CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Gods. Lucius’s blood drained from his head to his
lap and he went hard at the spot where they were pressed together,
where she rode him unexpectedly. He didn’t answer her with words,
didn’t think he could form a coherent sentence as a roar of heat
came close to obliterating the train of thought he’d been locked
into for too long. Intellectually, he knew that the question wasn’t
whether he had mageblood a few generations back; it was whether he
would give in again to the weakness that had given the makol its toehold. But as Jade’s taste exploded
across his senses and heat roared within him, he knew the answer
wasn’t as simple as the instinctive hell,
no inside him, because if he didn’t know what the chink in
his armor looked or felt like, how could he be sure of staying
strong? That was what had kept him studying the paintings and
prophecies long into the night, looking for an answer. That and
struggling with thoughts of Jade, and the knowledge that he
couldn’t go to her until he had his fucking head screwed on right.
Except he hadn’t gone to her; she’d come to him, propositioned him
with the glitter of solstice magic in her eyes. And what the hell
was he supposed to do about that?
She broke the kiss to
whisper against his lips, “Stop brooding. It’s a cardinal
day.”
Wry amusement had his
mouth curving despite his mood. “That doesn’t exactly equate to
party time around here. In fact, it seems like the perfect time to
brood. We’re pinning everything on a damned ball game. If this
doesn’t work, we’re screwed.”
“And your sitting out
here alone is going to change that?” When he didn’t respond, she
nodded as though he’d answered. “Exactly.” She took his hand in
hers; their scars rubbed together in an inciting echo of being
blood-linked. “This doesn’t have to be complicated. Right now, for
today, it can just be about the solstice.”
Deep inside, he knew
he shouldn’t let it be that easy. But at the same time, there was
nothing easy about the electricity that crackled between them,
nothing simple about the roar of heat and need that pounded through
him, or the frustration that had ridden him for the past three
days. But then, unbidden, his hand rose to cup her cheek. He felt
the softness of her skin, saw the wary heat in her eye, and he was
lost. “Fuck it. Happy summer to me.”
Throwing thought and
caution aside with almost giddy relief, he kissed her, deep and
dark, and he filled his palms with her curves. Her hands fisted in
his hair and she whimpered at the back of her throat, her body
molding to his, her breasts pressing against his chest. On a surge,
he swung around and rose to his feet with her legs around his
waist, her arms around his neck.
“Lucius!” She grabbed
on convulsively.
“I’ve got you.” He
carried her down the steep stairs like that, their mouths fused.
The man he’d been wouldn’t have dared try it. The man he’d become
reveled in how easy the move was for him now, just like the ball
game had been. Whereas in the past he’d struggled with his own
body, now he was in total control.
When they reached his
cottage, he carried her across the TV room to the bedroom, this
time cradled close to his heart. In some atavistic corner of
himself, he was aware of the danger, but just then he didn’t care.
It was the solstice, a time for sex and magic. He set her on her
feet just inside the bedroom door, sliding her against him inch by
torturous inch. In unspoken agreement they shed their clothing with
glorious abandon, not stopping until they were both naked. The
earth-toned light reflected from the ball game scene on the TV
screen limned the dip of her waist, the curve of her breast, and
the long lines of her arms and legs. He reached for her, thinking
to carry her Rhett- like to the bed, but she held him off with an
upraised hand. “Wait. Let me.”
Before the ridiculous
image of her carrying him to the bed could form, she knelt down and
closed her mouth over him almost in a single move. His vision
grayed and he forgot what the hell he’d been thinking, damn near
forgot his own name. All he could do was lock his knees, bury his
hands in her hair, and hang on for the ride.
She drained him, left
him weak legged and shuddering, wholly at her mercy. At some point
they collapsed together on the bed with her astride him, driving
him up again as he filled his hands, his mouth, with her breasts,
her lips, her tongue. He talked to her, slipping from English to
Yucatec and back, saying her name, lacing it with praise and pleas,
urging her up and over, saying more perhaps than he’d said to
anyone since he’d nearly lost the option to say anything ever
again. She shuddered against him, small climaxes building to the
whole, as she rode him, drove him onward, controlled him, until
finally she clenched around him, shuddering, his name seeming
ripped from her throat as she came.
