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.
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.