Final Prophecy 05 - Blood Spells (34 page)

“Why didn’t you?” Rabbit hadn’t meant to ask. He’d told himself he didn’t care, that he had Myrinne for support and Jox for the occasional piece of advice, so it didn’t matter if three of the four people he’d grown up with—Strike, Anna, and his old man—were out of the picture.

But now, off alone with Strike after what they’d just been through, it wasn’t about him and Strike the king, but rather him and the guy who’d helped raise him, and who’d been older by enough years to play a role that had hit halfway between big brother and father figure. And who had disappeared on him recently.

With it just the two of them, and him raw as hell, Rabbit could admit that it had mattered. It had mattered a shit-ton.

“Because you terrify me,” Strike said finally. “I’m terrified
of
you. I’m terrified
for
you. And I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to the rest of us if things go wrong with you. You’re already the strongest mage of the bunch of us, and I have a feeling you haven’t even started to tap what’s in that head of yours. You’re too fucking brave for your own good, and you’ve got the shittiest luck of anyone I’ve ever known. You put all that together, and it keeps me up some nights worrying about what’s in your future. Two days, two weeks, two years . . . shit, I don’t know what you’re going to be doing two minutes from now, except that I know that whatever it is, you’ll be giving it a hundred percent effort, for better or worse.”

Strike paused, but Rabbit didn’t say anything—he fucking
couldn’t
say anything past the millstone that’d just landed on his chest.

After an awkward pause, the king shrugged. “So, yeah, I’ve been riding your ass. Jox’s too, because he’s ripping himself to shreds trying to keep it all together at Skywatch and making himself miserable in the process. And Brandt and Patience . . . shit. The team is coming together, but some of the people in it are on the edge, and I don’t know how to pull them back. I—”

He broke off, jamming his hands into his pockets, his shoulders sagging from their usual “I can handle whatever the hell you want to chuck at me” squareness. “Fuck. And I’ve just turned what happened here into something about me, which I didn’t mean to do. I just thought . . . I just wanted you to know that nothing that’s been going on between the two of us has a godsdamned thing to do with who your mother was—or, hell, who your father was, what he did, or what he was thinking when he did it. You’re you. I’ve known you most of my life. And . . . I love you. I just thought you might need to hear that right about now.”

Forget not being able to talk. Rabbit couldn’t breathe.

Strike stood there for another moment, looking uncomfortable as hell. Then he shrugged, shot a funny half smile that Rabbit remembered from a thousand times before, growing up, and turned away, heading back to the village center.

He’d gone two steps when Rabbit’s feet finally came unglued and his lungs and throat started working again.

“Hey!” he called. And launched himself at his king.

Strike caught him on the fly and they hugged like they hadn’t since . . . shit, Rabbit didn’t remember. Since back before he’d gotten too cool to do crap like hug the big brother who wasn’t really. They both ignored Rabbit’s stifled sob and the way Strike hung on a beat too long, and when they separated, they both stared into different parts of the forest rather than at each other. But the air between them was clearer than it had been in weeks, maybe longer.

“We should get back,” Rabbit said finally. “There’s a shitload left to do.”

But when they stepped through the archway together, he saw that the others had been seriously busy while they’d been gone. Either that, or he and Strike had been gone longer than he’d thought.

The bodies from the forest and village had been stacked beside the fire pit and layered with wood that had been stripped from Saamal’s hut, leaving the structure’s skeleton behind. The central pole was gone; a hole in the bloodstained sand marked where its base had stood.

Myrinne crossed to Rabbit and held out her hand. “Here.”

From Lucius’s tendencies toward verbal diarrhea when he was working in the library, Rabbit knew that “eccentric” was a catchall term for the small, flat objects the ancients had made from stone, imbuing them with ritual significance—and sometimes even power—through their choice of shape and stone. Some had holes so they could be worn as pendants or carried in pockets, while others had been sacrificed or buried in a house or village to ward off evil.

Leah, Nate, and Alexis each wore one given to them by the king, signifying that they were members of the royal council; those eccentrics were abstractly curving shapes that made Rabbit think of Chinese dragons.

