CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jade’s nerves revved
high as she followed the companions, who were moving fast through
the dying cloud forest, their heads and tails low as though they
were on a mission. Which she supposed they were: Save Kinich Ahau,
and get him back in the sky where he belonged.
One thing at a time, she reminded herself.
First we need to find the hellmouth. As
she chased after the long-legged black hellhounds, she sought the
magic, called it to her, but nothing happened. Panic flickered.
Don’t you dare quit on me
now.
But it wasn’t that
the magic had quit on her, she knew. She’d quit on it. Or rather,
she was blocking the hell out of it.
Damn it, Lucius, she thought, but even as she did,
she knew it wasn’t entirely his fault, or hers. They had both
screwed things up the night before. She should’ve told him about
her theory of the connection between their emotions and their
magic, and she should’ve come clean to him that she was falling
hard and fast for him despite all her best intentions. Even
admitting it to her inner self brought a lick of panic. He’d turned
her down, said that wasn’t what he wanted, she wasn’t what he wanted.
Granted, his behavior
on the ball court and the way he’d worn her scarf as a knight’s
Dark Age favor suggested he’d been doing some rethinking too, and
the way he was following close behind her now had all the hallmarks
of a male warrior- mage protecting his mate. But they hadn’t said
the words, hadn’t had the conversation.
More talking? she asked herself, irritation
spiking. Therapy might be a two-way conversation, but she was
getting sick of it. She was tired of talking herself into trouble;
she wanted to act, to react, to make a
difference, damn it.
Up ahead, the big
black creatures crossed a wide clearing and then stopped dead,
standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing nothing in particular. Then
they sat, still staring at that same nothingness. Only it wasn’t
nothing, Jade knew. It was the hellmouth . . . or it would be if
she could figure out the magic.
Lucius moved up
beside her while the other magi fanned out, waiting for her to do
her thing. None of their talents was compatible with the task—fire
could level the forest but it couldn’t uncover what had been
hidden; a shape-shifted hawk could fly a search pattern, but the
Volatile could see only what was visible. Mind-bending wouldn’t
help; Strike couldn’t ’port blind; and invisibility wasn’t their
problem—visibility was.
“It’s all yours,”
Lucius said, his thoughts paralleling hers. He took her hand,
squeezed it. “You can do it. I have faith in you.”
That jarred against
his recent behavior. “Maybe,” she said softly, “but what if I’m not
strong enough?”
He looked down at
her, his eyes intense. “The harvesters believed in the importance
of their work; Shandi believed in the value of the harvesters. The
stars believed in the prophecies, Vennie in her own brilliance.
You’re a part of each of them. What do you believe
in?”
She didn’t answer
right away. She knew that the clock was ticking, that everyone was
waiting for her. But she was stuck on Lucius’s question. What did
she believe in? She believed in the magic, in the Nightkeepers and
the war. She believed that she was stronger than she used to think
she was, and that she and Lucius . . . what? Did she believe they
could make each other happy in the long run?
That was the problem,
she realized suddenly, or one of them. She’d seen the end of so
many relationships that she entered each new affair preparing for
its end, creating a self- fulfilling prophecy that made it easier,
safer, and less dramatic to not bother trying to keep it going.
What would happen if she threw herself into it heart and
soul?
She might be crushed,
she realized. But she might also succeed.
“I believe,” she said
slowly, “that inner peace is highly overrated.” While he was trying
to puzzle that one out, she stepped into him and kissed him, hard.
What was more, she opened herself fully to her own emotions and
damned the consequences.
The magic shimmered
within her, in the air around them, and a hidden door opened inside
her, letting in the power of the solstice, and the power that was
hers alone. She stepped away from Lucius, taking her place directly
between the companions, facing nothing.
Only it wasn’t
nothing, she saw now. It was everything.
