Jessica Andersen: Spellfire

His former teammates would never know about his sacrifice, but it brought a spark of grim satisfaction to dredge up bloody saliva and spit in her face. “Kiss my ass, bitch. You want what’s inside my head? Come and fucking get it.”

She hissed, her eyes flaring briefly demon-red, and the air around them crackled with the oily rattle of dark magic. The power was useless against him, though, at least for her purposes. Turned out he would have to give her his magic voluntarily for this particular spell . . . if he still had any magic, that is. She didn’t realize the gods had already taken back their gifts.

Biting off a vicious curse, she snapped, “More. I don’t care what it takes—I want him broken, damn you. We’re running out of time.”

Rabbit braced himself, knowing the first few blows were going to hurt like a bitch. He didn’t close his eyes, though—it was worse not knowing when the whip was going to hit. Instead, he glared at Phee, hating her for what she’d done to him. And hating himself for what he’d let her turn him into.

An animal. No, worse—some subhuman creature that couldn’t tell truth from lies, couldn’t recognize love and loyalty when he had it.

He still knew what hatred felt like, though. Knew it very well. It was his blood, his bones, his very existence.

The lash whined, then cracked across his shoulder and chest, and agony slapped at him, bright and brilliant. He kept his eyes fixed on the demoness, using the rage to weather the pain. Little by little, though, blow by blow, agony whittled away at his humanity, his capability for rational thought, until he became no more than a whipped dog that refused to die, living only because it dreamed of escaping its chain and tearing into its captor.

By the tenth blow, the hot agony of each whip strike had turned cold and his body was shaking with chills. By the twentieth he was nearly numb, his eyes going unfocused as his consciousness threatened to take a hike.

And then the weirdest fucking thing happened. He saw his father, in all his hatchet-faced, pissed off, Wes Studi from The Last of the Mohicans–channeling glory.

It wasn’t a memory or even a vision. It was more like Red-Boar was really there, sitting in midair near the doorway with one booted foot crossed onto his opposite knee. He was a little on the transparent side, but he was wearing brown fatigues and a camo-green T-shirt, and scowling at whoever sat opposite him, giving them his trademark don’t-be-an-idiot look. It was so real that even knowing his old man was dead and gone, anger lashed through Rabbit.

But then the image wavered and disappeared, leaving a faint tingle of magic behind.

Son of a— He roared and went after the vision, surging against his chains and hitting the ends with a body that was still big and strong despite his captivity, though marked now with new scars. The manacles bit into his wrists and ankles, giving only slightly against the pins that held them in place. And as blood flowed from the cuts, old, unloved memories came at him from someplace deep inside, a flip-book of remembrance that battered at his inner defenses and threatened to turn the beaten dog back into the boy he’d once been.

He was a kid—six, ten, sixteen, whenever, it was all pretty much the same—watching his father turn away from him with that same old don’t-be-an-idiot look because he’d fucked up again.

He was nineteen, seeing his old man do real magic for the first time as he brought the Nightkeepers’ desert home out of its magical shield and back to earth with Strike and Anna’s help. Not Rabbit’s, though, because he was only a half blood and his father didn’t trust him with the magic.

He was in a dark tunnel beneath the ruins of Chichén Itzá, fully a magic user now, though not by his old man’s doing. He raced ahead of a fiery lava creature and then darted into a side passage to hide, but tripped over a limp, yielding body. When he lit its face, he saw Red-Boar’s slashed throat and open, staring eyes.

He was torching his old man’s pyre and watching it burn, not sure how the hell he was supposed to feel, and feeling nothing, really.

After that, the time blurred into a gooey mess of mental sameness—not because the months and years had been the same as he had grown and aged, his powers accelerating the process until he was huge and looked closer to thirty-three than twenty-three—but because his old man had been the little devil that rode his shoulder and whispered in his ear: You’re an idiot, a moron, useless, unworthy.

Gods knew he’d spent those years trying to prove Red-Boar wrong. But maybe his old man’d had a point there, too. Just look where he’d wound up.

Gasping, gagging, Rabbit went limp in his shackles, numb to the outside world as he cursed the place where his old man’s ghost had been.

Or maybe there hadn’t been anything there at all. Maybe he was finally losing his grip on sanity. Gods knew it was past time.

“Enough!” The word cracked in the air, yanking him back into his body. He groaned as the agony of the beating flooded back through him, only then realizing that the flogging had stopped, that Phee was scowling at him. “This isn’t working, and we’re running out of time.” Her lips curved. “I guess we need to take a little trip and pick up that leverage we’ve been talking about.”

“No!” Rabbit bellowed with a force that turned his throat raw. “Don’t you fucking touch her!” The demon bitch meant it this time. Where before she had used the taunt to twist him up inside and make him bleed, now it was for real. He had stalled too long.

But Phee just laughed and swept out on a buzz of dark magic. The camazotz followed without a backward glance, dropping the blood-soaked whip into the small pool of salt water that collected near the door. Its barbed tail was the last to leave, lashing with a force that sent the wicked, knifelike point skittering across the stone floor.

Rage hazed Rabbit’s vision. He hated Phee and her camazotz minions, hated the part of him that had allowed itself to be poisoned by her lies, the part that hadn’t ever outgrown feeling unloved and unwanted. He hated this fucking cell, with its line of stone skulls carved up near the ceiling, watching him with empty sockets, and he hated the trickle of seawater that ran from a crack near the door to fill that blood-tinged depression, bringing the smell of the ocean and taunting him with the hint of the outside world. But most of all, he hated knowing that Myrinne was once again in danger because of him.

Maybe he’d been wrong to steal the resurrection skull and try to bring her back from the verge of death. But after what he’d done to her, betraying his teammates had been all too easy. The spell hadn’t worked, though, and the Nightkeepers had come after him, leaving him with just one option: a life for a life. He had offered himself to the gods in exchange for her, and had wound up in Phee’s hands instead. It was a sacrifice he would make again, though, a thousand times over. He would do anything for her, damn it. Give anything.

“You can have the magic!” he roared, straining to the ends of his shackles. “Come back. You can fucking have it!” But there was no answer.

He went mindless, berserk, lunging against the chains over and over again, howling threats, curses, pleas, words that stopped having any meaning beyond the fury in his veins and the roar of the creature he had become, which lived only to rip into his enemy and protect what had once belonged to him. The chains clattered rat-a-tat like automatic fire and then snapped taut with grenade crack-booms. Agony howled through him, but he didn’t care about the damage or the pain; the whipped dog had finally reached its breaking point.