“Forget that. Here goes everything .” She faced out over the black lagoon.
The flashlight had finally died, leaving them lit only by the starlight that came in from up above as he stood beside her, so they were hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. They held their hands out over the swirling pool and let the sacrificial blood fall into the water. When the first droplet hit, the buzz in Brandt’s veins altered its pitch, seeming now to hang in the air around them.
A glance at Patience showed that she felt it—heard it?—too. He nodded back with what he hoped was an expression of reassurance rather than the greasy nerves that had sprung up at the realization that this was it. This was what he’d spent his entire life preparing for, without really believing it was going to happen.
He was about to bust his magical cherry. Holy shit.
He took a deep breath, aware that Patience was doing the same thing beside him. Together, they said the magic words: “Pasaj och.”
Warmth bloomed in his chest and rocketed outward, suffusing his body. His senses expanded: He heard the imperceptible lap of fresh water against stone and smelled how it went slightly brackish near the tunnel, where a submerged conduit must run out to the ocean. His skin prickled, sensitizing to the warmth of Patience’s body on one side of him, the chill of the night air on the other. He tasted their lovemaking and smelled the tang of blood that hung between them, around them. His night vision sharpened too, making him squint against the sudden gleam of starlight. It reflected off the water and sand, and off the stones around them, where tricks of the light formed strange patterns.
But that was all that happened.
He didn’t leave his body to enter the barrier, didn’t see or feel a change in the faint red-gold sparkle.
Disappointment thrummed through him. “Shit. I guess we can’t jack in without a proper bloodline ceremony, after all.”
As babies, their lack of connection to the barrier had saved their lives. Now, though, it meant that the magic didn’t recognize them.
“Maybe not, but something happened.” Patience’s attention was fixed on the back of the cave.
He followed her gaze. “I don’t—” He broke off as the reflected starlight and shadows rearranged themselves in his mind, and excitement jolted. “Holy fucking shit.”
What had been light and shadows moments earlier had become the silver-limned outline of a doorway: two heavily carved pillars connected by a linteled archway, with stygian blackness beyond.
The carved details were obscured by distance, but there was no doubt that the doorway was Mayan-
Nightkeeper in style . . . and it hadn’t been there before. Even as lost in each other as they had been, they would’ve seen it by the light of the fireworks. Which meant they had called it with the spell words, even though they lacked their bloodline marks.
The magic—at least that much of it—was working. Wonder thrummed in his veins. Anticipation.
He stared at the doorway, wanting more than anything to get his ass through it and see what was on the other side. “What do you think?”
Her teeth flashed, reflected starlight. “Stupid question.”
“Sorry.” And she was right; it was their duty as Nightkeepers—trained or not, bloodline marked or not—to figure out what the hell was going on, and whether it signaled the beginning of the end. More, they were programmed for this shit, bred and born for it. No way either of them was turning away from the adventure.
Given his choice under human ethics—and, hell, as a Nightkeeper male whose body was still warm from hers—he would’ve left her behind in the cave. But he didn’t have any reason to think she wouldn’t be able to handle herself. So despite his natural inclination to protect the shit out of her, he nodded. “Let’s go.”
Excitement kindled in her eyes. “I’ve got your six.” She patted his ass. “And a delightful six it is.”
“Don’t let the ogling distract you.”
“I’m a chick. We multitask.” But she was all business as they set off, skirting the lagoon to approach the silver-limned doorway, knives at the ready.
As they approached, the starlight and shadows resolved themselves into a pair of gape- mouthed serpent carvings forming the pillared uprights, with an intricate text block incised into the arch above them.
“I can’t read the glyphs,” he admitted. “You?”
“The dots and lines are numbers.” She indicated two geometric glyphs that looked like a pair of dominoes. “As for the rest, you’ve got me. Hannah said the hieroglyphs were dropped from the curriculum a few generations ago because most of the modern-day spells were either memorized phonetically or had more to do with mental powers than spell words.”
“Woody too. Let’s hope it doesn’t say ‘abandon all hope, yadda yadda.’” Catching a whiff of something funky, Brandt narrowed his eyes, trying to make out a lumpy variation of the shadows just inside the tunnel. “No shit.”
“What?”
“Flashlights. Sort of.” He reached in, felt around, and came up with a couple of torches, a flint, and a striker. “They’re pretty low-tech, but should do the job.”
Once lit, the torches proved to be artifacts in their own right. They were made of glyph-carved bones—he tried not to wonder if they were human—that had been hollowed out and packed with a hardened, crusty substance that smelled faintly like rancid grease and flowers. The business ends were loaded with a flammable combination of plant matter he couldn’t begin to identify, glued together with a dried-out, resinlike substance.
It was all pretty crusty, but it took only a couple of tries with the flint to get the first one started, and once they were both going, they gave off decent light, very little smoke, and an earthy, not unpleasant incense.
Patience eyed hers. “How old do you think these things are?”
“No clue. Somewhere between two decades and two millennia?” There was really no way to tell right then whether the torches were ritual pieces that had been used by their parents’ generation, or if the tunnel was a relic from before the conquest. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing to think? “My gut says they’re old, though.”
“Mine too.” She lifted the slow-burning brand; the light revealed a tunnel leading away from them.
“But I’m going to file that under ‘things I can’t think about right now,’ because I’d way rather see where this goes.”
At his nod, she moved through the doorway, taking point even though she’d promised to watch his six.
No hardship, Brandt thought, and followed her in. He kept his senses wide-open, including the unfamiliar, buzzing level of the magic, and stayed focused as Woody had taught him. Beneath that, though, ran the thrill of finally doing what he’d trained for all these years . . . and the sick fear that something would go wrong and Patience would pay the price.
Not this time, he thought grimly. Never again.
The limestone walls of the tunnel were marked with softly rounded ripples, suggesting that it had originally been the track of an underground stream. The floor was wider than the arched ceiling, with tool marks showing where the surface beneath their feet had been widened and flattened. The walls were uncarved, but the ripples made them seem decorated nonetheless. A footpath was worn smooth along the middle.