The bright sparks
she’d seen as part of the shifting pattern of power in Rabbit’s
sublet had come from sex or emotion, maybe both; the fluid magic
she’d sensed covering the hidden tunnel at Skywatch had been an
ancient spell imbued with modern hopes and fears. But seeing those
things was just half of her magic. The other half was in the spell
words themselves, and her ability to morph them from one thing to
another. She had created ice magic, it was true, but she hadn’t
been able to use that part of her talent since.
Now, as she laid
herself open to the magic, to the possibilities, she saw it. In
front of her, rising from the dried-up cloud forest floor to the
wilted canopy above, stretching the width of the clearing in either
direction, was a wall of magic. It was bright sparks and flowing
power. It was the code beneath the chatter, the structure
underlying the fabric of the earth. At the same time, glyph strings
crawled across the undulating surface of the spell, morphing and
mutating as she watched. How in the hell was she supposed to alter
a spell that was altering almost faster than she could follow
it?
Gods, she thought, stomach twisting. It was too
complex, too mutable. She could see the structure but she couldn’t
get a grip on it. The spell was a slippery ball of power, sliding
through her grasp each time she thought she had it.
She stared at the
nothingness, sweat prickling on her brow.
“Jade.” It was
Lucius’s voice, low in warning. On either side of her, the
companions were growling, their shoulder fur ruffling.
“They won’t hurt me.
I think they’re worried. The magic of the game brought them
through, and now they can’t get back to him. Unless . . .” She
trailed off as a glyph glinted in the flowing string. It glowed,
floated off the spell surface, and locked itself into a single
pictograph. As she watched, a second followed. Then another. Her
magic churned and spun, but she wasn’t quite there yet. The magic
wasn’t quite there.
Without another
thought or hesitation, she opened herself to the task, to the power
and the potential for failure and drama. Take
what you need. Something shifted inside her, a sharp lurch
beneath her heart, and she gasped. Then it was there: The
counterspell flared in front of her, burning itself into her mind’s
eye.
She reached back for
Lucius’s hand, felt their fingers twine and link. Whispering a
small prayer in her heart, she recited the
counterspell.
The shimmering
curtain of power and spell words disappeared as though it had never
existed. There was no explosion, no power surge. One moment all she
saw in front of her were more trees, more dying vines. In the next,
she was staring at a mountainside with a terrible skull carved into
it, jaw gaping wide so it screamed the dark, ominous entrance to a
cave. Just inside its mouth, a skeleton hung skewered to the cave
wall, still wearing the remains of what had been a purple velour
tracksuit.
Overhead, heretofore
silent monkeys screamed in fear, and parrots took wing in a thunder
of brittle feathers. For a second, nobody moved. Then, without
warning, an unearthly shriek split the air and terrible creatures
with twisted, humanoid bodies and the heads of animals boiled out
of the blackness of the tunnel. Snakes, jaguars, eagles, hawks,
crocodiles, every sacred creature was mocked in twisted Egyptian
parodies arising from dark magic. Their human parts were gnarled
and gray skinned, with some parts grown too large, others shrunk to
vestiges.
Jade screamed; she
couldn’t help it. These were the creatures that had captured her
and Lucius before, only now they were damaged even worse and pissed
about it. She could feel their rage as a palpable force against her
magic, and instinctively tamped down her power, her
vulnerability.
Strike roared an
order and the warriors let fly with a fireball salvo that detonated
against the front line of animal-heads, sending body parts flying
in a spray of blood, fire, and flame. Their screams were terrible;
the smell was worse. Gagging, Jade reeled against Lucius. He
grabbed her. “Back to the trees!” he yelled over a roar of fire as
flames napalmed from Rabbit’s outstretched palms, turning the
second rank of attackers to a pyre. “We need to take
cover!”
Jade was turning to
comply when sharp teeth seized her arm and dug in, pulling her the
other way.
She screamed and
swung out with her cudgel; it slammed into the shoulder of one of
the big black dogs. For a second, she thought she was dead, that it
was going to tear her throat out then and there. But it simply
glared at her and bore down on her hand, almost—but not
quite—breaking the skin. Its legs were braced, its ruff standing
straight up in a vicious line along its spine, making it look like
some prehistoric, spiked creature.
