Demonkeepers

took a deep breath. “I’ll shield us.” At his sharp look, she shook her head. “I know it’s a warrior’s spell, but there’s something—” In the air, she started to say, but broke off because that wasn’t it, precisely. The faint glitter of red-gold magic and the hum of Nightkeeper power were right there in front of her, misting the air between her and Lucius, close enough that she thought she could reach out and grab the power if she was brave enough. Do it, her instincts said. She didn’t know if it was the residual vulnerability from the sex magic, the barrier crossing, or something about the strange canyon, but the magic suddenly felt as if it were a part of her, in a way that was both foreign and compelling.

Acting on instinct, her body moving without her conscious volition, she bit down sharply on her own tongue, drawing blood. Letting go of Lucius’s hands, she stepped back and spit onto the sparkling, red-tinged sand, offering a sacrifice of both blood and water to the gods. The red-gold coalesced around her, then around Lucius, as it had done before, when they had been lying together in the aftermath. Magic spurted through her like lust, hot and hard. It caught her up, spun through her, making her want to scream with the mad glory of it.

Lucius said something, but she barely heard him over the hum of magic that gathered around her, inside her.

“I can do this,” she said, or maybe she only thought it. Either way, the certainty coiled hard and hot inside her, and the shimmering magic that hovered in front of her coalesced into . . . what? She could almost see shapes in the sparkles as she reached out to the magic, touched it. A soundless detonation ripped through her, a rush of power that strained toward something that stayed just out of reach. If she could just—

“Jade!” Lucius’s shout broke through, shattering her concentration. He had her by the arms and was shaking her, his eyes hard. “Pull it back, now!”

The magic snapped out of existence in an instant, without her volition. The loss of that vital energy sapped her, had her sagging against him. Her head spun, but his urgency penetrated. “What? What’s wrong?”

Then she heard it: a dog’s mournful howl coming from the other side of their concealing pillar.

Lucius crowded her closer to the column, pressing her flat against it with his body. Against her temple, he whispered, “There’s something going on in the pyramid.”

The carved stone was warm and rough where Jade’s fingers clutched at the grooved surface, grounding her even as her mind spun with the power of the magic she’d just touched on, and the sharp grief that she’d been unable to do a damned thing with it. Her heart banged against her ribs as she and Lucius eased around the edge to take a look.

“Oh, shit.” She wasn’t sure which one of them said it. Maybe they both had.

Whereas before the pyramid had seemed deserted, now a man stood on the first of the three big, god-size steps. He was wearing a simple white loincloth and had dark hair and strangely gray- cast skin, and after a moment of standing motionless, he raised a carved conch shell to his mouth and blew a shrill note. Moments later the call was answered by movement at the darkened doorways on the lower tier; then five more men emerged, but these guys were wearing ceremonial regalia and full-face masks carved to look like various creatures: a snake, an antelope, a white jaguar, a bird of prey, and a wolf. The masks were topped with elaborate feather-and-bone headdresses that created colorful halos, and the men’s bodies were asymmetrically shielded on their left sides, leaving their right arms free to wield the short- handled clubs they wore at their belts.

Jade just stared, stunned. The skin of the men’s arms and legs was gray-cast in places, missing in others, peeled away to show reddish meat, even down to glimpses of stained bone. Worse, the animal shapes weren’t masks; those were the actual heads of the man-beasts who had come from the pyramid.

For a second, denying the horror of it all, her brain locked on the image: five armored men and one musician against a background of rusty hues. It was just like the painting that’d been showing on Lucius’s flat- screen. But why? How? What did it mean?

“They sensed the magic,” she said, forcing the words. What had she been thinking, trying to wield a warrior’s spell? Worse, she’d let the magic take over, let it use her—or at least attempt to use her.

“I think so.” But he squeezed her shoulder in silent support. “Now the question is whether that’s a good thing.”

Jade held her breath, though it wasn’t as if that was going to change anything.

Without hesitation or consultation, the five armored men—demons? what were they?—headed straight for their hiding spot, with Jaguar-head in the lead and the others grouped behind him. He pulled the short club from his belt, held it out to the side, and uttered a sharp command. The weapon shimmered momentarily and a malicious rattle skidded through the air as the short club elongated to become a long, deadly looking shaft with a wickedly barbed spike at one end and a bulbous knob at the other. The blunt end roiled greasy brown.

Dark magic!

A cry caught in Jade’s throat. She locked eyes with Lucius as their question was answered all too clearly. “Not good!” they said in unison.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Come on!” Lucius grabbed Jade’s hand and dragged her to a skidding run that churned up the sparkling sand and pebbles underfoot. He kept his body between her and their pursuers, impelled by a vicious, bloodthirsty sort of protectiveness he’d never felt before. For all that he respected the hell out of the Nightkeepers’ egalitarian use of both men and women in the warrior caste and on the front lines, this was a different situation, a different woman. She shouldn’t even be there, damn it. Neither of them should.

As they burst from cover, the jaguar-masked warrior shouted something that probably translated to

“Halt, intruder!” or the equivalent, though Lucius didn’t know what language they were using. It wasn’t Mayan; at least, not any version of it he’d ever studied or heard.

From within the stone enclosure, the dog stopped howling and started barking, and was soon joined by a second set of snarling barks, feral-sounding and mean. Then, half a heartbeat later, the barks were drowned out by a roar that wasn’t made by anything so mundane as a canine. The noise shook the canyon floor and made the arched top of the temple start to seem less like an artistic flourish and more like the top of a cage.

Lucius glanced over his shoulder. Their pursuers were gaining fast, in a blur of ceremonial armor, ragged flesh, and flashing fangs. And what the hell were they? Animal- headed zombies didn’t feature in the Nightkeepers’ legends, at least, not that he knew. A connection nudged at him, but he couldn’t think about that right now. They needed to find a way out of the strange canyon, which was starting to feel too much like a gladiatorial pit. Gods knew that concept wasn’t outside the legends.

“Look!” Jade pointed toward one of the corners where the canyon ended—only it wasn’t a corner anymore. As they drew nearer, the optical illusion of a dead end gave way, showing where their canyon made a T intersection with another running at right angles. Maybe that was a way out!

They tore around the corner, hand in hand. Twenty feet into the narrower canyon, they slammed into an invisible, unyielding surface stretched across the opening. Lucius’s breath exploded from him on an “oof” that became a howl when unseen coils snapped tight around them both, jerking them off their feet to dangle in midair.

“Fuck!” He struggled to get to Jade, to free himself, to do something, anything. A harsh rattling noise surrounded them, marking the invisible force as the dark magic wielded by the denizens of the underworld. He had a nauseating image of him and Jade being caught in a huge, invisible spiderweb, with something terrible and eight-legged advancing intangibly toward them.

If you’re ever going to connect to the magic, now would be a good fucking time, he thought, and bit down viciously on his tongue. Pain flared and blood welled in his mouth, but that was it. No magic. No power. No nothing.

“Lucius!”

Jade’s shout was scant warning as Jaguar-head grabbed Lucius’s ankles and yanked, pulling him free of the web magic. Lucius hit the ground hard and let himself go limp, though his heart hammered in his chest, impelled by rage and the pounding need to get to Jade, to protect her, to somehow get her back to safety, though he wasn’t the mage she needed him to be.