Like something in that box, maybe?
Backtracking, he dropped to his heels and tugged on the cross-folded flaps to open the box. It was more than half full of flat stones that had been carved into all sorts of weird shapes. The inner flap was labeled in Lucius’s crabbed writing: Eccentrics for our favorite eccentric.
“Nice,” Rabbit muttered. Lucius—the Nightkeepers’ head researcher and an ass kicker in his own right— might’ve rolled his eyes a little at his request and grumbled about needles in haystacks, but he’d come through and collected a shit ton of eccentrics.
The small, flat pieces of stone were all different shapes, from abstract geometrics to detailed images of people, animals, glyphs, gods… it was all fair game. In ancient times, they had been worn as pendants or symbols of office, tucked into pockets as charms, or even busted up as sacrifices. The small stone artifacts were as common as arrowheads farther north, and hadn’t been thought to have any real magic… until the dying shaman had given one to Rabbit and named him as its wielder, suggesting that some eccentrics, at any rate, could be important.
But although Rabbit had been able to sense power in the small black flint carving, he’d never managed to trigger any sort of magic. Which was why he had asked Lucius to cull others for him, thinking he might need a full set, or a Nightkeeper half to go with the Xibalban piece.
And now, sure enough, as he spread his fingers and let his hands hover above the collection, hot, sparkling magic rose up, feathered along his palms, and flowed into his veins, sweeping along to pool at a point on his upper right thigh, where he carried the black eccentric in his pocket.
Holy shit, he thought, pulse suddenly thundering in his ears. Holy, holy shit. He had known. Somehow, he had known it would work like this.
Dipping into his pocket, he wrapped his fingers around the eccentric, which was all curves and points and looked a little like a flame frozen in stone. Normally it was cool and a little greasy to the touch; now it was blood- warm, echoing the heat coming from the box. And when he pulled it out, he saw that a faint skim of magic slicked the surface of the stone, picking up silver glints in the light.
Silver! His breath hissed out as excitement kicked in. That wasn’t dark magic; it was muk—the light and dark powers joined together. Of the Nightkeepers, only Michael could wield the silver power, and he commanded solely its killing aspect, not its other facets.
But if the magi could harness muk, they could win the war.
Rabbit’s heart pounded. It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered if he could be the guy to rebuild the bridge— the crossover—between the light and dark magic, reuniting the halves. But it was the first time he thought it might actually happen, there and then.
Please, gods. He wasn’t sure if he sent the prayer to the sky or the underworld; he knew only that he meant it with every fiber of his being.
Pulse thudding, he shoved his free hand into the box and started sifting through. Pain stung his fingers and palm as the sharp edges bit in, but he didn’t stop, instead letting his blood smear the stones and mingle with the magic as he searched for the source of the heat.
The spinning in his head shifted his perceptions, making things seem very surreal, like he was standing outside and watching himself pick through stone shapes of white, black, green, gray, with a few flashes of yellow and orange. There was even a single piece of deep, vibrant crimson stone that practically glowed from within, gorgeous and powerful, and seemed so out of place that he picked it up, cradled it in his palm, and stared at it for a long moment before he noticed that his fucking hand was burning.
“Ow! Shit.” Instinct had him juggling the thing to his other hand.
Power roared the second the two eccentrics touched. Brilliant, blinding light flashed from the pieces, so bright and searingly hot that he dropped the stones. They fell, fused together in a twisted shape of black and red. He didn’t hear them land, though, didn’t hear anything except the wham-bam of his heart and the scrape of his boots as he stumbled and went to his knees. He hit the box on the way down, overturning it with a rattling crash.
Light. Heat. Gods.
He shielded his eyes with his arm, which felt naked and singed beneath his shirt. And then, thank fuck, the heat flatlined, then faded to a glow. Rabbit gaped as the glow coalesced into a shape that got bigger—first dog size, then man. “What the fuck?”
Within moments, he was staring at a woman’s white-cloaked figure. And oh, holy shit, he could see right through her.
She was dark haired, fine featured and somehow ageless, rendered even more otherworldly by her eyes, which were a cloudy, opaque white that gleamed from within. She was wearing a feather-worked, embroidered ceremonial robe and a crackling aura of power like he’d never seen before. This wasn’t the greasy brown roil of dark magic, the sparkling red-gold of Nightkeeper power, or even the sliver gleam of muk; it was translucent. It wasn’t anything he knew, but suddenly it was everything, awe inspiring and overwhelming.
If he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would’ve ended up there now. His legs were shaking; his whole body was shaking. “Are you one of the creators?” His voice cracked on the question.
Those luminous eyes widened. Then, to his surprise, she smiled. “No, I’m not. Though in a sense, I suppose I am, from your perspective.” Her voice was soft, feminine and singular, with none of the chorus effect that came from the ancestral beings known as the nahwal. So what was she? A ghost? A goddess?
His heart pounded even faster, though he couldn’t have said why his fight-or-flight was kicking in. Maybe it was the way the bones of her face suddenly seemed familiar, as if he’d seen them in another time and place. Or maybe it was flat-out awe. He didn’t know. He only knew that it felt like he was on the edge of something huge. And that he, who had rarely—if ever—done humility, all of a sudden felt pretty fucking humble.
Voice dropping to a strangled whisper, he forced out: “Who are you? Why are you here?”
“Don’t you recognize me, Rabbie?”
“I don’t…” He swallowed hard and, then, when that didn’t move the lump in his throat, hacked a hairball clearer of a cough. “My name is Rabbit. Nobody calls me ‘Rabbie.’”
The nickname—a shortened version of the already weird-ass name his old man had hung on him—had always made him twitch. He hated it even more than he’d hated “bunny-boy,” “Playboy,” and all the others his high school tormentors had used put together, hated the way it made him feel incomplete, alone, and very, very young.
“No, Rabbit was your nickname. Your birth name was Rabbie.”
“My…” A crushing pressure vised his chest, stealing his breath and putting him on his hands and knees, gasping for air. A humming whine grated in his ears, a gathering darkness crept in on his vision, and incredulity washed through what was left of his brain as he realized that he was about to fucking faint.
Rabbie. My Rabbie. My baby boy. The memory came out of nowhere, singsong words that reached inside him, grabbed his heart, and squeezed.
“No,” he grated in between wretched gulps of air. “No fucking way. That’s not… you’re not… no way.”
No. Impossible.
“Rabbie.” The word was a sigh that prickled his skin.
But was it impossible? No, not really. The shaman had said his mother had probably been one of the handful of his village’s women who had joined—either willingly or by abduction—Iago’s dark, vicious sect of Xibalbans.
“You’re her.” It burned to say, agonized to think, yet when he lifted his head to look at her, he saw his own face. “You’re my mother.”
“Yes.” Her colorless eyes glittered. “You didn’t forget.”
He had, though; his memories began entirely with the strange blended family he’d grown up in. Red-Boar might not have given him affection, acceptance, or even the fucking time of day, but he’d had the good sense to eventually go live with Jox, Strike, and Anna. Even then, Rabbit had grown up a little wild and a lot rebellious, outcast and unhappy until the magic came along and gave him a reason to grow the hell up. It wasn’t until after his old man was killed, though, that he had gone looking for his mother, trying to understand the other half of his magic, the other half of himself.
And now she was here… only she wasn’t. She was see-through and wreathed in magic, clearly not a creature of this plane anymore. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only say, like a dumb ass, “You’re a