Lucius cursed and
rounded on the companion, but she waved him off as understanding
dawned. “We have to fight through,” she said urgently. “Kinich Ahau
needs our help!”
At her shout, the
warriors knotted together in a defensive formation. “We can’t help
shit if we’re dead,” Michael said, then spun to unleash a stream of
deadly silver muk into the horde; the
death magic cut a swath as animal-heads crumbled to dust. Sasha
stood behind him, her hand on his waist, her eyes closed as she fed
him her lifegiving magic, balancing out the danger of using the
ancestral magic that melded both light and dark
halves.
The animal-heads kept
coming, their ranks swelling to overrun the clearing. Some of the
creatures climbed over their own dead, uncaring, while others
stopped to feed on the bodies with a ferocity that made Jade’s
gorge rise.
“The whole world is
going to die if we don’t rescue Kinich Ahau,” Strike countered. “If
Akhenaton’s ascension doesn’t spell the beginning of the end, our
failure to rescue the last god remaining outside the sky plane
might.” He looked from the companions to the cave mouth and back
again, and Jade could see his anguish. His father had ordered the
Nightkeepers to their deaths under far better odds. He didn’t
hesitate long, though. Sweeping his cudgel in a high arc, he
pointed to the tunnel mouth and shouted, “Go!”
The big dog released
Jade’s hand, spun, and bolted away, with its twin right
behind.
The other warriors
picked up the cry and charged, clearing the way with fireballs and
Rabbit’s humanflamethrower routine. Jade found herself screaming,
“Kinich Ahau!” and running with them. Ice magic raced through her
veins but she held it in, not sure whether it would douse the
flames. Lucius was right with her, solid at her side, his fierce
loyalty not up for question, even if their relationship remained
hazy and uncertain.
The Nightkeepers’
charge carried them to the cave mouth before the animal-heads
rallied. A huge creature with a crocodile’s head rose above the
others, snarling something in that strange, guttural tongue she had
heard before, in Xibalba. At their leader’s orders, the
animal-heads reoriented and charged, surrounding the magi and
killing the momentum of their charge.
“I’ve got it!”
Michael shouted. He called a thick, sturdy shield spell and slapped
it across the point where the cave mouth narrowed into a tunnel
leading into the mountainside. A hundred animal-heads, maybe more,
were trapped outside the shield, cutting the immediate threat in
half. “Go!”
“Good man,” Strike
said shortly as he and the others faced forward, to where a
seemingly endless stream of animal-heads poured up through the
tunnel. Under the next fireball onslaught, the narrow space filled
quickly with burning bodies, their stench turning the air thick
with an oily, choking smoke that made Jade gag. She reached for
Lucius, who caught her against him, holding on
tightly.
Sasha moved to her
mate’s side to boost his magic and keep him leveled off. She
glanced at Jade and the friends—a former chef and an
ex-therapist—shared a quick how the hell did
we end up here? look, and then returned to their
tasks.
Jade and Lucius
followed Strike and the others as the small fighting force
slaughtered its way deeper into the tunnel, winning forward one
bloody foot at a time. Jade focused on the companions; they always
seemed to know where to twist and turn in order to find their way
through the surging melee. Lucius cracked his cudgel to his left
and right, his jaw tight, his eyes reflecting the same sharp horror
that rattled through her. In the underworld, the animal-headed
warriors had regenerated quickly. Up on the earth plane, they just
flat-out died. And although they resembled the ancient Egyptian
gods, each of the head- types was also a species that had—or used
to have—a corresponding Nightkeeper bloodline. Had Akhenaton
harnessed the Nightkeepers’ ancestors as an army? Was that who the
magi were killing?
“Don’t think about
it,” Lucius rasped against her temple. He was still holding her
close, using his body to shield her as they forced their way
through. “Not now. Just go.”
