stress shit doesn’t count as ?reasonable? in my book.” She closed the distance he had put between them, cupped his jaw between her palms, and rubbed her thumbs along the line of his beard in a move that usually made him want to purr, but now just made his chest hurt. “I’m sticking with you,” she said. “Deal with it.”
“But . . .” He trailed off, seeing from her expression that it wasn’t worth arguing—and not really sure he wanted to, as the dream-fever drained and his heart rate leveled off. His queen could take care of herself, and he needed her. Gods, how he needed her.
Impossible choices.
“Was it the same dream as before?”
“Yeah.” Except that this time, he hadn’t been entirely sure whether he’d been seeing the beginning of the Solstice Massacre through his father?s eyes, or if he’d been himself in the middle of a battle that hadn’t yet been fought.
“It’s stress,” she said firmly. “Not a vision. You’re taking too much on yourself.” She pressed her cheek to his. “As usual.”
“I don’t have any choice. I’m my father?s son.” Which meant he was the Nightkeepers’ king, the last male descendant of the royal jaguars.
“Yes, you are. You’re also your own man.” She wrapped her arms around him, thawing some of the chill. “You won’t make the same mistakes he did.”
“No, I’ll make new ones, with potentially the same consequences. What has happened before—”
“Hush,” she interrupted. Her breath feathered across his earlobe as she reached to capture his hand, then draw it up to cup one of her breasts. “It was just a dream.”
“Maybe,” he said, pulling her down into a kiss that brought their bodies flush, freed their hands to touch, and turned the “maybe” into a growl of, “Oh, yeah.”
But as he wrapped himself around her, sank into her, and lost himself to the jun tan magic and the power of loving his gods-destined mate, he was all too aware that the dream might be changing a little each time, evolving . . . but there was one thing that always stayed the same.
In the end, the king always sacrificed himself.
CHAPTER TEN
December 13
El Rey ruins
Cancun, Mexico
When the theme from Jaws sounded from Sven’s pocket, he winced but didn’t answer. It was kind of hard to “can you hear me now” when he was fully up-linked, with Patience on one side of him and Jade on the other, their bloodied hands intertwined and magic flowing through them. Strike shot him a look but didn’t say anything. They were too deep in the magic to be kibitzing about ringtones.
At the forefront of the arrowhead formed by the ten teammates, Rabbit focused on three man-sized stones that were inset into the ground. About the size and shape of coffins, the carved slabs cast a magical cloak, hiding the entrance to an ancient intersection beneath El Rey. If the Nightkeepers could get through the spell and get the doorway open, they would solve a whole shit-ton of their problems by getting the direct pipeline to the gods they should’ve had access to all along—aka, the skyroad. Problem was, the entrance was hidden by a dark-magic spell and Iago had broken Rabbit’s hell-link, blocking him from the dark magic despite his half-Xibalban heritage. So far, nothing they had tried had even come close to reestablishing the connection, which left Rabbit scowling at the stones while Sven’s phone rang on, the ominous music all too fitting.
A year ago, Sven would’ve laughed his ass off. Now, he just wished he’d remembered to mute the damn ringer. He was low on patience, felt like crap, and wanted to get this over with so he could get some space. Normally he loved the trips to El Rey—the ruin was right on the coast, giving him a rare chance to breathe salt and see endless blue-green ocean. Now, though, he had his back to the harbor and just wanted to go home. He wanted dust in his sinuses, dry heat on his skin, and packed earth beneath his feet.
“You okay?” Patience asked in an undertone.
“Yeah.” Realizing he was bottlenecking the uplink, he refocused and channeled the magic as the phone went silent and dumped to voice mail. “Sorry.”
She shot him a worried look. “Don’t be sorry. If something’s wrong, talk to me. Or if not me, talk to someone.”
“I’m fine. Really.” He lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug, covering the wince when the move pulled at the bandage he wore on one biceps, hidden beneath his pullover.
The damn wound was taking far too long to close up. He would’ve thought his healing skills were on the fritz, except that his other injuries were doing fine. Which meant . . . shit, he didn’t know. He couldn’t even remember how he got the jagged slice. And he couldn’t think about it now. Focusing on the uplink, he kept the magic zinging around the circle as Rabbit gripped the small carving he’d gotten from a dying Xibalban mystic the year before. Although the flattened stone didn’t seem to have any real power, it had become his talisman. Now, he held it out in front of him as he leaned on the magic and cast a new spell that Jade and Lucius were hoping would work.
Magic flared around the uplink, moving smoothly and ramping up, making the air sparkle red-gold. More, the spell coalesced and took shape in an unusually visible form, a cloud of glossy glitter that was headed for Rabbit. It coalesced, sped up, took form and substance as it neared him, and then—
Without warning, it doubled back and accelerated straight into Sven.
Holy shit. He gaped as it thwumped into him feeling like a feather pillow doing forty. The impact sent him staggering back, breaking the uplink. Power flowed into him, arrowing to the injury high on his biceps, and from there dragging him straight into a vision that was more a series of impressions than anything: He breathed dust, walked on hard-packed ground that burned his feet. He was searching, searching, missing something. But what? He heard a hawk’s cry, a scurry of small feet, a death keen. Then wings flapping back up into the sky.
“Sven?” Cool hands touched him, sending magic that brought him out of the vision. “Sven, can you hear me?”
For a few seconds, the words didn’t make any sense; they were only sounds. Then they came clear, as did the sight of his teammates clustered around him as he lay flat out on the rocky ground. Sasha was bent over him, touching him, healing him.
“My arm—” he began, then broke off because she already had his sleeve up, the stained bandage off. But his skin was whole and unmarked, like he’d never been hurt.
He was searching for something, needed something, didn’t know where to find it. Hot sun. Burning feet. Thirsty. The world tunneled down, blackening at the edges and withering inward until all he could see was Sasha’s face, her eyes wide and worried, her lips shaping his name. Then dust washed across his vision and he coughed, fighting for breath, fighting the hands that tried to hold him, take him captive.
“The spell is linking to something, but I can’t follow it,” she said, her voice nearly lost beneath the howling noise of a sandstorm. “Rabbit, get in here and—”
Blackness.
Somewhere off Virginia Beach
Voices washed over Cara Liu, unintelligible at first and then slowly coming clear, followed by other sensations: a cool, wet deck beneath her, the gentle roll of waves, the smell of the ocean, the humid air that was at odds with her parched-dry mouth.
“Give her some room,” said an older-sounding woman, the kind with the built-in cluck in her voice. “Let the poor dear breathe!” The tone brought the image of a weathered sixty-something in a crazy pink sun hat as Cara’s
