Jessica Andersen - Spellfire

“I . . .” She stopped, swallowing hard. “I don’t know enough of the language.” Hell, the ancient Egyptian tongue was even deader than ancient Mayan—so many of the sounds were guesstimates, with filled-in vowels and pronunciations that changed from decade to decade.

“Rosa gave you the message in ancient Mayan,” Lucius whispered. “Go with that.”

“Okay. I . . . okay.” Stop stalling. She took a deep breath, found the words, and said formally, “Oolah yuum Bastet. Ba’ax ka wa’alik?” Greetings, goddess Bastet. What do you say?

Throom! As the shock of a second sonic boom reverberated through the chamber, magic flared and the goddess’s image solidified. Suddenly, Anna could see new details of Bastet’s fur, her eyes, her robe.

And then the goddess took a deep, shuddering breath and came alive.

Her robes and fur ruffled in an unseen breeze, her whiskers twitched, and then she blinked and focused, looking momentarily startled to find herself in the midst of a crowd, or maybe a crowd like this one. But then she focused on Anna, and her expression cleared. “Ahh,” she said. “Itza’at. I’m glad to finally see you.”

The words came out in a strange, guttural language that Anna didn’t recognize, but somehow translated inside her head, so she understood the words and heard what was behind them—relief, regret and a huge upwelling of power.

She glanced back at Lucius, whose face was lit with wonder. “Did you get that?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed hard. “Yeah, I did.”

“We all did,” Dez said from behind them.

Anna faced Bastet and said in English, “Greetings, goddess.” She hesitated, suddenly aware that her knees were shaking; her whole body was shaking. What was she supposed to say? What was she supposed to do? Should she meet the goddess’s eyes or look away? Mother, help me! Maybe it was real, maybe wishful thinking, but her amulet seemed to warm further in her grip, steadying her. She took a deep breath, looked up and met those blue, blue eyes. “Yes, I am of the itza’at line, though untrained. I got your message and will do whatever you ask of me.”

“I ask nothing but that you listen and believe, all of you.”

Anna nodded. “We will.”

“It will be difficult.”

There was movement all around her, a shifting of bodies and stances as the others moved up to surround Anna, so they faced Bastet as a united front.

Dez tipped his head in a shallow bow. “We’re not scared of hard going, goddess, or even death. We only fear what will happen if we fail.”

“As well you should.” Her image flickered, wavering and growing translucent once more.

Feeling the skull’s magic hitch and start to fade, Anna clutched the amulet and poured all of her energy into the crystal skull. The world dimmed around her, sparking desperation. She wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t—

A hand gripped her upper arm and she was flooded with the power of a touch-link, which was gentler than a blood-link, but still effective, especially for this. Then there was another clasp, another increase in the magic flowing through her. Then more. Relief washed through her as she looked back to find Lucius on one side of her, Dez on the other, and the rest of her teammates standing close by, all touching, linking to help her. Together, as a team.

Gathering their joined power, she focused once more on the amulet, sending the Nightkeepers’ magic into the spell. A glow kindled deep within the bloodred skull, and the goddess’s image solidified.

“Quickly,” Bastet said. “The kohan and the kax are trying to block this magic. Soon, they will cut it off at the barrier.”

“Kohan?” Dez whispered, lips barely moving.

“Sickness,” Lucius translated, sotto voce.

“Shut it!” Anna hissed in her do-it-or-die prof’s voice.

“The kohan rule the upper plane, just as the humans control the middle plane and the kax control the lower plane.”

“The sky gods, then.” Dez nodded. “Go on.”

Bastet’s eyes flashed. “No. Not gods. Kohan. They are no more gods than you are, or the kax. All are equal in the eyes of the true gods. The upper, middle and lower planes are just places, realms where the magic exists. Your many-times-great ancestors understood this, just as they knew that the kohan and the kax each wanted the middle plane and its inhabitants for their own—a playground, with powerful playthings.”

“That’s . . .” Impossible, Anna wanted to say, but couldn’t, because the sudden elevator drop of her stomach said otherwise.

“Holy crap.” Lucius’s whisper was dull with shock, but his eyes were alight with wonder. “Rosa was right. There are other gods out there. True gods.”

“There are six of us,” Bastet confirmed. “Three belonging to life, three to death.” Images flickered rapid-fire across Anna’s brain, imprinting themselves on her mind’s eye. “Your ancestors knew us, worshipped us. But the kax corrupted one of the ancient kings and turned him against us, breaking our hold on the middle plane and destroying almost all of our guardians. Those who survived moved to a new land, one that was poised at the juncture of the three planes. There, they lost faith, falling prey to the whispers of the kohan, then the kax. They split the magic and lost their way, becoming fragments of what they once were. Until now, until you.”

“No.” Anna shook her head, denying the awful possibility of it all. But even as her heart tried to reject what the goddess was saying, she saw how it dovetailed with the Nightkeepers’ flight from Egypt and the way their magic had changed in the Mayan territories, becoming chaotic and unpredictable, and eventually splitting into its light and dark halves, wielded by the Nightkeepers and the Xibalbans. “It’s not true,” she insisted, too horrified to worry about arguing with a goddess.

“Or is it that you do not want to know the truth?” The goddess’s image grew until it filled Anna’s vision, her senses. She didn’t know if Bastet had leaned closer, or if the goddess had simply locked on to her magic, but in that moment she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but see, hear and feel the horrors of the past.

Terrible visions raced through her, reminding her finally of the things she’d seen during those last few minutes of chaos during the massacre, while Jox had dragged her and Strike down into the shielded, hidden bolt-hole beneath Skywatch. She hadn’t been there, though—her mind had been in the southlands, dying with her kinswomen in the narrow tunnel system beneath Chichén Itzá.

Anna let go of the amulet and covered her eyes, trying to shut it out. But the images flowed through her, awakened her. A woman screamed as a boluntiku rose above her, dripping with the fiery energy of lava and going solid in the last moment before it killed her. Another wept as she unleashed terrible fireballs into the smoking spot where her mate had been only seconds before. A man cried; another screamed and held his own entrails. It was all dim and dark, cloaked in carved stone and blood, closing in on her, suffocating her.

“Enough,” she whimpered. “I get it.”

“It’s not nearly enough,” said Bastet, uncompromising. “Know the rest, and believe in it. Believe in me.”

More memories, more terror, this time coming from her mother’s mind. Her blessed, beloved mother. “No!” the queen screamed as the shimmering bubble of the barrier tore down its center and a terrible blackness poured through, exuding evil and horror as it became a winged serpent—a perverted, wronged form of the great creator god, Kulkulkan. “For gods’ sake, Jag, stop the spell!”

He didn’t, though. He couldn’t. And they had died.

Anna cried out when her mother’s perceptions ended in a flash of brilliant, lava-born orange, then moaned when she was battered by echoes of other horrors, other deaths.