The one that Myrinne held out, in contrast, was a flat, flared quatrefoil.

He stared at it. “Well, hell.”

“Literally,” she quipped, but her eyes searched his. “What can I do to help?”

“You’re already doing it.” He took the eccentric and held it flat on his palm; it was heavier than it looked. He didn’t see any markings on it, didn’t catch any power buzz. It seemed to be nothing more than a carefully knapped piece of waxy gray flint. “Ten bucks says I slice myself every time I stick my hand in my pocket with this thing.”

“You could wear it around your neck.”

He was pretty sure she was kidding. “Yeah. That’ll happen. Not.” He wasn’t even sure he should carry it day to day. “What if it—I don’t know—attracts dark magic or something?”

“Like the hellmark doesn’t already?”

She had him there. “I’m just wondering if I should leave it here. Nothing says I have to accept it. You heard Saamal—they weren’t our allies at all, and they were operating on a whacked theology. I mean, sky demons? Seriously?” He shook his head. “No. Even if this branch of the order was threat-level yellow compared to Iago’s, they opposed the gods.” He rubbed a thumb over the eccentric, which had warmed in his hand. It was soft to the touch. Appealing. “I shouldn’t carry it, or even keep it.”

Myrinne thought for a moment. “How about you hang on to it for now and ask Lucius to check it out? Once you’ve got more info, you can make the call.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, exhaling. “Yeah, that’ll work.” He went to slip the eccentric into his pocket and was startled to realize he already had.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“I know.” He was all too aware that Strike had helped the others finish their grisly work. Now he and the other members of the team stood loosely ringed around the large stacked pyre that contained the village inhabitants, and another, smaller one next to it, where Saamal lay on a crisscrossed pyramid of poles, with a brightly colored swath of fabric covering his gaping chest. Strangely, his color looked better now than it had at the end of the reanimation spell. Was that a sign that dark magic took a toll on the user?

Catching Rabbit’s eye, Strike said, “You okay to do this?”

“No. But I’ll do it anyway.” Fire was cleansing. It was traditional. And although he’d never tested out the theory, he had a feeling that on some level, it tapped into both light and dark levels of the magic.

Before he started, though, he moved around the pyres and pulled Strike away a few paces. “I just wanted to run this by you.” He showed the king the hellmark-shaped eccentric and went through his and Myrinne’s thought process. “If you don’t like the idea of me holding on to it, though, tell me now, because I’d like it to go into the pyre.”

“Keep it. We found a cache of codices and a couple of modern notebooks in the elder’s place. Lucius and Jade are going to go through them as soon as we get back. Maybe one of them will have something about the eccentric.”

Rabbit hadn’t realized he’d tightened up until the tension eased. “Okay. Good. That’s good. Thanks.”

“No problem,” the king said, like it was no big deal, but as Rabbit turned away, he caught Strike’s almost imperceptible nod.

The thing was, he also caught Myrinne’s fleeting scowl. She lost it the moment he turned back to her, but he was sure he’d seen it. That brought back some of the tightness, because he sure as shit didn’t want to wind up caught between her and Strike. He’d let her jealousy ease him away from Patience—he’d even kind of liked that she’d cared enough to be territorial—but Strike was family.

“Myr?” he asked.
You’re everything to me,
he wanted to tell her,
but you can’t be the only person I care about.
At the same time, though, he didn’t know if he could’ve coped just now if she hadn’t been there.

She smiled, though the warmth didn’t make it all the way to her eyes. “Time to do your thing, Pyro.”

He nodded, feeling none of the anticipation that usually accompanied the prospect of fire magic.

“Yeah.”

He took his place in the circle, with his back to the stone archway that would long outlive its builders. He refused to call on the dark lords, but knew the villagers’ souls wouldn’t appreciate him praying to the sky gods. So in the end he blanked his mind of everything but the magic as he called fire . . . and finished burning Oc Ajal to the ground.

 

It was early afternoon before the teammates reassembled in the great room, showered, changed, and more or less recovered from the morning’s ordeal. Physically, anyway. Brandt had a feeling that the Oc Ajal massacre was going to stick with all of them in one way or another.

