Magic Unchained Read online

  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.

  Silver! His breath hissed out as excitement kicked in. That wasn’t dark magic; it was muk—the light and dark powers joined together. Of the Nightkeepers, only Michael could wield the silver power, and he commanded solely its killing aspect, not its other facets.

  But if the magi could harness muk, they could win the war.

  Rabbit’s heart pounded. It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered if he could be the guy to rebuild the bridge—the crossover—between the light and dark magic, reuniting the halves. But it was the first time he thought it might actually happen, there and then.

  Please, gods. He wasn’t sure if he sent the prayer to the sky or the underworld; he knew only that he meant it with every fiber of his being.

  Pulse thudding, he shoved his free hand into the box and started sifting through. Pain stung his fingers and palm as the sharp edges bit in, but he didn’t stop, instead letting his blood smear the stones and mingle with the magic as he searched for the source of the heat.

  The spinning in his head shifted his perceptions, making things seem very surreal, like he was standing outside and watching himself pick through stone shapes of white, black, green, gray, with a few flashes of yellow and orange. There was even a single piece of deep, vibrant crimson stone that practically glowed from within, gorgeous and powerful, and seemed so out of place that he picked it up, cradled it in his palm, and stared at it for a long moment before he noticed that his fucking hand was burning.

  “Ow! Shit.” Instinct had him juggling the thing to his other hand.

  Power roared the second the two eccentrics touched. Brilliant, blinding light flashed from the pieces, so bright and searingly hot that he dropped the stones. They fell, fused together in a twisted shape of black and red. He didn’t hear them land, though, didn’t hear anything except the wham-bam of his heart and the scrape of his boots as he stumbled and went to his knees. He hit the box on the way down, overturning it with a rattling crash.

  Light. Heat. Gods.

  He shielded his eyes with his arm, which felt naked and singed beneath his shirt. And then, thank fuck, the heat flatlined, then faded to a glow. Rabbit gaped as the glow coalesced into a shape that got bigger—first dog size, then man. “What the fuck?”

  Within moments, he was staring at a woman’s white-cloaked figure. And oh, holy shit, he could see right through her.

  She was dark haired, fine featured and somehow ageless, rendered even more otherworldly by her eyes, which were a cloudy, opaque white that gleamed from within. She was wearing a feather-worked, embroidered ceremonial robe and a crackling aura of power like he’d never seen before. This wasn’t the greasy brown roil of dark magic, the sparkling red-gold of Nightkeeper power, or even the sliver gleam of muk; it was translucent. It wasn’t anything he knew, but suddenly it was everything, awe inspiring and overwhelming.

  If he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would’ve ended up there now. His legs were shaking; his whole body was shaking. “Are you one of the creators?” His voice cracked on the question.

  Those luminous eyes widened. Then, to his surprise, she smiled. “No, I’m not. Though in a sense, I suppose I am, from your perspective.” Her voice was soft, feminine and singular, with none of the chorus effect that came from the ancestral beings known as the nahwal. So what was she? A ghost? A goddess?

  His heart pounded even faster, though he couldn’t have said why his fight-or-flight was kicking in. Maybe it was the way the bones of her face suddenly seemed familiar, as if he’d seen them in another time and place. Or maybe it was flat-out awe. He didn’t know. He only knew that it felt like he was on the edge of something huge. And that he, who had rarely—if ever—done humility, all of a sudden felt pretty fucking humble.

  Voice dropping to a strangled whisper, he forced out: “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  “Don’t you recognize me, Rabbie?”

  “I don’t…” He swallowed hard and, then, when that didn’t move the lump in his throat, hacked a hairball clearer of a cough. “My name is Rabbit. Nobody calls me ‘Rabbie.’”

  The nickname—a shortened version of the already weird-ass name his old man had hung on him—had always made him twitch. He hated it even more than he’d hated “bunny-boy,” “Playboy,” and all the others his high school tormentors had used put together, hated the way it made him feel incomplete, alone, and very, very young.