So she went,
following in the companions’ wake. They outdistanced the
fireball-wielding magi, so she lashed out with bursts of ice magic
that froze some of the animal-heads, slowed others by dumping
drifts of snow. Time lost meaning, becoming a cycle of spell
casting and advancing, with Lucius staying strong at her back. Then
the tunnel opened up around them and they were standing in a
ceremonial chamber with ritually carved walls and a wide altar.
Jade didn’t process the details, though. Her attention was
immediately commanded by the liquid shimmer of the far wall, which
bent and flexed, seeming alive.
The companions bolted
toward it.
“The barrier!” She
surged after them, but Lucius yanked her back. “What—” She spun on
him and broke off on a gasp. The tunnel was blocked with
animal-heads and the Nightkeepers were nowhere in
sight.
“They’re cut off,”
Lucius reported grimly. “And this is a dead end.”
“No, it’s not. It’s
the beginning of the hellroad. It’s open because of the solstice,
or maybe because of the hellhounds and the ball game. Who knows?
All I know is that we need to get through there.”
“We can’t—” He began,
but then broke off when a jaguar-head started barking orders.
“Fuck. Come on.”
They ran together to
the back wall, which looked like stone but wasn’t. The companions
had waited for them, and the four rescuers dove through together.
As she passed through the barrier, Jade felt power ripple across
her skin. Then she was caught up, sucked down, spun around. Her
hand was torn from Lucius’s grip and she screamed. She heard him
shout her name; then even that was lost to the roar of acceleration
as the world whipped past her. She felt the same wrenching, sliding
sensation as before, when she and Lucius had traveled to Xibalba.
Only this time it was ten times worse, because she was experiencing
it fully. Her physical self wasn’t safely at Skywatch anymore. She
was traveling, body and soul, into hell.
Xibalba
This time, when
Lucius and Jade blinked into existence within the dry, angular
canyon, he immediately recognized it as a giant, “I”-shaped ball
court, with the out-of-bounds lines marked by the faint shadow of
dark shield magic. Then again, the association was a hell of a lot
more obvious: The pyramid and its surrounding columns were gone,
small vertical stone hoops protruded from halfway down each of the
long sides of the canyon . . . and there was a game in
progress.
His mind snapshotted
the scene. Akhenaton’s ghostly form was on one side with his guards
and five animal-heads. The makol was a
dark shadow. The other nine, decked out in full armor, held spiked
cudgels and wore knives on their belts. Kinich Ahau stood alone on
the other side in the guise of a horned, plumed man, not the
firebird. The god wore a feathered robe with hints of glistening
armor beneath but held no weapon. There were stone shackles on the
god’s wrists and ankles; heavy sinew-threaded ropes stretched from
the cuffs to a stone ring set low on one wall. A man’s head lay on
the ground between the two teams, wide-eyed and staring, with fluid
leaking from the stump. Lucius thought it might have belonged to
the musician, who was nowhere in sight.
Oh, he thought. Of
course.
He must’ve said it
aloud, because as he and Jade scrambled to their feet, she
whispered, “What is it?”
The players, locked
in a preplay stare-down, seemed oblivious to the newcomers, but
Lucius figured he didn’t dare count on how long that would last.
Keeping his voice low, he said, “One of the creation stories in the
Popol Vuh describes how the Hero Twins journeyed to the underworld
and played ball against the Banol Kax
themselves. If the dark lords won, the twins would be stuck forever
in Xibalba. But if the twins won, their father would be
reincarnated on Earth and they would be free to return with him.
Akhenaton must not be able to rule the sky in his makol form. In order to take his place in the sky,
he has to defeat Kinich Ahau and be reincarnated on
Earth.”
A soul-curdling
fanfare sounded from all around them, and the players scrambled to
gain control of the game ball. The sun god lunged and hit the end
of his tether, which stopped him several paces shy of the ball. The
horned god shrieked with rage, the firebird’s cry coming from the
man’s mouth as a snake- headed warrior snagged the
ball.
Jade whispered, “Does
that mean that if Kinich Ahau wins, he automatically returns to
Earth?”
