Ignoring them, Sven kept his eyes on the ground, searching for tracks while staying attuned to the coyote’s thought stream, which had gone from warnings about the enemy to a growing sense of edgy frustration.
Or was that coming from him? Gods knew he’d been hair-trigger lately. Carlos said the new restlessness and aggression—like the dreams and the hormone surges—came from his magic getting used to the impulses of his familiar, that he would level off soon and go back to being the guy he was. But Sven had a feeling it was the other way around, that he was finally coming into his true self and would stay that way. It felt like he had been sleepwalking for so long, and was just now waking up, just now—
Mac yowled and exploded, diving into a cluster of bushes nearby. Enemy!
Adrenaline hammered through Sven. Yanking his knife and calling up a shield, he hollered and plunged after the big canine. Branches whipped at him, deflecting off the shield as he burst out of the middle growth and into a small, sun-dappled clearing.
There, Mac stood over a villager. For a second, Sven’s heart leaped at the thought that they had found a survivor, but then he got closer and saw otherwise. The man’s body was twisted unnaturally, unmoving, but his face was animated and his eyes shone luminous green as he hissed at Sven, face alight with bloodlust.
“Nice job, Mac,” Sven said, reaching for his knife and prepping himself for the head-and-heart spell. But he paused when something nagged at him. It took him a second, but then he got it: The makol wasn’t regenerating. Something was wrong with it.
He started to crouch down for a closer look, but Mac pivoted over the makol and stood with his legs braced, head lowered, and teeth bared. A bloodcurdling growl rumbled in the coyote’s throat.
Sven froze. “Mac? What the hell?”
The coyote sent a stream of glyph images that spelled out friend-enemy-friend, which didn’t make any more sense than him protecting the makol. But Carlos had impressed on Sven that he needed to trust his familiar, and experience had shown that Mac would get in a snit if ignored. And a hundred-pound coyote having a temper tantrum was not a pleasant experience. So think it through, Sven told himself. Analysis had never really been his thing before, but he’d been getting better at it lately. The coyote had saved Reese’s life by attacking a makol back at Skywatch, but he wouldn’t let Sven near this one, and was even acting protective of it. So what was different? Did it have something to do with how this one wasn’t regenerating?
Friend-enemy-friend came again, this time along with a sharp, mossy smell.
Moving slowly, Sven crouched down again, sending peaceful, nonlethal thoughts. Mac’s growls subsided and he gave way.
The makol’s human host had been a young man, maybe early twenties. He was wearing jeans and a grayed-out wife beater, and had a small, new-looking leather pouch hanging around his neck. The mossy smell Mac had noted was coming from the pouch. With a mental flick that would have been ten times more difficult before his familiar had come into his life, Sven translocated the pouch into his outstretched palm. But the second it vanished from around the makol ?s neck, the creature shuddered and arched, and a terrible, screaming keen ripped from the host’s throat.
Luminous green flashed, blinding Sven, who dove back and yanked up his shield. When his vision cleared, though, there didn’t seem to be any danger. Instead, the other man’s eyes were those of a human once more, filled with pain and grief. He looked at Sven and his lips moved, but no words came out. A second later, his eyes dulled and a last breath leaked out of him.
For a moment, Sven just stood there, clutching the leather pouch that was still warm from the other man’s body.
“Holy shit,” Alexis said from behind him—softly, reverently. “Did you just cure a makol?” He hadn’t heard the others approach, but they were there now, staring down at the corpse, which hadn’t gone to greasy ash, hadn’t required a head-and-heart spell.
“He died,” Sven said hollowly. “That’s not much of a cure.”
“But he died human, and he was killed—or at least fatally wounded—in battle. He’s destined for the sky now.” Which was far better than staying a makol and being automatically consigned to the ninth layer of Xibalba.
“Yeah.” Sven held up the pouch, let it dangle. “The demon flashed out when I took this off him.”
