She squinted through the half-light at the cacao grove, and raised her voice. “Is someone there?”
A shadow moved. Then luminous green flashed, followed by a high-pitched whine.
“Makol!” Reese spun and bolted, then screamed in pain when something slash-thudded into her shoulder. Another blow impacted low on her back, and then the creature was on top of her, tearing at her, growling vicious words in a language she didn’t know. She heard Dez’s furious bellow, saw a blast of lightning magic, felt the makol being ripped away and turned to ash. Then it was all pain and blackness. Then nothing at all.
“No!” Dez roared, dropping down beside her. “Reese!”
His shield sparked around them both as he dragged her up. He saw her blood, smelled it, felt it on his hands when he grabbed her and slung her over his shoulder, his heart pounding a sick litany of: Not Reese. Please no. Not Reese.
In the cacao grove, dark magic rattled and air whoomped with the sound of an outgoing ’port. Moments later, leaves parted and more makol poured through: men and women wearing the mix of loomed textiles and modern clothes favored by the highland Maya.
Pulse slamming, Dez reinforced the shit out of his shield and went for his armband, nailing the emergency alarms on every available channel. “We’ve got makol by the big training hall, repeat by the fucking training hall. Reese is hurt. I need Sasha here, now. And for fuck’s sake put somebody on the star demon. I think Iago’s here.” The magic of the outgoing teleport had felt different, bigger.
Then he spun as a big makol with a nose ring and the robes of a village shaman-priest came out of the trees and lunged, slashing. The buzz-sword bit into and through Dez’s shield. He felt the blow not just in his shield but in his body; pain roared in his shoulder and chest and he staggered back, went down. He landed hard and lost hold of Reese. And his godsdamned shield shorted out.
“Fuck!” He launched to his feet, putting himself in front of her as the big makol raised his buzz-sword for the killing blow. He tried to call his shield. Failed. Tried to call lightning. Failed. Went for his .44, but it was too late. The buzz-sword sliced the air and—
Foliage whipped suddenly as a furry grayish blur erupted from the cacao grove and leaped on the makol.
Dez froze for a split second, surprised as hell when the dog—wolf? coyote?—clamped its teeth on the shaman’s sword arm and twisted. Inertia spun them around, and then the huge canine was on top of the makol , snarling horribly as it tore out the demon’s throat and then bit down on its face with a terrible crunch.
More makol raced out of the grove and the big dog spun to face them with a chilling snarl, its jaws dripping blood and saliva. Then it leaped over the attackers, raced back into the cacao. And disappeared.
Whump! Air displaced as Strike and six more magi appeared in the middle of the fight. Immediately, they slammed shield magic into place and started blasting away. Rabbit and Michael were in front, wielding fire and muk. The deadly magical flows scythed through the bulk of the makol while the others napalmed with fireballs, then followed up with head-and-heart magic.
“Don’t let them at your shields,” Dez snapped. “One of them shorted mine out.” He couldn’t explain that. Couldn’t explain the coyote. Couldn’t explain how Iago had gotten inside the ward. Impossible, all of it.
Yet it had happened. And Reese had taken the brunt.
Fuck.
He dropped down beside her, gathered her up, cursed when he felt the feverish heat pouring off her body and heard the way her breath sobbed in her lungs, strange and rattling. “Sasha!” he called harshly. “Now. She took a buzz-sword blade to the shoulder.”
But Reese shook her head weakly and rasped, “The shoulder’s just a cut. That’s not . . .” She swallowed hard, then pushed up her sleeve and said faintly, “This is worse.”
Her right wrist was swollen and angry, the flesh dimpled in a semicircular bite that was blackened at the edges and wept clear fluid from the center. The sight sledgehammered Dez in the gut and chilled him down to his very soul. “Son of a bitch.”
The magi had been lucky so far—none of them had been bitten—but they all knew what it said in the library about makol bites: They had to act immediately. And even then, the odds weren’t good for a mage.
For a human, they were even worse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Strike zapped the entire fighting force straight to the sacred chamber in the center of the mansion, both because Reese would need all the help she could get, and because it was a defensible position.
Michael and Nate each took a door and cast heavy shield magic, because until further notice, no place was safe.
Dez carried Reese to the big chac-mool altar, which was set in cement made from the ashes of long-ago Nightkeepers. He slid down so they were sitting together on the floor, with him leaning back against the altar and her cradled in his lap, her back to his front, so he could brace her and hold her injured arm steady.
She moaned weakly, drifting back to consciousness to ask, “What are you doing?”
“We need to cut you and get the poison out right away,” he whispered into her hair. It was the only way—it might be an old wives’ tale for snakebites, but when it came to magic, the old remedies worked best. “We’ll use a sleep spell. You won’t—”
“No,” she said. “No sleep spell.” She shuddered. “Hate ’em.” Her voice slurred, but her eyes were adamant.
He started to argue, but Sasha interrupted, saying, “I need her conscious. She has to say the spell.” The worry was plain in her face though: As a human, Reese didn’t have any magic. The spell might not have any power coming from her.
He met Sasha’s eyes, saw her agonized sympathy. “Don’t,” he rasped. Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t look at me like that. “She can sense the magic,” he said almost desperately. “Not loud and clear, but she knows when I’m jacked in.” It was something he hadn’t let himself think about too closely, because it only added to the self-serving logic urging him to take her as his mate.
“Then link up with her,” Sasha ordered. “Gods know she’s going to need all the help we can give her.”
There was a commotion among the others, a flurry of phone and radio traffic. Dez caught the words “star demon” and “fucker got it” and his gut twisted with the knowledge that they were in deep, dark shit. Iago had at least four of the artifacts, might know where to find the fifth.
He cursed. They should have been safe inside the compound. What the hell had happened? How had the fuckers gotten in? He was furious—at Iago, at the whole fucking situation—but he shoved all that aside and bent over Reese. Her body was cooling from the spiked fever, but not in a good way. She was limp and clammy, her breathing labored. Her hand was swollen and hot, the blackness of the bite mark spreading along the webwork pattern of her veins. Death follows quickly, the codices warned about makol bites. And he could practically see her fading, see the darkness overtaking her. A tsunami of emotion hammered through him—rage, regret, guilt, loss, grief—all the things he hadn’t fully felt when he lost her the first time. Back then, he’d been lost himself, and by the time he found his way out with the help of the Triad magic, it had been far too late for him to go after her. Now, though, he realized that he had kept her image inside him, and fought every skirmish with her locked in his heart, knowing she was out there in the world he was defending. He couldn’t lose that, couldn’t lose her.
He wanted to pray, but couldn’t find the inner stillness he needed. So as Sasha used her belt to set a tourniquet above Reese’s elbow, he pulled his knife and carved a jerky furrow in his palm, then hers. He clasped her hand, pressed his cheek to hers, and whispered, “Pasaj och.”
Magic flowed into him, but it weighed him down rather than lifting him up.
Sasha linked up on the other side, connecting her flow of life energy to Reese’s. “Okay,” the healer said, poising her knife over the bite mark. “On four. One, two . . .” She slashed on “three,” bringing a gout of watery black fluid, followed by blood.
Reese stiffened and gave a harsh, strangled cry. Pain radiated into Dez through the blood-link—it was dull and unfocused compared to what he was used to sensing from uplinks with the other magi, but it was there, damn
