Skykeepers

“What have you two got?” Strike asked from the other side of the tomb.

“Not sure,” Michael answered. “Maybe nothing.” But maybe everything.

He’d almost killed Sasha. When she’d put herself between his machete and her father’s demi- nahwal, Michael had seen her, had known who she was, but he hadn’t registered it or cared; he’d been too damned caught up in the raging fury. In that moment he’d hated himself, hated the world.

The sluice gates had held, but somehow the Other had been inside him regardless, urging him on, bringing the blood fury it had been taught to love, to feed on.

Who the hell was he? Michael? The Other? Both? Neither?

He didn’t know how he’d stopped himself from cutting her head off, and he couldn’t promise he’d be able to stop himself the next time. The muk hovered at the edges of his soul. The dam hadn’t cracked or broken; it had gone insubstantial, friable, like the barrier was becoming as the countdown to the end- time continued. And he knew, deep down inside, that if the Other broke through now, there would be no stopping it until everything—and everyone—around him was dead. Where the Other had once killed with all manner of human weapons, now his alter ego wielded the muk like a weapon, with deadly and precise command.

More, Sasha had flat-out asked him about the “silver magic,” which he feared meant she was already too close to it. The Other’s power had been drawn to her from the very beginning; it wanted her goodness and life, wanted to corrupt her, use her, destroy her balance. And that absolutely, positively could not be allowed to happen.

He’d die first, damn it.

“Ambrose said the scroll is inside the coffin,” she said in answer to a question from Strike.

“According to him, it’ll open during the solstice, and we’ll find the scroll, which will tell us how to summon something—or some one—called a Prophet. It all has to happen during the peak of the solstice.”

“The solstice,” Strike murmured. He looked down at Leah, hope kindling in his eyes. “We could have the library a week from now.”

“The timing will be tight,” she warned, but her eyes were alight with hope.

Rabbit was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, still taking pictures of the carved hieroglyphs. “We’ve gotta get these pictures to Anna, ASAP, but I’ve got zero signal.”

Strike nodded. “You’re right, we need to get Jade and Anna on this, on all of it. We’ll have to head topside, though—there’s no way I can ’port from down here, either. Too much interference.”

Cell phones were pressed into service to record the site for initial analysis, and then the magi formed a rough line and headed out. This time, Strike and Leah led the way, with Sasha near the end.

Michael fell in behind her, forming the rear guard. As he did so, her sex magic slid along his skin. The darkness within him locked on the sway of her hips, the lethal grace of her movements, and the glitter of pure red-gold magic that sparked in the air around her. Like matter drawn to antimatter, he reached for her—no, the Other reached for her. Michael fought the monster back. Barely.

When they came to the point where the spell-cast rubble had blocked the tunnel, Strike paused while the others caught up. “We need to guard the tomb entrance, or close it off or something.” There had been no sign of Iago, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of their success. Given the power of the tomb it seemed unlikely the Xibalban could ’port directly into the chamber itself, but he’d already proven able to zap himself into the tunnels. They had to believe he’d try it again, if he could.

“I could collapse it for real,” Rabbit offered. He didn’t look like he was kidding.

“Don’t you dare,” Leah said immediately. To Strike, she said, “I hate to split the manpower, but maybe we should post guards.”

Michael prowled the area, partly to distance himself from Sasha, partly drawn by a tendril of power.

He ran his hands along the tunnel walls, finally finding the point where it was strongest. “Gotcha.”

“You see something?” Strike asked.

“No, but I feel it. Some sort of variant shield magic . . . there it is. Got it. I don’t think this is Ambrose’s spell. I think it’s an older one, with an on/off switch of sorts.”

He waved the others away. When they were clear of where he thought the shield would drop, he touched the magic, nudging a tendril of shield magic toward the spot he’d found. Moments later, the rubble reappeared.

Sven blinked. “Whoa. Cool.”

Michael touched one of the busted chunks of debris. It felt like rock. For all intents and purposes it was rock, though it was an illusion, too. Kind of like him. Quickly, he showed the others how to work the spell.

Strike grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.” He turned away and headed up the tunnel, calling, “Moving out.”

Michael fell into his place at the back of the line, keeping an iron grip on the Other, which—for the moment, anyway—had slipped back behind the dam, laughing softly at Michael’s belief that it could be contained. Go ahead and laugh, Michael shot after it. One of these days . . .

He trailed off, because he didn’t know what the hell to threaten the bastard with, given that the monster was part and parcel of himself.

When they reached the end of the tunnel, he was surprised to find that it was still daylight. It felt like they’d been underground forever, but in reality it’d been only a couple of hours . . . albeit a couple of hours during which a great many things had changed. At the thought, he fixed his eyes on Sasha, walking a few steps ahead of him.

As if aware of his gaze, Sasha glanced back as she stepped outside, into the orange-dappled sunlight. Her expression made him wonder what she saw in him in that moment, what she thought of him. “Sasha—” he began, then broke off when he saw movement beyond her, and his warrior’s talent sounded the alarm.

“Get down!” He lunged for her, knocked her to the ground, and covered her body with his own.

And all hell broke loose.

The air split with gunfire and a fat fireball of silver-brown Xibalban magic, sending the Nightkeepers diving for cover. The ambush was perfectly timed and stupidly simple, with the Xibalbans dug into positions around the temple mouth, hidden in the thick underbrush, where they could—and did—fire at will. The tree line afforded them access and visibility, the slight downgrade to the temple mouth giving them the advantage of higher ground.

Michael covered Sasha as the other Nightkeepers scattered in singles and pairs, taking cover and returning fire, using basic shield magic to block the incoming fusillade. Nate snapped orders on one side, Strike on the other. That was what the magi had trained for, what they were bred to do—fight the enemy rather than retreat. But something—instinct, maybe, or his warrior’s mark—told Michael that this time was different. This time they should get out while they still could.

Putting a strong shield around him and Sasha, he stood and pulled her to her feet. “We’ve got to get to Strike. Can you run?”

Strike and Leah were on the other side of the temple mouth, hidden behind a broken-off stela, in the shallow shelter offered by a niche in the green-covered temple wall. It was a distance of only fifty yards or so, but it looked like five times that when his shield wavered and a bullet pinged off the rock beside his head, warning that his magic wasn’t strong enough. Not for this. Blood wouldn’t help, he knew—her own shield magic was still too new to trust and he didn’t dare touch her for a sex magic boost. Gods, he thought in an almost-prayer he suspected would fall on deaf ears. Help me out here.

I’m trying to do the right thing. I swear it.

His shield settled fractionally. He figured that was as good as it was going to get. “Go!” he barked, sending her ahead of him and concentrating his shield around her, at the expense of his own protection. “Run!”

They lunged from concealment and raced across the open ground. Bullets and fire magic splattered around them, bouncing off the shield. Strike rose from concealment, shouting something Michael couldn’t hear over the roar of magic and gunfire and the pounding of his own heart in his ears, his boots on the ground. Almost there. Twenty-five yards. Twenty.