exactly the way I had planned.”
After telling Cara that she was Jox’s chosen successor, Sven had given her the opportunity to bolt and she’d taken it. Then, a few weeks later, she showed up at Skywatch with the rebels… on her own terms.
Sven shrugged and pointed out, “She got here eventually.”
“Yes, she did, and I’m far better off with her willing cooperation than I would’ve been if I had forced her into the position. That’s why you’re getting a choice now.”
“What happens if I say no?”
“I’ll use Rabbit to eavesdrop. I don’t want to, though.”
“Christ,” Sven muttered, though Carlos had boxed his ears more than once early on for calling on the son of the Christians’ God. “It’d be a fucking train wreck if they figured out you mind-bent them to get information.” Bad enough if they caught wind that the king suspected them of treason. If they realized Rabbit was using his magical talents to spy on them telepathically… Shit. Twenty times worse. A hundred.
“Like I said, I don’t want to do it. But we can’t afford to have this blow up.”
Then don’t ask me to do it, Sven almost said, because gods knew he’d fucked up major assignments before, like the time he’d fumbled a translocation spell during a museum heist and Patience had wound up hurt. He’d gotten steadier since bonding with Mac, but he hadn’t been given any really sensitive tasks since then, either. Most of his assignments had been of the slash-and-burn variety. Or tracking. He and Mac together were hell on wheels finding shit, and it kept them on the move. But spying? And using Cara and Carlos to do it? He didn’t know about that.
“Why not ask someone else? There are plenty of others who are closer to their winikin than I am.” Hello, understatement.
“Because you also worked with JT down south, and you got along with him as well as anyone outside of the rebels has, which gives you connections in both camps. And besides”—a ghost of a smile touched Dez’s lips —“Reese and I agree that if Rabbit is our loose cannon, you’re our wild card. We have this feeling that you haven’t gotten to the bottom of yourself yet, and that if and when you do, big things could happen.”
“Big good, or big bad?”
The smile got real. “That’s the ‘wild’ part.” The king paused. “Do you gamble?”
Sven thought of winter nights, a fire in the hearth, and an ancient wagering game spread out on the kitchen table: the patolli, which was an ancestor of the modern Parcheesi, with rolls of the dice, figures moving around the board, and strategies of defense and offense. Carlos had used it to teach him war games; Cara had used it to win her way out of chores; and her mom, Essie, had just liked having the four of them together in one place. When the memory threatened to hit the nostalgia button, he set it firmly aside and shook his head. “Not for a long time.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to give it a shot.” The king stood. “Think about it and let me know.”
But as Sven strode away from the royal suite, with Mac at his heels and no real destination other than “away,” he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do. If there was a problem—or worse, a traitor—it needed to be dealt with, and fast… but if there wasn’t, and it came out that he’d been getting close to Cara and Carlos to spy on the winikin, it wouldn’t be worth trying to fix those relationships. In fact, if that happened he might as well just hit the road and keep on going, because they—and especially she—would never speak to him again.
CHAPTER THREE
“Lame, lame, boring, meh, lame…” Near dusk on the day of the funeral gone awry, in a dark corner at the rear of the long, narrow stone room that housed the library, Rabbit rifled through yet another box of carefully labeled artifacts. The brain trust had culled the pieces as being more or less related to the boar bloodline, so he was going over them in the hopes that he’d get a vibe. So far, though, there was a whole lot of nothing going on.
Okay, the artifacts themselves were pretty cool—he had come across a set of spear-thrower missiles that were made out of intricately carved peccary-tusk ivory and weighted with slivers of stone, and he had been tempted to swap out the ceremonial knife he wore on his belt for a longer, thinner blade made of pale green stone and carved with repeating boar motifs. But a MAC-10 loaded with jade tips—or better yet a fireball—kicked ass over a spear-thrower any day, and the knife he wore had been his old man’s. And although Red-Boar had been a miserable son of a bitch, tradition said you used the weapon that got handed down, like it or lump it. Besides, he wasn’t browsing for some “ooh, shiny” shit to take with him just because it appealed. The magi all had boxes to go through, because the Nightkeepers badly needed some new tricks.
“Boring, boring…” He paused to pick up a weird-ass clay statue that was about the length of his forearm and covered with a red pigment that had faded to Pepto pink. Although the glyph incised on the bottom was a boar, the thing itself looked like some sort of waterbird. Eyeballing it, he muttered, “Shit, glad you’re not giving me any tingles.” He could just picture himself going up against the dark lords wielding a Death Flamingo, or whatever the fuck it was. No frigging thank you. He shook his head and put it back down. “Sissy, boring, lame, lame…”
Gods, there was a ton of stuff from the boar bloodline. Then again, the boars had been the royal bloodline prior to the jaguars, reigning during the first millennium, when the library was established, so he guessed it made sense they would figure heavily in the archived material. And he didn’t mind some quiet time alone in the library, really. It was peaceful, and he’d been pretty damn short on peace lately.
The cluster-fuck with the xombi virus had taken something out of him, plain and simple. He had gone down there thinking he, Sven, and the others would be able to handle the outbreak, save the villagers, and block the magical pipeline that was causing the problem. Instead, he’d found himself razing the very villages he’d gone there intending to protect, then helping Sven track and kill the xombis, napalming dozens of them, hundreds.
He still woke up pretty much every morning with the stink of it lodged in his sinuses.
“No buzz, no buzz, boring, boring…” He moved to a nearby rack, stopping at a carved bone miniature of five warriors wearing ceremonial garb, toting spear chuckers and stalking a wild peccary. Beside that was an incense burner painted to show a boar-bloodline warrior offering his heart to a woman who turned her face away.
That one pinged, though not because of any magic.
Damn it. He rubbed the heel of his hand over the center of his chest, which had suddenly gone hollow and achy because of how things had been between him and his human girlfriend, Myrinne, lately. He loved her one hundred percent—he’d kill for her, die for her, and anything in between—but he wished he could get her to stop pressuring him to experiment with the other half of his magic. More, he wished that it didn’t feel like more and more that when she said, I love you, it really meant, I love you when you do what I want. Especially when what she wanted him to do went against the king’s orders.
Last year, a dying Xibalban shaman had named Rabbit the “crossover” and said that his mingled blood made him the key to winning the war using both the light magic of the Nightkeepers and the dark powers of his Xibalban half. But not long after that, their enemy Iago had managed to break Rabbit’s connection to the dark magic—and since then, pretty much every time he’d tried to make a real impact he’d just wound up making things worse, until Dez had finally ordered him to stop trying to reconnect with his darker side. These days he was doing his damnedest to follow orders and be a good mage, a good soldier. And that was driving Myrinne up a freaking wall.
“Shit.” Letting go of the big, weighted-down box he’d just been about to open, he launched to his feet, suddenly needing to pace off the restless energy that came from inside the hollow place in his chest, along with the sly inner voice that said he was a lucky son of a bitch to have her and he’d better do whatever it took not to fuck it up. Once he was on his feet, though, he swayed and had to slap a hand out to steady himself against the nearest wall. “Whoa. Vertigo.”
Sweat popped on his forehead and crawled down his spine, and a rush of nausea filled the hollows. He swallowed hard, then blinked to clear his eyes when they threatened to fog.
Shit, maybe that third chili dog had been a bad idea. He’d needed to recharge his batteries, but maybe he should’ve gone with nice, safe pasta instead of five-alarm pig by-products and extra pepper jack.
Except… His head whipped up as logic made it through the spins, reminding him that the magi didn’t usually get pukey from stuff like food poisoning. Which meant this was something else.
