Blood Spells

their joined magic eased . . . and they opened their eyes, still nose to nose, their lips touching.

Although their cave visions had skipped the interval between their first kiss and the end of the lovemaking that had followed, those memories filled her now as she looked up and saw tenderness in the gold-shot depths of his brown eyes. And now, as then, she was filled with the utter certainty that the two of them had been meant to find each other that night, that they had been meant to fall in love.

Now, though, she realized that she didn’t know whether they had been meant to stay together.

A deep-seated fear that the answer was no had her wanting to hold on too tight. So instead, she made herself step away from him, drop her shield, and take a look at the damage.

She stared. “Holy crap.”

The shield had contained the explosion exactly within its sphere, carving a scoop out of the stone behind where the bomb had been attached. If the wall had been solid, there would have been a missing half-moon of limestone.

Instead, there was a perfectly circular opening, with darkness beyond.

“The tunnel,” she whispered as her heart stuttered in her chest. They had punched through to the tunnel. “We can get to the inner chamber before the solstice-eclipse.” And maybe—hopefully—call on the gods.

A sudden blast of static made both of them wince, and then Strike’s voice, broken up by interference, said, “Almost . . . we’re . . . shit.”

Patience and Brandt exchanged a look and bolted for the surface.

By the time they got topside, though, the fight was over, the makol gone. The air stank of char and vibrated with magic, but the coast was clear.

Patience’s adrenaline flagged quickly, fatigue threatening to take over, but there was triumph, too, as she said, “The cave is clear . . . and the tunnel is open.”

The announcement was met with a ragged cheer. The magi were beat-up, dirty, and fight-worn, but they had won the intersection.

“Don’t get too excited,” Rabbit warned in a low voice from the edge of the group, where he sat on a boulder, slumped and boneless. Myrinne stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Patience hadn’t always loved how much influence the younger woman had over Rabbit, but now she was glad to see her there, the two of them forming a united front against Strike’s scowl.

“The blocks didn’t work,” Rabbit continued. “Iago got everything. He knows what I know about Ix’s death, the Triad spell, Anna and Mendez being chosen, how Brandt is linked to Cabrakan. . . .” He trailed off and looked at Patience, eyes hollow. “Once he realized you and Brandt killed Ix, he focused on you guys. He pulled everything he could about you. . . . I’m not sure what he got out of me, but he has to have seen the twins.”

“The—,” she began, then broke off when the oxygen drained out of her lungs. She wasn’t even aware that she’d started swaying until Brandt grabbed her arm to keep her from going down. “No,” she whispered, leaning on him. When he started to say something, though, she held up a hand to stop him, and then pushed away to stand on her own when she repeated, louder: “No.”

Rabbit looked suddenly eighteen again. “I’m sorry—”

“I mean ‘no’ as in ‘I’m not going to let this screw me up,’” she interrupted. “The whole point of having Hannah and Woody take them away was so nobody—not even Iago or the Banol Kax themselves—could find them if our enemies learned of their existences, right?” Strike had even gone so far as to have Rabbit use his mind-bending to make it impossible for a teleporter to lock on to any of them. They were off the grid. Safe. Please, gods, let them be safe, she thought, knowing she was beyond lucky that Rabbit didn’t know the one vital clue that Iago could have used to find them.

“She’s right,” Brandt said, stepping up beside her so their fingertips brushed. “How much does it really matter that Iago knows who was chosen for the Triad? I’m already watching my back, and the other two are protected. He wants a piece of me and Patience because we killed Ix? Well, we want a piece of him right back. As for the intersection, we won the first round of that fight.” He gestured to the tunnel entrance. “So I vote we get down there and see about protecting our newest asset.”

Sven’s eyes fired. “Hell, yeah. Let’s—” A roaring boom cut him off as a violent explosion detonated beneath them. The ground shuddered and bucked, sending Patience reeling. She grabbed on to Brandt, screaming as a huge gout of debris erupted from the pyramid’s doorway in a giant shotgun blast of dust and shrapnel.

There was no time for a shield spell. Brandt turned them so he took the brunt; she felt the impacts shuddering through him, and cried out when pain slashed across her upper arm on one side, her calf on the other. A series of crashes followed the first detonation, sounding like the earth was tearing itself apart.

As the noise faded, the others started shouting questions and raging at their enemy, but Patience couldn’t make out words over the low-throated rumble of stone and earth resettling itself, and the ringing in her ears.

Heart hammering, she pushed away from Brandt, took two steps in the direction of the pyramid, and stopped dead.

“No!” The word ripped from her throat in a scream. She pressed the back of one hand to her mouth, tears flowing at the sight of a huge pile of rubble where the pyramid had been.

It had collapsed in and down, toppling into the deep, circular depression that had appeared behind and under it. Their cave.

“He planted a second bomb,” she said numbly. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears, though the ringing had subsided.

Brandt gripped her hand, squeezing hard, his eyes dark with anger. But then he tugged her away from the wreckage to where the others were gathering. “Come on. We need to get our asses out of here and regroup.”

He was right. The chameleon shield had held through the blast, but the humans would be incoming, rushing to see the damage that they would undoubtedly blame on one of the miniquakes that were part of Cabrakan’s warm-up act. And the magi were banged up: She had deep cuts on her arm and leg.

Brandt was favoring one side of his torso, his face drawn in pain; Sven was cradling his arm; the rest of their teammates were variously bloody and battered. Not to mention that they were all starting to sag with postmagic fatigue.

Patience stared at the rubble for a long, yearning moment, not wanting to believe that the beautiful blue- green lagoon, with the flowered vines and the pretty white beach where she and Brandt had first made love together, where they made sense together, was gone. But it was.

After a long moment, she turned away and headed to join the others. And she didn’t let herself look back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Skywatch When Patience had finally resigned herself to the twins being gone, one of the few things that had helped was knowing that Hannah and Woody were taking care of them, raising them. But when the banged-up team materialized back at Skywatch and the other winikin descended on their charges, she would’ve given almost anything for Hannah to be there too.

Then Patience would have had someone to fuss over her, someone who would be focused on helping her bounce back as quickly as possible, with no other agenda beyond that. And although part of her beating the depression had involved being responsible for her own well-being, just then she would’ve given a body part to duck that load for an hour or two.

Sighing, she dropped onto the nearest couch and let the chaos of fragmented explanations and winikin -led triage flow around her. She would get up in a minute, she thought. Already, her accelerated healing powers were dulling the pain of the cuts on her shoulder and leg, expelling the debris, and knitting the flesh. But right now, she didn’t want to have to take care of herself.

“What do you say we head for the suite, so we can get cleaned up and survey the damage in peace?”

It took a moment for Brandt’s words to penetrate the cottony numbness that surrounded her, another