Blood Spells

There were numerous types of spread, ranging from the single-card quick-and-dirty reading she had done when she pulled the etznab cards, to a full array of stars, lenses, and oracles, placed in intricate patterns of meaning. For this reading, she had chosen a simple three-card line called the “tree of choice.” Trees were sacred; their roots tapped the underworld, their trunks lived in the realm of mankind, and their canopies touched the sky and protected the villages. In the oracle spread, the three cards represented, in order from right to left, the root of the problem implied by her question; the core —and potentially flawed—beliefs surrounding the problem; and the branches through which the answer could be achieved.

At least that was the theory.

Taking a deep breath, she flipped the first card. On it, four parallel yellow curves crossed a maroon square that was outlined in black. Behind the square rose a yellow, rayed sun. “Imix,” she said, pronouncing it “ee-meesh” in the ancient tongue. The Divine Mother card, it symbolized trust, nourishment, maternal support, and receptivity.

Her stomach flutter-hopped, because she pulled Imix almost every time she did a reading for herself. It was her totem card.

But pulling the card now made her grimace with twisted amusement. “Great. I’m the root of the problem.”

She couldn’t sustain the self-directed humor, though, because that seemed all too likely. Brandt had tried to get her to back off the family stuff and focus on her magecraft, but she hadn’t been able to make that switch. Loving him and the twins wasn’t something she could step away from, and it pissed her off that he’d done it so seamlessly. If they needed to work together to regain his lost memories, then it was certainly possible that her negative emotions could be blocking things.

Taking a deep breath, she reached for the book. Flipping through the worn pages, she found Imix, and read down its associations. Most of them didn’t seem related to the issue at hand, but one pinged: Imix was connected to the earth element, and they were racing to counter the earthquake demon. It wasn’t exactly a neon sign, but it was something.

Then again, in the outside world she’d been a champion at reading deep meanings in her fortune cookie fortunes.

Moving on, she skimmed over the light aspects of Imix, which she knew by heart. The card was a call for her to look below the surface of her life, to give and receive love. She was trying to do that, damn it.

She paused, though, when she got to the first line of the next section.

“‘The shadow aspects of Imix are issues of trust and survival, feelings of being unsupported or unworthy, and the need for outside validation,’” she read aloud, feeling a tingle run through her body.

Except for the validation part, that described the person she’d been during her depression, and the temptations she still had to fight against.

The reading seemed to say that her thought processes were at the root of the problem. Which sucked. But at least that was something she might be able to fix. “Okay, fine. Be that way. So what’s the core belief I need to use or get past in order to move forward?”

Not letting herself hesitate, she flipped the second card. It showed a royal blue square in the middle, with yellow circles at each corner. In the center of the blue square, a diamond-shaped cutout showed a starscape beyond. Behind all of that was the same yellow sun as on the first card. The continuity of pulling two sun cards in a row seemed to point at the involvement of Kinich Ahau, which played. This particular card, though, wasn’t familiar. She didn’t think she’d ever drawn it before.

She read the single word at the bottom: “Lamat.” A quick search through the book revealed that Lamat was the card of the One Who Shows the Way. Okay, then, it symbolized leadership. She didn’t think it referred to Strike, though. She didn’t see how the king could be at the core of Brandt’s inability to become a Triad mage.

Moving on to the light aspects, she read: “‘Lamat indicates harmony, clear perspectives, and the creation of beneficial combinations.’ Meh.” She shrugged and moved on. “‘The shadow aspects of Lamat are disconnection and the belief that there is only one right way, one exclusive system that can bring harmony.’” That resonated. More, when she added it to the concept of leadership, she came up with the distant, rigid, system-based former architect who had been prophesied to lead the magi against Cabrakan. Brandt.

Unfortunately, identifying Brandt as the core of the problem wasn’t news either. Disappointment gathered as she skimmed through the rest of the information, finding little of note except for the animal and elemental associations of Lamat: the rabbit, and fire. That suggested that Rabbit was involved with the core issue, or maybe its solution. But beyond that, she wasn’t seeing anything nearly as concrete as the mirror card had been, in terms of giving her a clue of what she was supposed to do next.

“Have faith,” she murmured. And she flipped the third card.

The image was unfamiliar, and very different from the first two, done in a watery blue green, with white accents, showing none of the yellows and blacks that were on the other cards. It was a moon card, with a white disk in the background. In the foreground was an arrangement of lines and shapes, just as on the others. But on this one, the combination of downward-arching lines at the upper corners and a circular pattern at the lower center combined to form the image of an angry, scowling face with a strange twinkle in its eyes.

“Chuen.” She flipped to the proper page in the book, and frowned when nothing connected. Chuen was the Monkey Trickster. Its light aspects were celebration, innocence, joy, and laughter; its shadow aspects were the destruction of old, useless patterns, the upending of known life, and the creation of a new one. Disappointment kicked. Frivolity sure as hell wasn’t going to connect Brandt with the Triad magic, and she didn’t see how mixing things up would help either. “Come on. Give me something to work with here!”

Frustrated, she paged to the front of the book, where it described the spreads. Maybe she had missed something, or made a mistake.

But when she figured out what she’d done, she just stared for a long moment. “Oh. Oh, gods.” This wasn’t good.

The tree-of-choice array was supposed to be laid out in a line from top to bottom, canopy to roots.

She had laid her cards from left to right, which wasn’t the tree-of-choice spread. It was the past-

present-future spread, which had nothing to do with the question she’d asked, and had everything to do with the person who had pulled the cards—namely, her.

The Divine Mother was her past.

The rigid, rule-following leader was her present, and he had put her world in disharmony. Brandt.

And her future was chaos and upheaval . . . leading to a new life.

She didn’t want a new life, she thought on a surge of pure self-pity. She wanted her old life back, damn it. She wanted to be a wife and mother first, with everything else coming after that. She wanted to be back in the pretty kitchen of the Pittsburgh house, with Brandt snoozing in their shared bedroom, the boys napping down the hall. Or, rather, with Harry napping and Braden planning world domination, toddler-style. She wanted to know that if she headed into the bedroom, her sleepy-eyed husband would snag her hand and pull her back into bed with him.

But that life was already gone, wasn’t it? She wasn’t just a wife and a mother anymore; she was a warrior. And even if the magi won the war and everything went back to so-called “normal,” she wouldn’t ever get her old life back. On some level she knew that. But that didn’t mean she wanted to think about what her new life was going to be like.

“Did the oracle work?”

She jolted at the sound of Brandt’s voice, the sight of him filling the pool house doorway. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come in.”

He wore black cargo pants and a black tee with square-toed boots. The outfit was almost, but not quite, combat gear, suggesting that it was time for their next and almost last option. Her heart thumped, but with an aching wistfulness rather than surprise. When he raised an eyebrow, she realized she hadn’t answered his question about the oracle.

“No. It didn’t give me anything.”

He got points for not even hinting at an “I told you so.” Or maybe her success with the etznab spell had made an impression. Instead of commenting on the cards at all, he said, “Strike’s ready to ’port us down to El Rey. He’ll leave us there to poke around for as long as we need.” He