Jessica Andersen - Skykeepers

It was over so quickly, there and gone in an instant, that Sasha blinked, tempted to think they had just left, or been ’ported away. But she saw the gray cast of death on Michael’s skin, saw the dark grief and guilt of the man, the cold satisfaction of the killer within.

He turned back to her and offered his hand. She took it without hesitation and rose to stand next to him, leaning into him in mute reassurance. He stared down at her, eyes dark, but finally calm, as though he’d gone beyond himself, or maybe found himself. “This is who and what I am.” His voice was a low rumble in his chest.

“This,” she said firmly, “is war. It’s justice.” She took his hand, lifted his wrist, and pressed her lips to his marks. “Neither of us is perfect. Together, though, we balance each other out. And even if we didn’t, I’d still want to be with you.”

“Despite what I am.”

“Because of who you are,” she countered. “Now. Let’s finish this.”

His eyes went past her. Flattened. “Shit.”

Sasha turned, her warrior’s instincts firing a second too late. Not because of an attack, but because of what the lack of attack meant. Iago, badly battered by the makol , sagged against the larger throne, losing blood fast. But he was still alive, having survived the edges of the close-range muk blast by virtue of his healing powers . . . and the makol bond. His color was wrong, his eyes disoriented . . . but they flicked to luminous green and back again. When they went green, his face became more angular and power seemed to glow in a halo around him, as the emperor Moctezuma fought to come through to the earth.

As his eyes settled green, ’port magic rattled in the air.

“Stop him!” Sasha cried.

Roaring, Michael lunged for Iago. The Xibalban disappeared with a pop of displaced air, leaving Michael to slam into the throne, then pound it with a fist. “Gods damn it!”

Sasha reeled as near-prescience gripped her. Moctezuma had come to earth. And he’d possessed the strongest of the Xibalban magi, leaving the Nightkeepers with . . . what? They had nothing, and the solstice threatened to pass without their gaining the one thing they needed most: the Prophet.

At the thought, she moved around the throne, in search of their former ally . . . who might just manage to become an ally once again. “Lucius?” she called, cursing softly when she saw his feet stretched out behind one of the planters, blood splashed on the stones. Then she rounded the planter.

And cursed aloud. “Michael! Come quick.”

He came around the corner, his only reaction a hitch in his stride when he saw what Iago had done to the makol . Lucius’s head had been all but severed from his body, and his heart hung out of his chest cavity by a thread. His eyes were closed, but his chest still moved in a gruesome, bubbling parody of life, held by the makol ’s healing magic.

Sasha dropped down beside him, heedless of the blood that soaked through her pants. “He’s alive.

Sort of.” She felt the makol ’s dark magic fluctuate, heard Lucius’s song cut in and out. “Iago must have said the spell. He didn’t get the head and heart all the way, though.” But the makol wasn’t healing; he was merely existing, his eyes flicking from hazel to green and back again.

Sasha met Michael’s eyes over the laboring near-corpse. Feeling the hard practicality of the warrior she had become, she said, “Get the library scroll. Let’s not waste the sacrifice.”

“Are you sure? He’s not a magic user.”

She grinned fiercely up at him. “Maybe not. But the makol is.”

Michael’s expression went blank, then fired with excitement as he went for the scroll, snagging it off the floor, where it had fallen during the melee. “ Fuck . I can’t read it. You?”

She glanced at the glyphs, but she shook her head. “That’s beyond what Ambrose taught me. And we can’t risk my screwing it up.” She looked toward the rubble-filled tunnel. “We have to get the others in here.”

Michael’s eyes flashed acknowledgment, but he turned up a hand in question. “Can you get the ’port image to Strike through the bloodline link?”

“Not clearly enough.” She shook her head. “Maybe Rabbit . . .” He’d sent her his cry for help from the pueblo, using the connection they’d forged when he’d been inside her mind. But when she searched inwardly for a hint of that connection she found nothing. “I think it only goes one way. How about shield magic? Could you use it to clear the tunnel somehow?”

Eyes dark with frustration, he shook his head. “I don’t think so. Damn it.”

“Break the mountain,” said a faint whisper.

For a second, she thought the words were inside her head. Then she realized they’d come from behind her. She looked down to find Lucius conscious, squinting up at her. The flesh at his throat had knitted somewhat. His abdominal cavity gaped open, but as she watched, his heart drew back into place slowly, looking sad and misshapen. Yet his eyes were fixed on her, gone hazel, though he shuddered with the effort of keeping them that way. The entire effect was macabre in the extreme.

“This is Paxil Mountain,” he whispered. “Break it.” His eyes stopped flickering, started to dull.

Michael’s and Sasha’s eyes went to the planters set on either side of the thrones. Maize and cacao.

Was it possible?

“The gods split Paxil Mountain to release the seeds to mankind,” she said. “But we’re not gods.”

“Maybe not.” Michael took her hand, twining their fingers together. “But we’re what’s left.” He lifted her hand. Pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “And I’m not through fighting. Not for you, and not for justice.”

Sasha’s power kicked at his words, at the quiet certainty in them. She felt the muk resonating from him, reaching into her. For the first time, she didn’t push the sensation away, but rather welcomed it, welcomed him. Aware of the solstice magic raging around them, within them, she turned to face him.

“I can’t do this alone. Iago said we could create incredible power together.”

“We do,” Michael said softly. “We can.” He paused, and his voice roughened. “You’ve been everything I need and want, even when I was too caught up in myself to realize it.”

Her heart shuddered and went still in her chest. She saw the truth in his eyes, felt it in his touch and his energy. And for the first time, she wasn’t looking at Michael, or the Other, or the Mictlan. She saw all of them in him, saw them as a single man, the united whole she’d fallen for. The real Michael didn’t come from an absence of darkness, she realized with sudden paralytic comprehension. He came from balance. He was a chameleon himself, shifting among aspects of himself and his magic, but the core remained. The man remained.

“I kept telling myself you weren’t real, that you were a fantasy straight out of one of Ambrose’s stories. Which you are. But you’re also real.”

He leaned down and she reached up, in that stilled moment of time, and she heard her own music, heard his, then heard the two twine together, backbeat and chords blending to form a fully realized song. And, as the solstice slid to its peak, their magics combined, muk to ch’ul .

And the world around them started to shake.

Magic poured through Michael, piercing every aspect of him: light and dark, love and revenge, murder and justice. The coming of the three-year countdown fired through him, smashing his hard-

won barriers to dust and opening him to all of his dissociated pieces at once. But where before that had been one of his greatest fears—the loss of control, the loss of himself—now he gave himself up to it.