Whatever had gone down between Strike and Rabbit had cleared the air between the two of them, but that didn’t come close to offsetting the pall cast by the villagers’ slaughter. The magi drooped, tired in body and soul, tended by somber
winikin
.

Sitting beside him on the love seat, Patience said, “I don’t care who they worshipped. That was . . .” She trailed off.

“Yeah.” Horrific, inhuman, vile, evil, and a hundred other words applied, yet none could fully encompass what had happened to the almost forty victims. There had been at least ten bodies in the village itself, and twenty-eight more in the surrounding forest, probably cut down as they had run toward the village, no doubt called by the screams.

Maybe a dozen of them had been kids, including twins a few years older than Harry and Braden; they’d been lying just beyond the elder’s hut, near a pair of dead coy-dog pups.

At first, Brandt had tried not to wonder whether the woman in the elder’s hut had been their mother. Then he decided their memories deserved his pain, so he let himself picture the boys trying to get to her, hearing her screams and calling her name as the
makol
shot them down. Or had the
makol
shot the boys and pups first, while their mother watched, and then dragged her into the hut, lashed her to that damned pole, and gone to work on her?

He could still smell the smoke and blood, as if it had leached into his skin and hair, permeated his soul. He hadn’t known any of the victims. Hell, they were the
enemy
. But it was far, far too easy to imagine his family in that village. He kept picturing Patience in the woman’s place, Harry and Braden lying in the dirt near those pups, Woody cut down defending his charges, Hannah sprawled facedown with a grindstone near her outstretched fingertips.

Even worse, he could picture the scene there at Skywatch, with bodies scattered in the mansion and out near the picnic area.

Was that how it would happen? Would the Nightkeepers be cut down in their homes, ending the war before it truly began?

The villagers had hidden behind glamours rather than wards, he reminded himself. And they had been priests and acolytes, not warriors.

“So why kill them?” he said. “How the hell were they a threat to Iago?” When the room went still, he realized Strike had been talking, that he’d totally zoned out on the start of the meeting.
Way to engage, dickhead.
“Sorry,” he said with a guilty look at Patience. “I was thinking out loud. I’ll stop.”

“Don’t stop thinking,” Strike said wryly. “You could, however, work on the timing.”

He didn’t seem that upset, though, probably because they were all feeling pretty damned fragile, and the exchange eased the heavy mood in the room. Not by much, but it was something.

After a raised-eyebrow pause to see if Brandt was going to jump in, Strike said, “It’s a valid question. As far as I can see, there are three main answers that jump to mind: One, Iago wanted to finish his father’s work by destroying the other Xibalban sect, and he didn’t know where the village was until he got the info from Rabbit.” He ticked off a second point on his fingers. “Two, he doesn’t want Rabbit to get any further on his search for his mother. That’s intriguing, because it suggests there’s a weakness we don’t know about, some way the other side of Rabbit’s heritage could harm Iago.”

Rabbit unbent from the elbows-on-knees slouch he’d assumed on a couch next to Myrinne, expression pensive. “It’s possible. Iago knew her. He
has
to have known her. The timing—”

“Hold it,” Leah broke in using her cop voice, which was guaranteed to stop Rabbit in his tracks. “Promise me you won’t dip into his head for the answer until and unless the royal council clears it and you’ve got spotters standing by. Better yet, promise
Strike
you’ll wait until then.”

A year ago, asking for Rabbit’s promise would’ve been about as useful as trying to stop up the bathroom shower with a single finger—sort of effective, but not really. Now, though, he actually winced and thought about it for a second before he met Strike’s eyes, and said, “I promise I won’t connect with Iago to find out about my mother until you give me the go-ahead.” Myrinne shot him a look, but didn’t say anything.

The king considered that for a moment, no doubt looking for loopholes. Then he said, “Let’s make this a fair trade. Once this solstice-eclipse is behind us and things—gods willing—settle down a little, I promise that I’ll do what I can to help you figure out as much or as little as you want to know about that side of your family. Deal?”