Itchy’s body—it had to be a body, because there was no way anything could survive with its head hamburgered up like that—hit the back wall and slid down, drawing a gory streak.
Shaking, sobbing, she bolted for the ladder, her only thought to escape, to get free, to get somewhere, anywhere far away. Then her eyes locked on the carved chest, which sat near the trapdoor. Yes, the voice inside her said. Open it.
‘‘I don’t know how,’’ she whispered. There was no latch, padlock, or keyhole, no obvious way to get the thing open.
Yes, you do.
No, she didn’t. But somehow she did. She held her torn wrists over the lid and waited for a few drops of blood to fall. When they did, she whispered, ‘‘Pasaj.’’
She didn’t have a clue what it meant or where it’d come from, but it worked. The trunk opened, not by the boring old lock-and-lid method, but by freaking vaporizing, puffing out of existence as though it’d never been. Inside the box lay a square packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a shoelace. It glowed red and resonated a high, sweet note in her soul.
Mine, Leah thought, and reached for it. Her fingers closed over the packet, and cool heat radiated up her arm as she tucked the thing into the back pocket of her jeans. Her headache snapped out of existence, and the pressure disappeared as though it’d never been, leaving a silence inside her head that crackled with electricity, with power. With urgency.
She had to get out of there, had to get away. She hadn’t heard any other footsteps down below, but kept the empty Glock at the ready, figuring it’d be good for intimidation if nothing else.
She was halfway down the ladder when a heavy weight slammed into her from behind.
Screaming and fighting for balance, she pitched forward and landed hard, rolling onto her back as she scratched for freedom, trying to struggle out from underneath her attacker.
Itchy’s ruined face loomed over her, which was just unbelievable. He shouldn’t still be alive. But as she watched, the flesh started knitting back, eyes and tendons re-forming, meat growing out to cover regenerating bone. Impossible! she screamed in her head, but knew it wasn’t a dream. It was real.
Shrieking, she jerked a knee up between them and tried to break free, but he was too strong. She couldn’t get any leverage as his fingers closed over her throat and bore down. Her windpipe folded closed under the pressure, and her consciousness dimmed.
Help, she cried in her skull. Help me!
Damn it! Strike’s mind raced as he looked around the featureless mist of the barrier, searching for the others.
What’d gone wrong? What had—No, never mind that, he told himself. Just go back and get them. If they were already jacked in, he should be able to tap into Red-Boar’s connection and follow from there.
Closing his eyes, he envisioned his corporeal body still sitting cross-legged in the ceremonial chamber back at the training center.
Without warning, red-gold light flared behind his eyelids, and power thrummed through him on a high, clarion note of alarm. Everything inside him froze.
The protection spell had activated. Leah was in immediate fear for her life.
‘‘Leah!’’ he shouted, rage and anger coalescing in his soul. ‘‘Hold on!’’ He closed his eyes, thought of her, grabbed onto the travel thread that appeared in his mind’s eye, and—
Logjammed.
His mind raced. Leah needed him, but so did the trainees. Given that he’d gotten knocked off course within the barrier, what was to say Red-Boar hadn’t gotten his ass lost, too? The trainees might be alone, stuck somewhere, unable to get back. But Leah was in danger.
Nightkeepers before mankind, the king’s writ said. Mankind before family and personal desire. But the gods were before all else, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that Leah’s trouble had hit during the aphelion, could it? What if she were still connected to the god somehow?
Caught between the two, Strike stripped off the heavy headdress and tipped his head back so he could say to the gray sky, ‘‘Gods, I know I haven’t been the best about my prayers, but please hear this one. Please help me make the right choice.’’
‘‘Go to her.’’ The words came from everywhere and nowhere at once, in an amalgam of many different voices, all speaking at once, though at different pitches.
Heart jamming his throat, Strike looked around. ‘‘Who said that?’’
Nearby, a human-shaped shadow darkened the mist. It was tall and broad, in the way of all Nightkeepers, but stick-thin, as if the muscle and substance had melted away. It solidified out of the fog, a man yet not a man, with nut-brown skin drawn in tight wrinkles over bones and sinew, and gleaming obsidian orbs instead of eyeballs. On its right inner forearm, it wore the mark of the jaguar bloodline.
‘‘Nahwal,’’ Strike said quietly, heart thudding against his ribs as he tried to figure out whether he should bow or run. The nahwal of each bloodline embodied a small piece of all the ancestors from that line—not their personalities, but fragments of their wisdom and sight. The creatures lived—if you could call it that—in the barrier and showed themselves when they chose, provided information when they chose. They weren’t supposed to have distinguishing marks, save for their bloodline glyphs. But as this one approached, Strike saw the glint of a bloodred ruby in its left ear.
Chest tightening, he touched his own left ear, where the piercing he’d gotten in his teens had long since grown over. ‘‘Father?’’
‘‘The others must find their own way,’’ the many-voiced voice said without inflection. ‘‘Go now, or the woman dies.’’
The mists thickened, and it was gone.
‘‘Wait!’’ Strike took two running steps toward where the image had been, then slammed on the brakes when the surface beneath him shifted. The ground—or whatever the hell it was—under his feet fell away, sliding like quicksand, or soil running into a growing rift, drawing him with it. The mists around him shifted from green to gray, warning that he was far too close to the edge of the barrier.
‘‘Shit!’’ Backpedaling, he scrambled to solid ground, then stood, chest heaving with exertion, with the desire to shout, What the hell is going on?
But he didn’t have the time for more questions. Leah didn’t have the time. And though he knew the nahwal could’ve been wishful thinking, that he could be following his father’s steps into the place where delusion became reality, he couldn’t—just couldn’t—leave her to die. So he was going to have to screw the writs and go with his gut.
Closing his eyes, he pictured Leah. Grabbed the travel thread.
And made the selfish choice, hoping to hell it was the right one.
Leah wrestled with Itchy’s choke hold, growing weak as oxygen dimmed and her consciousness flickered. Panic kicked alongside an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, as though she’d suffocated before, died before. Only she hadn’t.
Please help, she screamed in her mind, arching against her attacker in mindless terror, in supplication. Please!
There was a sharp crack, and a huge ripping noise filled her upstairs hallway with sound and light and wind. The next thing she knew, the blue-eyed guy was there, wearing a seashell-dotted red robe that should’ve made him look foolish but instead made him look like a warrior from another time, a modern samurai.
He took one look at the situation, and his face contorted with terrible rage. He grabbed Itchy by his bloodstained shirt and pants, hauled the bastard off her, and slammed him into the wall. There was a sickening crack, and Itchy’s ruined head flopped sideways.