He squeezed her fingers. “Stay safe.” Then he broke their handclasp, drew his knife with an almost inaudible rasp, and moved out.
With her warrior’s talent going full blast, Patience mirrored his movements, monitoring his position by the faint sounds he made as they entered the cave and skirted the outer perimeter, where the shadows largely concealed their growing trail of footprints in the sand.
When they got within a few feet of the makol, Brandt moved in for an invisible attack. All Patience saw were the consequences: The guard jerked, his luminous eyes going wide and his mouth gaping in a gurgling cry as his throat opened in a gruesome line of blood that quickly became an arterial spray.
The second makol spun and shouted, then slashed out wildly with his buzz sword. Patience ducked the attack and used an invisible foot sweep to send him sprawling, then followed him down, planted a knee in the middle of his back, and pithed him.
Her bile surged as the cartilage, tendons, and muscle at the back of his neck resisted and then gave, and her blade slid home. She twisted, and the makol convulsed and went still.
Exhaling, she reminded herself: Head incapacitates, heart banishes. These lesser makol didn’t require the complicated cardinal-day ritual it would take to banish a powerful ajaw-makol like Iago had become, but she still needed to make sure her enemy was dead.
As the Nightkeepers’ powers had increased, so had those of their enemies.
A few feet away, the other makol’s protective tunic ripped off its chest, seemingly of its own volition, revealing a heavily tattooed, thickly muscled chest and abdomen. When a long slice appeared out of nowhere, she gagged and dropped the invisibility spell.
Brandt appeared, grim-faced and covered in blood. He met her eyes over the makol’s body. “I’ll take care of both of them. See what you can do about the bomb.”
Adrenaline spurted anew. The bomb. Oh shit.
Bolted securely to the stone very near where the light-magic doorway had appeared, the device was marked only with a bar of light that flashed through a building sequence from dim to bright and back again, on a repeating cycle that sped up incrementally as she approached.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. It was a timer, but without a countdown, she didn’t have a clue how long they had left. It could have ten minutes left on it, or ten seconds. Her gut-level instincts said to haul ass out of there. Her DNA said they had to protect the light-magic intersection. An explosion wouldn’t hurt the magic, but it could block the hell out of the tunnel.
“If we can get it off the wall—” She reached for the device, heart racing.
Dark magic spat a fat spark, pain cracked through her body, and a booming electric shock flung her backward. Brandt lunged forward and caught her against him; she clung for a second, grateful when he called up his shield magic to protect them both.
“Are you okay?”
“Tenderized.” But the magic had given her an idea. “We can shield it ourselves and contain the blast,” she said quickly, pulse hammering as the light blinked faster by the second.
Working together, racing against the barely flickering light, they cast a pair of double-thick shields, one around them, the other around the bomb and part of the rock wall behind it.
A high whine split the air.
“Close your eyes.” Brandt put his body between her and the danger, pressed her cheek to his chest, and buried his face in her hair.
She wrapped her arms around him and splayed her hands across his back in a feeble gesture of protecting as much of him as she could. That wasn’t enough to stem the panic that threatened to punch through her warrior’s determination, though. She needed to do something more, say something more.
Don’t say anything you’ll regret later, she warned herself, knowing that her emotions were far too close to the surface.
So instead she rose up on her toes and locked them together in a kiss. She meant to hold herself back, to find the strength of sex magic without giving away too much of herself. But she was too aware of the sacred lagoon behind them, the drape of green vines, and the yellow warmth of the sunlight coming down from up above. Power hummed around them, coming from the shield spells, from the cave itself. And from the heat that sparked at the first touch of her lips on his.
Yes, she thought. This was their place. This was where they clicked, where they made sense.
He groaned at the back of his throat and answered her kiss, pulling her up into his body and sliding his tongue against hers. And she gave him everything, holding nothing back. Desire poured from her to him and back again through their jun tan connection, turning their shields red-gold, so they were surrounded with the sparkling magic that they made together.
They twined together, held on to each other.
And the bomb blew.
The brilliant flash of the explosion flared through the cave, strobing her vision even through her closed eyelids. The shields muffled the roaring boom, but the spell sucked mad power as they fought to contain the shock wave, concussion, and shrapnel spray.
Patience clung to Brandt, who tightened his arms around her, anchoring them both as they poured their combined magic into the shield, which bucked and shuddered, threatening to give way.
It held, though, remaining intact as the conflagration within it crested and drained. The terrible pressure on their joined magic eased . . . and they opened their eyes, still nose to nose, their lips touching.
Although their cave visions had skipped the interval between their first kiss and the end of the lovemaking that had followed, those memories filled her now as she looked up and saw tenderness in the gold-shot depths of his brown eyes. And now, as then, she was filled with the utter certainty that the two of them had been meant to find each other that night, that they had been meant to fall in love.
Now, though, she realized that she didn’t know whether they had been meant to stay together.
A deep-seated fear that the answer was no had her wanting to hold on too tight. So instead, she made herself step away from him, drop her shield, and take a look at the damage.
She stared. “Holy crap.”
The shield had contained the explosion exactly within its sphere, carving a scoop out of the stone behind where the bomb had been attached. If the wall had been solid, there would have been a missing half-moon of limestone.
Instead, there was a perfectly circular opening, with darkness beyond.
“The tunnel,” she whispered as her heart stuttered in her chest. They had punched through to the tunnel. “We can get to the inner chamber before the solstice-eclipse.” And maybe—hopefully—call on the gods.
A sudden blast of static made both of them wince, and then Strike’s voice, broken up by interference, said, “Almost . . . we’re . . . shit.”
Patience and Brandt exchanged a look and bolted for the surface.
By the time they got topside, though, the fight was over, the makol gone. The air stank of char and vibrated with magic, but the coast was clear.
Patience’s adrenaline flagged quickly, fatigue threatening to take over, but there was triumph, too, as she said, “The cave is clear . . . and the tunnel is open.”
The announcement was met with a ragged cheer. The magi were beat-up, dirty, and fight-worn, but they had won the intersection.
“Don’t get too excited,” Rabbit warned in a low voice from the edge of the group, where he sat on a boulder, slumped and boneless. Myrinne stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Patience hadn’t always loved how much influence the younger woman had over Rabbit, but now she was glad to see her there, the two of them forming a united front against Strike’s scowl.