  “No, Rabbit was your nickname. Your birth name was Rabbie.”

  “My…” A crushing pressure vised his chest, stealing his breath and putting him on his hands and knees, gasping for air. A humming whine grated in his ears, a gathering darkness crept in on his vision, and incredulity washed through what was left of his brain as he realized that he was about to fucking faint.

  Rabbie. My Rabbie. My baby boy. The memory came out of nowhere, singsong words that reached inside him, grabbed his heart, and squeezed.

  “No,” he grated in between wretched gulps of air. “No fucking way. That’s not… you’re not… no way.”

  No. Impossible.

  “Rabbie.” The word was a sigh that prickled his skin.

  But was it impossible? No, not really. The shaman had said his mother had probably been one of the handful of his village’s women who had joined—either willingly or by abduction—Iago’s dark, vicious sect of Xibalbans.

  “You’re her.” It burned to say, agonized to think, yet when he lifted his head to look at her, he saw his own face. “You’re my mother.”

  “Yes.” Her colorless eyes glittered. “You didn’t forget.”

  He had, though; his memories began entirely with the strange blended family he’d grown up in. Red-Boar might not have given him affection, acceptance, or even the fucking time of day, but he’d had the good sense to eventually go live with Jox, Strike, and Anna. Even then, Rabbit had grown up a little wild and a lot rebellious, outcast and unhappy until the magic came along and gave him a reason to grow the hell up. It wasn’t until after his old man was killed, though, that he had gone looking for his mother, trying to understand the other half of his magic, the other half of himself.

  And now she was here… only she wasn’t. She was see-through and wreathed in magic, clearly not a creature of this plane anymore. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only say, like a dumb ass, “You’re a projection, aren’t you? A spirit from the dark barrier.” The barrier, like the magic itself, had long ago been split into its light and dark aspects. Where the Nightkeepers could visit the light barrier to gain wisdom—and occasionally confusion—from their ancestors, the Xibalbans could do the same with its dark, shadowy half. His eyes went to the eccentrics, which were locked together in a shimmering swirl of red and black. “Those things summoned you.”

  “I’m sending my image through them, but yes, they’re the catalyst.” Her voice went soft. “And, yes, I reside in the dark barrier. We both do.”

  “You and Red-Boar?” Rabbit frowned, because it didn’t play. His father had been firmly entrenched in the light magic, and he had always and forever mourned the Nightkeeper wife and sons he had lost in the massacre. As far as Rabbit knew, he hadn’t wanted another family, certainly hadn’t wanted his half-blood son. Then again, it had
never been clear how he’d wound up siring Rabbit with a Xibalban in the first place. Which meant… Shit, he didn’t know what it meant. Only that he’d been waiting for this for a long, long time. A million questions raced through him, but beneath the roil was a huge, excited warmth. Because while his cynical, battle-hardened self said this could be a trick, the image a fake, he knew, deep down inside, that she was real.

  “I speak of Tristan. Your brother.”

  “I don’t…” Rabbit trailed off, eyes widening, then filling as the singsong memory came again, this time caroling, Trisss-tan and Rabbie climbing in the trees. Laughing and playing, and chasing honeybees… “Gods,” he whispered, forcing the syllable past a surge of nausea. “Tristan. Turtle. You called him Turtle.” He couldn’t see faces, only the outlines of a woman and a little boy who wasn’t him, but was so very familiar that it hurt, deep down inside.

  “Yes, Tristan. Turtle. He was so cautious, where you were always on the move, hopping from place to place.” She paused, face going achingly tender and heart-rendingly sad. “You two were—”

  “Twins,” he whispered, knowing it with the same bone-deep certainty that recognized her. I had a twin. Not just a brother, but another half of himself—not identical, but rather complementary, filling in the gaps and making a perfect, powerful whole.