He followed her over,
kept her going, grinding against her, pulsing into her as she said
his name again, this time on a moan. Then on a whisper. Until,
finally, she sagged against him, pressed her cheek to his, and went
still. In fact, he was pretty sure the whole world went still for a
long, drawn-out moment that laid him bare, stripped him raw. And in
that moment, he thought that he would do anything to keep her with
him, anything for her.
He lay there drained,
reveling in the languor of an orgasm that had devastated him,
seeming akin to an apocalypse in its own right. Unable to move, he
lay sprawled and satiated while his senses spun and a faint breeze
seemed to come from nowhere to tug at him.
It took him a few
precious heartbeats to recognize the sensation through the
postcoital haze. Then exultation slammed through him. Magic! It was there; he
was there. He reached for it, grabbed on to it, opened himself to
it—
And the world hazed
luminous green around him.
“No!” He lunged
upright, pawing at the night. “Godsdamn it, no!”
He saw Jade’s face
swim into his vision, saw her mouth moving but couldn’t hear the
words; he couldn’t hear anything over the hammer of his heartbeat.
His vision flickered back to normal and the world lurched, or maybe
he was the one moving. Jade’s voice cut in, soothing: “It’s okay,
it’s—”
“It is godsdamned
well not okay,” he snarled, then froze
when the words came out instead of being trapped inside his skull,
and he snapped back to awareness of his own body. The world
solidified around him. “Fuck. Oh, fuck.” He doubled over, leaning
against her. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Up,” she ordered.
“Into the shower.”
“Yeah.” His voice was
thick; his mouth tasted like shit. He staggered to the bathroom,
got the shower on, and stuck his head under the fiery spray.
Nauseated and shaking, he stayed under the stream, heat on max,
until his skin was red and he was back under control.
Then he stayed
another couple of minutes as his brain came back online and things
started making sense, and not in a good way. He toweled off, found
clean jeans and a tee waiting for him, and dragged them on, his
heart pinching at the expectation of things to come.
Jade had gotten
dressed and was waiting for him in the main room. She’d shut off
the TV and turned on a light. When he appeared in the doorway, she
looked up at him, her eyes huge in her face. “Why did you fight the
magic?”
“I wasn’t fighting
the magic. I was fighting the makol.”
She paled. “You
weren’t.”
“Trust me, I’d know
that green eye slime anywhere, anytime. The bastard is still inside
me. If I hadn’t yanked myself out of there, I might have—” He broke
off, had to swallow hard so he wouldn’t gag on his own bile. It was
like before, only worse, because this time he’d thought he was
finished being a slave. “I can’t go back there. I fucking
won’t.”
She stood to face
him. “You’re not going anywhere, Lucius. The makol is dead; its soul was destroyed during the
spell, just like my sister’s was. There’s no way it’s still
connected to you. It doesn’t exist
anymore. If it did, you wouldn’t have been able to access
the library even the first time. Get it? The only place that demon
still lives on is in your memories.”
He went very still.
“You think I’m making this up?”
“I think . . .” She
blew out a breath. “How about we sit down?”
Eyeing the sofa, he
said softly, “Would you rather I lie down while you pull the chair
around? I’ve told you I don’t want to be your patient, Jade. Don’t
try to therapize me.”
“There’s no such word
as ‘therapize.’ And another word for therapy is a two-way
conversation, Lucius.” But the way she said his name, he knew she
was thinking “asshole.”
Deciding she was
probably right about that, he sat on the damn couch, and he didn’t
move away when she sat beside him and took both of his hands in
hers. In fact, he was tempted to lean into her, lean on her. He compromised by tipping his head to rest
lightly atop hers. “The sex was fabulous. Sorry about the
postcoital girlie screaming.”
