Spellfire Read online

  Apparently the Xibalbans weren’t the only ones who believed that Rabbit was the key to winning the end-time war—the gods did, too, and now the Nightkeepers. And where before their opinions toward him had ranged from “how could he?” to “good riddance,” now along with the wariness and mistrust there was scattered relief and a few “thank the gods,” because they were that desperate for something to believe in. They were pinning their hopes on Rabbit’s rescue and Red-Boar’s promise that he could be redeemed.

  The irony seemed lost on everybody but Myrinne.

  Then again, she was used to being the outlier.

  You can deal with this, she told herself, swallowing hard to keep the growing churn of nausea at bay. You knew it was going to happen one of these days. But now she realized that while her head might’ve known there was a good chance that they would find him and bring him back, her heart hadn’t believed it, not really.

  “You okay?” Anna asked from beside her.

  Myr just stared at her friend, feeling like she was drowning.

  The two of them had nearly two decades between them in age and were miles apart in looks, with Anna’s red highlights, cobalt eyes and ex-professor sensibility contrasting with Myr’s straight dark hair, brown eyes and Goth-goes-coed clothes. Their temperaments were as opposite as their looks, too, but they had bonded recently over their dubious distinction of being Red-Boar’s two least favorite people in the compound—Myr because she was only human and thus worth less than earwax in the old mage’s mind, and Anna because she couldn’t use the seer’s magic of her bloodline.

  It took a moment for Anna’s words to get through, another for Myr to nod. “I’m . . .” she began, but then trailed off, suddenly aware that although most of the others were already on the move, getting geared up for the rescue, there were more than a few sympathetic looks—and outright pity—being shot her way. Her spine stiffened. “Don’t worry about me. I can handle myself.”

  “I know you can. I just wish you didn’t have to.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.” Things were different now, and not just because the gods had sent Red-Boar back with an explanation of Rabbit’s brainwashing and a spell to ensure that he wouldn’t betray his king and teammates ever again.

  “That’s not the only thing you’re going to be up against, living here with your ex.” Anna’s smile went crooked. “Ask me how I know.”

  Maybe it was ridiculous to flinch at the word “ex,” but she’d never had one before. Besides, it sounded weird to call him that. There should be a distinction between a relationship that ended, say, because of infidelity or general assholeness, and one that flamed out in the midst of accusations and attempted murder. And that was when it hit her: after today—assuming the Nightkeepers pulled off the rescue—she would be dealing with Rabbit on a daily basis. Even fighting alongside him.

  A dull headache took root, pounding with the beat of her heart. “I’ll be fine.” I don’t want to talk about it. Not with you. Not with anyone.

  When Dez called for the teleporters to get into position, Anna hesitated. “I could stay.”

  “Don’t. Not on my account. I’ll just . . .” Myr made a vague gesture. “I don’t know. Go take some Tylenol or something. Maybe drink myself stupid.”

  Dez might not be the soul of sensitivity—the former gang-leader-turned-Nightkeeper king was more of the club-and-drag variety—but he didn’t ask if Myr wanted to go on the rescue mission. The answer would’ve been “no,” of course. In fact, she didn’t want to be there to see the warriors in their black combat gear, with their loaded weapons belts slung around their hips, didn’t want to wonder what they were going to find when they reached Rabbit, didn’t want to care.

  Moving on legs gone far wobblier than she wanted to admit, she headed out of the main room with no real destination in mind just so long as she didn’t have to watch the rescue team ’port away. To them, this was the gods’ will, the next step in the battle plan, and Rabbit was just another mage run afoul of dark influences. Lucius had spent more than a year possessed by a demon and working for the Xibalbans; Brandt had turned away from his wife and children because of a decades-old curse; and Dez had spent ten violent, lawless years under the influence of a dark-magic idol. Each of them had come back and redeemed himself, and the Nightkeepers were hoping Rabbit would do the same. They wouldn’t trust him easily—he had gotten plenty of second chances already—but they were willing to give him the slim benefit of a doubt.

  Myr, on the other hand, had no intention of giving him anything, ever again.

