Blood Spells

The ground hit back.

The earthquake tossed the world around, making the surface beneath them undulate and heave. Out in the street things crashed and people screamed. The Nightkeepers had materialized with Patience’s magic in full force, rendering them invisible to any humans who might be nearby, but although the Templo Mayor and surrounding buildings were popular attractions, the place was deserted. The locals and tourists were far more concerned with either getting out of the city or hunkering down someplace reinforced to ride out the quakes.

Brandt landed and locked his knees, and when Patience nearly went down, he hooked an arm around her waist. They hung on to each other while the quake went on far too long, the earth rippling with unnatural liquidity.

“It feels like the barrier,” Patience said against his chest, and she was right, except that instead of a soft, yielding surface and harmless fog, they were standing on stone slabs that threatened to crack and buckle, and there were steel girders all around them, arching overhead to support the flapping expanse of plastic.

“Hope the roof doesn’t come down on our heads,” he muttered. Even as he said it, a section of clearspan tore free and swung down in a ghostly flutter, to reveal the night sky. The stars seemed unnaturally bright in contrast to the eclipsed full moon. The moonlight was orange red, painting the carved eagles with light the color of old bloodstains.

The solstice-eclipse was almost on top of them. They needed to hurry.

Even when the tremor was past, the ground seemed to hum with a low, tense vibration that put Brandt on edge. The others felt it too; they muttered and traded looks as they started moving into place, forming an uplink circle with their knives at the ready. Rabbit didn’t move, though. He stayed off to one side, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, breathing heavily.

Myrinne bent over him. “What’s wrong?”

“I hope he didn’t use himself up back at El Rey,” Brandt muttered, low enough that only Patience heard him. “We’re all dragging ass, and we’ve still got a demon to fight.” Even without the hellmark, Rabbit was their strongest fighter.

“It’s this place,” Rabbit said, his voice sounding thick and strange. “Gods. What’s with this place?”

“Violence,” Lucius said. “According to some of Cortes’s men, more than a hundred thousand skulls were displayed, and the carved idols in here were fed with hearts and covered with five or six inches of clotted blood.”

“I can smell it,” Rabbit grated. “Shit. I can taste it.” But his color was getting better, his breathing coming back to normal. “Give me another second to finish blocking it out. It’s not dark magic, really, or at least not the way I used to sense it. This is . . . pain. This whole place is soaked with pain.”

“We’ve fought through pain before,” Strike said grimly. “We’ll do it again.”

Working fast, the magi uplinked. Brandt joined the circle last, taking Rabbit’s hand on one side and Patience’s on the other. He felt his powers expanding and deepening, taking sustenance from the solstice-eclipse, the teamwork of the Nightkeepers, and wide-open jun tan bond that linked him and Patience, feeling vibrant and alive.

But it wasn’t enough. The low-throated vibration of old pain and violence threatened to drown out the hum of Nightkeeper magic, and the ground shuddered beneath their feet. Worse, there was no sign of the streaming red lights his ancestors had shown him.

Brandt’s chest went hollow as he forced himself to say it. “In the painting there were dozens of magi near the wall, and more in the distance. Hundreds, maybe.” He paused. “What if there just aren’t enough of us?”

The ground shifted beneath them. In the street, something crashed.

“We’re going to have to be enough,” Michael said bleakly. “We’re all there is.”

Patience squeezed Brandt’s hand. “Try the Triad magic again. There has to be something more, something we’re missing.”

Needing the contact, he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers, taking her warmth, her strength, as he concentrated on the inner question, How can we fight Cabrakan?

He got only the image of Patience’s face, lit from within with love.

Panic and despair spiraled through him. He couldn’t lose her. Not now. Please, gods, help me out here.

He saw Patience again, this time studying a spread of cards. And for all that he had come to accept that the Mayan Oracle wasn’t the crock of shit he had once believed, it seemed odd that he would picture her like that.

Which meant it wasn’t an accident.

Adrenaline kicked. “You’re the answer,” he told her. “You or—”

“Love,” she interrupted. “Maybe love is the answer.” She turned to Lucius. “Neither the Aztecs nor the Xibalbans use sex in their rituals, do they?”

“Not the way the Nightkeepers do.”

She looked back at Brandt. “Which I’ll bet means there isn’t a dark equivalent of sex magic. What if we can use that to break through the layer of pain that’s covering this place?”

“Etznab,” he said, making the connection. At her look of confusion, he said, “Think about how our jun tan works: It creates a feedback loop that lets each of us mirror what the other is feeling. If we can do the same thing with power . . .”

Her eyes lit. “It’ll amplify. Maybe even enough to override Cabrakan’s dark magic.”

Rabbit stepped forward. His eyes were stark hollows in his angular face, but intensity burned at their depths. “If you can show me how your jun tan works, I can transmit it to the others.” He glanced at Strike. “Okay?”

Overhead, through the torn spot in the roof, the last sliver of white moon disappeared. “Do it,” the king said implacably, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line. “We do whatever it takes. That’s why we’re here.”

But it wasn’t the only reason they were there, Brandt thought as he held out his hand to Patience.

Because what was the point of the war if they weren’t also fighting for the smaller, equally important parts of themselves? Love, family, a personal future . . . it was all worth fighting for.

It had taken him a long time to see that. Almost too long.

Patience took his hand and they closed for a kiss, with Rabbit tapping in via touch link. Brandt put everything he had into the kiss and their jun tan connection, not just giving her his body, strength, heart, and soul, but taking hers in return, until it wasn’t his strength versus hers anymore—it was their combined power that fired his bloodstream and lit him from within with a level of power he’d never before experienced.

The magic came from the solstice-eclipse, and from the way the stars and planets were beginning to align as the end time approached. But it also came from him and Patience, and the new level of connection they had forged from the ashes of their old lives.

Thank you for not giving up on me, he sent through the jun tan.

He got a wash of love and acceptance in return, and a whisper of, I might’ve given up on you . . . but I couldn’t give up on us .

And thank the gods for that.

He slanted his mouth across hers and took the kiss deeper, hotter, harder, until sex magic sparked and crackled around them and his body tightened with the need for privacy, the need to bury himself inside her. The need, quite simply, for her.

Red-gold power responded, washing from him to her and back again. His jun tan heated, activating; he could feel her pleasure and his own, along with Rabbit’s discreet contact as he fed the jun tan pattern to the others, showing them the feedback loop. Then he felt the incremental increases in his power as the mated pairs came online, each adding their own distinctive flavor to the burgeoning mix of magic.

The power cycled higher and higher, until, without warning, a soundless detonation slammed into him and then out again, down through his feet and into the earth itself.

And the Nightkeeper magic took on a life of its own.

Brandt broke the kiss as the power surged beyond sex magic to something incandescent. It wasn’t coming