Her fingers tightened
fractionally on his. “That was more than sex. And there’s no
makol. Whatever you felt just now was
your psyche’s way of warning you away from the powerlessness and
lack of control that comes from caring for another person. You’re
not afraid of the makol. You’re afraid
of what’s happening between the two of us.”
For a second he
thought he’d misheard. When he went over the words and they didn’t
change in his head, he bared his teeth. “In what way?”
She seemed to miss
the danger signs, instead rolling on: “I accessed my magic by
opening myself up to my feelings for you; I was hoping you’d
eventually come around to the point of doing the same thing on your
own. You finally did just now, and the Prophet’s magic started to
come back online, but—and here I am therapizing a little, to use
your word for it, but bear with me, because it plays—I think the
magic triggered some of the fears you carry from your experiences
with the makol, namely those of being
trapped and out of your own control. Your psyche knee- jerked that
into a signal it knew you’d react to, namely the green glow of
makol possession.”
He ground out, “Back
up to the part about hoping I’d come around, will you? Exactly how
long have you been working on this theory?”
Her encouraging
smile—her counselor’s smile—faltered. “Since I started being able
to access the scribe’s talent by thinking about you.”
If he hadn’t been so
shaken by the makol’s reappearance, the
fear that it would block him from getting back to the library, and,
yes, the intensity of the sex, he might have appreciated the irony.
Here he was, facing down a lover who was looking up at him as if he
were the answer to her freaking prayers, and all he could think
about was escaping. From his own damn house.
Hello, shoe on the other foot.
He hadn’t gone into
this looking for a relationship. He’d been looking to grow up and
move on, and stop getting caught up in old patterns. He’d gotten
caught, though, in reverse. And with a woman he cared about, one he
hadn’t meant to hurt. Bullshit, a voice
said inside him, sounding like Cizin all of a sudden. If you really didn’t want to hurt her, you would’ve cooled
things off days ago. You knew she was falling, but you kept coming
back. Hell, you carried her over the damn threshold. What the fuck
was she supposed to think?
He was suddenly
chilled, both by the familiar mental tone of a creature that logic
said was dead, and by the realization that whatever the source, the
inner bitch-slap had a point. He’d been telling himself one thing
while doing what felt good. Those weren’t the actions of the nice
guy she’d painted him as. It was the sort of thing makol bait would do.
There was a flicker
of nerves in Jade’s eyes now, but she continued. “What just
happened is good news, really, because it means that the next time,
if you ignore the green and let the magic take over, you’ll wind up
in the library.”
“Maybe,” he said
coldly. “Or maybe you’ll wind up with another ajaw-makol loose inside Skywatch. And maybe this
time I won’t be strong enough to stop it.”
She paled. “There’s
no makol here right now. It’s your way
of processing the fear of being vulnerable.”
His anger drained,
leaving a hollow ache behind. “Damn it, Jade, they were your rules.
Just friends, you said. I was the one who started off wanting more,
back before, and you let me down easy.” He shook his head. “Now I
guess it’s my turn, for the first time ever, to try to do this
right. So I’ll start off with the cliché: It’s not you; it’s me. If
I’ve learned anything over the past nine days, it’s that love means
putting the other person first, even over your own safety and life,
and despite what the writs say about loyalty to the king and the
war.” He paused, trying to get it right, and trying not to falter
as her face fell. In the end, he said simply: “I can’t put you
first.”
Her eyes flared for a
second and she snapped, “That’s—” Then she clicked her teeth shut
on whatever she was about to say, and shook her head. “Forget it.
Just forget it. I guess I misread what I thought I was seeing. I
thought we were on the same page.”
“So did I.” He was
going to feel like unholy ravening shit in a few minutes, he
thought. For the moment, he just felt numb and gray. Like all the
color and life had leeched out of him. Was this what it felt like
to break up with someone you liked but didn’t love? Gods. He’d thought it sucked to be on the other
end. This was ten times worse. A hundred. He felt as if a piece of
his world were suddenly out of joint.
