“Lots of traffic,” Patience said.
“Makes you think it leads somewhere cool, doesn’t it?”
“Gods willing.” She glanced back at him, eyes firing. “What if—”
“ Sh! Wait.” He held up a hand when, at the edges of his perception, the magic fluctuated.
“I felt it.” Her eyes went unfocused. “Up ahead. It’s . . .” She frowned. “It doesn’t feel the same.”
“Like we’re experts?” But he wasn’t arguing. “It’s . . . darker. Greasy, almost.”
“You think it could be the Banol Kax trying to come through the barrier?”
“We’d better hope to hell it’s not.” The last time a couple of the dark lords had made it fully onto the earth plane, they had wiped out most of the Mayan Empire before the Nightkeepers—or rather one Nightkeeper, a member of the legendary Triad—had forced them back behind the barrier.
His gut fisted at the knowledge that if the dark lords had managed to tear a gap in the supposedly sealed barrier, the world was in very deep shit.
And nobody knew about it except the two of them.
He wanted to invent an excuse and send her back up to the cave, but knew she wouldn’t go. More, that was the man and the human talking. A true Nightkeeper would never put a lover above his duty.
“I’ll take point,” he announced, and moved past her.
She caught his arm. “Wait. What do we do if it is . . . you know. Them?”
Her eyes were wide with mingled excitement and nerves. She wasn’t going to back down from this fight, or any other. And in another lifetime, she would have been his mate. Damn it all to hell.
Ignoring the warnings that blared from his subconscious, he went in for a kiss. She met him halfway, gripping a fistful of his shirt to hold him close. His lips slanted across hers; their tongues touched and slid as the kiss went from hot to gentle and back again. He gathered her against him, trying to imprint the feeling in his sensory memory just in case.
Hard, hot pressure built in his chest and tightened his throat, and for a moment the buzz changed pitch and red-gold sparkled in the air.
Then he broke the kiss and eased away to meet her eyes, which had gone stormy with passion. “The gods put us here, right? I’m willing to have faith that they’ve got a plan for us.”
Or, rather, for her. They wouldn’t sacrifice her for his sins.
He hoped.
She released his collar and touched his lips with her fingertips, with a brush reminiscent of their kiss. “Then why did that feel like good-bye?”
“Not good-bye,” he lied. “Good luck.” As in, they would be damned lucky to both walk away from this if their worst fears were confirmed. But if only one of them was going to make it out, he’d make sure it was her. Given his status with the gods, she was the one the world was going to need. Not him.
She didn’t believe him; they both knew it. But they also knew this wasn’t the time for their first fight.
Instead, they got moving. She led the way, walking soft-footed. He did the same, and they ghosted along in silence for a few minutes, carefully watching for booby traps as the strange, oily-feeling magic grew stronger with every step.
In the back of his head, he was thinking, What the fuck are we doing? There’s no way that two untrained, unmarked college kids can take on a Banol Kax with a couple of five-inch blades, two torches, and a piece of flint.
But the rest of him was entirely in the moment, testing the limits of his senses, the placement of each footstep. That part of him knew that their lacking bloodline marks wasn’t entirely a negative. It meant that whatever was pumping out that strange power wouldn’t be able to sense them, at least not on the magical level.
In theory, anyway.
The tunnel curved, then curved again, and they saw a light up ahead, beyond the next bend. Brandt snuffed his torch against the tunnel wall, working not to sneeze against the puff of incense-laden smoke. Patience did the same, plunging them into a near blackness that made him acutely aware of how long the tunnel stretched behind them, and how late it was getting. How far past the actual moment of equinox would the doorway stay open? He didn’t know, didn’t have any basis for guessing, but they couldn’t turn back now.
Patience’s hand found his in the darkness. He squeezed back, trying to let the gesture convey affection, attraction, respect, reassurance, and all the other things he wanted to surround her with.
The handclasp stung, then flashed sudden warmth up his arm as his sacrificial cut aligned with hers and blood spoke to blood.
Mine, he thought as he had earlier in the day when he’d first laid eyes on her. You’re mine.
Except she wasn’t. Not in this lifetime.
Pulling away, he got ahead of her as they moved on. He might not be able to claim her or keep her, but he damn sure wasn’t letting her be the first one into a fight.
As they silently closed in on the corner, and the light beyond, his heart beat double time while his brain churned. Even if it wasn’t one of the Banol Kax up ahead—and he hoped to hell it wasn’t—the dark lords commanded many ur-demons, like the boluntiku , six-clawed lava creatures that moved as vapor and went solid the instant before they attacked, and the makol , damned souls that could possess human hosts, turning their eyes a luminous green.
Without warning, a man’s voice rose over the humming buzz of magic, chanting in the old tongue. It sounded human, but how could they be sure? This wasn’t exactly a “know thy enemy” situation—they were making it up as they went.
When they reached the corner, Brandt’s pulse thudded in his ears as he took in the scene: Beyond the curve, a straight section of hallway ended in a sheer wall with an arched, open doorway that was set at a right angle, giving them some hope of approaching without being seen right away. Both the chanting and the light—flickering yellow-orange firelight—were coming from within.
Holding up a hand to warn Patience back, Brandt eased down the last straight stretch and popped his head around the corner, staying low.
His brain snapshotted the scene: Beyond the door was a circular chamber that looked natural, as if there had been another lagoon, now gone dry. There were two other entrances. The one opposite their position opened to another tunnel, while the middle doorway was shut with a carved stone panel.
Torches set into holes in the wall provided light and incense, and a plain altar sat against the wall, little more than a square block of stone with a shallowly curved top.
A lone man stood before the altar.
A . . . Nightkeeper?
Brandt risked another look, confirming his first impression. The guy was tall, wide-shouldered, and fair-haired. Wearing black, insignialess paramilitary gear, with a carved stone knife stuck in his leather belt, he could’ve stepped right out of one of Wood’s stories. From the looks of him, he was a good decade older than Brandt . . . and he knew his shit. He was holding his bleeding palms out over the altar, letting the blood fall in the
