Dawnkeepers

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 Chichen Itza. 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