“I . . . I guess I’ll
go. It’ll be morning soon.”
Reminded that it was
the cardinal day, Lucius fleetingly wondered whether he should have
let the magic take him, on the chance that he’d been wrong somehow
about the green. No, he knew that had been makol green. No question about it. He’d done the
right thing, just as he was doing the right thing now. He didn’t
know how to love as people like Shandi or Willow did. He had no
basis for it, and didn’t want to learn. Jade had been right in the
first place when she’d said that love destroyed lives. Love wasn’t
the answer. Inner strength was.
He watched in silence
as she crossed the TV room and turned back at the kitchen threshold
he’d carried her across less than an hour before. Her face was
calm, composed, but he could see the strain beneath. “I’m sorry
things got messy. I’ll see you on the ball court in a few hours.
We’ve got a game to play.”
She turned and left.
He didn’t call her back.
When her family-only
cell phone rang, Patience nearly dropped a plate of eggs in her
husband’s lap.
Brandt’s head came up
at the unfamiliar ringtone. “Who’s that?”
The accusatory edge
to the question assuaged her guilt when she flipped open the phone
and blithely lied, “Kristie, at the dojo. I know I’m not an
official owner anymore, but I gave her my private number in case
there were any questions we didn’t go over during the transfer.”
Don’t overexplain. She placed the plate
in front of him at the dining table they hardly used anymore. “Dig
in. I’ll take this in the bedroom while I finish getting ready for
today.”
Alone, she pressed
the phone to her ear. “Ms. Montana?”
“Nope. Apparently
today my name is Kristie and I own a dojo. I’m betting I dot the
‘i’ in my name with a little smiley face. Or am I a
Kristy-with-a-‘y’?”
Having already
discovered that the bounty hunter had a high retainer, a killer
hourly rate for nonbounty work, a smart mouth, and little interest
in making friends or even being polite, Patience didn’t bother
responding to the dig. “Did you find something?”
“Not just
something. I found your
sons.”
“You—” Patience’s
voice broke on a surge of emotion.
The other woman
rattled off a quick summary about facial recognition and driver’s
licenses, blah, blah, followed by an address.
“Wait! Let me write
this down.”
“I’ll text
it.”
“Thanks.” Her heart
was going rapid- fire and her palms were damp; it’d been months
since she’d last felt this good. A year. “Do that.”
The phone clicked. It
took her a few seconds to realize the bounty hunter had hung up on
her. Moments later, the text came through. She stared at the
address, memorizing it. Then she pressed her lips together and made
herself delete the info, just as she’d deleted all the other small
nuggets of info as soon as she’d committed them to memory, just in
case. All the while, her head spun with a litany of She found them! She found them! I can’t believe she found
them!
Dropping the phone
back into her pocket, she headed back out into the kitchen to scare
up some cereal for herself while Brandt finished his cholesterol
bomb. He gave her a fork wave as she passed. “Everything
okay?”
She smiled.
“Everything’s fine now. Just a few details we need to nail down.”
And then, after that? Clear
sailing.
Within the first hour
of playing Kinich Ahau’s game, Lucius discovered that being a jock
wasn’t nearly as cool as he’d imagined it would be. Or rather, it
was fun being one of the cool kids, but it was also damned hard
work. By the second hour, he’d come to understand the game on a
cellular level; his body seemed to know where to put itself to
return each serve with a forearm, shin, or hip. By the third hour,
he’d become almost prescient within the confines of the ball court,
always placing himself at the point of maximum impact, maximum
play.
The heavy ball, made
of natural rubber and infused with some sort of magic that had kept
it resilient despite the years, was heavy and irregular, meaning
that it bounced erratically, often confounding lifelong athletes
Strike, Michael, and Alexis, as well as more analytical players
like Nate, Brandt, and Leah. Sven flung himself through the game
with wild abandon, usually winding up out-of-bounds, while Rabbit
played with vicious glee and lots of knees and elbows. By that
time, the others had rotated out and were watching from
above.