  Just leave, whispered her inner, smarter self. Just grab a Jeep and go.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d considered it—she even had a plan, and had stashed some cash and liberated one of the remote controls that the winikin used to deactivate the blood ward and open the main gates. Before, she’d always wound up staying, telling herself that the world needed saving and she could help. Now, though, she realized that she wasn’t nearly so tough as she’d wanted to think, because when it came down to saving the world or avoiding her ex, she was all about plan B.

  “So what are you waiting for?” she asked when she found herself in front of the door leading to the garage wing. “An invitation? Permission?”

  She wasn’t going to get either, she knew, and she shouldn’t have needed them. She was supposed to be a loner, an independent contractor who did what she wanted, when she wanted to. That was what she’d told herself back in New Orleans when freedom had finally beckoned. But almost immediately after the disappearance of the Witch—foster mother, fake tea shop psychic, and general evil bitch—she had fallen in with Rabbit, then fallen for him, hard. He had rescued her, brought her to Skywatch, and offered her everything she’d been raised to want: magic, power, a greater purpose. She had thrown herself into the Nightkeepers’ world, marveled at it, fought for a place in it, and earned the right to call herself a warrior, even if only a human one. And through it all, she and Rabbit had been a team within the team, a pair of misfits who fit perfectly together.

  Or so she had thought.

  When tears fogged her vision, she swiped them away with her sleeve. “Get over it. He’s gone.”

  The others could welcome him back if they wanted to, but as far as she was concerned, the demoness had taken Rabbit away from her long before he’d physically disappeared. In those last few weeks, he had been moody, suspicious and angry, entirely unlike the man she had loved. And that last morning. That horrible morning . . . No. She blocked the memories, not wanting to remember how his eyes had been cold, his voice a double-edged blade, his—

  “Fuck this.” She was moving before she was aware of having made the decision, pushing open the door into the garage and beelining for the wrecked Jeep Compass that sat in the corner, waiting for some body work and a new motor—or a decent burial. The cash and remote were right where she had hidden them, as were the keys to the oldest and most nondescript of the Jeeps, which didn’t have GPS tracking installed. Given that the teleporters couldn’t lock on to her with their magic—so long as she kept herself out of trouble, at any rate—she would be off the Nightkeepers’ grid.

  Heart drumming in her chest with a cadence that seemed to say hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, she fired up the vehicle, hit the override for the garage doors, and aimed for the widening patch of sunlight and desert. She was doing twenty when she burst from the garage, thirty when she flew through the wrought iron gates that guarded the front entrance of the compound. And by the time she hit the first downhill dune leading from Skywatch, she had the pedal to the metal and the Jeep’s engine whining in protest. She didn’t know where she was going, didn’t care, just so long as she disappeared.

  The Nightkeepers could save the world. She was saving herself.

  * * *

  Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico

  Rabbit was just short of making it out of the tunnel when a dozen camazotz suddenly dogpiled him, jamming the tunnel and coming at him like a fucking swarm.r />
  Cornered, he fought hard, swiping at his enemies with the broken-off whip handle, which had cracked on an angle that gave him a weak-assed excuse for a blade. But it was something. By the gods, it was something.

  “Go to hell!” The snarl tore at his throat and drew stabs from his tortured ribs, but the grab-yank-dick-hack move that accompanied it melted another ’zotz to a stinking pile. It was his fourth kill with only eight, maybe ten left to go, but that didn’t matter fuck-all when another rat-eyed bastard took its place almost immediately.

  He was wedged in a narrow spot of the tunnel, where the ’zotz were forced to come at him one by one, like something out of a freaking Spartans-versus-everyone-else movie. Beyond the next curve, sunlight shone in, gleaming white off the limestone. When was the last time he saw the sun?

  “Come on, motherfuckers. Bring it!” He stepped out of his niche and the two nearest creatures screamed and closed on him. He stabbed one in the eye, got a splatter of ichor in his mouth, spat it out and turned on the second just as it wound up to bitch slap him with razor-sharp claws. He cursed and ducked, but he was too damn slow. Fiery pain slashed across his cheek and throat, but he straightened, jammed his makeshift knife straight into the thing’s screeching mouth, and shoved until stone grated on bone.