“That’d be consistent
with the legend. Not much chance of that, though, unless—” Lucuis
broke off as transport magic surged again, the air rippled nearby,
and the sun god’s companions materialized midlunge. The big
hellhounds hit the ground running, baying the attack. And all hell
broke loose.
Akhenaton whirled
toward the threat. His fury laced the air as he split his team,
sending the guards after Kinich Ahau, the animal-heads toward Jade
and Lucius, who had landed maybe thirty yards farther down the
playing field, on the sun god’s side. The companions bolted toward
Kinich Ahau; the sun god jerked its plumed head toward Jade and
Lucius. Its eyes were anguished.
The animal-heads
closed quickly; there were two snakes and three caimans, reptilian
jaws gaping wide. Lucius stepped in front of Jade, suddenly feeling
very human. But they’d damn well have to go through him to get to
her.
“Down!” she yelled
from behind him.
When a chill touched
the back of his neck, he didn’t waste time asking questions or
arguing; he pancaked it.
The air snapped
freezing cold and a deep-throated roar of power sizzled through the
space he’d just been occupying. An iceball the size of a MINI
Cooper flashed at the animal-heads; it hit with a big whump, the ground heaved, and sand shot in the air.
When the debris came back down, there was an ice- lined crater
where the animal-heads had been.
Lucius flipped to his
feet, mouth hanging open. “Holy shit.”
Jade was pale, her
eyes huge in her face, but her expression was resolute. “We need to
use the tools we’re given, right?” She sagged a little, and when he
took her arm, she leaned into him. The iceball had drained her more
than he liked, but she was up and moving, and ready to
fight.
The gods got it wrong, he thought. She’s a warrior. Always has been.
Motion on the field
of play caught his attention; two of the guards were heading for
them, leveling those damned long pikes as dark magic rattled low at
the threshold of hearing. The remaining guards were passing the
decapitated head as they ran toward the sun god, aiming for the
hoop high on the wall.
If they made the
basket, it was all over.
“You’ve got to block
that shot!” Jade shoved him toward the field. “Go. I’ll be right
behind you!”
Lucius wanted to stay
with her, to hold her close and shield her, but he couldn’t. Not
right now. She’s a fighter, he reminded
himself. She’s got your back. It was
strange to realize that he’d never thought that about her before.
He’d seen her as his friend and his lover, his adversary and his
ideal, but never before as a teammate. Locking eyes with her, he
said, “You can do this.”
“Don’t worry about
me. I’m tougher than I look.”
“About time you
figured that out.” He flashed her a smile. And took off
running.
Head down, he
barreled into the first of Akhenaton’s guards, taking the brunt of
the blow on his armored shoulder. It was like running into a side
of beef mounted on a house. His shoulder sang with pain, while the
other guy barely blinked, just raised his spiked cudgel and swung
for his head.
Jade screamed his
name. Then, inexplicably, she whistled a short, sharp burst, as
though calling a taxi.
Lucius ducked,
cursing when dark magic dug bloody furrows across his bare
shoulder. A second guard arrived as the first raised his weapon for
the killing blow. But before the guard could let loose with the
magic, a growling black blur slammed into him from the side.
Moments later a second snarling creature joined the fray. The
companions! Summoned by Jade’s whistle, the big black creatures
drove the guards away, giving Lucius time to scramble to his
feet.
He looked for her and
his blood froze in his veins when he saw that she was headed
straight into the scrum, where Kinich Ahau was down, wrestling with
one of the guards. The remaining player and Jade were both zeroing
in on the head-ball, which lay inert on the nearby
sand.
One of Lucius’s
attackers had dropped his pike when the dogs showed up; it had
returned to its shorter form and no longer shimmered with dark
magic. Instead it looked like a short, wickedly spiked club. Lucius
grabbed the heavy weapon and bolted toward the field of play as
Jade grabbed the head. The guardsmen of the other team converged on
her as Lucius shouted, “Jade!”