  Harsh noise roared in his brain and then downward to fill his throat and chest, tearing him with a single wrenching sob. No. Gods, no. Please. It hurts. But he couldn’t escape the memories now; they crowded him, banging against a barrier he hadn’t even realized existed in his mind. He’d had a brother. A twin. And Red-Boar had never told him. Never even hinted that there might be a reason that he’d so often felt jagged and incomplete, like he was missing part of himself.

  Son of a bitch.

  Rabbit hung his head, trying to fight the nausea, the dizziness, the blackness that took on the shadowy shape of a face very like his own, only not. Something cool touched the back of his neck, a gentle, feathery brush of ghostly fingertips that telescoped time, turning him once more into a child. Pain ripped through his soul as memory broke through. He sagged and cried out, dry-heaving as she touched him again, freeing the last of the long-ago pain, and sending him into the memories. And into a vision that wasn’t his own.

  The small house tucked amid the trees, glittering with leaf-dappled sunlight, might’ve been made of the same wood and thatch the native Mayan villagers used, but with its blocky construction, framed windows, and silly flower boxes, it looked more like a starter home in the ’burbs. Which in a way it was, Phee thought as she followed the hidden path leading home.

  The house and the family inside it were a fresh start, a do-over for both of them after her imprisonment, his bad luck, and the miracle of her and Red-Boar finding each other, healing each other to the point of moving on.

  Alerted somehow of her arrival—maybe by a change in the birdsong overhead, or some residue of the mind-bender’s talent he had once wielded—he came through the front door, eyes locking on her instantly. As it always did, her heart missed a beat at the sight of him. Tall and layered with lean muscle that popped beneath nut brown skin, with his skull shaved and his shirt off, he was a fantasy she hadn’t dared dream when she’d hung, naked and shackled, in the Xibalbans’ ritual chamber of horrors. Now, though, she was free to look at him, free to run her hands over him.

  Simply and wonderfully free.

  He didn’t smile when he saw her; he rarely ever relaxed the fierce scowl that had grooved deep lines beside his mouth, and his eyes would probably always carry shadows, no matter how much time separated them from the massacre that had taken his first family. But Phee had learned to look beneath his fierce exterior and see the subtle easing of tension that said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Those small signs were all she needed. That, and the sight of two small faces popping out behind their father, the sound of their voices saying, “Mommy’s home!”

  Her heart lifted as the boys—both miniature versions of their father, but with her gray eyes, one light haired, the other dark—scrambled through the door and raced toward her, arms outstretched. They whumped into her knee-high and wrapped around her as if she’d been gone for days on a supply run rather than just the couple of hours she had taken to walk the perimeter of their safe zone.

  Slinging her rifle over one shoulder, she crouched down and hugged them back.

  “All clear?” Red-Boar asked.

  “You’ve said it yourself—at this point, checking for footprints is as much a habit as anything.”

  It had been four years since she had escaped, three and a half since Red-Boar had found her lying almost dead at the edge of a ruined Mayan pyramid. And it had been more than two years since the last rumor that men wearing the bloodred quatrefoil of the Werigo’s vicious Xibalban sect were searching the highlands for her. Still, though, they stayed vigilant. They had the boys to worry about now.

  Oblivious to his mother’s thought process, Rabbie—aka Mr. Short Attention Span—pulled away from her and bounced back to his father, talking animatedly and so fast that only every third word was really intelligible.

  Tristan wound his arms around her neck and grinned. “Rabbit and turtle?”

  “Again?” she asked, laughing past the sudden tightness in her throat. “You’ve already heard it a zillion times.” The story had been the boys’ favorite even before she and Red-Boar had started using the all-too-apt nicknames.

  “Rabbit and turtle!”

