the whole needed to be dealt with.
The big picture was too damn scary right now: The Nightkeepers were having zero luck activating the screaming skull, there were nasty things coming up that tunnel, and it was her job to make sure they didn’t get to the Nightkeepers.
So she concentrated on the pieces that needed to work. “Breece,” she directed, “go help Sebastian.” The shield stones had their own power sources, but they used a blood-link as the catalyst. The more a winikin hated magic and the magi, the harder they found it to link up, even if they were honestly trying, as if something deep inside them still rejected the connection.
Trying very hard not to think of the parallel to Sven, she made a couple of other moves, shoring up faltering spots in the shield-stone dome, which was visible as a pale blue glow all around them. Through it, she could see a dark mist gathering at the tunnel mouth, then thickening to an opaque fog that began to roil and spin.
The rattlesnake hiss amped, but she held her ground, all too aware of the magi in the center of the dome. They were blood-linked and deep in the magic, nearly insensate as they focused all their energies on the skull and the resurrection spell. They were trusting her people with their lives, and she wasn’t going to let them down.
She had their backs, even if nobody had hers.
“Weapons ready,” Brandt called out, his voice ringing over the din. “Wait to fire until we see—”
A vicious rending noise tore through the cave, and the fog split in half, gaping to either side as terrible creatures poured through into the cave. At first she saw only a roil of dark body parts, glimpses of clawed hands and feet, and wickedly barbed tails, but then the creatures fanned out and she saw the demons for real.
They were human shaped, eight or nine feet tall, with wingspans of twice that, made of dark skin stretched across fingerlike bones. Their faces looked like they’d been caught in the middle of a shape-shift between human and pug, with squashed-in noses and beady eyes that kindled and glowed red as they solidified. And if that wasn’t enough to warn her that these were the bat demons JT and Natalie had once faced, barely escaping with their lives, then the ID was sealed by their whiplike tails and grotesquely oversize penises, which had flat, leaflike scales at their tips.
“Camazotz!” JT shouted, confirming her guess and sparking new fear, because the powerful demons could be killed only up close and personal—cutting off their penises puffed them to smoke—and because where he and Natalie had fought a nest of newborns, these camazotz were fully mature.
As they came through the tear in the dark barrier, their burning red eyes locked onto the winikin and their mouths split in terrible screeches that started in the audible range but then ran up from there to a supersonic whine that made Cara’s bones ache.
Someone screamed, snapping the terrified silence of the winikin line and unleashing a chain of cries and shouts that warned of a stampede.
“Hold your shields!” she shouted. “Stay open to the magic! For the love of the gods and tomorrow, don’t lose those shields! And get ready to shoot!” She checked her weapon—an M-16 modified to handle the new exploding- tip jade bullets—with hands that shook so badly it took two tries to get the clip back in.
The camazotz poured through the rip. There were twenty of them, then thirty. And then, as if they had reached some critical mass or were answering some command given outside human hearing, they raced to surround the shielded circle.
“Steady,” Patience called. She and Brandt were blood-linked, adding their magic to that of the shield stones, and they each had a pulsing, glowing fireball conjured and ready to hurl through the one-way shield, which would let things out, but not in.
The camazotz moved closer, eyeing the shield as if trying to figure out whether it would burn them. But the shield stones gave off only a passive force field, and one that hadn’t yet been truly tested.
Please, gods, Cara whispered inwardly, but then didn’t know what she dared ask for, or even if the gods were listening. For a few brief days, she’d felt like part of the prophecies, part of the war. Now, though, it seemed like she’d been talking herself into the impossible-seeming logic. What were they doing here? Was this even the right place, the right spell? On some level, she had expected the Banol Kax to send the shadow creatures to attack: the hellhound, the eagles, all the other beasts that had erupted during Aaron’s funeral. Those were her enemies, hers and the winikin’s, and would have meant something.
The camazotz, though, were pure killing machines, an army sent to wipe out the resistance. Which meant… what? That her signs that the winikin were crucial to the equinox hadn’t been signs at all, just wishful thinking? Or, worse, had she and Sven gotten it wrong, after all? Because something wasn’t right; that was for sure. The Nightkeepers didn’t seem to be making any progress; they were uplinked in a circle, heads bowed, with Dez leading a chant. He had the skull artifact in front of him; faint smoke rose from it where they had burned their blood offerings. But aside from that, nothing was happening. All the magic was dark, the newcomers demonic. And they were closing in.
Focus. It was way too late to turn back now. All she could do was concentrate on the task at hand. Hold the shield. Protect the Nightkeepers.
“Ready,” Brandt said in the same calm tone as his wife, the two of them working together with a seamlessness that put a lump in Cara’s throat.
A huge, burly bat demon grabbed a smaller one standing nearby and shoved it into the shield. The nearest winikin shouted and stumbled back, but the shield held. It held!
But it also didn’t fight back. Unlike some of the Nightkeepers’ shields, it couldn’t deliver an electric shock or slash of fire. It was a forcefield, not a weapon.
The camazotz roared in triumph, and attacked.
“Now!” Patience shouted, and let rip with her fireball. It slammed into the surging churn of demons, grazed one, and hit another squarely, engulfing it in flames. A nanosecond later, Brandt’s fireball hit a huge male nearby.
“Fire!” Cara ordered, and let rip with a burst from her machine pistol. The rest of the winikin started shooting a nanosecond later, and for a moment the only thing she could hear was the chattering hail of automatic weapons followed closely by the crack-booms of the explosive-tipped rounds detonating to drive shards of sacred jade deep into the demons’ flesh.
The world outside the shield erupted with bestial screams and oily sprays of black ichor. The creatures reeled as their blackish flesh peeled away under the searing, magic-wrought fire or was shredded by the jade shrapnel. Within seconds, nearly a third of the camazotz were on the ground, writhing, but a dozen or so had reached the shield. They scaled the sides like spiders, wings outstretched so they blocked the light and made it hard to see what they were doing. They were moving like they had a plan, though, which wasn’t good.
“Get them!” Cara ordered, gesturing. “We don’t want them to—”
Suddenly JT shouted, clutched at his chest, and dropped to his knees. Natalie cried out and raced to him, only to fall partway there with her hands over her heart. Above them, a pair of camazotz clung to their sections of the shield and were regurgitating a dark ooze onto the surface of the magic. It burned where it hit, eating through the shield-stone spell and somehow knocking down the stones’ wielders.
“No!” Cara unloaded her clip into the first of the bat demons, which fell back with its face gone to pulp, leaving a gaping opening in the shield. Sebastian and Breece took aim at the second breach.
“I’ll patch the gaps!” Patience said to her. “Help them!”
Cara raced to Natalie as several others converged on JT, who was normally their medic. His kit lay beside him, but in the terrifying moment when she leaned over Natalie and couldn’t find a pulse, breath, or hint of life… Cara couldn’t remember who was next on call for medical emergencies. Suddenly everything was jumbled up inside her head, competing for space. Panic lashed through her. Don’t lose it. Don’t you dare lose it.
She automatically turned and said, “Who—”
There wasn’t anybody there to ask.
“It’s the blood-link,” called the man who was bent over JT’s unmoving body. “You’ve got to break the blood- link!” It was a sandy-haired winikin with steady blue eyes. Cara couldn’t remember his name or anything about him.
“Wait!” Brandt snapped. “Let me take over their shields first. The punctures aren’t affecting me or Patience, and we can hold the spells.… Okay, go!”
The guy stripped off JT’s wristband, breaking his link to the shield stone. The second the band was off his flesh, JT arched up off the ground and sucked in a harsh, rattling breath. “It’s working!” the guy barked. “Get
