Jessica Andersen - Spellfire

“I hope so.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s . . . nothing. Just something my old man said.” He paused. “Did you ever imagine your parents showing up one day, putting the smackdown on the Witch, and whisking you away to your real life?”

She lowered her beer in surprise. “Where did that come from?”

“I was thinking about what Bastet said about the kohan and kax conspiring against us, and how it would help to think that there was a reason for all the bad luck we’ve had. Not just now, but in the past, too. The rise of the Aztec, the Spanish conquest, the Trail of Tears, the Solstice Massacre . . . all those times the Nightkeepers were just starting to flourish in a new land, when wham, something knocked them back down again.”

“Which got you thinking about being an orphan.” The word tried to stick in her throat. It was true, though. The surviving full-blooded Nightkeepers had grown up without their parents, though in most cases their winikin had filled in as best they could. And Rabbit himself might’ve been better off if both his parents had been out of the picture. “What about you?” she asked him. “Did you ever imagine your mother showing up and taking you away from Red-Boar?”

“Not really.” But then he sighed. “Okay, maybe. More over the past couple of years than when I was a kid, though. Back then, I more or less believed that I was a disaster, good for nothing, all the stuff my old man kept telling me. So why would my mother—who, of course, I pictured being gentle, kind, generous and the exact opposite of him—want anything to do with me? Worse, what if she actually did come, and was disappointed?”

“Rabbit . . .”

“No.” He took her hand, threaded their fingers together. “No sympathy necessary, no pity requested. I haven’t been that kid for a long time. That didn’t stop me, though, from chasing after her ghost over the past few years, thinking there was no way she could be as bad as Red-Boar.” He snorted, though his fingers tightened on hers. “Just my luck she turned out to be worse.”

“Luck,” Myr said softly.

“Yeah. There’s that word again. Like I said, it’s tempting to think that a whole lot of what’s gone down has been because our so-called gods have been fucking with us. Which makes it really damn cool to think that there’s an even higher power out there somewhere that wants us to succeed, and is trying to get through and help us.”

“Bastet as Daddy Warbucks?”

“More like some sort of superhero who’s been blocked from the planet, and could help us out if we can manage to open up the lines of communication.”

“In eight days.”

He glanced up at the night sky. “Almost down to seven, now.”

“Scary,” she said, going for wry but aware that her voice shook. It hit her like this sometimes, the knowledge that they were coming up on the end date, and that she was going to be right there on the frontlines. For all that she was a warrior and a mage, sometimes she still felt very much like a frightened little girl.

His shoulder bumped against hers. “Yeah. Scary.”

They sat like that for a few minutes in silence.

“I thought about it,” she said then, surprising herself. “My parents showing up, I mean. Sometimes, I would hide out and watch customers come into the shop, and I would pretend they were my parents, and that they’d come to take me back. Now and then I would picture them having the Witch arrested, but mostly all I cared about was getting out of there.” She paused. “I guess it was one thing to picture it, another to do something about it.”

“Don’t be ashamed of staying. Kids are programmed to believe their parents, wrong or right.”

She toyed with her brownie. “You’re saying I stayed because of inertia, just like some of the Nightkeepers and winikin—maybe a lot of them—are going to want to stick with the sky gods because they’re familiar.”

“What if they’re right?”

“Was I better off letting the Witch use me as a punching bag?”

“Ah, baby. Don’t do that to yourself.” He wrapped an arm around her.

“I won’t. I’m not. I’ve moved on, damn it.” But she let herself lean into him for a few seconds. And, when she felt his breath on her cheek, his lips on her ear, she tipped her head to accept the kiss, then sought his mouth with her own.

The churn of unease in her belly warmed quickly to desire, and she slid her hand up his chest to press over the steady thud of his heart. This was what she needed; it was why she had gone walking with him, why she couldn’t stay away from him.

He made her feel important.

He broke the kiss, to press his forehead to hers, so their breaths mingled when he said, “Will you come home with me tonight?”

She nodded but said nothing, not sure she trusted what would come out of her mouth right now, with her emotions too damn close to the surface.

They climbed down from the pueblo, pausing at the flat spots to kiss. And as they headed back toward the cottage, hand in hand, with her head on his shoulder, she didn’t let herself think about tomorrow. It would be enough to go home with him, make love to him. She wouldn’t let herself give in all the way like she had last night, though, and she wouldn’t stay the night.

December 19

Two days to the zero date

With fewer than forty-eight hours on the clock, the Nightkeepers sat in the great room while Lucius used his laptop to flash pictures of Egyptian paintings and carvings on the big screen. He’d already gone over Bastet; the ram-headed creator god, Khnum, who made the bodies of men from mud and then breathed life into them; and the sun god, Amon-Ra, who had the head of a hawk and ruled the lands of the living. All the good guys Bastet had mentioned.

“Now for the not-so-good guys,” he said. “This is Anubis.” He clicked to a statue of a pointy-eared, pointy-nosed dog cast in gold and painted black. Lying on its belly with its front paws outstretched, it was positioned like the Sphinx and had gleaming gem eyes that seemed to scan the room even in 2-D. “And so is this.” The next slide showed a tomb painting with the same foxy head, but this time on the body of a bulky, muscular man. “Since jackals were often seen scavenging near the dead and their tombs, the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as the guardians of the dead. Anubis here is the god of death and the dying.” He hit the button again, skipping a slide and stopping on another animal-headed man. This one, though, had a strangely elongated nose, almost a beak, along with square-tipped ears, and what looked like scales. “And this is Seth.”

As Rabbit frowned, trying to figure out what the hell it was, Myrinne leaned over and said in an undertone, “They had armadillos in ancient Egypt?”

He exhaled a soft snort. “That’s good news for us—if we poke it with a stick, it’ll roll into a ball and wait until we go away.”

Her grin warmed him, as did the press of her thigh against his where they sat together at one end of the big sofa. Quarters were tight with the full seventy-seven-person team crammed into the mansion’s great room, but he wasn’t complaining. Ever since that afternoon up at the pueblo, he and Myr had been hanging out pretty much every day, and things had been going well. The sex was incredible and having her back in his life was even better, though she still wouldn’t spend the night.

Even that was probably for the best, though, because it meant he didn’t have to explain why he spent almost an hour each morning sitting cross-legged in front of the altar in the spare bedroom, burning incense and staring down at the carved stone surface while he made sure the dark magic stayed contained. And it meant he didn’t have to let on that it was getting harder each day.