Jessica Andersen - Spellfire

And right now, there was no fucking way he could use the stones without his own link to the dark magic.

But he had to follow her. Had to find a way.

Tightening his grip on his makeshift weapon, he advanced on the stones as a cloud covered the sun, throwing him back into the shadows. The temp dropped and the palm fronds rattled in a sudden downdraft, sounding like giant wings and making the back of his neck crawl, just like—

“Shit!” Rabbit flung himself to the ground and rolled.

A huge camazotz hit right where he’d been, with its wings and claws outstretched and its tail scything the air. The creature wore a stone yoke tied around its hips, which didn’t just make the demon damn tough to banish; it signified that it was a ’zotz leader. Bigger and meaner than the soldiers, they were tough as shit to kill . . . and they rarely traveled alone.

Sure enough, as Rabbit ducked a tail-swipe and missed a grab for the barbed end, the sky went dark, clouding over with more huge camazotz, dozens of the fuckers, all zeroing in on their leader.

Grim reality broke over him. He was screwed, finished. He couldn’t get to the stones, couldn’t get back to the cave, couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except bare his teeth at the hoard, brandish his puny-assed knife and shout, “Come on, motherfuckers. You want a piece of me? Come and fucking take it!”

“Rabbit, get down!”

The sound of Dez’s voice froze his brain, but his body obeyed the king’s order, pancaking him face-first in the sand. Then the ice cracked and his mind raced. That hadn’t just happened, couldn’t have happened, he hadn’t heard—

A salvo of fireballs blasted right over him, crackling red-gold and burning like fury and proving that the impossible was real. The Nightkeepers had found him, they had come for him.

The fireballs hit the ’zotz line and detonated. Flames roared, and the demons shrieked as Rabbit lifted his head and squinted through watering, disbelieving eyes at the carnage. And carnage it was—a dozen of the enemy were down and smoking, including the leader. But the sky was still dark, the air still full of the leather-boom of wings and the screams of incoming demons.

He wasn’t alone anymore, though.

Lurching to his feet, he started to turn toward the others, choking out, “How in the hell did—”

“Save your questions,” said a deep, grating voice behind him, nearly drowned out by sudden bursts of gunfire, which went ripping into the oncoming camazotz. Rough hands spun him back around, shoved a heavy machine gun in his hands, and jammed a sheathed knife in his ragged waistband. “Fight!”

Then a hard spine slammed into Rabbit’s and he was back-to-back with something he never thought he’d have again: a teammate.

Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. The Nightkeepers were all around him—huge, strong, beautiful and so damn glossy it almost hurt to look at them. There were dozens of winikin, too—smaller, lighter and more agile than the magi, they fired machine guns filled with jade-tipped ammo from behind shield spells as if, while he’d been gone, they had somehow turned into an actual magic-wielding army. At their core, Sven and Cara fought shoulder to shoulder—a Nightkeeper and a winikin teaming up, aided not just by Sven’s huge coyote familiar, but also by a smaller, darker coyote that stayed close to Cara’s heels.

Rabbit’s head spun. Jesus fucking Christ. How long had he been gone?

A second round of fireballs detonated, biting into the enemy line and filling the air with fury and pain, but he barely flinched. He was too busy staring.

He saw Anna and Strike, huge and regal, and the closest thing he’d had to siblings; Patience and Brandt, who had taught him what a real family could feel like; Lucius, the human researcher who was more of an outsider than Rabbit had ever been, yet had somehow become one of them. And so many more . . . all familiar, yet suddenly seeming like strangers.

But there was no sign of the one person he was looking for, the one person he needed to see. Where the hell was Myrinne?

A bony elbow jabbed his ribs. “Fight, damn you!”

He didn’t know who he was backed up against—JT, maybe, given the attitude and sneer-laden voice—but the order cut through the shock and triggered what was left of his warrior’s instincts. Sudden adrenaline seared through Rabbit, pushing the other stuff aside. He raised the machine gun—how the hell had they known he would need it?—and sighted on an ugly brute that was swooping through the dissipating fireballs and beelining straight for him. Leaning into the solid weight behind him, he shouted through split lips and hit the trigger.

The jade-tipped bullets ripped into the approaching demon and then detonated, sending fragments of the Nightkeepers’ sacred stone deep into its flesh. The thing screamed, spasmed and crashed into another, sending them both slamming to the ground. More gunfire spat from behind Rabbit as he lurched forward, yanking the knife from his belt. It was a plain military-issue blade, not the ceremonial stone knife he’d left behind at Skywatch, but it would do the job.

He went down on his knees, feeling the impact thud all the way to his jaw as he yanked at the ’zotz’s dick, hacked it off and grated, “Go to hell.”

The thing puffed to oily smoke and a funk at the back of his throat. After that, his vision narrowed and he went into overdrive, bringing down demon after demon and dispatching them with a hack and a curse, over and over again. And then . . .

Silence. Suddenly there weren’t any more demons to fight, only gritty ash mixing with the churned-up white sand and the gentle lap of waves. But his blood still raced with battle madness.

Furious and unsteady, caught between his prisoner self and the warrior he’d been, Rabbit whirled on Dez. “Where is she? Where’s Myr?”

That rasping voice snapped from behind him, “How about you start with a fucking ‘thank you for saving my ass’?”

Without the muffling gunfire, the tone was suddenly all too familiar, yet impossible.

Rabbit’s blood chilled as he spun around, then froze solid when he saw who he’d been fighting with.

His godsdamned father.

Red-Boar.

It was another fucking ghost. Only it wasn’t, because sure as shit it was his old man standing there in flesh and blood, looking exactly like he had right before he died—dark-eyed, sharp-faced and condemning, with a thin line of a mouth and a salt-and-peppered skull trim. He was wearing his usual drab brown, though in combat camo rather than the ceremonial robe he’d favored, saying that brown was the color of penitence. Not that Rabbit had ever heard him apologize for shit. If anything, it was the people around him who were constantly sorry.

Red-Boar’s death had been a shock, but in reality it hadn’t left much of a hole—at least Rabbit hadn’t thought so. Now, though, an old, ugly fury kindled in his gut. “You’re dead.”

“I was. And I would’ve stayed that way if it hadn’t been for you.” Red-Boar spat on the ground, in a gesture that either meant respect for the gods or disgust for his son. Probably both. “The gods sent me back to find your ungrateful ass.”

Suddenly, the flash of magic Rabbit had felt when he killed the first ’zotz made far more sense. That didn’t stop the thudding pulse of what-the-fuck in his veins, though, didn’t make it any easier to say: “You used a blood-link.” Which was ironic, given that his old man hadn’t ever wanted to admit they were related.

Red-Boar nodded curtly. “I don’t know how the gods knew you were going to get your shit in trouble like this—history repeating, I guess—but rather than send me to the afterlife, they warehoused me in the fucking in-between for a while, and then gave me my marching orders and sent me back here. The reanimation spell will keep me going until after the war, and then poof.” He pointed to the sky. “Up I go.”