Blood Spells

Oh, shit. What the hell was he supposed to do now? What—

Power exploded at the place where he and his nahwal were joined, searing his hand and sending currents of fire racing up his arm. Pain lanced through his chest and his heart skipped a beat; he’d heard the expression before, but he hadn’t really understood the dissonance of the off-kilter thudda-

thudda until then.

Despair tore his soul as his nahwal moved, not away, but into him, aligning itself so its front was to his back. He felt the chill of its flesh, the flow of ichor beneath its skin as its form overlapped with his, suffusing him with a clammy chill and an awful sense of invasion.

He heard Patience call his name in a raw, frantic voice. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to make everything better. But he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he rasped, the words setting his throat aflame. “I wish—” But he didn’t get to finish, because the Triad magic rose up like the cold, unforgiving water of an ice-fed river. And sucked him down.

“Brandt!” The name tore from Patience’s throat as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed into the fog.

Yanking away from her nahwal, she dropped to her knees and scrambled to find him through blinding tears and the knee-deep mist. She found a leg first, followed it up to his armored torso and higher, to his throat, where she tried to find a pulse. Couldn’t.

“He’s not dead. Not dead. Can’t be dead.” She repeated it over and over, babbling the words in a litany, petrified that if she stopped, he’d be dead. One dead, one mad, one survivor. Gods, let him be the survivor. Suddenly nothing else mattered.

She fought the ground’s squishy roll as she hauled his upper body up across her knees, trying to get his head above the level of the mist. He was deadweight, limp and entirely unmoving, his skin cool and cast the same gray green as the world around them.

But then she felt a flutter under her fingertips. Another. He had a pulse. And he was breathing, though the moves were weak. She shuddered with relief, ready to take whatever little she could get.

“He’s not dead,” she said to the others, who had gathered close. Tears dripped from her face onto his, adding to the moisture of the mist, as she bent over him, touching his face, his neck, his damp hair.

Rabbit had pulled Strike off to one side, and was telling him something in a low, broken voice. She caught Iago’s name, but couldn’t think about that right now. Her entire being, both woman and warrior, was focused on Brandt.

He was alive, but only barely.

“Wake up,” she whispered, taking his hand in hers and forming a blood-link. “Please wake up.” She opened herself to him, offering him all the magic and strength she had left to give.

The connection formed on her end, but nothing happened on his.

Sick nerves drilled through her. “He’s not responding.”

“He is trapped inside the Triad magic,” a multitonal voice answered.

Patience’s head jerked up. Her nahwal stood there staring down at her. It was the only one left; the other ancestral beings had disappeared.

“Trapped how?” she demanded, heart thudding.

“The Triad magic cannot speak to the eagle until he makes peace with his ancestors.” The nahwal seemed to be speaking from rote, its expression blank. But for a second she thought she caught a glimpse of something more.

The creature had spoken to her only twice before, and both messages had been frustratingly vague.

She hadn’t made much of an effort to improve the connection through ancestor worship, preferring to focus on the living. Now that was coming back to bite her in the ass.

It was too late to fix that now, though. All she could do was try to reach that spark of humanity, the hint that someone—some one—in there was trying to get through to her. “Please tell me how to help him,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “Please. I’ll do anything.” Almost.

“You must help him become a Triad mage before the solstice-eclipse. The lost jaguar and the serpent have long, dangerous roads to travel, and he is the only one who can prevent Cabrakan from avenging his brother’s death at the hands of Kali’s children.”

The nahwal took a step back, away from the group. Patience would have gone after the creature, but Brandt’s heavy body weighed her down. “What am I supposed to do?” Her voice broke. “Tell me.”

“Take him home.” The nahwal’s form blurred as the gray-green mist closed around it. “Help him remember the debt he owes.” Another step.

“Wait!” She stretched out her hand. “Don’t . . .” She trailed off as it vanished. Reeling, she looked up at her teammates, whose expressions ranged from concern to gray-faced shock. “What the hell is it talking about?”

It was her nahwal, her message. But it was Strike who said in a ragged voice, “The lost jaguar and the serpent have to be Anna and Mendez. The other two firebirds must have gone to earth.” Which so wasn’t good news. Anna didn’t want anything to do with the Nightkeepers anymore, and Mendez was a rogue mage, a loose cannon who’d spent most of the past three years behind bars.

“Why the hell would the god pick them?” Nate asked. “For that matter, why did it go for Brandt if he can’t complete the spell?” He locked on Patience, expression grim. “What debt was it talking about?”

She wanted to weep and rage, wanted to curl in a ball and pretend the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. But that was the woman she had been, not the one she was now.

Focus. Prioritize. Her warrior’s buffer might not be as strong as Brandt’s, but it would be strong enough. It would have to be. Calling on it to stem the panic and pump determination in its place, she tightened her grip on him. “I don’t know about any debt. But I’m damn well going to figure it out.”

She had already been forced to say good-bye to her sons and winikin. She wasn’t letting go of her husband without a fight.

Skywatch The magi materialized in the sunken center of the mansion’s great room, in a big open space surrounded by wide, low-slung leather couches and ottomans. In the kitchen area that opened off the upper level of the two-level room, Jox, Leah, and Lucius were sitting at the marble-topped breakfast bar, waiting for news.

They were up and moving before the ’port magic had cleared, but faltered when they saw that Michael and Nate were carrying Brandt’s motionless body between them.

Jox headed for Patience. In his midsixties, fit, and trim, with long gray hair that he wore back in a Deadhead ponytail, the royal winikin was responsible for protecting and guiding several of the magi as well as running the day-to-day operations of the entire compound. Yet despite his already heavy workload, he had unofficially adopted Patience when her winikin, Hannah, had left with the twins.

“What happened?” he demanded as he ran a quick vitals check on Brandt, who was deathly pale and cool to the touch, his lips dusky, almost blue.

The walls of the high-ceilinged great room seemed to press in on her, but she fought the panic and made herself be strong, made her voice stay steady when she answered, “The god chose Rabbit first, but when the power flux woke Iago, the Triad magic bounced out of Rabbit and into Brandt. Now, according to my nahwal, he’s trapped in the spell because he can’t connect with his ancestors until I help him remember some debt he hasn’t repaid. If we can’t wake him before the solstice-eclipse, we’re screwed. And Anna and Mendez are Triad numbers two and three.” Like ripping off a wax strip, she said it all at once, quickly, to get the pain over with.

Only this pain was just beginning, wasn’t it?

“Gods.” Jox’s face lost all its color. “Anna.”

“Yeah,” Strike grated. Leah stood beside him, gripping his upper arm in support. He said, “I’ll make the calls. We need to know if they’re—well. We need to know.”