The points stayed
grimly even, rising and falling together, never hitting the magic
thirteen. The hoop, eighteen feet in the air and mere inches larger
than the ball of play, could’ve been an illusion; the ball passed
by it, banged off it, arched over it, but never went
through.
By hour four, when
the strange orange sun hit the apex of the sky and began its
descent toward dark and destiny, Lucius had entered a glazed,
numb-feeling zone where he was down to physical action without
internal reaction, sport without soul. He’d even ceased being aware
of Jade sitting up above, carefully not watching him with cool,
hurt eyes.
A finger tapped him
on his unarmored shoulder and a voice said, “It’s
over.”
Anger surged through
him, hard and hot and searching for an outlet. Blood hitting fever
pitch in an instant, he whirled on his enemy, lifting his
stone-weighted hand. “Fuck you.”
Jox stood there in a
referee’s robe, with the conch-shell pipe that acted as a time-out
whistle, his eyes going wide and scared as the hand stone
descended. Lucius’s vision flickered green, then normal; he didn’t
pull the punch.
“Son of a bitch!” A
heavy blow slammed into him from the side, sending him to his
knees; he lost his grip on the hand stone and came up swinging with
his fists, dully surprised that it was Rabbit who had knocked him
aside, Rabbit who protected Jox with his body and shouted, “Leave
him alone, asshole; he’s just doing his job!”
“He—” Lucius stopped
dead, aware that the others had stopped playing, were ready to step
in. “Shit. Fuck. Sorry, I—Sorry. I got caught up.” Was that all it
had been? He hoped to hell so.
“Understood.” Jox
nodded, accepting the apology, though he stayed behind Rabbit’s
bigger bulk. “But like I said, play is over for right now. We’re
breaking for an hour. You might want to take two.”
“I’ll take an hour,”
Lucius grated. “I don’t have time to be tired today.”
He grabbed food at
random from the overloaded picnic tables that had been moved to
just outside the court, found a spot far away from all the others,
and sat on the steps of the ball court alone. He ate mechanically
but didn’t make any headway against the hollowness
inside.
“I’m disappointed in
you.” The censure came from slightly above him, in Jox’s
voice.
He glanced back and
saw the winikin set down his plate and
take a seat one step up and a few feet over, out of his immediate
reach. Lucius shook his head. “I don’t have anything against you
personally. You just seem to be the guy in my way when I lose
it.”
The winikin bit into a hot dog. “That wasn’t what I was
talking about. You’re wimping out.”
“The old me was the
wimp. Try again.”
“The old you might
not have been able to bench-press a Hummer, but he wasn’t afraid to
go after what he wanted.”
“You’re talking about
Jade.” Appetite gone, Lucius shoved aside his plate. “You’re off on
that one; she didn’t want the old guy. Besides, he was terrified of
being alone, and spent most of his time wishing, not doing. He . .
. Shit. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t need to
talk to me anyway. Talk to her.”
Lucius looked over to
where Jade sat between Sasha and Patience, chatting. She was
wearing a pale peach-colored shirt and had a matching scarf tied
around her loose ponytail, its color nearly washed out in the funky
sunlight. The others might think nothing had changed. Her face was
smooth, her eyes clear, her tone light. Lucius, though, saw the
hurt beneath the calm surface. “I can’t. I’m not ready to. She’s
the one who says that people don’t change, not at their core, and I
think that’s true to a point. I’m bigger and stronger now, better
coordinated. I’ve made choices not to repeat old patterns. But deep
inside, I’m still me.”
“You’re the one
distinguishing between the old version of you and the new one,” the
winikin observed mildly. “The rest of
us aren’t.”
“She is. She gave the
old me the ‘let’s just be fuck buddies’ speech. The new me got a
watered-down version of the same speech at first. Then, the next
thing I know, she changed the rules on me and tried to manipulate
me into falling for her. How is a guy supposed to deal with
that?”
“Let me see. . . .”
