Blood Spells

paused. “Jox suggested we should try getting a room at the same hotel or one like it. We could spend the night and see if it jogs some memories.”

“That makes sense.” It also made her want to weep. Instead, she carefully gathered her cards, stacked them atop the book, and cradled the small pile against her as she unfolded herself from the daybed. She didn’t look back at the pillows or the memories they brought.

She did, however, catch sight of herself in the big mirror beside the door. And for a second, she didn’t recognize the person staring back at her.

The Patience who had come to Skywatch with her sons and been shocked to find her husband there already—instead of on the business trip he’d claimed—had looked younger than her twenty-three years, soft-faced and bouncy despite her fighting credentials and Nightkeeper upbringing. The woman in the mirror had lost the softness and gained an edge that said she wasn’t just trained to fight; she had fought for real and emerged, if not victorious, then at least alive.

On some level, though, “alive” was about all she could claim. She wore jeans and a practical shirt, sturdy shoes, and a ponytail. And all she wanted to do was get through the next solstice, the next year, the next two years, and hope that tomorrow would be better than today.

Gods. Was that the person she had become?

“Patience? You okay?”

There was honest concern in Brandt’s eyes, but that was it. Chest gone suddenly hollow, she nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

She headed for the door, but instead of giving way, he caught her hand. And pulled her into his arms.

As she stiffened in shock and fought the too-tempting urge to burrow into him, he wrapped himself around her, enfolding her within the curve of his body and the strength of his arms. He splayed his hands, one spanning her waist, the other buried in her hair, holding her face tucked into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, with her lips almost touching the sensitive spot at the base of his throat.

She tried to pull away, but he held her fast, not squeezing too hard, but not letting her go either.

“Hush,” he whispered into her hair, though neither of them had made a noise. “Just give me a moment here, and take one for yourself.”

If she fought, he would let her go, she knew. And she should fight. She should yank away and tell him that it wasn’t fair for him to reach for her now, when he’d pushed her away so many other times before. She should tell him to make a godsdamned choice, that he either wanted her or he didn’t, that she couldn’t handle seeing desire in him one moment, distance the next.

She should tell him that she would be his partner in whatever way he needed her in order to gain the Triad magic, but only because it was her duty, that if it were up to her, she would walk away, not look back, because he was the root of her problem, not the branches of its answer.

Instead, she burrowed in. And for a minute, she let herself hang on tight.

Chiapas Mountain Highlands Mexico Rabbit whooped and grabbed the holy-shit strap as Cheech—his and Myrinne’s driver-slash-guide, who was in his midteens and drove like a death bat out of hell—gunned the battered Land Rover over a mogul-sized bump and caught some air. The dirt track flattened out on the other side, and Cheech revved along the one-laner, which was barely holding its own against the fuzzy undergrowth and the vines that hung down from the overarching trees.

In the cramped backseat, Myrinne cheered.

They flashed past scatterings of goats and pigs being herded among ancient stone stelae by little kids wearing everything from T-shirts and hip-hanging denim cutoffs to hand-loomed textiles in a dizzying array of bright colors and loud patterns. When they turned a corner and Cheech eased up on the gas, so they rolled past a cluster of homes at slightly under warp speed, Rabbit saw the same juxtaposition of modern and traditional materials, with some of the round pole buildings capped with huano thatch made of palm fronds and grass, others roofed in tin.

“Upgrades?” he said, nodding to the metal roofing.

“Nonoptional,” Myrinne corrected. “The contractors building the so-called ‘green’ resorts have clear-cut so much of the native vegetation that several of the major palm species have wound up federally protected.”

“Thank you, Fodor’s Guide to Mayan Villages,” he intoned, but grinned at her from the front, where he rode shotgun.

“It’s called ‘Google’ and ‘getting the lay of the land.’ You should try it sometime.” She smiled sweetly, but her dark brown eyes sparkled in challenge.

Her dark hair was slicked back in a twist that left her neck and shoulders bare above a skimpy tube top, though the goods were modestly covered—sort of—with a filmy white button-down that she’d tucked into a pair of low-riding cutoffs. They had started out as jeans, but she had scissored and frayed them midthigh when she and Rabbit had wound up staying down south a couple of days longer than originally planned. For today’s adventure, she had skipped her sexy woven sandals in favor of lace-up boots more suitable to bumming around the mountains, but even though Rabbit couldn’t see it, he knew she was wearing the ruby red toe ring he’d bought her the other day.

And, as always, she wore the promise ring he’d given her the year before. He got a hard charge out of that, one that was admittedly harder because of all the looks she’d been getting on their little working vacation. He knew it made him a “guy”—in his head he heard the word in her voice, with a sneer—but seeing the way other men looked at her, and knowing she was with him, heart and soul . . . that mattered.

“Gods, you’re hot.” So hot, in fact, that he was starting to sweat in the lightweight long-sleeve shirt he’d worn to hide his forearm marks. He hadn’t exactly forgotten how flat-out gorgeous she was, but when they were at Skywatch, it was easy to lose track of how much exponentially hotter she was than most everyone else in the universe. Any second now and he’d be drooling.

Her teeth flashed, but she raised an eyebrow and shifted her eyes in Cheech’s direction, as the Rover cleared the little village and the pedal hit the metal once again. “Going polytheistic on me?” In other words: Watch yourself. We’re supposed to be normal gringos.

He covered the wince with a chuckle. “More like going native. This place feels . . . familiar. Like I wouldn’t mind staying for a while.”

That earned him a tolerant-seeming “stupid-ass tourist” look from Cheech, but it was the gods’ honest truth.

Rabbit had been to dozens of centuries-old ruin sites, ranging from tourist traps to magic-shielded Nightkeeper temples, but although he’d gotten power buzzes from plenty of the sacred sites, he’d never stepped into one and thought, I know this place. I belong here. Yet ever since they’d told Strike a couple of half-truths and set out from Cancun for San Cristobal, and from there up into the mountains, that sensation had been growing steadily.

It was like he could breathe up here in the mountains. Like things made sense. He’d barely needed the directions they’d gotten in San Cristobal to reach the foothill village, not just because the road system thinned out to few options, but because he’d instinctively known where to go.

The same thing had happened in the village itself. He’d parked the rental, ensured its safety with a couple of bribes and some low-grade mind-bending, and then led Myrinne out into the strange mix of old stone and bright cloth like his feet knew where they were going, even if he didn’t.

Myrinne had gawked and lost herself in the first market they had come across. She had haggled delightedly over a brightly patterned scarf and a pair of rope-and-leather sandals, using a stumbling mix of the Spanish she’d picked up quickly at UT and the old-school Mayan trading language she’d absorbed at Skywatch, which bore zero resemblance to the modern dialects. Most of the locals had understood the Spanish far better than the other, but Rabbit had stood back and paid attention, picking out three men and one woman who had all gopher-popped their heads when they heard the ancient words.

A quick sift of their minds—very low-level, tight-beam magic he didn’t think Iago could sense—

had revealed that two of them had studied the trading language as part of the new revival movement.

The other two, both men, recognized a few of the words from a dialect spoken high up in the mountains, in a small hamlet called Oc Ajal.

It wasn’t exactly the “Ox Ajal” Jox had remembered Red-Boar mentioning as the name of the village where