what to think or believe. Were the sky gods the saviors the Nightkeepers thought them, or were they lying schemers, like Zane here?
Hello? he called, hearing it rattle. Anyone?
In the outside world, the others were discussing Zane’s fate. Sven said, “We can’t just let him go. Not with that inside him. What if we—”
Out of nowhere, a power surge hit Rabbit, making his blood sing. It poured through the walls of his mind, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. The rattles got louder and louder, sounding like a crazed mariachi band trying to do “Radar Love” on fast-forward; they swirled around him, tightened in on him, blotted out everything except the noise and the magic.
He must’ve fogged out for a minute, because when things cleared, he heard the others still talking about what to do with Zane. They hadn’t felt the surge. How was that possible?
Because this power is yours alone, Rabbie.
Mama!? The word burst from him with such a rush of hope and joy that it almost made it all the way back to his body, to be shouted aloud.
Careful. Some secrets are better kept until you know more. Finish quickly here and then come to me.
The power snapped out of being, though its echo remained. Rabbit’s heart thudded happily in his ears; the flop sweats were gone, along with his hesitation over what to do with Zane. He was powered up, jazzed, ready to get on with things as he tuned back in to the conversation.
Cara was saying, “I don’t like it. What’s more, the others are going to be pissed if they find out your idea of ‘releasing’ Zane was to stick him in a mental institution and fake the paperwork to keep him there through the end date. You’re getting dangerously close to imprisoning winikin to avoid a mutiny.”
“Trust me,” Dez said. “I’m aware of the parallels. But not everything Scarred-Jaguar did was one hundred percent wrong. And, besides, the rumors are your problem.”
“We’ll tell ’em he was mind-bent and released,” Sven said promptly. “They don’t need to know the rest. And, Cara, seriously? Admit it. You don’t want him released all the way, either. You know what he’s capable of.”
She made a noise of disgust, but subsided.
“So I should get started?” Rabbit asked, trying not to let his real body jitter with suppressed excitement the same way his mental projection was doing inside Zane’s skull.
“Yeah,” Dez said. “Do it. We’ll deal with the logistics.”
Working fast, riding high on the power that was apparently his alone—the others sure didn’t seem to notice it—Rabbit slapped heavy blocks around Zane’s key memories of Skywatch and the people inside it, repressing them and installing new surface memories that turned the training compound into an encampment hidden in the Blue Mountains, the Nightkeepers into a doomsday militia that was raided and scattered.
All the while, he was acutely aware of the power flowing through him. It wasn’t dark magic but wasn’t fully light, either. It was his mother’s magic, now his own.
Gods, he had almost started to believe she’d been a dream.
“Rabbit? You okay?” The question came in Dez’s voice. “You need a break?”
“Nope, I’m almost finished.” Hurrying now, he soldered the last few blocks into place and added a couple of fail-safes, along with giving Zane a newfound craving for garlic pickles, because he liked Cara, damn it, and the bastard had messed with her. He might have done more—how’s a little erectile dysfunction sound, there, Zane, old boy?—but the magic was tugging him back toward his cottage, to the place where he’d hidden the two eccentrics.
He could feel the small carvings vibrating, yearning to be together for the first time since he’d discovered the second one. He didn’t know how or why, but the channel for communication was wide-open, waiting for him to tap into it.
“He’s all set,” he said as he started backing out of Zane’s consciousness layer by layer. Where he usually had to brace himself to pull out when he’d been so deeply enmeshed, now there was just a faint tug of conscience, a protest from the part of himself that remembered what it felt like to have his own brain fucked with, and regretted having to do it to someone else, even a traitor.
Then he was out of Zane’s mind and back in his own, blinking to clear his vision while the others talked over his head. The room spun. The magic heated, calling him, begging him.
“Gotta go,” he mumbled, shoving abruptly to his feet and heading for the door of the small storage room– slash–prison cell. “Need to…” He pantomimed barfing. “He’s fine. He’s good. Send him wherever he’s gonna go.”
Cara took a couple of steps toward him. “Do you need something? Food? Help back to your cottage?” As much as she tried not to be a winikin, she was a nurturer at heart. Not that she would thank him for saying it, even if he could get a coherent sentence through the pounding beat of magic that filled his head.
“No. I’m fine,” he managed, though he didn’t think any of them were buying it. “Just need a bathroom.”
He made it upstairs to the one on the mansion’s main floor, locked the door, and turned on the water in the sink to cover any telltale noises. Then he yanked his knife, blooded his palms, and sank to the tiled floor opposite the john, his body going heavy and lax as he focused inward, knowing what he had to do and sensing that he was running out of time, the channel of communication threatening to fade if he didn’t get it right.
Concentrating so hard that sweat popped down his spine and chilled against the cool marble of the bathroom wall, he thought of the eccentrics, stuck in separate socks at the bottom of a drawer. Telekinesis was his weakest talent, but with all the magic rocketing through him right then, he could’ve moved a frigging mountain.
Instead, he eased the eccentrics out of their socks and slid them together, all of it happening inside his underwear drawer. He felt the pieces move, felt them click into place and fuse. The universe seemed to take a breath and hold it. Then there was a soundless detonation inside him, a boom of pressure. For a second his perceptions lurched and grayed out.… And when they cleared, he found himself standing in the middle of a blasted desert that wasn’t like anything he’d ever experienced before.
What… the… fuck?
He turned a full circle, seeing only gray and more gray: an ashen landscape of dunes and black, twisted trees with a horizon of a black, featureless sky.
It looked like the in-between, the wasteland that separated the plane of the living from that of the dead, and where souls could walk forever and never get anywhere, looping endlessly until they were ready to begin their journey through Xibalba, where they would be tested and earn their way—maybe, hopefully—to reincarnation. But the in-between didn’t have a fitful breeze that brought him the sharp, acrid smell of ashes, and it was the reddish brown of sky and soil, not corpse gray. More, this didn’t feel like any of the other planes he’d ever been to. If anything, it felt like home, like the earthly plane.
Only it sure as shit didn’t look like it.
A shiver worked its way through him. “Mother?” Although he’d called her “mama” before, that was for kids. And he didn’t know her, not really.
I am here.
He spun and found her behind him, though she hadn’t been there an instant earlier. As before, she wore flowing white and had pale, gleaming eyes. This time, though, she wasn’t translucent. Her body was solid and her bare feet left marks in the ashes. She was really there.
Hello, Rabbie. Her words still sounded in his head, not aloud, but they were stronger now, in a voice that stirred long-buried memories, as did the name.
Rabbie. It had been circling inside his head for days now, alternately warming him and depressing the shit out of him, until he’d felt like a fucking seesaw or a dippy bird or something, zigzagging between extremes of emotion underlaid with the deep, dark fear that it had been a onetime thing, that he’d never see her again.
And now here they were.
He reached for her, needing to touch, but his hand passed right through her image. His gut hollowed out on the realization that wherever they were, he was the ghost. That brought a big-ass chill crawling down his spine, as did the realization that he couldn’t feel the magic anymore, as if he’d used it up… or he was in a place where magic didn’t work.
“Where are we?” he asked. “Is this the dark barrier?” The shiver dug in and got claws, but beneath it there