Her head whipped
around; she saw him and yelled, not his name or for help, but,
“Here!” She threw him the head. A split second later, one of the
guards tackled her, taking her down.
Lucius caught the
head on the fly; the thing weighed more than he would’ve expected,
and was slippery. He wound up grabbing it by the hair. Then he
hesitated. The hoop on the opposite side of the court was
unguarded. It was far above him, an almost impossible
shot.
If he made it, he
would return Kinich Ahau to Earth. But in doing so, he would lose
Jade. Gods, Jade.
The writs told him to
save the world. His heart told him to save his woman.
“Fuck it.
Catch!” He hurled the head to the sun
god, aware that the game was fixed, that the god’s bonds wouldn’t
allow it close enough to score the vital point, barely allowed it
to guard its own hoop. “Don’t let them have it. I’ll be right
back.” He hoped the god understood English, or at least his
intent.
Without looking to
see if Kinich Ahau had gotten the head—or the message—Lucius spun
and lunged toward Jade—
And stopped dead. The
guards held her immobilized as Akhenaton’s dark shadow drifted
toward her. The ghost soul lost its form as it approached, becoming
amorphous, insidious. Lucius flashed hard on the memory of a dark
shadow entering him, filling him up, making the world go
green.
“No!” he shouted, his voice cracking on a howl that
was echoed in the companions’ voices. Behind him chaos erupted as
the animal- heads finished regenerating from whatever molecules had
been left after the ice explosion, and rejoined the
fray.
Duty, ambition, and
his need to make a difference in the world said he needed to play
the game, needed to save the sun. Duty, he decided, could go fuck
itself. Turning his back on the game, on the god, Lucius gripped
the spiked cudgel, though he knew it wouldn’t do any good against a
shadow. He could think of only one thing that could go up against a
demon on its own turf.
Another
demon.
The shadow touched
Jade, moved up her body. Her eyes locked on Lucius’s, wide and
scared. His heart pounded, not with dread, but with an
all-important realization that came far too late. “I love you,” he
said to her. Then, when the words were lost beneath the animal
roars from the game and the god, he raised his voice and shouted,
“I love you!”
Her face went blank,
then flooded with emotion, followed by quick understanding. Horror.
“Don’t—” she began.
But he did. He lifted
the cudgel and used one of the spikes to lay his palm open in a
quick slash. Pain bit. Blood welled. Then, closing his eyes, he
opened himself to her—not to her magic, but to the things he felt
about her, the things he felt when he was with her. He threw
himself wide, remembering their first night together, their last.
He filled his senses with the image of her face, the soft brush of
her hair, the taste of her when they made love. His love for her
entered him, filled him, completed him. And as he invited the heat
and wonder and awe inside him when he’d held it away before, power
stirred and his vision flickered from normal to green hued and back
again. He didn’t know whether it was Cizin or another makol, and didn’t think he cared. He needed a
demon’s power, and this was the only way to get it.
Yes, he thought. That’s it,
you bastard. Come into me.
Opening his eyes, he
threw his arms wide and shouted, so it echoed across the canyon: “I
love her! I love Jade.” In that moment, he put her above everything
else inside him and gave over control to the magic, letting it have
him in exchange for her safety. The air detonated around him,
whipped past him. Power surged and crackled; motion caught his eye,
and he turned to see that a few feet away the canyon wall had
suddenly gone liquid and strange. Inside him, the place that had
been empty for the past half year flared with bright, brilliant
agony and began to fill up.
“Lucius!” Jade
screamed.
He couldn’t answer,
couldn’t look at her, could only drop to his knees in agony as an
alien presence entered him, invaded him, became him. Come on, come on, hurry up! He had to get the demon
inside him, had to gain control somehow and pit it against
Akhenaton before the bastard took Jade.
The shimmering nearby
grew more distinct, then flared bright white with a boom of
detonation. When it cleared, the other Nightkeepers stood on the
canyon floor, bloody and bedraggled, staring around in themselves
in shock.
