Jessica Andersen - Magic Unchained

He couldn’t explain the visions or Mac’s odd behavior, but it was time to make a choice. He could keep following the vision, or he could go back to the fight, the team, and his woman.

“I’m going back.” He said it aloud, daring the nahwal, the gods, or the universe to tell him different. Then, not waiting for an answer or caring what it might be—this was his life, his choice—he spun and bolted back the way he had come.

No lightning struck him dead; no demon appeared to drag him to Xibalba as he raced through the rain forest on his own two feet. He didn’t feel the slashing branches, didn’t stress about his magic, Mac, or anything else he couldn’t control right now. The one thing he could control—the thing he should’ve been in better control of all along—was himself. Starting now.

As he ran, he prayed that Cara would give him one more chance to apologize, one more chance to prove that he wanted her, that he was willing to make whatever amends she wanted, whatever sacrifice would prove that he was committed to her the way she wanted, the way she deserved.

He didn’t know yet how he was going to do that. But he would do it. That was a promise.

The way back seemed shorter than the trip out; he was there within minutes, chest heaving and legs burning from the sprint. He’d made it!

But as he neared the edge of the clearing at the mouth of the tunnel, a terrible rattle split the silence and the air shimmered in a smudged gray curtain across the cave mouth. The surface bulged and rippled obscenely, warning that the barrier was almost breached at that point, which wasn’t something they had planned for. If the demons came down that tunnel and caught the Nightkeepers unprepared… “No!” Sven surged toward the breach. “Cara!”

A blur came hurtling at him from the side, too fast for him to defend. It slammed into him and he went down beneath a huge projectile of fur, muscle, and sinew.

He hit hard and rolled, shouting, “Mac, godsdamn it, stop!”

But the coyote that faced him in an aggressive crouch wasn’t Mac, he saw with sudden shock. It was a sable-coated female with dark, frantic eyes. She lowered her head and snarled, then jerked up with an utterly canine look of surprise as Mac burst from the undergrowth with a roar.

The bigger male hurtled over Sven and thudded to the ground in front of the female with his teeth bared and a low growl revving in his chest. The female’s snarl ratcheted up and the two tensed to spring, to fight, to—

“Hold it!” Sven surged to his feet. “Mac, hold! Look!” He pointed to the cave entrance, where the dark curtain was folding in on itself and curling around to enter the tunnel, moving fast. “She was protecting me!” As the bigger coyote subsided, Sven repeated in an oh, holy shit tone, “She was protecting me.”

Moving around Mac, he put himself right in front of the female, who was still crouched, but had stopped snarling. She watched him with wary eyes and her whole body shook, but she held her ground as he hunkered down.

“Dear gods. You’re real, aren’t you? Where did you come from, sweetheart? What are you doing all the way down here?” Mac had appeared unexpectedly, but at least they could theorize that a pack of the coyote bloodline’s carefully selected hybrids had escaped after the massacre and gone feral. Down here… he didn’t have a clue.

But she was real, all right. And she was powerful enough that her visions had reached him all the way up in New Mexico.

Heart thudding with sudden excitement, he tried to think of how it felt when the visions came, how he’d run after Mac seeing double, once as himself and once as another coyote. And, seeking those feelings, he sent a pulse of magic, along with a thought-glyph. Friend.

The female barked, high and excited. Friend! Talk! Where? Man where? Searchsearchsearch, where?

The “man” concept was one he knew from when Mac had been trying to track him down, their mental link somehow activated before Sven really understood what was happening to him. It was gender neutral, and meant the one particular human being that the coyote was meant to bond with. The female was a familiar in search of her person.

And there was only one other person on the planet who wore the double-dotted coyote glyph.

Excitement flashed in his veins like wildfire. “In there!” He pointed to the cave, where the dark, roiling shimmer had entirely plugged the tunnel. “She’s in there! Is there another way to get inside?”

His mind filled with scattershot images coming in a suddenly very familiar mental tone. Running. Searching, searching. A cave. Enemy! The enemy is in the cave. A back way. Another tunnel. Run. Hurry. Fast-fast.

He didn’t know how she had learned thought-glyphs or come to be in the Guatemalan rain forest, or how she’d managed to contact him, but right now none of that mattered. All that mattered was getting into that cave.

“Go!” Heart hammering, he waved her off. “We’ll be right behind you.”

Following her thought stream like a beacon, he and Mac chased the sable female through the trees and up a nearly vertical cliff face, to where a crack led to a narrow, twisting tunnel. And, gods willing, all the way inward to the cavern of Che’en Yaaxil.

“What the hell is that?” Natalie cried. But she knew. They all did. The chatter of dark magic coming from the tunnel was just as the magi had described it: like the noise made by an Amtrak-size rattler.

“They’re coming,” Brandt confirmed. He and Patience were helping the winikin with the shield stones that Lucius and Jade had magicked up for the winikin to use for protection. They worked either singly or as an overlapping domed defense, which was what they had in place now.

“Stand your ground,” Cara called to her teammates, amazed that her voice stayed steady. The rattling noise shifted and slithered and made her want to claw at her own skin. She held it together, though, just as she’d held it together up to this point in the op, by focusing on the immediate situation and dealing with whatever small piece of the whole needed to be dealt with.

The big picture was too damn scary right now: The Nightkeepers were having zero luck activating the screaming skull, there were nasty things coming up that tunnel, and it was her job to make sure they didn’t get to the Nightkeepers.

So she concentrated on the pieces that needed to work. “Breece,” she directed, “go help Sebastian.” The shield stones had their own power sources, but they used a blood-link as the catalyst. The more a winikin hated magic and the magi, the harder they found it to link up, even if they were honestly trying, as if something deep inside them still rejected the connection.

Trying very hard not to think of the parallel to Sven, she made a couple of other moves, shoring up faltering spots in the shield-stone dome, which was visible as a pale blue glow all around them. Through it, she could see a dark mist gathering at the tunnel mouth, then thickening to an opaque fog that began to roil and spin.

The rattlesnake hiss amped, but she held her ground, all too aware of the magi in the center of the dome. They were blood-linked and deep in the magic, nearly insensate as they focused all their energies on the skull and the resurrection spell. They were trusting her people with their lives, and she wasn’t going to let them down.

She had their backs, even if nobody had hers.

“Weapons ready,” Brandt called out, his voice ringing over the din. “Wait to fire until we see—”

A vicious rending noise tore through the cave, and the fog split in half, gaping to either side as terrible creatures poured through into the cave. At first she saw only a roil of dark body parts, glimpses of clawed hands and feet, and wickedly barbed tails, but then the creatures fanned out and she saw the demons for real.