The winikin paused, considering. “A
beautiful, talented woman you’ve been panting after decides she
wants to be more than bed partners. . . . How should you feel? I’m
thinking flattered would be a good start. Maybe grateful. How about
overjoyed?”
“She changed the
rules.”
“She changed herself.
And she did it because of how she feels about you.”
That brought Lucius’s
head up. He turned to face the winikin
more fully, but scowled. “Not until I got buff.” He didn’t know the
resentment was there until he’d said it aloud.
“Reality check. You
don’t get to talk down about the old you and then get pissed when
you think she likes the new-and-improved version better. And
besides, I wasn’t talking about the past few weeks, or even the
past few months. Think about it. When did she start standing up to
Shandi and the others?”
“While I was
gone.”
“It was because you were gone, dipshit. Anna had more or
less checked out, and everyone else was concentrating on their own
problems. Jade was the one who kept your name out there. Why do you
think Michael put his own life on the line to get you out of the
in-between?”
“Because it
distracted the boluntiku and bought him
enough time to cast the spell he needed to free himself of the
Mictlan’s magic.”
“Screw that. He did
it because he knew Jade wanted you back, and he owed her one. He
did it for her. Because he knew how much she cared about you, even
if she wasn’t ready to admit it at the time.”
A dull rushing noise
built in the back of Lucius’s head, and a heavy weight settled on
his chest. “I thought about her all the time. It was the only thing
that kept me going.”
“So why are you
pissed at her now?”
Lucius looked up at
her, catching her eye. She glanced away, her chin high and her
features tight. “I’m not. I’m . . . Shit, I don’t know. I think it
was easy for us to care for each other when we were apart; we could
remember the good stuff and forget the rest. How can I be sure we
won’t go through the same pattern over and over? What if chemistry
and friendship aren’t enough? She’s the one who says people don’t
change, but I think they do. I mean, just look at her. She’s
getting stronger every damn day, whether she realizes it or not.
How do people make it work when they can’t control what they’re
going to get from day to day?” He thought of his parents, locked in
a thirty-year stalemate between football and Tupperware, thought of
his brothers and their interchangeable, silent girlfriends, and his
sisters and their husbands and lovers, who could have been swapped
out for his brothers without anyone noticing or caring. Who the
hell wanted to live like that?
“If two people truly
want to stay together, then they grow in the same direction. Not
accidentally, but because they work at it.” The winikin gestured at the picnic tables, where the
mated pairs sat close together, sharing intimate looks and private
smiles. “Doesn’t that look like people making it
work?”
“Those are magi, not
people. The gods care for humans, but they don’t give them
destinies.”
Jox tapped Lucius’s
wrist, right above the hellmark. “Don’t be so sure of that.” The
winikin collected his plate and rose to
his feet. “Break’s almost over, but like I said, go ahead and sit
out the first shift if you want to.”
Lucius dumped his
leftovers and headed toward the playing field, where the teams were
assembling, the players looking steely eyed and rested, determined
that one side or the other was going to get the upper hand. But
when he reached the edge of the playing field, he paused and looked
back to the tables, where Jade was helping Shandi clean up. As
though she felt his eyes on her, Jade looked up, their gazes
connecting.
He saw the hurt
beneath the calm. More, he saw her determination, her refusal to
give up on the people who needed her, even though she might have
preferred to be somewhere else, doing something else. Duty,
dignity, decorum; she’d said it was the harvester way, and she had
all of those qualities. But she was also brave and intelligent,
quietly fierce and loyal. And none of those things, he realized,
jibed with her being shallow or manipulative. She was a kind
person, a healer, not of the body like Sasha, but of the mind and
spirit. She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything; she’d
been trying to do what she thought was right, trying to let him
find his own way rather than control him, because she knew he
needed to not be boxed in.
Which left them . . .
where? Hell, he didn’t know, but he suddenly knew one thing for
certain: They weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
He tried to convey
that in a look, but her face went blank and confused at first, and
then gained an edge of anger beneath. That anger reminded him too
strongly of his own, of the green flash and the echo of the
makol ’s voice inside his skull. He
couldn’t go to her, not yet. He needed to deal with the darkness
inside him first . . . and pray to the gods it was possible to
break free, finally, from his past mistakes.
