Blood Spells

“Okay, you two. Let’s get this thing open.”

Rabbit and Jade clasped hands once again, blending their magic so her uncloaking ability was skewed from light magic to dark, and got some extra oomph. As she cast the spell, the air over the coffin-shaped stone shivered and the dark-magic smear started swirling faster and faster, expanding with each revolution.

Then the magic solidified with a low-level boom, and a small stone temple appeared right in front of them. It was plain, square, and unadorned, and the end facing them was almost entirely taken up by an arched doorway that led to a set of stairs heading down.

Two Aztec makol stood just inside the doorway, looking startled as hell.

“Rabbit, down!” Michael barked from behind him.

Rabbit dropped to his knees. A split second later, death magic flared straight over his head in a killing stream of silver light that forked to hit the makol chest high. They died instantly in a flare of muk, becoming greasy piles of gray char that crumpled inward and collapsed with a hiss.

Rabbit glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Michael had turned ash gray himself. Sasha took his hand and summoned her chu’ul magic, working to level off the aftereffects. Although the assassin’s power was lightning fast and worked against all but the strongest of their enemies, it took its toll. Michael wouldn’t be good for too many more flat-out kills.

Which could be a problem, because the guards weren’t a good sign.

Thinking to test for more of them, Rabbit stepped through the doorway and opened up his senses.

And was instantly awash in power.

As if coming from very far away, down a long, echoing tunnel, he heard Strike say: “Fuck. Iago’s already down there.” There was a pause; then he said, “Rabbit, can you sense anything?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Dark magic flowed all around him, through him, weighing his soul and making him want to gag at the same time that it skimmed over his skin, lighting his neurons and getting him hard. He loved it, hated it, wanted it, despised it. For a moment he was balanced. Then there was a surge, the scales tipped, and he leaned into the glorious flow of coppery brown magic, opened himself up to it, and—

“Rabbit! ” Myrinne was suddenly in his face, shaking him. “Shut it down, now!”

It took him a second to focus on her, another to figure out what she was talking about. Then the gag response flared higher as the Nightkeeper half of him reasserted itself, beating back the lure of the dark power.

He shut down the connection, slamming the barriers down. His head echoed with sudden emptiness and he sagged against the wall, would’ve gone down without it. Scrubbing his hands over his face, he rasped, “Holy shit.”

He’d never sensed the dark magic like that before, never felt like he could ride the wave to someplace incredible.

“Somebody get a shield over the doorway,” Strike ordered. Then he gripped Rabbit’s shoulder.

“Talk to me.”

“Let him breathe first,” Myrinne snapped.

But Rabbit shook his head. “I’m okay.” Sort of. “The hellroad is wide-open.”

Strike cursed. “That shouldn’t be possible this far ahead of the solstice.” He paused. “Maybe it’s something to do with the eclipse, or Moctezuma’s magic.”

“Or else Iago jump-started it with blood,” Patience said, her voice barely above a whisper. Brandt reached out and took her hand, but although she leaned into him, the air around them remained still.

“Does he know we’re here?” Brandt asked, eyes fixed on the staircase leading down.

Rabbit shook his head. “He’s pouring all his power into keeping the intersection open. He doesn’t know we took out the two makol up here.”

Strike glanced at him. “What do you think? Can you still do it?”

When the kidnapping had nixed the plan of baiting a trap by letting Iago see specific things within Rabbit’s mind, Jade had modified the spell in the other direction. Now Rabbit should be able to make his presence look like part of Iago’s background mental pattern and—in theory, anyway—influence his thoughts.

There hadn’t been any time to test it, though. “If he senses me, he’s going to link up and take over,” Rabbit warned, though they had been over the pros and cons a dozen times already. “You might not even know he’s got me until it’s too late.”

“I’ll know.” Myrinne moved up beside him so they were shoulder to shoulder facing the temple door.

Strike nodded. “Do it.”

Taking a deep breath and hoping to hell this shit worked, Rabbit slipped off the protective circlet.

Although he’d had it for only a few days, his head felt seriously naked without it. Deal with it, he told himself, and got to work.

Disguising his thoughts beneath a layer of mental patterns that were as close as he could get to Iago’s, he dropped the blocks and cracked open the hell-link. Between proximity and the power of the solstice-eclipse, the connection formed instantly. One second he was looking at Myrinne, and in the next, he was in a ceremonial chamber, looking out through Iago’s eyes as the Xibalban raised Moctezuma’s knife. And advanced on his first sacrificial victim.

As Rabbit tuned out and swayed on his feet, Patience gave a low moan and whispered, “Please, gods.”

Brandt gripped her hand and got a return squeeze, but he didn’t feel anything more than the press of her fingers on his. They were standing in the middle of El Rey, yet he couldn’t sense the special buzz of magic that had been theirs alone.

She was blocking him. She had closed herself off, distancing herself when they most needed to be working together.

“Don’t shut me out,” he said under his breath.

She glanced at him. “I’m not.”

But there was a barrier between them, one he didn’t know how to breach. The Akbal spell wasn’t the answer. He was sure of that much.

“I’m in,” Rabbit said suddenly, his voice a low, effortful gasp. “I’ll stall him as long as I can, but we need to move fast. He’s already got his first sacrifice prepped.” He fixed on Brandt. “It’s Woody.”

The world froze as the words rocketed around inside Brandt’s head, in his heart, icing his universe.

It’s Woody. . . . It’s Woody. . . . Woody . . . Woody.

Sudden heat raced through him, boiling the ice with mad, murderous rage. He lunged for the dark-

magic doorway, lashing out with his warrior’s talent and slamming aside Michael’s sturdy shield spell.

“Holy shit,” someone said; he didn’t know which one of them it was. Didn’t care. All he cared about was that he would have the strength of an eagle warrior when he went up against his enemy.

Patience was right on his heels, with the others behind her. When darkness closed around him, he called up light—not a weak and harmless foxfire, but a fighting fireball that pulsed red-gold and dripped sparks from his hand, searing stone and sand to glass where they fell. Talent magic hadn’t worked beneath Chichen Itza, but it worked here. Michael spread a chameleon shield over them, cloaking the light and noise as the others called their fireballs. The burning lights cast the smooth, water-cut tunnel walls bloodred as they raced down the twisting staircase.

Rabbit haltingly briefed them as they went: Iago and Woody were alone in the sacred chamber, but there were twenty Aztec makol on the far side, in the short stretch of the light-magic tunnel that had survived the cave-in. They were guarding Hannah and the twins, who were in an offshoot room Iago had discovered.

“They’re all okay,” Rabbit said, but the unspoken caveat was, For now.

Another twenty makol guarded the dark-magic entrance; the Nightkeepers would have to go through them to get to the chamber. And although Rabbit was working to prevent Iago from killing Woody while also keeping the Xibalban from sensing the incoming attack, the effort was costing him. He leaned heavily on Myrinne, and his words slurred as he said, “We’re almost on top of them.”