Jessica Andersen - Storm Kissed

Seeing her around Skywatch had hammered home to Dez that he was seriously fucking lucky. The Triad magic hadn’t just picked him; it had saved him, given him a second chance. And in the process, it had sleeked him down and enhanced his existing magic. Like a serpent, he used all of his senses, analyzing scent signatures by both smell and taste, and detecting minute changes in body heat. Not to mention that his warrior′s talent gave him the sharpened reflexes and strategic thinking of a killing machine, and the lightning magic gave him some serious shock-and-awe. The three together made him a formidable weapon, and he was determined to be the best damned soldier he could be. He couldn’t undo the past, but since waking up from the Triad transition, he had thrown himself into the Nightkeepers’ war, taking his own ego out of the equation and doing whatever he was damn well told.

That is, until last week when he got Keban’s strangely formal note—his fucking marching orders: Prepare yourself—and the rest of the magi—to meet me at noon on the day of the solstice. Bring the black artifact. I’ll gather the others that have been found, and on the proper days I will find the two that remain hidden. I will contact you with instructions when the time comes. Be ready.

Bull-fucking-shit to that. Anntah had made it clear during Dez’s mental Roto-Rootering that Keban had some of his rhetoric right, but he didn’t speak for the serpent bloodline. He was sick and damaged. More, he knew far more than a winikin should about the magic, which made him dangerous. So Dez was prepared, all right . . . prepared to kill Keban and destroy the artifacts. And if there was some grim satisfaction in the chore, he figured he could live with that. He’d never claimed to be a frigging saint.

A trickle of dislodged rocks interrupted his train of thought and brought his head up. The sound was followed by the faint tread of footsteps coming not from the path, but from the back country on the other side of the park.

Heat flared as his warrior′s talent came on line, sharpening his reflexes and bringing his fighting magic close to the surface. He bared his teeth when he caught the faintly sour smell he had been trailing for days. His enemy had arrived, and for once he was a step ahead of the bastard rather than chasing behind.

Easing from the cold passageway into the warmer air outside, he let his magic ramp up, the fine electrical currents making him acutely aware of each neuron and synapse. The sun was gone, the sky a clear, darkening blue going scalloped pink at the edges as he slipped from one shadow-shrouded doorway to the next, working his way through the interconnected chambers of the labyrinthine ruin. The small, furtive noises he was tracking headed for the northernmost point of the ruin, where eight-foot-high stone walls outlined a huge circular chamber.

Dez wedged himself into the shadowy juncture where an intersecting wall ran into the curve of the room’s outer edge and a small window gave him a decent view of the inner courtyard. Moments later, Keban came into view. And even though Dez had braced himself to see the winikin again—and to kill him—the sight of the hunched-over body and scarred face shot his pulse into the stratosphere. In an instant, he flashed back on that night in the storm, and the look on the bastard’s face as he had pressed the star demon into Dez’s bleeding palms.

His final slide had started at that moment. The bad shit that followed had come from inside him, it was true, but Keban had set it free.

Wait it out, Dez told himself. Let him get the artifact first. He watched through slitted eyes as the winikin skimmed a hand over a section of the wall where the masons had worked a snakelike stripe of green stone into the red-rock background, then paused, lips moving as he read the shadowscript. After a moment, he turned and paced the diameter of the kiva three separate times, scuffing his feet when he hit the center. Then he stood in the place where his scuff marks intersected and started walking north, perpendicular to the plane of the setting sun. When he reached the wall, he dropped to his knees, pulled a folding shovel from his knapsack, screwed the pieces together, and started digging.

Almost, Dez thought, shifting restlessly in his hiding spot. A second later he realized that the twitchiness was more than his usual impatience—there was a new current humming in the air, an itchy heat that was familiar yet not. Magic, he thought, gut knotting on the realization. Shit. The buzz was coming from Keban, growing stronger the farther down he dug. It was from the artifact, a soft, insistent call that reached inside Dez, seeming to echo in his very DNA.

Block it out, he told himself, steeling himself against the siren song. He could handle it this time. He would have to handle it.

He started to sweat.

The winikin suddenly made a satisfied noise, ducked down and shoved his hands into the hollow he had carved alongside the wall. He came up with a bundle, started unwrapping a layer of rotting fabric, then paused and turned away to paw through his knapsack for something.

Digging his fingernails into his palms hard enough to draw blood, both as a crude sacrifice and to keep himself from doing something stupid, Dez called the magic for a shield spell, intending to turn it into a damned cage. Power raced in his veins as he spread his fingers and imagined the shield falling into place, but he didn’t trigger the spell. Wait for it, he told himself. Wait . . . for . . . it.

Keban straightened, holding a flashlight.

Now! Dez unleashed his shield spell at the same instant that Keban turned on the flashlight. There was a spark of electricity, a flare of magic.

And the world went nuts.

A fat spark shot from Keban to Dez and back. The winikin cried out and dropped the flashlight, but a flare of blue-white power suddenly engulfed Dez, lighting his surroundings and totally fucking the element of surprise. Keban spun, took one look at him, and bolted.

Damn it! Dez slammed his crackling shield around the other man. Not invisible like most of the warrior′s defensive spells, or concealing like the chameleon shields Michael or Alexis could call, Dez’s shield was like most of his magic: loud, unsubtle, and supercharged. It arced with blue-white electricity, forming a weblike cage that stopped bullets and buzz-swords, and could make like a Taser if he wanted it to. And hell, yeah, he wanted it to right now. He wanted the bastard to burn.

Keban skidded to a stop in the center of the magic, and turned back as Dez approached the cage. The blue-white light showed a face that sagged like wax around the scars, eyes that were sly and calculating, but didn’t track normally.

Nate’s illegal hack into the winikin’s psych ward records had revealed that Keban had suffered an acute psychotic break a few days after that night in the storm. He’d stayed put for a decade, then vanished the day of the Triad spell, which couldn’t have been a coincidence. He’d been rational enough to work out an escape, rational enough to send that letter and track down the artifacts he wanted. Now, though, he stared past Dez’s shoulder, twisting his fingers in the filthy cloth wrappings, and mumbling to himself, looking more pitiful than rational.

Dez’s rage didn’t quite die, but it sure as hell faltered.

Up close, the man inside the glowing cage was a deflated, deranged version of the beast he had seen in his nightmares, year after year, until new demons took his place. He didn’t look like the ruthless bastard who had dragged Dez to dozens of crumbling ruins as a kid and turned him loose with a knife and orders to find the temple’s sacred chamber, make his sacrifice, and “for fuck’s sake, get it right.” And he didn’t look like the man who had whipped him bloody each time he failed.