lit by torchlight, and Alexis clutched Nate’s hand hard at the sight of the screaming skull mouth and the dark, brackish water leading into the cave system. For a second everything inside her rebelled at the thought of going inside. Then her eyes locked on a glitter of purple and gray, and rebellion went to horror.

Mistress Truth’s headless body, still garbed in purple velour, was spiked to the wall of the cavern, pointing the way inward, a grisly sacrifice to a brutal pantheon.

Anna said quietly, “Call home. Please. I did what I could through the blood link, but it wasn’t much.” She was very pale, still rubbing her forearm where the ajawlel mark was clearly paining her, but she’d abided by the king’s decision to follow the battle rather than their hearts.

“Already on it,” Strike said. He had the satellite phone pressed to his ear, but shook his head and clicked it off with a curse. “Nothing.”

“Oh, there’s something, all right,” Alexis said, her own voice feeling as if it were coming from far away. She wasn’t sure if that was her talking now, or the goddess. The power conduit felt different somehow, as though it were vibrating on an entirely new frequency. “Listen. Feel.”

There was a faint whistling noise, almost a high scream, barely audible to human ears. The earth beneath their feet shimmied slightly, the faintest of tremors. The cloud forest around them, dank and ancient and rotten, was silent. The air hummed with a waiting tension.

Nate said, “I think—”

A huge, grating crack rent the air, the ground gave a massive heave, nearly throwing Alexis off her feet, and the cave mouth shuddered and started to move. At first she thought it was collapsing. Horror coalesced and built when she saw that it wasn’t collapsing at all; the upper jaw of the screaming skull was hingeing, the scream growing wider as the skull mouth stretched open.

Then, darkness spewed from the opening. Evil. A gout of foul purple-black smoke came first, followed by an unearthly howl that nearly sent her to her knees. She was barely aware that Nate held her up, that he shielded her with his body as a dark shape hurtled from the hellroad and took flight, flapping its great, leathery wings as it disappeared into the darkness beyond the torchlight. Then another. Another.

They were bats, she realized with sharp terror. Huge bats, each the size of a subcompact. Three of them, then a fourth, then two more, until all seven of the death bats had flown free of the cave. Camazotz’s sons had been freed by Iago. The powerful altar stone must have overcome Iago’s lack of the obsidian knife that Nate wore in his belt, Alexis thought. Or else they’d been wrong and the Volatile’s knife had never been one of the prophecies; it was something else. But what?

The death bats screamed as they wheeled up and dived back down aiming for the Nightkeepers, then screamed again when Michael’s shield spell sent them tumbling back.

“We’re too late,” Nate shouted over the thunder of wings. “Iago breached the barrier!”

“Not yet,” Alexis shouted, not sure how she knew, but positive she was right. “He’s torn a hole, but it’s fixable. We can weave it shut.”

It wasn’t until she said the word that she understood its import. Weaving. Rainbows. It wasn’t about fighting the demons with rainbows, never had been. Her job was to repair the barrier. It would be up to the others to fight the bats.

“Tell Leah to call Kulkulkan,” she gasped, feeling the goddess reach into her and start pulling her into the magic. Or was Ixchel pulling the magic from her? She couldn’t tell, wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure of anything beyond the fact that this was what she’d been born to do; this was her fate and destiny.

“They’re already on it,” Nate answered. He was bracing her, channeling the magic into her as the bats slammed into Michael’s shield again and again, denting it and threatening to break through. “The others are linked up. Ready for the boost?”

She nodded, so full of magic already that she thought she might burst with it, so full that she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, could only cling to him as the Nightkeepers formed the sacred circle, with Strike and Leah using their joined power to channel the golden clarion call that would bring the creator god to earth. Then Nate linked hands with Anna, and Michael reached for Alexis’s free hand, completing the circle and linking their power to hers.

And for a few seconds, she was a god.

Power streamed through Alexis, into her, lit her up and sent her higher than she’d ever been. She reached up and touched the sky, stretched down and thrust her roots deep underground. Then the clouds parted overhead, the night went day-bright, and a rainbow speared down, slamming into the ground at her feet and making the earth shudder with its force. This one’s for you, Izzy, Alexis thought, saying a prayer for the only mother she’d ever really known.

And, finally understanding what she had to do, she pulled away from Nate and stepped into the rainbow.

She heard him shout her name, but couldn’t answer. Pain speared through her, followed by exhilaration and the sense of moving, accelerating, shooting up into the air. She had a moment of free fall in reverse as she traveled up the rainbow, up the column of light to a place in the sky where there was a huge, gaping split. Only it wasn’t the sky that was split, she saw once she reached it. It was the barrier. She could look through the tear and see the other side, straight into hell. There she saw lava-orange boluntiku and the green-eyed shadows of makol without their human shells. Behind them were black, blank shapes of unimaginable evil, Banol Kax, surrounded by their lesser demons, the armies of hell, gathered together on a wide, gray-black plain that was somehow on the same level as the earth’s atmosphere.

The creatures strained toward her, toward earth, held back only by the barrier, which was unraveling strand by strand as she watched.

And there, as she hung within the rainbow itself, Alexis heard Ixchel’s voice, faint with distance. She couldn’t make out the words, but she understood.

Taking hold of the rainbow, she pulled on a strand of blue, looping it and tossing it across the gap to snag one ragged edge of the sky. Magic sparked at the place where the blue strand touched the edge, and again when she looped red to the other side of the gap. Then she began to pull on the strands, tugging them together, trying to seam the sky itself.

Slowly, very slowly, the tear began to narrow.

A trumpet scream sounded behind her, and she glanced back to see a snakelike slide of motion, a glowing gold-and-crimson dragon with an elongated snout and whip-like tail. Kulkulkan.

The creator god rose up in the sky and spread his great feathered wings as he hovered above the rainbow, bugling a battle cry, becoming the serpent and the rainbow as they had been carved on the ceiling of the stone temple. Then Kulkulkan screamed again and pinwheeled in the air, locking onto the death bats, directed by the mental link he shared with Leah and Strike, who stood near the hellmouth with their warriors.

The king and queen had her back, Alexis thought, and was warmed by the knowledge, steadied by knowing she wasn’t alone, even though she felt so lonely up there in the sky, sitting on a rainbow, sewing the world back together. But the rainbow strands held. The barrier was closing. Slowly, but it was closing.

For a second she actually thought she was going to pull it off. Then there was a massive heaving on the other side of the barrier, a concerted rush as the Banol Kax sent their forces toward the weak spot, a massive battering ram of evil seeking to force its way through to earth. The creatures hit the barrier at a spot below the tear, and the fabric of psi energy bowed under the pressure, straining at the torn spot.

Shouting, Alexis pulled on the threads with both hands and hung on to the rainbow with her legs, fighting to keep the gap from widening. Then a long, squidlike tendril of evil snaked through the opening, wrapped around her, and yanked her off the rainbow.

And pulled her through the gap to hell.