Rabbit met his eyes and did something he almost never did. He said, “Please.”
The king stayed silent for a long moment. Then he nodded. “Fine. We’ll try it.” He got on the radio and recalled the entire team, his body language stiff and annoyed.
While they waited for the others, Rabbit met Myrinne’s eyes. She gave him a covert thumbs-up and the special smile she reserved just for him, which smoothed out some of the nerves that were digging into him harder by the minute. He sent her a wink of thanks. And as the others converged, he said a small, directionless prayer: Please, gods, don’t let this be a trap.
He didn’t think it was, but Iago knew him too well. Better, it seemed some days, than he knew himself.
“I need a ten-foot radius,” he said. “Except for Michael. I need you in here.” Quickly, Rabbit explained what was going on, and what he was going to try. As he did, Saamal’s ghost faded entirely; he hoped to hell it wasn’t all the way gone. When Michael came up beside him, he said, “I need you to boost me with the smallest trickle of muk you can manage.” Which was a little like trying to plug a reading light into a nuclear power plant—it might work . . . or it might blow the lamp right the fuck up. And he was the lamp.
“You’re sure about this?”
“Yes.” No.
At a nod of agreement from Strike, Michael moved around behind Rabbit and gripped his shoulders, the way he did when he balanced Sasha’s chu’ul magic. “You ready?”
Rabbit nodded. “Bring it.”
Michael brought it, all right. Silver power slammed into Rabbit, searing from his shoulders to the ends of his fingers and toes and back again. Pain ripped through him and he hissed out a breath.
“Too much?” Michael asked, his voice rocky with the effort of squelching the power to a thin trickle.
“I’ll deal.” After the first sledgehammer blow the pain leveled off, then warmed to something closer to pleasure. Magic twined through Rabbit, the silver becoming braided strands of brown and red-gold, dark and light magic intertwined. “Okay,” he breathed, peripherally aware that the others were fixated on him, waiting for him to do something amazing.
Well, he was godsdamned well trying.
Slowly at first, and then with growing confidence, he separated the strands with fingers of thought; he sent the light magic into the back of his brain, where his Nightkeeper talents resided. Then he put his hand once more inside Saamal’s open chest cavity, where his heart should have been, and channeled the dark magic to that point.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the dark power curled around his hand, taking the shape of his fist and becoming almost tangible. Within the bundled magic, he felt a flutter. A pulse. Another.
The throbbing gained in rhythm and intensity as he channeled more dark magic into Saamal. He could almost hear the pulses become a twofold beat: lub dub, lub dub. It was fucking working.
What was more, the ghost became visible once more as a dark shadow beside the body. And, as Rabbit continued to feed the dark magic into the half-finished spell, the ghostly image started drifting down to align with the corpse.
“Come on, old man,” he said under his breath. “You must’ve stuck around for a reason.”
“Ho-ly shit,” Patience whispered from the other side of the fire pit, where she and Brandt stood shoulder to shoulder.
There was enough of his old crush left that he got a buzz off her gasp. But in the split second he was distracted, the magic built inside him too quickly, threatening his control. A shimmer of red-gold magic leaked through the connection, making the ghost writhe with a soundless scream.
“Shit!” Rabbit yanked back the light magic and tried to send it toward his talents, but his usual reserves were already beyond full.
“Let off some steam,” Michael warned in a low voice. “You’ve got to keep the balance between light and dark.”
“Right.” He couldn’t pour dark magic into the elder without bleeding off an equal amount of light magic. But where was he supposed to put it?
Fire, came the immediate instinctual answer. Light this place up in a pyre that all the gods will see.
But the thought brought a twist of nausea and the image of the pole buildings burning with people inside. Smoke clogged his throat and sinuses, smelling of charred flesh. No, he thought. Not fire. Too much had burned there already. With his mind-bending blocked by the circlet, he was left with his smallest talent, that of low-level telekinesis, but what—
“Give it to me,” Jade said unexpectedly. When Lucius no-fucking-way’d her, she waved him off.
“Hear me out. There’s a strange sort of pattern here, some sort of concealment spell. I can’t get a handle on it, though. I need a boost to get a better look.”
Rabbit held out a hand. “Free magic,” he rasped. “Onetime offer, first come, first served.”
At Strike’s nod, Jade moved forward. The moment she took his hand, Rabbit felt a huge rush of relief as the light magic left him and headed for her, and the painful pressure inside him eased.
Then something strange happened: The air around them all took on a gleam of red-gold, then a hint of silver.
“Jade?” Strike said in soft warning.
“There’s a cloaking spell permeating the village,” she said, voice tight with effort. “It’s not the normal sort of magic, but I think that I can reverse it if I just—” The light magic surged through Rabbit and then drained away to almost nothing as she leaned on their link. “There it is. I think if I . .
.”
A psychic shock wave rolled through Rabbit, and both the dark and light connections winked out of existence. Boom, gone. Like they had never been.
“Jade, no!” he cried, but it was already too late. Whatever she had done, it had cut his connection to Saamal. He couldn’t sense the dark-magic spell anymore, couldn’t hear the lub-dub heartbeat that had been going strong only moments before.
But something was happening.
“What the hell?” Michael breathed, staring out into the forests, where a shimmer of magic moved in the distance, working its way around the village, spiraling inward.
Rabbit turned to follow the movement, aware that the others were doing the same as the incandescence became more visible, skipping from one place to another, getting closer.
“It’s coming from the bodies we found in the woods,” Sven said. He pointed ahead of the moving shimmer. “The next one is right about there.” Seconds later, magic flared near where he’d just indicated.
After that, the spell—or whatever the hell it was—entered the village, hazing the air around the burned-out pole buildings where human remains were mixed with char. The magic moved one to the next, ever inward, until it reached the men lying near the central pole building and the woman with the blood-spattered grindstone. When the shimmer cleared, the woman was taller and paler, with honey-
colored hair where it had been dark a second earlier. The men too were bigger and burlier, and had lighter hair.
Before Rabbit could even begin to comprehend what he’d just seen, the shimmer coalesced around Saamal’s body. The air around the corpse shimmered and shifted, and then the body grew, its limbs and torso elongating with strange, Gumby-ish plasticity, then thickening with ropy layers of muscle gone soft with old-man flab. The elder’s face broadened and paled slightly, while the skin of his unmarked forearm darkened in a familiar pattern.
When the air stabilized, the dead man was well over six feet tall, big and tough looking. And he wore a black quatrefoil on his inner right wrist.