Blood Spells

The words echoed back to that first night, warming her and making her feel more solid. Focus, she told herself. But the warmth lived alongside her warrior’s battle tension as they continued downward, trailing the fingers of their free hands along the tunnel wall to help guide them in the pitch blackness.

Then, suddenly, the darkness lightened: Up ahead, she could see where the tunnel opened up to the cave, which was lit from sunlight coming down from above.

“Can you guys read us?” Brandt breathed into his throat mic, but got static back. They were on their own.

As they moved closer, the air gained a hint of salinity and freshness. The combination was a potent memory trigger, but Patience kept the lid on her emotions as they took high and low positions and eased around the corner to check out the situation.

“Oh, dear gods,” she whispered almost soundlessly as she got her first real look at the cave.

It was beautiful.

The ancient cathedral had been impressive at night, lit by fireworks and starlight. In the daylight, illuminated with yellow sunlight, it was magical. The perfectly circular skylight dripped with lush green vines that hung down from up above. Sunlight streamed through, casting the lagoon water in vivid blues and greens that contrasted with the white limestone and the richer tans and browns of soil and other stones.

But even as one part of Patience locked on to the beauty of the subterranean pool, her inner warrior focused on the situation: There was no sign of the doorway that led to the inner chamber, but the two makol were positioned right where it had been. One of them stood guard with his buzz sword at the ready, staring through them. The other one was hammering something into the wall.

“Looks like the bastard’s not going to bother with magic,” Brandt breathed. “He’s just going to blast his way in.”

“Not if we take out his makol,” she said, equally softly, though her stomach churned.

She hated killing makol. Even though their human hosts were chosen based on evil, and couldn’t be saved once the possession was complete, she was all too aware that each of those hosts had once been someone’s child.

Taking a deep breath to settle the quease, she pulled her ceremonial knife. “You’re on point. I’ve got your six.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Stay safe.” Then he broke their handclasp, drew his knife with an almost inaudible rasp, and moved out.

With her warrior’s talent going full blast, Patience mirrored his movements, monitoring his position by the faint sounds he made as they entered the cave and skirted the outer perimeter, where the shadows largely concealed their growing trail of footprints in the sand.

When they got within a few feet of the makol, Brandt moved in for an invisible attack. All Patience saw were the consequences: The guard jerked, his luminous eyes going wide and his mouth gaping in a gurgling cry as his throat opened in a gruesome line of blood that quickly became an arterial spray.

The second makol spun and shouted, then slashed out wildly with his buzz sword. Patience ducked the attack and used an invisible foot sweep to send him sprawling, then followed him down, planted a knee in the middle of his back, and pithed him.

Her bile surged as the cartilage, tendons, and muscle at the back of his neck resisted and then gave, and her blade slid home. She twisted, and the makol convulsed and went still.

Exhaling, she reminded herself: Head incapacitates, heart banishes. These lesser makol didn’t require the complicated cardinal-day ritual it would take to banish a powerful ajaw-makol like Iago had become, but she still needed to make sure her enemy was dead.

As the Nightkeepers’ powers had increased, so had those of their enemies.

A few feet away, the other makol’s protective tunic ripped off its chest, seemingly of its own volition, revealing a heavily tattooed, thickly muscled chest and abdomen. When a long slice appeared out of nowhere, she gagged and dropped the invisibility spell.

Brandt appeared, grim-faced and covered in blood. He met her eyes over the makol’s body. “I’ll take care of both of them. See what you can do about the bomb.”

Adrenaline spurted anew. The bomb. Oh shit.

Bolted securely to the stone very near where the light-magic doorway had appeared, the device was marked only with a bar of light that flashed through a building sequence from dim to bright and back again, on a repeating cycle that sped up incrementally as she approached.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. It was a timer, but without a countdown, she didn’t have a clue how long they had left. It could have ten minutes left on it, or ten seconds. Her gut-level instincts said to haul ass out of there. Her DNA said they had to protect the light-magic intersection. An explosion wouldn’t hurt the magic, but it could block the hell out of the tunnel.

“If we can get it off the wall—” She reached for the device, heart racing.

Dark magic spat a fat spark, pain cracked through her body, and a booming electric shock flung her backward. Brandt lunged forward and caught her against him; she clung for a second, grateful when he called up his shield magic to protect them both.

“Are you okay?”

“Tenderized.” But the magic had given her an idea. “We can shield it ourselves and contain the blast,” she said quickly, pulse hammering as the light blinked faster by the second.

Working together, racing against the barely flickering light, they cast a pair of double-thick shields, one around them, the other around the bomb and part of the rock wall behind it.

A high whine split the air.

“Close your eyes.” Brandt put his body between her and the danger, pressed her cheek to his chest, and buried his face in her hair.

She wrapped her arms around him and splayed her hands across his back in a feeble gesture of protecting as much of him as she could. That wasn’t enough to stem the panic that threatened to punch through her warrior’s determination, though. She needed to do something more, say something more.

Don’t say anything you’ll regret later, she warned herself, knowing that her emotions were far too close to the surface.

So instead she rose up on her toes and locked them together in a kiss. She meant to hold herself back, to find the strength of sex magic without giving away too much of herself. But she was too aware of the sacred lagoon behind them, the drape of green vines, and the yellow warmth of the sunlight coming down from up above. Power hummed around them, coming from the shield spells, from the cave itself. And from the heat that sparked at the first touch of her lips on his.

Yes, she thought. This was their place. This was where they clicked, where they made sense.

He groaned at the back of his throat and answered her kiss, pulling her up into his body and sliding his tongue against hers. And she gave him everything, holding nothing back. Desire poured from her to him and back again through their jun tan connection, turning their shields red-gold, so they were surrounded with the sparkling magic that they made together.

They twined together, held on to each other.

And the bomb blew.

The brilliant flash of the explosion flared through the cave, strobing her vision even through her closed eyelids. The shields muffled the roaring boom, but the spell sucked mad power as they fought to contain the shock wave, concussion, and shrapnel spray.

Patience clung to Brandt, who tightened his arms around her, anchoring them both as they poured their combined magic into the shield, which bucked and shuddered, threatening to give way.

It held, though, remaining intact as the conflagration within it crested and drained. The terrible pressure on