Blood Spells

their name for me, he kept me, but he didn’t . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t want to snivel that his father hadn’t loved him, hadn’t liked him, had barely tolerated him most days. But still. “How does that make any sense? He was a Nightkeeper, for fuck’s sake! He was the Nightkeeper. How could he do that? And what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I don’t want to be a half blood. I don’t want to be the crossover, whatever the fuck that is. I just want to be a godsdamned mage.” He stood and turned, opening his arms for a hug, assuming it was Myrinne who had come after him.

But it wasn’t Myrinne. It was Strike.

“Shit.” He turned the arms-out move into a swipe at his tear-soaked face and puke-fouled mouth, then drew back, jamming his hands in his pockets. “Want to take a swing at me? Go ahead. I could use a good pounding right now. Might make me feel better about—” He broke off as a faint breeze stirred the air, bringing him the smell of blood and terror.

The image of the woman’s body hit him again, and his gorge rose. He fought it down this time, and lifted his chin in a dare. Tears sheened his vision, making the world shimmer. “Go ahead. What are you waiting for?”

Strike shook his head. “I didn’t come out here to pound on you. I came out to apologize. I’ve been acting like a dick and it’s not fair. What’s more, it meant you couldn’t talk to me about wanting to track down your mother.”

Rabbit swallowed hard, taking a second to process the apology. Which just made him feel more like shit. “I should’ve told you anyway. You wouldn’t have let me go, we wouldn’t be here now, and none of this—” He swallowed the heave, knowing it was his body’s way of wussing out of facing what he’d done. “None of this would’ve happened.”

“Or maybe it would’ve happened a different way. We can’t second-guess the gods—sky or Xibalban.” Strike paused, grimacing. “But I wish this had happened differently. I wish I’d handled it better, wish I’d handled you better.”

“Why didn’t you?” Rabbit hadn’t meant to ask. He’d told himself he didn’t care, that he had Myrinne for support and Jox for the occasional piece of advice, so it didn’t matter if three of the four people he’d grown up with—Strike, Anna, and his old man—were out of the picture.

But now, off alone with Strike after what they’d just been through, it wasn’t about him and Strike the king, but rather him and the guy who’d helped raise him, and who’d been older by enough years to play a role that had hit halfway between big brother and father figure. And who had disappeared on him recently.

With it just the two of them, and him raw as hell, Rabbit could admit that it had mattered. It had mattered a shit-ton.

“Because you terrify me,” Strike said finally. “I’m terrified of you. I’m terrified for you. And I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to the rest of us if things go wrong with you. You’re already the strongest mage of the bunch of us, and I have a feeling you haven’t even started to tap what’s in that head of yours. You’re too fucking brave for your own good, and you’ve got the shittiest luck of anyone I’ve ever known. You put all that together, and it keeps me up some nights worrying about what’s in your future. Two days, two weeks, two years . . . shit, I don’t know what you’re going to be doing two minutes from now, except that I know that whatever it is, you’ll be giving it a hundred percent effort, for better or worse.”

Strike paused, but Rabbit didn’t say anything—he fucking couldn’t say anything past the millstone that’d just landed on his chest.

After an awkward pause, the king shrugged. “So, yeah, I’ve been riding your ass. Jox’s too, because he’s ripping himself to shreds trying to keep it all together at Skywatch and making himself miserable in the process. And Brandt and Patience . . . shit. The team is coming together, but some of the people in it are on the edge, and I don’t know how to pull them back. I—” He broke off, jamming his hands into his pockets, his shoulders sagging from their usual “I can handle whatever the hell you want to chuck at me” squareness. “Fuck. And I’ve just turned what happened here into something about me, which I didn’t mean to do. I just thought . . . I just wanted you to know that nothing that’s been going on between the two of us has a godsdamned thing to do with who your mother was—or, hell, who your father was, what he did, or what he was thinking when he did it. You’re you. I’ve known you most of my life. And . . . I love you. I just thought you might need to hear that right about now.”

Forget not being able to talk. Rabbit couldn’t breathe.

Strike stood there for another moment, looking uncomfortable as hell. Then he shrugged, shot a funny half smile that Rabbit remembered from a thousand times before, growing up, and turned away, heading back to the village center.

He’d gone two steps when Rabbit’s feet finally came unglued and his lungs and throat started working again.

“Hey!” he called. And launched himself at his king.

Strike caught him on the fly and they hugged like they hadn’t since . . . shit, Rabbit didn’t remember. Since back before he’d gotten too cool to do crap like hug the big brother who wasn’t really. They both ignored Rabbit’s stifled sob and the way Strike hung on a beat too long, and when they separated, they both stared into different parts of the forest rather than at each other. But the air between them was clearer than it had been in weeks, maybe longer.

“We should get back,” Rabbit said finally. “There’s a shitload left to do.”

But when they stepped through the archway together, he saw that the others had been seriously busy while they’d been gone. Either that, or he and Strike had been gone longer than he’d thought.

The bodies from the forest and village had been stacked beside the fire pit and layered with wood that had been stripped from Saamal’s hut, leaving the structure’s skeleton behind. The central pole was gone; a hole in the bloodstained sand marked where its base had stood.

Myrinne crossed to Rabbit and held out her hand. “Here.”

From Lucius’s tendencies toward verbal diarrhea when he was working in the library, Rabbit knew that “eccentric” was a catchall term for the small, flat objects the ancients had made from stone, imbuing them with ritual significance—and sometimes even power—through their choice of shape and stone. Some had holes so they could be worn as pendants or carried in pockets, while others had been sacrificed or buried in a house or village to ward off evil.

Leah, Nate, and Alexis each wore one given to them by the king, signifying that they were members of the royal council; those eccentrics were abstractly curving shapes that made Rabbit think of Chinese dragons.

The one that Myrinne held out, in contrast, was a flat, flared quatrefoil.

He stared at it. “Well, hell.”

“Literally,” she quipped, but her eyes searched his. “What can I do to help?”

“You’re already doing it.” He took the eccentric and held it flat on his palm; it was heavier than it looked. He didn’t see any markings on it, didn’t catch any power buzz. It seemed to be nothing more than a carefully knapped piece of waxy gray flint. “Ten bucks says I slice myself every time I stick my hand in my pocket with this thing.”

“You could wear it around your neck.”

He was pretty sure she was kidding. “Yeah. That’ll happen. Not.” He wasn’t even sure he should carry it day to day. “What if it—I don’t know—attracts dark magic or something?”

“Like the hellmark doesn’t already?”

She had him there. “I’m just wondering if I should leave it here. Nothing says I have to accept it.

You heard Saamal—they weren’t our allies at all, and they were operating on a whacked theology. I mean, sky demons? Seriously?” He shook his head. “No. Even if this branch of the order was threat-

level yellow compared to Iago’s, they opposed the gods.” He rubbed a thumb over the eccentric, which had warmed in his hand. It was soft to the touch. Appealing. “I shouldn’t carry it, or even keep it.”

Myrinne thought for a moment. “How about you hang on to it for now and ask Lucius to check it out? Once you’ve got more info, you can make the call.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, exhaling. “Yeah, that’ll work.” He went to slip the eccentric into his pocket and was startled to realize he already had.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“I know.” He was all too aware that Strike had helped the others finish their grisly work. Now he and the other members of the team stood loosely ringed around the large stacked pyre that contained the village