Jessica Andersen - Blood Spells

Focus! The word echoed in Woody’s voice. And for fuck’s sake, have a little faith.

The memory—or was it something else?—snapped Brandt out of his downward spiral. He blinked, clearing his mind of the noise out on the street, and the TV images. Within the relative calm that followed, an image formed: that of a huge lake with an irregularly shaped island rising out of the center, connected to the mainland by four causeways built up out of stone and rubble.

And he freaking got it.

“I’m not an island,” he said, “but this piece of Mexico City used to be.”

He opened his eyes to find Patience, limned in sparks of magic, staring at him in wonder. “Your eyes are gold,” she whispered.

He caught her hands, using her to anchor him as he reached out with his mind and found the inner filing cabinet where he had put the scariest, most tempting and terrifying part of the Triad magic: his ancestors’ powers.

The eagle magi had designed the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica using math, physics, and arcane schematics painted onto fig-bark codices. Now their combined talents expanded his senses, letting him perceive the structure of the city around him. He sensed the buildings above the surface, their cracks and stresses, and the places where they had been shored up against earthquake damage.

Beneath them, he perceived the layers that represented five centuries of habitation, with Moctezuma’s capital city of Tenochtitlán at the very bottom.

He perceived the ghostly foundations of the ancient palaces, temples, and markets. More importantly, he saw where the causeways ran across the lake bed, two from the northern end of the island, one from the west, one from the south. The causeways had long been buried beneath the rubble that the Spanish had carted in to expand Mexico City beyond the island. But their structures were still there . . . and they were the only things holding Cabrakan in check.

The demon strained against them, drawn to the place where generations of terrible blood sacrifices had weakened the barrier enough for him to punch through during the solstice-eclipse, but held back by the four causeways, which had been built by the slave labor of captured Maya, and held the power of their sky gods.

The big earthquake two decades earlier had weakened the causeways, and the recent miniquakes had further crumbled their stone bases and compressed paving. One or two more good tremors, and the demon would be free.

Not on my watch, Brandt thought fiercely. He bore down, pulling power from his ancestors, his teammates, and Patience—his wife, mate, and partner. His forebears had once built vast cities from stone and the images in their minds. Now their knowledge, along with the combined magic of his teammates, gave him the power to rebuild the roads that anchored the center of Mexico City.

A spell whispered in his mind, coming in a man’s voice that sounded oddly like flutes and drumbeats, and brought the icy chill of river water to touch his skin.

Brandt said the words aloud. And the world turned bloodred.

Power detonated. Fiery magic streamed out of him and blasted along where the four causeways had been, going from crimson to translucent as it passed the limits of the ruin. The ground heaved and shuddered, nearly pitching Brandt to his knees as Cabrakan fought back far below them.

The magic poured out, draining Brandt and making his head spin, but he kept going, pulling strength from the depths of his soul and beyond. And the causeways responded, beginning to realign into the form they had taken a thousand years ago. The changes were infinitesimal at first—a stone returning to alignment in one spot, a fracture sealing in another—but then the alterations mushroomed, gaining speed.

Brandt sensed Cabrakan’s rage against the magi who had killed his brother and now barred him from the earth. The dark lord slammed against the earth beneath Moctezuma’s palace, which had been at the center of the bloodshed and was now the weakest spot of all.

The ground yawed and threatened to shake apart. Something crashed down from above, but was deflected by shield magic.

“Thanks,” Brandt grated, not sure who had set the shield, but understanding that the others were protecting him so he could concentrate everything he had on locking stone against rubble, rubble against sand.

Although the original causeways had ended at the island’s shores, he continued inward, reinforcing Cabrakan’s prison all the way inward to the Templo Mayor, which was the central point where all four causeways intersected, and where slave-built temples had been soaked in blood.

There, wielding the magic of love and family, of past and present, Brandt joined the causeways together, stabilizing the ground beneath Mexico City and sealing the demon into Xibalba.

And then, spent, he let himself fall, knowing that Patience would catch him and bring him home.

December 22 One year, three hundred and sixty-four days to the zero date Skywatch Woody’s funeral rites were planned for noon the day after the solstice-eclipse. His pyre was built at the edge of where the Nightkeepers’ Great Hall had stood before the massacre. Red-Boar had been sent to the gods from that spot, as had Sasha’s father. There had been zero discussion of setting up a second funerary site for the winikin even though the separation had been traditional in their parents’ generations. Winikin , Nightkeeper, human . . . they were all teammates, all equally worthy of the gods’ attention on their way to the sky.

Brandt, Patience, and Hannah did the bulk of the work on the pyre, with Harry and Braden alternately helping and getting in the way. To Patience, their perpetual motion and piping voices brought a sense of lightness, completion, and joy that she had so badly missed . . . and one she would yearn for when they left again.

But now, more than ever, they needed to stay hidden.

Iago’s injuries would heal, and when they did, he was going to be pissed . She didn’t want the boys anywhere within his reach. If she could have sent them to another planet, another plane, she would have. As it was, she was doing the next best thing: She was entrusting them once again to Hannah, and this time she wouldn’t go looking for them, no matter what. She would love them best by letting them go. Even if it killed her to do so.

“There.” Brandt stepped back, dusted off his hands, and stuck them in the front pockets of his jeans as he surveyed the work. Braden did the same, mimicking his father so they stood side by side, both with their hands in their jeans pockets and their shoulders slightly hunched beneath black T-shirts, staring at Woody’s pyre with matching frowns.

Patience’s heart turned over when Brandt glanced down, caught Braden’s fierce scowl, and laughed out loud. It was a rusty-sounding chuckle, one forced through his grief for Woody, and his sorrow at knowing the boys would be there for only a few more hours. But instead of shutting all that away, he caught her eyes and shared it: the laugh, the grief, and the sorrow.

“You guys are going to be okay,” Hannah said softly from behind her.

Patience turned to find the winikin sitting atop one of the nearby picnic tables, with Harry cross-

legged on the picnic bench near her feet, watching his father and brother debate the placement of the three ceremonial sticks of ceiba, cacao, and rubber-tree wood.

Moving to sit on Harry’s other side, Patience propped her elbows on the table and nodded. “You know what? I think so.”

In another lifetime, when she’d been young and so caught up in being in love that she hadn’t remembered to be herself, she would have been adamant about it, would’ve made sweeping statements about love at first sight and forever. Now she was far more cautious. But at the same time, now she knew what it took to make love at first sight last forever . . . and she had a partner who knew he had to meet her halfway.