  As the ’zotz headed for the floor, he spun back to the other one and did a Lorena Bobbitt, in some dim corner of his brain wondering whether he should be worried that it wasn’t even freaking him out anymore to grab on to a demon’s dick, hack it off, and have it puff to dust in his hand. Don’t think. Just do it. Ah, a Nike commercial by way of ancient demondim, he thought, and knew he was brain-babbling. He was losing it—losing steam, losing coherence, losing everything except the driving force that told him he didn’t have time to lose anything. So he turned to the sixth ’zotz he’d taken down—seven if he counted the one back in the tunnel—and did his thing. Grab, yank, hack, gone.

  Eight . . . eleven . . . he was kneeling on number thirteen when it vaporized, dropping him to his knees on the stone with a vicious crack that made him see stars. Bleeding heavily, he dragged himself to his feet and came around to face . . . nothing.

  The tunnel was empty.

  Sunlight beckoned up ahead.

  New energy burst through him, and he hurled himself around the corner. But then he skidded to a stop and yanked up a hand to shade his eyes.

  The arching cave mouth opened to a brilliant white sand beach that gleamed so bright that it hurt. A breeze stirred nearby palm trees, and beyond that, turquoise water stretched like glass to a distant blue-sky horizon. It was beautiful. Incomprehensible. More, it was a fucking “wish you were here” postcard come to life, a few hundred feet from where he’d been tortured. There were even folding chairs, a cooler, and a couple of towels laid out on the beach, as if a swimsuit model had just stepped out of the picture.

  Spurred on by the thought of Phee hanging out there in between his torture sessions, catching a tan while he bled, he tightened his grip on his blade, and headed outside. “Okay, you bitch. How did you—Fuck.”

  The stone monoliths were all too familiar, though on a different scale than the carved eccentrics he’d once carried in his pocket. The wickedly curved half-moons—one black, the other a deep, red-streaked amber—were three times his height, with their bases set together, deep in the sand. Their inner faces matched perfectly and could magically interlock to create a transport spell. They were separated right now, so the stone slabs formed a huge, jagged V, but they would have been joined all too recently. That was how Phee traveled the earth, damn her, just as she had used the smaller stones to send her image into Skywatch to contact him. To corrupt him.

  And right now, there was no fucking way he could use the stones without his own link to the dark magic.

  But he had to follow her. Had to find a way.

  Tightening his grip on his makeshift weapon, he advanced on the stones as a cloud covered the sun, throwing him back into the shadows. The temp dropped and the palm fronds rattled in a sudden downdraft, sounding like giant wings and making the back of his neck crawl, just like—

  “Shit!” Rabbit flung himself to the ground and rolled.

  A huge camazotz hit right where he’d been, with its wings and claws outstretched and its tail scything the air. The creature wore a stone yoke tied around its hips, which didn’t just make the demon damn tough to banish; it signified that it was a ’zotz leader. Bigger and meaner than the soldiers, they were tough as shit to kill . . . and they rarely traveled alone.

  Sure enough, as Rabbit ducked a tail-swipe and missed a grab for the barbed end, the sky went dark, clouding over with more huge camazotz, dozens of the fuckers, all zeroing in on their leader.

  Grim reality broke over him. He was screwed, finished. He couldn’t get to the stones, couldn’t get back to the cave, couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except bare his teeth at the hoard, brandish his puny-assed knife and shout, “Come on, motherfuckers. You want a piece of me? Come and fucking take it!”

  “Rabbit, get down!”

  The sound of Dez’s voice froze his brain, but his body obeyed the king’s order, pancaking him face-first in the sand. Then the ice cracked and his mind raced. That hadn’t just happened, couldn’t have happened, he hadn’t heard—

  A salvo of fireballs blasted right over him, crackling red-gold and burning like fury and proving that the impossible was real. The Nightkeepers had found him, they had come for him.

  The fireballs hit the ’zotz line and detonated. Flames roared, and the demons shrieked as Rabbit lifted his head and squinted through watering, disbelieving eyes at the carnage. And carnage it was—a dozen of the enemy were down and smoking, including the leader. But the sky was still dark, the air still full of the leather-boom of wings and the screams of incoming demons.

