Luminous green flashed, blinding Sven, who dove back and yanked up his shield. When his vision cleared, though, there didn’t seem to be any danger. Instead, the other man’s eyes were those of a human once more, filled with pain and grief. He looked at Sven and his lips moved, but no words came out. A second later, his eyes dulled and a last breath leaked out of him.
For a moment, Sven just stood there, clutching the leather pouch that was still warm from the other man’s body.
“Holy shit,” Alexis said from behind him—softly, reverently. “Did you just cure a makol?” He hadn’t heard the others approach, but they were there now, staring down at the corpse, which hadn’t gone to greasy ash, hadn’t required a head-and-heart spell.
“He died,” Sven said hollowly. “That’s not much of a cure.”
“But he died human, and he was killed—or at least fatally wounded—in battle. He’s destined for the sky now.” Which was far better than staying a makol and being automatically consigned to the ninth layer of Xibalba.
“Yeah.” Sven held up the pouch, let it dangle. “The demon flashed out when I took this off him.”
“Shield it and bring it with you,” Strike ordered. “We’re getting out of here. There’s nothing more for us to do here, and work to do back home if we’re going to find Iago and neutralize the fucking serpent staff before the solstice.” To Rabbit, he said, “You want to take care of the body?”
The younger man nodded tightly, and made short work of the ritual cremation. Moments later, he joined the loose circle where the others were linking up for the dispirited ’port home. Sven made sure he had a really good hold on Mac, who was squirming and whining even harder than usual as Strike took a deep breath, tapped into the uplink, and triggered the ’port. And the magic went haywire.
“No!” Heart hammering, Strike lashed out with his mind, trying to recover the fat yellow thread of magic that connected him to his destination during a ’port.
He couldn’t believe he’d lost the fucking thread. One moment it was there, waiting for him to grab on with his mind and give a tug. The next it had slipped through his mental muscles, whipped past the mental blockades Rabbit had set up, and got sucked into a whirl of thoughts and feelings he didn’t recognize. Instead of the usual order, his head was a whirlwind of half-understood images—men and women dancing in ritual robes; warriors locked in battle with dark terrible creatures that breathed fire and bled acid; a huge house in flames.
Forcing himself to focus through the maelstrom, he thought of the great room at Skywatch, pictured it, tried to connect with it . . . and failed. Adrenaline pounded through him as, instead of the familiar sideways lurch and grayish blur of teleportation, the world spun and dropped, doing some sort of crazy carnival shit while magic sparked and flared red, gold, and gray, and wind tornadoed around them.
“Don’t let go!” he shouted to the others over the wind noise, and he clutched the hands linking him on either side—Rabbit on the left, Leah on the right, linked from there to the others. Jesus gods. He was going to kill them all and wipe out mankind’s last and best hope. And Leah. Oh, Leah. My love. I am sorry.
In reply, love came pouring through their jun tan bond to fill him with warm understanding and support, along with an edge that was hers alone. A millisecond later, raw power came into him from the other side as Rabbit opened the floodgates, not trying to mind-bend him or anything, but just being there and offering himself up. I love you, whispered in his mind, coming from Leah, who hadn’t believed in magic before she met him. I trust you, said Rabbit, who didn’t trust anyone, not even himself.
Gathering his magic, focusing it when it wanted to scatter, Strike thought again of Skywatch, visualizing the great room where so much had happened over the past few years, good and bad. It was where the Nightkeepers had first met as a team, where they had bonded and mapped out their plans. And it was where they needed to be now.
The world spun, the wind tore at him. Then, finally, a thin thread appeared in his mind’s eye. He reached for it, touched it, wrapped his mind around it. And pulled.
Crack! The great room took shape around them as the magi materialized right where they belonged. Unharmed.
Thank the freaking gods. Strike went limp as relief poured through him and his power cut out, drained by whatever the hell just happened. He would have sagged if it hadn’t been for Leah on one side, Rabbit on the other. They kept him up, made it look casual, steered him through the crowd.
Incredibly, none of the others seemed all that shaken up. He heard a few jokes about turbulence and barf bags, and Sven’s coyote actually was barfing, but nobody seemed to realize how close they had just come to dying, or that their king had almost lived up to his father’s legacy by finishing off the Nightkeepers. But once Leah and Rabbit got him to the royal suite and into bed, he stared through the glass ceiling of the solarium they used as the master and cursed himself bitterly because he, at least, knew how close it had been. And he knew something else: He couldn’t keep going on like this. He had been gutting through the fogginess in his brain and rearranging things to minimize the number of ’ports he needed to do in a given day, but this . . . shit. What the hell was happening to him?
And it couldn’t be a coincidence that the jaguar king was losing it just as a challenger was stepping up. Dez claimed he didn’t want the throne, and Strike sure as shit didn’t want to lose his kingship—never mind his life here on Earth, with Leah—but there were prophecies in play, just like Anna’s message said. What do you want from me? he sent into the sky, envisioning Kulkulkan, the god that had been his and Leah’s special guardian before the destruction of the skyroad. What am I supposed to do?
There was no answer. Just the slant of the afternoon sun that should have been pleasant but instead was a reminder that their time was running out.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pueblo Bonito
It was sunset by the time Dez was finally finished with Keban. He had refused to cremate him on the sacred ground of Skywatch—and suspected that the others, particularly the winikin, would object if he had tried—but when it came down to it, he hadn’t been able to just dump the bastard in a ditch, either. So he had come up to Bonito, the Chacoan castle built by their ancestors, and he had built a funeral pyre.
The humans considered the ruins a soaring mystery, the last remnants of an elusive tribe that had lived a thousand years earlier, leaving behind a grand stone-and-timber castle with many floors, dozens of kivas, hundreds of rooms, and tricky interplays of light and shadow that could be used to tell time or plot the stars. Some scholars thought it had been a trading center, others a home for the gods. In a way it had been both, though not even his serpent ancestors would have been ballsy enough to call themselves gods. He hoped. Either way, this was the serpents’ castle, and whatever else he had been and done, Keban had served the bloodline by saving its last male descendant. So Dez built a small pyre in a sheltered spot near a curving wall and lit it with a combination of diesel and magic. He watched the smoke curl, blocked out the smell, and listened to the hiss-pop of the fire, let himself drift . . .
It was the day of the Nightkeepers’ planned attack on the intersection, and the training compound was a beehive of activity overlain with tension.
Dez’s vantage was all feet and knees, his perceptions those of a three-year-old, but he felt the tension in the air as the huge, battle-armored warriors and their winikin gathered in the courtyard. Knots of men and women were being kept under guard as they prepared for battle—Dez had heard them called dissy-dents; he wasn’t sure what that meant, but he could see they were mad, and most everyone else was mad at them.