Then Jox blew the
conch shell and tossed the heavy rubber ball to Nate for the first
serve, and Lucius told himself to get the hell on the
field.
He crossed to the
picnic table instead.
When he drew Jade
aside, her eyes went stormy. “No,” she said firmly. “You don’t get
to apologize. You were right about some of it, and so was I, but
what’s said is said; what’s done is done. I don’t—” Her voice
broke; she looked away, visibly trying to hold it together. “I
don’t like feeling this way. I want my peace and quiet
back.”
“Too late.” Not sure
what possessed him, he tugged the scarf from her hair. Looping it
around his arm, he tied it above where the ballplayers’
asymmetrical armor attached. Leaning in, he dropped a quick, hard
kiss on her lips. “We’ll talk later.”
He retreated before
she could respond, before she could insist that no, damn it, they
were going to talk now. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to
her, didn’t know what he wanted from her, but he knew it wasn’t
what they had right then, and it wasn’t for them to go back to
where they’d been before. They needed to go forward.
Moving fast, impelled
by a sudden, fierce sense of urgency, he raced onto the playing
field. Now, as he spun and pivoted, throwing hips and elbows, feet
and shoulders as the scrum boiled from one side of the narrow
pavilion to the other, there was nothing rote or mechanical in his
actions. He was entirely there, entirely in the moment and the
game.
He instinctively knew
when Jade climbed the stairs and joined the audience, knew when she
saw him, locked her eyes on him and didn’t look away. He played for
her, trying to make his case without the words he couldn’t find
just then. A faint note hummed on the air, high and sweet. It
sounded like it might have come from Jox’s referee’s pipe, but the
winikin stood off to the side, arms
folded.
“Nightkeepers onto
the field! Everyone, now!” Strike
bellowed suddenly, and Jade and the others raced to join the game.
The pace shifted, grew frenzied as the high, sweet note intensified
and the orange light coming from up above seemed, for a moment, to
brighten and turn white and warm.
Lucius was barely
aware of these peripherals, though; his whole focus was on the ball
and the play. Sven served to Nate, who returned to Alexis, who
bumped back to Sven. Action and reaction, arc and flow.
Over there, Lucius knew, and headed for
a clear spot at the edge of the action. Seconds later, the ball
flew straight toward him. So did Strike and Michael, their eyes
locked on the arcing sphere.
Michael crouched; the
ball hit his shoulder guard and deflected straight upward, when all
physics said it should have ricocheted to Strike in the pass they
had undoubtedly intended. Lucius didn’t slow or swerve; he barreled
straight at Michael. He saw the other man’s eyes go wide, saw him
brace for impact.
Only Lucius didn’t
hit him—he jumped, spring-boarded off the other man’s shoulder, and
went vertical.
The ball reached its
apogee and descended, hurtling toward a ball court that represented
imprisonment in the underworld. Lucius flew up to meet the sun
ball, slammed his armored forearm into its yielding irregularity,
and sent it hurtling through the heavy air. The ball shot sideways,
not toward the underworld court now, but toward the sacred stone
ring. Toward the future.
Gravity grabbed
Lucius, yanking him earthbound as though pissed that he’d broken
free for a brief and glorious moment. He slammed into the ground
and rolled to lie flat, staring up, as the sun ball passed through
the sacred ring without touching the sides. For a moment, the earth
went still, and he imagined he could hear the cosmic swish of his
sideways slam dunk.
Then the sweet note
went to a scream, a brilliant red-gold flash split the air, and the
world lurched around Lucius. Adrenaline slashed through him. This
wasn’t his magic, whatever that was. There was no green haze, no
feeling of inward pressure; this was entirely external, a greater
force taking him somewhere. Then he was moving, accelerating, the
world whipping sideways past him and going to a gray-green
blur.
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.