Gods. Lucius sagged as greasy brown vapor wisps
surrounded him, but he managed to make his mouth work enough that
he could croak, “Win the game. Free the god.”
Then his vision
washed green and he wasn’t just himself anymore. He was Akhenaton
too.
Akhenaton?
It didn’t make any
sense, but it was true. He could see the pharaoh’s thoughts, his
history, his greed—everything that made him the monomaniacal
murderer he had been. The makol seemed
equally shocked to find itself inside the human male rather than
the mage woman; Lucius caught the demon’s thought-pictures, though
no language was transmitted. Then Akhenaton saw the Nightkeepers:
Michael and Sasha were freeing Jade from the guard, while the
others raced toward Kinich Ahau, who still had control of the ball
but was under siege by the five animal-heads. Seeing its plans
crumbling, its opportunity to rule the sun sliding into jeopardy,
and fearing the wrath of its Banol Kax
masters, Akhenaton’s demon spirit thrust itself brutally into
Lucius’s psyche, grabbing for control of their shared
body.
No! Lucius roared inwardly. Never again! Using every iota of mental discipline
he had learned from Cizin, he slammed mental shields around
Akhenaton’s essence and forced the damned soul away. Power surged and magic swirled, forming a
vortex Lucius remembered from the Prophet’s spell. Added to that
now was the power he’d felt before, that hollow, rushing sensation
of a connection forming between worlds. He caught a glimpse of
black nothingness, and pushed the demon’s soul toward
it.
Akhenaton howled in
outraged protest. Too used to commanding through fear, the demon
didn’t know how to dominate someone who wasn’t afraid.
Die, Lucius grated. Die!
The pharaoh’s spirit
scrabbled for purchase, lost its grip, and tore away, pinwheeling.
A terrible, thin scream trailed off as the makol’s incorporeal soul was sucked into the
void.
There was a flash of
luminous green. Then the pharaoh was gone.
For a moment, there
was only emptiness inside Lucius. Then fierce triumph roared
through him. He’d done it. He’d defeated a makol! He wanted to scream victory, wanted to pump
his fists, wanted to snatch Jade up and spin her in a circle,
kissing her until she admitted that she loved him too, that they
would muddle through, make mistakes, and make it work.
But Lucius’s eyes
wouldn’t open. His body wouldn’t move. In fact, he was looking
down on his body, which was lax and
slack- muscled. He saw Jade racing toward him, bending over him.
And, strangely, he seemed to be floating up to the pale brown
sky.
Jade crouched down
beside Lucius. Tears stung her eyes when she couldn’t find his
pulse. Akhenaton was gone; she’d seen its shadow leave Lucius. But
then she’d seen another, glowing mist rise from his beloved body.
The faint shimmer was gone now, but she thought she knew what it
meant.
He’d sacrificed
himself for her, in all possible ways. And she’d be damned if she
would let that be the end of things for them.
Leaning in close, she
whispered in his ear, “I love you, so stay the hell alive.” Then,
nearly blinded by unshed tears, she scrambled up and lunged toward
the field of play, where the magi were jockeying for position as
the pharaoh’s guards and animal-headed minions passed the ball
among them, heading for the sun god’s goal. For a moment, she
didn’t understand what was going on; Akhenaton was gone, so who
were they playing for? Then she saw that beast-shadows lined the
high walls of the ball court. The Banol
Kax had come to watch, lending their weight to the
play.
If the Nightkeepers’
team won, they would be free and Kinich Ahau would return to Earth.
If not, they would all remain trapped in Xibalba.
Forever.
Habit and instinct
told Jade to hide on the sidelines. Instead, she bolted straight
for the action. Her breath whistled in her throat as she dodged a
spiked club, spun past a snake-head that snapped and hissed at her,
and lunged for Sasha. Tapping her on the shoulder, which had been
their signal for a player to rotate out of the game, Jade shouted
over the game noise, “Go help Lucius. He’s hurt.” She pointed
toward where he lay, steeling herself against the sight of his
motionless form.