  He wasn’t alone anymore, though.

  Lurching to his feet, he started to turn toward the others, choking out, “How in the hell did—”

  “Save your questions,” said a deep, grating voice behind him, nearly drowned out by sudden bursts of gunfire, which went ripping into the oncoming camazotz. Rough hands spun him back around, shoved a heavy machine gun in his hands, and jammed a sheathed knife in his ragged waistband. “Fight!”

  Then a hard spine slammed into Rabbit’s and he was back-to-back with something he never thought he’d have again: a teammate.

  Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. The Nightkeepers were all around him—huge, strong, beautiful and so damn glossy it almost hurt to look at them. There were dozens of winikin, too—smaller, lighter and more agile than the magi, they fired machine guns filled with jade-tipped ammo from behind shield spells as if, while he’d been gone, they had somehow turned into an actual magic-wielding army. At their core, Sven and Cara fought shoulder to shoulder—a Nightkeeper and a winikin teaming up, aided not just by Sven’s huge coyote familiar, but also by a smaller, darker coyote that stayed close to Cara’s heels.

  Rabbit’s head spun. Jesus fucking Christ. How long had he been gone?

  A second round of fireballs detonated, biting into the enemy line and filling the air with fury and pain, but he barely flinched. He was too busy staring.

  He saw Anna and Strike, huge and regal, and the closest thing he’d had to siblings; Patience and Brandt, who had taught him what a real family could feel like; Lucius, the human researcher who was more of an outsider than Rabbit had ever been, yet had somehow become one of them. And so many more . . . all familiar, yet suddenly seeming like strangers.

  But there was no sign of the one person he was looking for, the one person he needed to see. Where the hell was Myrinne?

  A bony elbow jabbed his ribs. “Fight, damn you!”

  He didn’t know who he was backed up against—JT, maybe, given the attitude and sneer-laden voice—but the order cut through the shock and triggered what was left of his warrior’s instincts. Sudden adrenaline seared through Rabbit, pushing the other stuff aside. He raised the machine gun—how
the hell had they known he would need it?—and sighted on an ugly brute that was swooping through the dissipating fireballs and beelining straight for him. Leaning into the solid weight behind him, he shouted through split lips and hit the trigger.

  The jade-tipped bullets ripped into the approaching demon and then detonated, sending fragments of the Nightkeepers’ sacred stone deep into its flesh. The thing screamed, spasmed and crashed into another, sending them both slamming to the ground. More gunfire spat from behind Rabbit as he lurched forward, yanking the knife from his belt. It was a plain military-issue blade, not the ceremonial stone knife he’d left behind at Skywatch, but it would do the job.

  He went down on his knees, feeling the impact thud all the way to his jaw as he yanked at the ’zotz’s dick, hacked it off and grated, “Go to hell.”

  The thing puffed to oily smoke and a funk at the back of his throat. After that, his vision narrowed and he went into overdrive, bringing down demon after demon and dispatching them with a hack and a curse, over and over again. And then . . .

  Silence. Suddenly there weren’t any more demons to fight, only gritty ash mixing with the churned-up white sand and the gentle lap of waves. But his blood still raced with battle madness.

  Furious and unsteady, caught between his prisoner self and the warrior he’d been, Rabbit whirled on Dez. “Where is she? Where’s Myr?”

  That rasping voice snapped from behind him, “How about you start with a fucking ‘thank you for saving my ass’?”

  Without the muffling gunfire, the tone was suddenly all too familiar, yet impossible.

  Rabbit’s blood chilled as he spun around, then froze solid when he saw who he’d been fighting with.

  His godsdamned father.

  Red-Boar.

  It was another fucking ghost. Only it wasn’t, because sure as shit it was his old man standing there in flesh and blood, looking exactly like he had right before he died—dark-eyed, sharp-faced and condemning, with a thin line of a mouth and a salt-and-peppered skull trim. He was wearing his usual drab brown, though in combat camo rather than the ceremonial robe he’d favored, saying that brown was the color of penitence. Not that Rabbit had ever heard him apologize for shit. If anything, it was the people around him who were constantly sorry.