“Shield it and bring it with you,” Strike ordered. “We’re getting out of here. There’s nothing more for us to do here, and work to do back home if we’re going to find Iago and neutralize the fucking serpent staff before the solstice.” To Rabbit, he said, “You want to take care of the body?”
The younger man nodded tightly, and made short work of the ritual cremation. Moments later, he joined the loose circle where the others were linking up for the dispirited ’port home. Sven made sure he had a really good hold on Mac, who was squirming and whining even harder than usual as Strike took a deep breath, tapped into the uplink, and triggered the ’port. And the magic went haywire.
“No!” Heart hammering, Strike lashed out with his mind, trying to recover the fat yellow thread of magic that connected him to his destination during a ’port.
He couldn’t believe he’d lost the fucking thread. One moment it was there, waiting for him to grab on with his mind and give a tug. The next it had slipped through his mental muscles, whipped past the mental blockades Rabbit had set up, and got sucked into a whirl of thoughts and feelings he didn’t recognize. Instead of the usual order, his head was a whirlwind of half-understood images—men and women dancing in ritual robes; warriors locked in battle with dark terrible creatures that breathed fire and bled acid; a huge house in flames.
Forcing himself to focus through the maelstrom, he thought of the great room at Skywatch, pictured it, tried to connect with it . . . and failed. Adrenaline pounded through him as, instead of the familiar sideways lurch and grayish blur of teleportation, the world spun and dropped, doing some sort of crazy carnival shit while magic sparked and flared red, gold, and gray, and wind tornadoed around them.
“Don’t let go!” he shouted to the others over the wind noise, and he clutched the hands linking him on either side—Rabbit on the left, Leah on the right, linked from there to the others. Jesus gods. He was going to kill them all and wipe out mankind’s last and best hope. And Leah. Oh, Leah. My love. I am sorry.
In reply, love came pouring through their jun tan bond to fill him with warm understanding and support, along with an edge that was hers alone. A millisecond later, raw power came into him from the other side as Rabbit opened the floodgates, not trying to mind-bend him or anything, but just being there and offering himself up. I love you, whispered in his mind, coming from Leah, who hadn’t believed in magic before she met him. I trust you, said Rabbit, who didn’t trust anyone, not even himself.
Gathering his magic, focusing it when it wanted to scatter, Strike thought again of Skywatch, visualizing the great room where so much had happened over the past few years, good and bad. It was where the Nightkeepers had first met as a team, where they had bonded and mapped out their plans. And it was where they needed to be now.
The world spun, the wind tore at him. Then, finally, a thin thread appeared in his mind’s eye. He reached for it, touched it, wrapped his mind around it. And pulled.
Crack! The great room took shape around them as the magi materialized right where they belonged. Unharmed.
Thank the freaking gods. Strike went limp as relief poured through him and his power cut out, drained by whatever the hell just happened. He would have sagged if it hadn’t been for Leah on one side, Rabbit on the other. They kept him up, made it look casual, steered him through the crowd.
Incredibly, none of the others seemed all that shaken up. He heard a few jokes about turbulence and barf bags, and Sven’s coyote actually was barfing, but nobody seemed to realize how close they had just come to dying, or that their king had almost lived up to his father’s legacy by finishing off the Nightkeepers. But once Leah and Rabbit got him to the royal suite and into bed, he stared through the glass ceiling of the solarium they used as the master and cursed himself bitterly because he, at least, knew how close it had been. And he knew something else: He couldn’t keep going on like this. He had been gutting through the fogginess in his brain and rearranging things to minimize the number of ’ports he needed to do in a given day, but this . . . shit. What the hell was happening to him?
And it couldn’t be a coincidence that the jaguar king was losing it just as a challenger was stepping up. Dez claimed he didn’t want the throne, and Strike sure as shit didn’t want to lose his kingship—never mind his life here on Earth, with Leah—but there were prophecies in play, just like Anna’s message said. What do you want from
