“Maybe I could meet you out there tomorrow morning,” he suggested casually.
Her lips curved. “It’s a date.”
It was also, he thought, a start.
“Sit,” Michael ordered, coming up behind him. “Unless you’d rather wear this?”
Seeing that he was balancing two pancake-piled plates and a couple of cups of coffee—one light, o n e black as tar—Brandt relieved him of a plate and the non-paint-peeling coffee, and followed Patience to the love seat.
As Michael and Sasha settled themselves, Strike asked Brandt, “Anything you want to add to what you told us last night?”
“Wasn’t that enough?” But Brandt knew what the king was asking. He shook his head. “I’ve got all the memories. Now it’s going to be a case of figuring out what we can do with them. If anything gels, I’ll tell you.”
“Do that.” Strike turned to Lucius, who was hacking away at something on his laptop, fingers flying. Seeing that he was in full-on glyph-geek mode and oblivious to the outside world, the king threw a balled-up napkin, bouncing it off his forehead. “Yo, Doc.”
Lucius straightened and looked around, blinking in surprise. “What? Oh, sorry. This glyph string is .
. . right. Never mind. And don’t call me Doc. My thesis defense was a train wreck.”
“Largely because the head of your committee was Xibalban.” But Strike waved the point off. “What have you got for us?”
“Is Rabbit coming?”
Strike shook his head. “He and Myrinne didn’t crash until like an hour ago. He was up late working on disguising the classified stuff in his head.”
Lucius said, “Well, send him my way when he wakes up. I think we found something that’ll help him block the mind-link.” He dug under his chair, came up with a wrapped bundle, and shook off the T-shirt wrapping to reveal a circlet of pale jade that was worked so thin that it was almost translucent.
Patience leaned forward. “What is it, some sort of necklace?”
“You’re about a foot too low.” Holding the delicate artifact carefully between his palms, Lucius said, “Turns out the tinfoil-hat wearers aren’t that far off; they’re just using the wrong material to protect their brain waves. They should be wearing jade. With this”—he set the circlet on his head, where it perched awkwardly—“the hellmagic shouldn’t be able to get through to him.”
“Nice work,” Brandt said.
Lucius removed the diadem and stared at it for a moment. “I’m still figuring out how to be an effective Prophet, obviously. Now that I’ve got this thing, it seems ridiculously obvious. You guys use jade-tipped bullets and jade grenades to neutralize creatures of dark magic, so it makes sense that something like this could work.” He paused. “We’ll need to field-test it, of course. I can’t guarantee it’ll work against Iago, given that he’s got a demon riding shotgun in his skull.”
“We’ll set something up once Rabbit’s awake,” Strike confirmed. “How did you guys do on the Akbal oath?”
Brandt was aware that Patience’s fork hesitated halfway to her mouth, then slowly lowered to her plate. He almost said, Don’t get your hopes up. Now that the memory block was fully demolished, he remembered the hours he’d spent online and in the library, researching all the religious oaths he could find, looking for a way to break them.
Lucius shook his head. “Sorry.”
Patience let out a long, slow breath. “Did you find anything?”
“No. And that doesn’t make any sense.” Lucius patted the laptop fondly. “Think about it: Akbal is an incredibly common glyph—it’s a day name, and the ancestors were all about their calendars. So going into the library search, I was figuring on getting Google bombed like whoa and damn, because even specifically asking about the ‘Akbal oath’ should’ve pulled hits from most everything related to the concepts of fealty and the calendar.” He paused and spread his hands. “Instead, I didn’t get shit, not even a bunch of random hits. Nothing in the library appears to have the words ‘Akbal’ and ‘oath’ together.”
Strike narrowed his eyes. “Does that mean the oath magic postdates the hiding of the library?”
Because their ancestors had folded the library into the barrier to keep its contents safe from the conquistadors, its knowledge cut off in the mid-fifteen-hundreds.
Lucius tipped his hand in a yes-no gesture. “Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of random hits.”
“You think the ancestors actively avoided using the term ‘Akbal oath,’” Brandt guessed.
“Yeah. Sort of a ‘he who shall not be named’ thing.” Lucius paused. “Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t help us figure out how to deal with the oath.” He paused. “I’ll keep looking.” But his voice warned, No guarantees.
Brandt grimaced. “Thanks for trying.”
Patience threaded her fingers through his and squeezed. “Don’t give up.”
“I’m not—” His voice broke, went ragged. “Damn it.”
“We have today and part of tomorrow,” Strike said. “Something’s got to break. It doesn’t make any sense that the gods came to Patience’s aid against Werigo only to turn their backs on her now.”
Brandt badly wanted to get up and pace, but he made himself stay put, next to Patience, the two of them forming a team within the team, as it should have been all along. Gripping both of her hands in his, he took a deep breath and looked at Strike. “Okay, we’ve got a day and a half. What’s the—” Plan, he was going to say, but an air-raid whoop split the air, drowning him out and kicking his adrenaline level to red alert in an instant.
The loudest, deepest sound came from the mansion intercom, but each of their pocket units emitted smaller, shriller versions of the alarm, which was keyed to the panic buttons carried by each of the residents at Skywatch.
All of who were in the room . . . except for two.
As the others flew to their feet, Jox lunged for the intercom cutoff, killed the alarms, and slapped the button to activate alarm device’s two-way feature. “What’s wrong?”
Myrinne’s voice came over the system, edged with hysteria. “You’ve got to hurry. Something’s wrong with Rabbit!”
Oc Ajal was burning.
The yellow-orange bloom of fire, usually so beautiful to Rabbit, was monstrous as it clawed at the pole buildings, eating away the thatch roofing and carved markings, then down through the skeletons of the structures, to the bones of the village itself.
The flames curled horribly around blackened human shapes. Other bodies were sprawled where they had fallen: A brightly dressed woman lay facedown, clutching a blood-spattered grindstone that suggested she’d died fighting. Several men lay unmoving in front of the central dwelling. A boy’s foot stuck out from behind it, and a half-grown pup lay dead nearby.
Six Aztec makol were spread around the village, carrying shields and long buzz swords across their backs as they hunted their prey.
Dark magic spat in the forest, followed by a scream that cut off abruptly. The makol didn’t react to that, just as they didn’t seem interested in the female sobs and harsh rutting noises coming from inside Saamal’s hut.
Rabbit writhed in his bed. It’s a dream, he told himself. Wake the fuck up! This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream. Iago couldn’t mind-link him through Skywatch’s wards.