  “Okay, okay. Let me get a drink first.” She stood, taking Triss with her and feeling the strain of his good, solid weight in her arms. As she headed for the house, a flock of parrots burst from the trees high overhead. She stopped and looked up, grinning at the flashes of red and green. “Look!” she said to Tristan. “What do you think the birdies—”

  Gunfire split the air, ripping the peace to shreds, and invisible blows slammed into her—thud, thud, thud—knocking her back and down.

  “Phee!” Red-Boar’s anguished bellow roared over the chatter of a second burst of machine-gun fire. A split second later, the underbrush thrashed and six red-robed Xibalbans burst into the clearing.

  She didn’t know whether she screamed or not, knew only that her heartbeat was hammering in her ears as she fell. She tried to hang on to Tristan, tried to curl around him and then scramble up and away from the attack. But nothing was working right; she couldn’t hold on to him, couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything but lie there as more shots rang out and one of the boys started crying.

  Dear gods, only one. Only…

  Blackness.

  Sometime later she awoke. She knew it was later by the angle of the sun, which was suddenly too bright, making her squint through a haze of tears as she tried to focus on Red-Boar’s face. His eyes were swimming with moisture, his face etched as always with grief. But it wasn’t old remembered pain right now; this agony was fresh and new, and wholly focused on her.

  She was dying. She didn’t need to see it in his eyes to know it. Her body was numb and cold, her heart stuttering. “Triss… tan?” she asked, forcing her lips to shape the word. “Rabbie?”

  A tear broke free and tracked down his face. “Rabbie’s fine. And you’ll…” He swallowed hard. “You’ll see Triss soon.”

  “Noo…” She closed her eyes as something broke inside her with utter and devastating finality. There was pain—terrible, rending agony—but there was also a strange sort of peace that said soon it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Soon it would be over—the pain, her life, all of it. Red-Boar, though, would have to live with the agony, not for his own sake, but for Rabbie’s. Her heart broke anew, because there could be no greater torture for him, she knew, than to be once more the survivor.

  “Take him home,” she said, knowing that if she hadn’t been chickenshit they would’ve already been in the States with their names changed and the last surviving winikin in charge of their anonymity. But she had been too afraid of the Nightkeepers’ hi
gh-pressure, high-tech world, clinging instead to the familiar forests she’d grown up in. That was her mistake, her sin. “Keep him safe and raise him right. Promise me.”

  His tears were flowing freely now and his eyes were soul-deep wounds without end. “I promise.”

  She tried to respond, but the only thing that came out was her final breath as the world went dim. Then dark.

  Then gone.

  Rabbit awoke to find himself lying on the stone floor of the library, cold and stiff, with tears drying on his face and an aching hole where his heart used to be.

  “Hello?” The word came out as a croak, nearly unrecognizable. “Are you still here?”

  There was no answer. She was gone.

  He rolled onto his side with a groan, then lay there for a few seconds, gulping for oxygen. His stomach muscles hurt and his throat was raw, like he’d been retching. And his whole world felt off balance, like it had gone off the road and halfway off a cliff, where it teetered, waiting for a stiff wind to send it crashing down.

  His eyes locked on two gleaming pieces of stone lying nearby, fitted together. Dragging himself to a woozy sort of upright position, he reached for them, then hesitated.

  The eccentrics had faded, one to its normal flinty black and the other to a bright white quartz that was shot through with reddish iron streaks. They looked like normal stones now rather than artifacts that had the power to allow a spirit’s essence to pass from the dark barrier onto the earthly plane. But that was what they had done.

  His mother’s ghost had come to him. He had seen her, talked to her.

  It almost felt like a dream, except that the eccentrics were there, connected. Just as he felt connected now to her… and to the twin brother he’d forgotten. Tristan. Gods.

  Exhaling softly, he touched the stones, which parted with a soft, almost musical grating sound. He didn’t feel anything when he picked them up, didn’t get any indication that they were more than plain stones, not even when he fitted them together once more. They aligned perfectly, with the spiky shapes of one fitting into the indentations of the other to create a single whole. But they didn’t click into place and there was no heat, no power.