Skykeepers

“Red-Boar?” His voice cracked on the name as his lungs filled with the acrid smell of char. He doubled over, coughing and retching, dimly aware that Myrinne’s dorm room was full of smoke, the fire alarms shrilling. “Dad!”

“Come on!” Myrinne hauled him up. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

The room was aflame around them. For real. Rabbit’s head swam, he was nauseated as shit, and he felt like he had one foot on the earthly plane, one foot somewhere else. He couldn’t wipe the hellish visions out of his head, couldn’t do anything but moan and lean on Myrinne as they staggered out into the hallway and joined the stream of bodies headed out of the dorm.

There were a few screams and a surge of the traffic flow when they staggered out of the burning dorm room and the other students realized that there actually was a fire, that it wasn’t a drill.

As they shuffled down the stairs, packed cattle car- tight with the other evacuees, Myrinne yanked Rabbit’s cell out of his pocket and speed-dialed. Shouting over the din, she said, “Anna? We need you.

Meet us outside your office building. And bring me some clothes.” She was still wearing her black silk robe, and didn’t have any shoes on. Rabbit noticed those details as if from a great distance away.

When they hit the great outdoors, his breathing eased but his head didn’t clear. If anything, the spins were getting worse and he was feeling less and less connected to his body by the second. “I d-d-

don’t think we should leave when the fire’s in your room . . .” he got out, then lost the thread of his thought.

Waxy face. Blood dripping from a knife.

“Anna will fix it,” Myrinne said, hustling him away from the crowd. “She’ll call admin and tell them where we are, and some version of what happened.”

That had him glancing back over his shoulder to the dorm, where flames licked out an upstairs window. He moaned, a low, broken sound, and turned away, hanging his head and gulping oxygen as he and Myrinne staggered to Anna’s office.

Strike was going to fucking kill him this time, he thought. But behind that thought came another, a whisper in a dead man’s voice: Get rid of the godsdamned hellmark, or you’re godsdamned screwed.

Which made sense, because the hellmark not only connected him to the first level of Xibalba, it bound him to Iago, giving the Xibalban bastard access to Rabbit’s head under certain circumstances. So getting rid of the hellmark made sense . . . but it wasn’t exactly an original concept. Strike and the others had tried everything they could think of to break the hellbond, but none of the spells had worked.

“What about it, old man?” Rabbit croaked, earning a wide-eyed look from Myrinne. “Want to tell me how the fuck I’m supposed to get rid of the damned thing?”

The darkness rose up, grabbed Rabbit, and dragged him down. He pitched forward, nearly taking Myrinne down with him as he collapsed against the side of the art history building. An he passed out, an image flashed through his brain, that of a carving, rough-hewn and powerful, showing a glyph that wasn’t Mayan, but far older: a scorpion with a double zigzag line beneath it.

Skywatch Michael stood on the upper level of the great room with his back to the wall, watching over Sasha from afar because he didn’t dare get within touching distance. She sat on one of the big sofas, describing the barrier vision the nahwal had sent her into. When she was done, Michael filled in with a few of his own observations.

Finally, Strike summed it up: “So it seems like a good bet that the library scroll is somewhere in the temple, and Sasha is probably the key to gaining access, given that the thing we’ve been calling the mad nahwal is Ambrose’s ghost . . . or I guess demi- nahwal is as good a term as any.” He paused, his lips curving. “Meanwhile, on the ‘oh, holy shit’ front, Sasha got her bloodline mark, the warrior talent, another talent we’re going to have to look into, and—hello, bonus—the royal ju.” He was playing it pretty cool, but blinking a little too much, evidence of what it’d meant to him to gain a sister.

Sasha’s answering smile was strained around the edges. “That’s going to take a little while to sink in, I think.”

“For all of us,” Leah said from her position beside Strike. She dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed. “So can I be blatantly practical and suggest we call it a night and reconvene tomorrow? We all pulled a fair bit of magic tonight, and probably shouldn’t make any major decisions until we’ve recharged. Let’s eat and crash.”

“I second that,” Sven said from his position flat-out on the floor in the middle of the great room.

“I’m whupped.”

As if that’d been the signal they were waiting for, the winikin moved in and started shepherding their charges toward food and then bed. Jox beelined for Sasha, his face alight, as if to say, This one’s mine! On one level, Michael was overjoyed for her. If any of them had needed to step into a ready-

made family, it was her. More, Sasha, Strike, and Anna should be able to uplink and increase one another’s power significantly—the sibling bond wasn’t as powerful as the twin bond or that of a mated pair, but it was meaningful nonetheless. With Strike and Leah’s Godkeeper bond negated by the destruction of the skyroad, Sasha’s ability to amplify the king’s power would be invaluable in battle, since she also wore the warrior’s mark.

Which meant that while there was no denying the power of the sex magic boost she and Michael made together, she didn’t technically need him for the magic anymore. She could lean on Strike or Anna. Michael told himself that should be a relief, that the less she needed him, the better off they all were. He’d gotten away with kissing her to bring them both back out of the barrier, but he had a feeling the Other had been almost . . . toying with him. Like it was waiting for something. But what?

Big surprise, he thought, irritated. More questions, no answers. He shifted against the wall, strung tight with a restless, edgy energy entirely at odds with the postmagic burn he should’ve been feeling.

He wanted to run into the night, wanted to pick a fight, wanted to throw his head back and howl at the moon.

Fuck all that; he wanted sex. He wanted Sasha, hard and fast, tight and wet around him, bowing back, her name tumbling from his lips as he pounded himself against her, poured himself into her, marking her as his own. Lover, killer—he didn’t even totally care which aspect of him got the score, as long as he was buried deep within her, and they were—

Oh, shit, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as he figured it out. The hormones.

Sasha might have gotten her bloodline and talent marks at the same time, but that didn’t mean she was totally clear of the hormone surges they’d all experienced between their bloodline and talent ceremonies. In fact, from the look of her flushed face and the way she’d suddenly become the center of attention in the kitchen, where Jox was plying her with tamales and some sort of seafood concoction, Michael would’ve bet his left nut she was on the brink of a really compressed version of the pretalent hormone surges. And it was going to be a Very. Long. Night.

Peeling himself away from his wall perch, he took a step in her direction, then made himself stop.

She didn’t need him near her right now. In fact, he should stay the hell away from her for the duration.

You’d rather someone else do the honors? a sly voice said from deep within him. He wasn’t sure if it was the Other or his own black mood talking. Either way, it was a valid point, Michael thought, glaring down at Sven, who’d pried himself off the floor to join the testosterone party in the kitchen.

The other magi were happily mated—they’d soak up some of the sex-magic buzz she was giving off, then take to their own beds. The winikin weren’t sensitive to the magic, so they were safe. But Sven was neither mated nor a winikin. And as Michael watched, he moved in, dipped his head toward Sasha with intimate familiarity, and said something that made her laugh.

Rage flashed through Michael, blinding him. For a second all he could see was Sven’s eyes bugging, his mouth drawing wide in horror; all he could feel was the hammer of the other man’s carotid under his thumbs as