the green flames, but not really giving a shit as long as they gave him a clear shot.
The knife was suddenly in his hand, his palms bleeding, though he didn’t remember making the sacrifice. It added to his power as he called the fire magic, gathering it from the depths of a soul he’d thought was dead and gone, used up and kicked aside when he’d betrayed his teammates. Now, though, he felt whole in a way he hadn’t for a long time—farther back even than his imprisonment. He wasn’t the whipped dog anymore, wasn’t the betrayer, the prisoner or the mage.
He was all of those things and none of them.
Magic pumped harder and higher, flowing through his synapses and setting fire to neurons long unused. He could do this. He could.
Raising his bleeding palms, he drew breath and shouted the command again: “Kaak!”
Sound, heat and fury detonated; flames speared from his outstretched fingers and hammered into the demoness. Her dark-magic shield cracked and then imploded, sucking back into its maker as she screamed, flung her arms wide, and caught fire.
“Rabbie!” she cried. The word trailed up at the end, going to an inhuman screech as she began morphing away from the human form she’d flaunted. Her fire-wreathed shape stretched, blurred, elongated . . . and became a huge dark shadow, with glowing green eyes that blazed with hatred and pain.
“Son of a bitch,” Rabbit grated. It was a makol, a soul of such terrible evil that it had descended to the lowest of the nine levels of Xibalba, to be tortured there, honed by fire and pain until it emerged as a green-eyed wraith.
The luminous eyes dominated his vision, locking him in place as her voice spoke deep inside his head. In time you will know me for real . . . Son.
“No!” He poured himself into the spell, into the flames, aware that the others had arrived and were adding their magic to his as he shouted a final: “Go to hell!”
The fire flared higher and the makol writhed, screeched and clawed the air, fighting hard enough to make him think it wasn’t simply being dumped back in the underworld, but was being destroyed utterly. And who knew? Maybe it was. The rules were changing as they got closer to the end date; the magic was stronger, the stakes higher. Good fucking riddance.
Her face appeared in the flames, human once more, and tortured as it screamed, “Rabb-ieeeeee!” Then the luminous green eyes winked out, the shadow disappeared, and the flames guttered and died. And Phee was gone, leaving behind only a few char marks scored deeply into the stones.
Rabbit stood, staring at the scorched spots.
Phee was gone.
Dead. Kaput. No more.
The burning need for revenge drained suddenly, leaving him hollow and aching, with no clue what he was supposed to do next. He could hear the thud of his own heart, the rasp of his breathing. He was very aware of the others standing behind him, partly as backup and partly—no doubt—to protect Myrinne from him. Which was a hell of a thought. I won’t hurt her, he wanted to tell them, but history said otherwise, driving home the fact that one part of the battle might be over, but another had only just begun.
Taking a deep breath, he turned his back on the Nightkeepers—on his resurrected father, his king, all the people who had every right to hate him—and faced Myrinne. Who had the most right of all of them to hate his ass.
She was standing at the midway point between him and the far wall, at the edge of where he’d set his shield spell—gone now, though he didn’t know when or how it had fallen—and very close to the smudgy ash pile that was all that was left of the camazotz.
As their eyes met, she lowered her ridiculous magic wand. And his power went out—poof, gone.
“I didn’t need your help,” she said coolly. “I had it under control. So, hey, thanks for nothing, don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”
Shock seared through him and he took a step toward her. “Myr?” There were a dozen questions in that one word, but he couldn’t articulate a damn one of them, not when she was staring at him the same as he’d stared at his old man, like he had come back from the dead and wasn’t all that welcome. And when a gesture from her had severed his link to the magic.
What was he supposed to do now? What was he supposed to say? An apology would be a good place to start, but there was really no way to apologize for what he’d done to her. Still, he wiped his freshly healed palms on his grubby rag-pants and started toward her, holding out his hands in a gesture of no harm, no foul, and hoping to hell that was the truth. He had harmed her, he knew, had fouled their relationship beyond repair. But if he could just—
She flicked the wand up and a shield spell slammed into place an inch from his nose.
He froze as another shock piled up on top of the others. “What the hell?”
The force field was clear, but threaded through with an almost imperceptible gleam of the same green he’d seen in the flames that had killed the camazotz. And suddenly things started lining up, sort of. His magic had come back when he got near her. He had sensed her emotions, felt a connection. Green fire magic—like his own, only not—had taken out the ’zotz. And his magic had cut off with a flick of her magic wand.
Holy shit. Had he somehow transferred his barrier connection when he traded his life for hers, linking their energies and giving her some of his magic?
Impossible.
“Not. One. More. Step.” Her eyes were hard now, implacable. “In fact, how about you just back the fuck off?”
He started to say something—anything—but then she pushed up her right sleeve and the air vacated his lungs with a quick sayonara at the sight of four marks in stark black on her forearm: the warrior, the fire starter, the telekyne and the mind-bender.
They were Nightkeeper marks.
More, they were his marks. All of them, save for the dark-magic trefoil.
“Holy shit, Myr,” he blurted, forgetting himself, forgetting the situation in the sheer impossibility of it all. “You got my magic!”
Myrinne hated how her nickname came out differently in his voice somehow, becoming more important, more intimate than it should’ve been. Hell, everything was too important and intimate all of a sudden, because— damn it—the magic had reached out to him. And now, even though she’d cut the connection, she couldn’t stop herself from looking at him and feeling an unwanted pang.
He was filthy and ragged, his hair grown out from its usual buzzed Mohawk to punkish spikes. The magic had healed him and kept his broad frame covered with a warrior’s muscles, but whip marks formed an X on his bare chest, as if a single arm had wielded the lash in an unvarying pattern. His back was even worse. More, the deep creases beside his mouth and the haunted strain in his pale blue eyes said that he had suffered over the past two months, and badly.
Part of her—dark and vindictive—whispered, Good, I’m glad. But the rest of her knew there was nothing good about any of this.
She wanted to tell him to fuck off, wanted to walk away. Unfortunately, she knew damn well that the magic was going to force her to deal with him. More, she didn’t want the others to see her wimp out. So, keeping her voice level, she steeled herself and said, “After you disappeared, I was unconscious for almost three days. When I woke up, I was wearing the marks and hearing voices in my head, reading minds.” It had been terrifying, yet illuminating, as if a whole new world was opening up in front of her. “The other talents came online soon after. Our best guess is that the gods wanted to keep the crossover’s magic with the Nightkeepers, and somehow managed to shunt the power into me when you went bad.”
The new lines beside his mouth deepened, but whatever pain she’d just caused him wasn’t nearly enough payback. He had accused her of spying for the demons when he was the one being influenced, and he had nearly offered her up to them as a sacrifice. Bastard, she thought grimly, because while he’d believed her in the end, saved her in the end, she’d had to let him into her mind to prove her innocence.
Having him see so deeply inside her had been bad—a tearing, rending invasion by the man she had loved. Worse, the mind-bending had stirred up old, unwanted memories—of watching tourists out on the street or from a
