Jessica Andersen - Spellfire

“I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the silence. “Shit. I didn’t mean to—”

“Of course not. It was the magic. Sex magic.” There, she had said it.

“It . . . yeah.” His eyes held a sheen of power, making his expression unreadable. She didn’t know what he was thinking, which put a stir of new nerves in her belly.

“This is a bad idea,” she said. “There has to be another way for you to use your talents. Maybe your father . . .” She trailed off. “It won’t work, will it?”

“No. You’re the one I need.”

I don’t want to be.

“You’ll be in control of the link. You can pull the plug any time you want.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” Not after the way the magic had reached out to him. Not after the way her body had wanted to do the same damn thing.

He looked away. “I hate putting this on you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Bullshit.”

That startled a laugh out of her, though it quickly threatened to head toward hysterical territory. “Well, when you put it that way.” But this wasn’t about blame, wasn’t even about the two of them, really. And it wasn’t like they had a choice. “Okay,” she said finally, “we can do this. We can find a way to work the magic together.” She could learn to block the sexual stuff, maybe. Probably. “But that’s it. Nothing else is going to happen.”

She wasn’t sure which one of them she was trying to convince.

He nodded, though. “Agreed.” He held out a hand. “Deal?”

They shook on it. “Deal.” She pulled away as quickly as she could, wondering whether she was talking herself into something that would be a big mistake. But there was no running away from the end of the world, was there? And as for the sex magic . . . gods, she didn’t know how she was going to stop it—or, worse, endure it. “We’ll need to experiment, like Dez said. We need to figure out whether the connection has a cutoff range and how it really works . . . and we need to see whether we’re stronger if we work together.” She didn’t want to think about the possibility, not when she used to fantasize about being his true mate and fighting at his side, their powers joined.

He searched her face. “You want to hold off until tomorrow, give it all a day to sink in?”

Yes. “No.” That would be the coward’s move. “I’ll meet you out at the firing range in an hour.” She needed breakfast, needed to pull herself together. And most of all, she needed to find a way to armor herself against the sex magic. Because she and Rabbit might’ve had their problems before, but sex had never been one of them. And now, with the added connection of the magic . . .

Gods. She didn’t know if she could handle this, not really.

She would have to find a way, though. Somehow.

Chichén Itzá, Mexico

Anna could’ve told Dez that finding more info on the crossover was going to be far easier said than done. She and Lucius had already combed the Nightkeepers’ library for references, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Google could help with. So they were back to the drawing board.

In a more perfect world, the Nightkeepers could’ve asked their itza’at seer to tell the future for them . . . but Anna was their only itza’at, and her inner eye was busted.

Sighing, she eased back on her heels and let the skull-shaped seer’s pendant drop back below the neckline of her tee. The magic flowed out of her, dissipating quickly because she hadn’t managed to call a vision, hadn’t managed to summon any of the old, blocked-out memories that she suspected were clogging her magic. Hadn’t managed to do anything, really, except waste her energy teleporting to the ancient ruin in the hopes that being there would shake something loose.

Granted, there wasn’t anybody around to see her fail yet again . . . but, really, that wasn’t a good sign either. Up until four or five weeks ago, the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá had been crawling with sightseers pretty much from dawn until after dusk. Now, though, the region was in the throes of an infectious outbreak, the area quarantined and the park off-limits.

The quarantine had allowed Anna to teleport directly to the ancient site rather than try to sneak in through the Nightkeepers’ hidden tunnels. And it had given her the run of the place, so she could climb up inside the Pyramid of Kulkulkan, touch the ancient carvings of the Skull Platform, and dangle her feet over the edge of the Cenote Sagrada and feel the power that wafted up from the perfect circle of green water a hundred feet below, where the ancient Maya had made untold sacrifices to appease the gods.

Now, though, as she wiped the blood off her nearly healed palms and tucked her knife away in the tough cargo pants she had worn with a cobalt blue T-shirt that nearly matched her eyes—fieldwork garb just in case someone saw her—she was too aware of the echoing emptiness of the ruins, where it seemed not even the ghosts were stirring.

Damn it all.

Exhaling, she folded her copies of the three torn pieces of notepaper that contained all that was left of the super-secret itza’at seer’s ritual and tucked them into her battered knapsack. An old friend, the knapsack had been with her since grad school. It had seen her through countless digs and field studies, and nearly two decades at the university, along with marriage, divorce, magic, the Triad spell and onward, all the way to now, with the Nightkeepers running out of time.

As she slung the battered knapsack over her shoulder, she tried not to think that it had been her companion more consistently than anything else in her life.

Well, that and the crystal skull amulet. But it wasn’t as if she’d had a choice when it came to the seer’s skull. “Keep it with you,” her mother had said right before leaving to attack the intersection, her eyes bright with what Anna had thought was excitement but had probably been tears. “I’ll show you how to use it when I get back.”

Only she hadn’t come back—none of them had. They had all died in the tunnels below Chichén Itzá, leaving behind a dozen surviving children, one grumpy-assed old mage, a handful of winikin, and the mandate to save the world in 2012 but no clue how.

Instead of reaching for the amulet or begging for help—been there, done that—Anna sighed and turned to head back the way she had come.

She found herself facing a man who most definitely wasn’t a ghost, but seemed like he’d appeared out of thin air without any magic.

“Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” Her words trickled off when her instincts kicked in, telling her not to say too much to the guy, who just stood there, eyebrows hitting his shaggy hairline.

At about six foot and one eighty, he wasn’t much taller than she. With brown hair, faded hazel eyes and an aquiline nose that had a bit of a once-upon-a-time-broken left-hand crook to it, he looked reassuringly forty-something and human. His bush pants and scarred boots were much like her own, and his open-throated shirt had a medical logo embroidered on the pocket.

“You shouldn’t be here.” His voice was smooth and mellow, with the faintest hint of an accent—British? Australian? She couldn’t quite place it, but it tagged him as nonlocal, while the logo said he was part of the outbreak response. Which made him official, and therefore someone she needed to handle carefully.

She was tempted to say she was a Red Cross volunteer or something, and use the opportunity to pump him for info on the progress—if any—the humans were making against the xombi virus. Gods knew the Nightkeepers hadn’t been able to make a dent against this wave of the cursed disease, which was part magic, part biochemical and wholly vile. They had tried, but there had been too many hotspots popping up all at once, warning that the barrier was on the verge of collapse, the demons amassing to pounce. The Banol Kax had sent their hellspawn virus to create a chaos that would be ripe for their plucking, and damned if it wasn’t working.