Sasha nodded and took
off, leaving Jade to play her position. When she was just barely
clear of the field, the sun god screeched an avian war cry. Holding
the head-ball under one arm, it raced across the canyon floor,
headed for the opposite team’s goal. The slack whipped out of the
sinew ropes, which snapped tight and yanked the god to a roaring,
thrashing standstill. The animal-heads boiled in pursuit,
regenerating as quickly as the Nightkeepers cut them down. Kinich
Ahau fought the bonds, which stretched but didn’t
give.
They’re too pliable! Jade thought suddenly. Heart
pounding, she summoned the last dregs of her magic and shaped it
into the now-familiar iceball spell. Cold touched the air and raced
through her veins as she let the ice magic fly. It hit the ropes,
which froze with a hissing, crackling noise. And turned
brittle.
With an exultant
howl, Kinich Ahau snapped free, tossed the head-ball into the air,
and leaped after it. As if the bonds themselves had contained the
god’s magic, the man-form became the firebird, morphing midair to
the fierce flame- clad creature. It flapped its wings once, twice,
and on the third sweep, it caught the head-ball in its beak.
Banking, the god swept past the hell-team’s goal, and flung the
head through the hoop with a shriek of triumph. As the ball passed
through, white light lit the sky and a soundless detonation rocked
the firmament. The animal-heads and the last of the pharaoh’s
guards dropped where they stood and lay, unmoving. Atop the high
walls on either side of the ball court, shadows rippled and the
Banol Kax disappeared, beaten by a game
that was part of the fabric of the planes themselves.
Drained of the last
of her magic, Jade collapsed to the canyon floor and buried her
face in her hands. She didn’t weep, not yet. Not until Sasha told
her Lucius was gone. But somehow she knew, she knew that had been his soul leaving his body and
heading for the sky, where warriors went after they died in
battle.
“Gods, please, no,”
she whispered behind her hands. The pain was incredible,
overwhelming, impossible to bear. But she didn’t wish it gone. She
embraced it, wallowed in it, held it to her. And if that put her on
the level of the most heartbroken patient she’d ever counseled,
then it was a good level to be on, because she had finally taken
the risk. She had loved. She had lived.
“Jade.” It was
Strike’s voice, oddly hushed. “Look up.”
“I know,” she said,
sighing as she let her hands fall. “He’s—” She broke off on a
gasp.
The firebird stood in
front of her, flanked on either side by the big black dogs that
guarded it. The flames that had wreathed it before had turned to
soft red-gold feathers. It looked like a giant eagle with the
plumage of a parrot, and it towered over her, dwarfed her as it
stretched out one wing, unfurled its long flight feathers, and
brushed them across her face and down her right arm. The touch
tingled; it burned, but not unpleasantly . . . and in a familiar
way.
Pulse suddenly
hammering, she looked down at her forearm. There she wore a new
glyph, a third mark. It wasn’t static, though; as she watched, it
morphed from one glyph to another and back again, oscillating
between the two.
The god was offering
her a choice, she realized: the sun or the jun
tan? Godkeeper or mate?
She looked up at the
firebird, her eyes blurring with tears. Even knowing that her
choice might cost them a Godkeeper, she said without hesitation, “I
choose to be his mate. Magic isn’t the answer. Love is.” And
although he might already be gone, the sudden warmth that curled
around her heart told her that it was the right answer for
her.
“Ho-ly shit,” someone
said from behind her. She didn’t know who.
The firebird dipped
its head—in acknowledgment, she thought. It touched her again with
its wing, and the jun tan firmed in
place, stark and black on her forearm. Then the god swept its
opposite wing toward Lucius’s motionless body. Sasha knelt beside
him, trying to keep his body going in the absence of its
soul.
Jade’s heart
shuddered as a white shimmer coalesced from the sky and drifted
down toward him. She told herself not to hope, but she couldn’t
stop the hot, hard anticipation from forming as the vapor settled
over him, sank into him.
For a moment, nothing
happened. Her world contracted, started to crumble around
her.
And then he began to
breathe.