Part 19 (1/2)

Rabbit cursed, yanked away from the circle, and strode away, boots ringing on the travel-packed ground. Myrinne followed him, but he waved her off with a sharp motion, then disappeared into the nearest hut. She stood for a moment, undecided, then unholstered her autopistol with a smoothly practiced move and headed into the next dwelling down. But she sent a long look back at the hut Rabbit had gone into, and it didn't take a mind-bender to sense her confusion.

Sven was staying out of it-being relations.h.i.+p-defective and all-but he had found himself way more aware of those nuances than he normally would be. Then again, he didn't used to wake up in a cold sweat, hard and aching, with his heart racing in the face of an overwhelming conviction that he was supposed to be looking for something, doing something, only he didn't know what. Carlos said that, too, would go away eventually. But he'd avoided Sven's eyes when he said it.

”Split up and search,” Strike ordered, though there seemed little hope of survivors.

”I'll take the perimeter,” Sven offered, and got a nod, which was a good thing. He needed to move, and he didn't know how much longer he was going to be able to hold the coyote back in the face of all the run-kill-bite-enemy stuff going through his furry head. ”They're gone,” he said in an undertone. ”We're too late.”

Mac growled deep in his chest.

”Yeah,” Sven agreed as he headed out of the village, keeping a tight mental leash. ”I feel the same way.” The Nightkeepers couldn't continue chasing Iago's tail like this. Something needed to change . . . but it needed to be the right something. Strike had given him, Rabbit, and Myrinne a clipped report of what sounded-reading between the lines, anyway-like a major s.h.i.+tstorm of Mendez proportions going down at Skywatch. But as far as Sven was concerned, prophecy or no prophecy, he and the others could-and would-take Mendez if it went that far. Strike was their king. Period and no discussion.

He let Mac range a little farther once they got a distance from the village and started making a wide loop around it. Their pa.s.sage flushed out countless bright, flashy birds and sent squadrons of b.u.t.terflies into the air. Ignoring them, Sven kept his eyes on the ground, searching for tracks while staying attuned to the coyote's thought stream, which had gone from warnings about the enemy to a growing sense of edgy frustration.

Or was that coming from him? G.o.ds knew he'd been hair-trigger lately. Carlos said the new restlessness and aggression-like the dreams and the hormone surges-came from his magic getting used to the impulses of his familiar, that he would level off soon and go back to being the guy he was. But Sven had a feeling it was the other way around, that he was finally coming into his true self and would stay that way. It felt like he had been sleepwalking for so long, and was just now waking up, just now- Mac yowled and exploded, diving into a cl.u.s.ter of bushes nearby. Enemy!

Adrenaline hammered through Sven. Yanking his knife and calling up a s.h.i.+eld, he hollered and plunged after the big canine. Branches whipped at him, deflecting off the s.h.i.+eld as he burst out of the middle growth and into a small, sun-dappled clearing.

There, Mac stood over a villager. For a second, Sven's heart leaped at the thought that they had found a survivor, but then he got closer and saw otherwise. The man's body was twisted unnaturally, unmoving, but his face was animated and his eyes shone luminous green as he hissed at Sven, face alight with bloodl.u.s.t.

”Nice job, Mac,” Sven said, reaching for his knife and prepping himself for the head-and-heart spell. But he paused when something nagged at him. It took him a second, but then he got it: The makol wasn't regenerating. Something was wrong with it.

He started to crouch down for a closer look, but Mac pivoted over the makol and stood with his legs braced, head lowered, and teeth bared. A bloodcurdling growl rumbled in the coyote's throat.

Sven froze. ”Mac? What the h.e.l.l?”

The coyote sent a stream of glyph images that spelled out friend-enemy-friend, which didn't make any more sense than him protecting the makol. But Carlos had impressed on Sven that he needed to trust his familiar, and experience had shown that Mac would get in a snit if ignored. And a hundred-pound coyote having a temper tantrum was not a pleasant experience. So think it through, Sven told himself. a.n.a.lysis had never really been his thing before, but he'd been getting better at it lately. The coyote had saved Reese's life by attacking a makol back at Skywatch, but he wouldn't let Sven near this one, and was even acting protective of it. So what was different? Did it have something to do with how this one wasn't regenerating?

Friend-enemy-friend came again, this time along with a sharp, mossy smell.

Moving slowly, Sven crouched down again, sending peaceful, nonlethal thoughts. Mac's growls subsided and he gave way.

The makol's human host had been a young man, maybe early twenties. He was wearing jeans and a grayed-out wife beater, and had a small, new-looking leather pouch hanging around his neck. The mossy smell Mac had noted was coming from the pouch. With a mental flick that would have been ten times more difficult before his familiar had come into his life, Sven translocated the pouch into his outstretched palm. But the second it vanished from around the makol s neck, the creature shuddered and arched, and a terrible, screaming keen ripped from the host's throat.

Luminous green flashed, blinding Sven, who dove back and yanked up his s.h.i.+eld. 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 s.h.i.+t,” 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.”

”s.h.i.+eld 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 s.h.i.+t 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.ds. Strike went limp as relief poured through him and his power cut out, drained by whatever the h.e.l.l 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 n.o.body 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 finis.h.i.+ng off the Nightkeepers. But once Leah and Rabbit got him to the royal suite and into bed, he stared through the gla.s.s 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 . . . s.h.i.+t. What the h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+t didn't want to lose his kings.h.i.+p-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 G.o.d 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 G.o.ds. In a way it had been both, though not even his serpent ancestors would have been b.a.l.l.sy enough to call themselves G.o.ds. 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.

Elsewhere, the younger winikin were herding all the kids into the Great Hall; the grown-ups were all pretending like it was a party-a movie first, dancing later, with pizza and cake. But their eyes were worried, and Dez's mother and father had hugged him too tightly just now. They had done the same to baby Joy, making her cry. She was still sniffling as Keban tucked her into her bouncy chair.

”Son.”

Dez craned around, but it wasn't his dad, it was Keban's father, Keru. The two winikin hugged briefly, looking very alike, though one was old and the other young.

”We've got everything packed like you said.” Keban kept his voice very low. ”If things go wrong, Breese and I are out of here with the kids.”

Dez sat up straight. Breese was his winikin-she was soft and nice, and smelled like strawberries. Were they all going somewhere? He wanted to ask Keban, but didn't dare. He was nice to Joy, not always so nice to everyone else.

”Be strong,” Keru said. ”And whatever you do, preserve the bloodline. Because G.o.ds help us if we have to go into the war without a serpent king.”

The men hugged again, and Keru went off toward the warriors, where Dez's parents were helping each other with their gear. Keban turned, found Dez staring at him, and started to scowl. Then he seemed to catch himself, and sighed. ”Come here, kid. Let's go find Breese. The four of us need to stick together, okay? No wandering off on your own tonight.” Dez nodded, but the winikin looked unconvinced. He hunkered down and gestured for Dez to come closer. ”Hold your sister's hand for a second.”