Jessica Andersen - Blood Spells

Jox headed for Patience. In his midsixties, fit, and trim, with long gray hair that he wore back in a Deadhead ponytail, the royal winikin was responsible for protecting and guiding several of the magi as well as running the day-to-day operations of the entire compound. Yet despite his already heavy workload, he had unofficially adopted Patience when her winikin , Hannah, had left with the twins.

“What happened?” he demanded as he ran a quick vitals check on Brandt, who was deathly pale and cool to the touch, his lips dusky, almost blue.

The walls of the high-ceilinged great room seemed to press in on her, but she fought the panic and made herself be strong, made her voice stay steady when she answered, “The god chose Rabbit first, but when the power flux woke Iago, the Triad magic bounced out of Rabbit and into Brandt. Now, according to my nahwal , he’s trapped in the spell because he can’t connect with his ancestors until I help him remember some debt he hasn’t repaid. If we can’t wake him before the solstice-eclipse, we’re screwed. And Anna and Mendez are Triad numbers two and three.” Like ripping off a wax strip, she said it all at once, quickly, to get the pain over with.

Only this pain was just beginning, wasn’t it?

“Gods.” Jox’s face lost all its color. “Anna.”

“Yeah,” Strike grated. Leah stood beside him, gripping his upper arm in support. He said, “I’ll make the calls. We need to know if they’re—well. We need to know.”

As Strike and Leah headed for the nearest phone, Jox pokered up and went into crisis-response mode, though Patience could see the effort it cost him.

She could relate.

Moving to the nearest intercom, the winikin keyed the button that would transmit his voice throughout the compound. “The away team’s back. All hands on deck in the great room, ASAP.” Then he said to Nate and Michael, “Help Patience get Brandt bedded down.” To her, he said, “I’ll send someone with an IV setup for him and food for you.” The magi all needed to rest and refuel after the amount of magic they had just pulled.

His orders were practical, a veneer of necessity slapped over a deep layer of shock. But that was what the Nightkeepers did, wasn’t it? They took what the gods threw at them, dealt with the bad stuff, fought the battles that needed fighting, and lived their lives in between crises.

Or tried to, anyway.

Focus, Patience told herself. Make a plan. This wasn’t a physical enemy she could fight, but she still needed a strategy. “Let’s hold off on the IV,” she said to Jox. “I’d want to try uplinking and—”

“Not a chance,” the winikin interrupted. “You need to recharge.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Promise me you won’t do anything before you’ve at least eaten.”

“I can’t just sit here.”

“You won’t be any good to him if you crap out in the middle of the uplink.”

“I’ll help,” a new voice interjected. Patience turned to find Lucius standing behind her. He was pure human, but he was also their Prophet, endowed with the magical ability to search their ancestors’ library for spells and answers. Although the magic had made him nearly as big and strong as a Nightkeeper male, his half-untucked T-shirt, finger-tunneled sandy hair, and ratty sandals reminded her of the geeky grad student he’d been when he first arrived.

Oddly, that small piece of continuity in the middle of chaos helped center her. Inhaling a breath that was too close to tears, she nodded. “Thanks. What did you have in mind?”

“Jade said the nahwal mentioned a couple of gods, Kali and Cabrakan. I’ll pull together info on both of them. But I was also thinking I could try to find a reboot spell, something that could get a mage out of misfired magic. Maybe we can reach Brandt that way.”

Patience’s chest loosened a little at the reminder that even though the nahwal had said she had to be the one to bring Brandt back, she wasn’t entirely on her own. “That’d be good. And maybe look for a memory-enhancing spell.”

“Right. Any ideas what the nahwal was talking about Brandt having forgotten?”

Disquiet tightened her stomach. “I can only think of one thing that neither of us can remember.”

Lucius snapped his fingers, making the connection. “The night you met.”

“Yeah.” They had both been down in the Yucatán for spring break and awakened in bed together the morning after the equinox with no memory of what had happened the night before. Later, it had become obvious that they hadn’t met by chance. Instead, they had somehow connected with the magic more than four years before the barrier fully reactivated. And they didn’t have the faintest clue what had happened that night.

The Nightkeepers and winikin had thrown around various theories, but those discussions had dwindled over time because the “where, how, why” of their marriage hadn’t seemed all that important in the larger scheme.

It did now, though. What had happened that night? What debt did he owe? And how the hell was she supposed to help him remember anything if he was trapped in the Triad spell?

“I’ll see what I can find.” Lucius pointed toward the residential wing. “Now go. Eat. Sleep. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.”

She meant to rest; she really did. But once she was alone in the suite, with Brandt stripped down to a black tee and bike shorts, lying too still beneath the blue coverlet of the bed they had once shared, she couldn’t settle. Instead, she found herself pacing the five-room suite, glancing at the framed pictures that were hung on nearly every wall.

Some were of just her and Brandt—a few candids and a posed portrait from their small wedding.

Others were of the family foursome: her and Brandt with the newborn twins; the four of them out in front of the starter house they had bought right before Strike had called them back to Skywatch. A few showed just the boys: Braden feeding a brown nanny goat while Harry hid behind Brandt’s jean-clad leg; Braden playing on an inflatable moon-bounce while Harry stood off to the side with a look of intense concentration on his face, as if trying to figure out how the thing worked. There was even one from Skywatch, an extended family portrait with the four of them, plus Hannah, Woody, and Rabbit.

But where those pictures were familiar, when she stalled in the bedroom door, the man she saw lying in the big bed looked like a stranger.

She wished she knew what she could have done differently. She had resented the hell out of him for backing Strike’s decision to send the boys away and then distancing himself when she had wanted—

needed—to talk it through. And when, in the worst of her depression, she had gone behind his back to break into the royal quarters in search of a clue to the boys’ whereabouts, Brandt might have alibied her when Strike and Leah had caught her coming out of their suite, but later, in private, he had turned away from her. And stayed gone.

Now, as she stared at his motionless form, the nahwal ’s words echoed in her mind: Help him remember. But how?

Giving in to the impulse, freed by the knowledge that there wasn’t anybody there who would hit her with a derisive snort or eye-roll, she pulled a small deck of oracle cards from the pocket of her combat pants, where she had carried them for luck. She shuffled them, taking solace in the small action; the cards were one of the few things that belonged only to her these days.

When the deck felt right, she stopped shuffling, cut the cards, and flipped the bottom one in the quickest and simplest of readings.

A shiver touched the back of her neck at the sight of a geometric glyph that looked like the outline of two flat-topped, step-sided pyramids that had been joined together at their crowns to form a ragged