Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

When Nate’s walkie crackled, calling the Nightkeepers in, he was moving before the king had finished speaking. He and Alexis converged on the royal couple’s position, and Strike said without preamble, “We’ll drop down into the tunnels now. We’ve got about an hour.”

Nate nodded. “Yeah. It’s time.” He paused. “Anything from Skywatch?”

“Nothing,” Leah reported. “It’s totally quiet there, just like here.”

“Iago’s at the hellmouth,” Nate said grimly, which meant it was going to come down to a battle of magic versus magic. And pretty much everything they knew about the Xibalbans—which wasn’t nearly enough—suggested that the Nightkeepers were going to be seriously outmatched. Add in the seven death bats and the Volatile, and they were pretty close to fucked.

Rabbit knew when darkness fell, even though he was locked in the lower level of the mansion, stuck in a windowless storeroom. He could feel the stars moving into position, feel the barrier thinning and the magic calling out to him.

There was something else calling out to him, as well. Something that shouldn’t have been able to get through the wards surrounding Skywatch, not to mention the additional shield around his room.

But the whispers penetrated, tempting him at first, taunting him. Then, as the equinox drew near and the power sink opened up inside him, lighting him with magic, the whispered temptation gave way to a demand. An order.

Open your mind to me, Iago said, his mental tone vibrating with the power of a mind-bender, power he’d stolen from Rabbit in the first place. Add your magic to mine.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Rabbit said aloud. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

He didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised as shit when a chuckle vibrated along the connection.

You invited me.

“Did not!” Rabbit shouted, indignant. But beneath the bluster lay the suspicion that maybe he had.

He’d been lying there all day, alone, in a room he’d ordered the winikin to strip of as much of the flammables as possible. TV was boring, he wasn’t in the mood for the game-loaded laptop Nate had hooked him up with, and his IM convo with Myrinne had lost steam a few hours earlier when she’d decided to nap, still recovering from her imprisonment.

So yeah, he’d been lying there, thinking of Iago, thinking about how he’d crawled inside the Xibalban’s head. He’d mentally retraced what he’d done and how it’d felt to tell someone to die and almost have it work. And maybe, just maybe, while he’d been doing that, he’d inadvertently reached out and made contact.

Anger kindled within Rabbit. Fury, and a burning need to protect what was his—his family and home. Myrinne.

Well, guess what? he thought, burning with the magic. Two can play this game.

He lay back on his cot, closed his eyes, and fisted his hands, digging his fingernails into his palms until blood flowed. Rather than fighting off Iago’s mental touch he sought it, grabbed on to it, followed it to its source. Whereas before it had been difficult to find his way into the Xibalban’s mind, it was easy this time, as though he were following the same path he’d blazed before.

I’ve got you, you son of a bitch, he thought, keeping the flare of triumph to himself as he slid smoothly into Iago’s brain. Then, suddenly, he was looking through Iago’s eyes, seeing what Iago saw.

And damn it, the Xibalban wasn’t anywhere near Chichén Itzá. The vegetation was wrong, the temperature and heavy cloud cover were wrong. And the temple Iago was facing looked like nothing Rabbit had ever seen before—all soaring stone arches cut directly into the side of a mountain, framing a godsdamned cave that was carved to look like a screaming skull.

It was the fucking hellmouth. The entrance to Xibalba.

Like what you see, Bunny-boy? Iago jeered, having yanked the nickname from Rabbit’s brain somehow. Good, because you’re not going anywhere.

Mental shackles clamped down on Rabbit, and the pathway he’d followed into the Xibalban’s brain vanished in an instant. He turned to run, to flee, to fight, but couldn’t. He was cut off from his body, cut off from Skywatch and any ability to warn the others, cut off from Myrinne and any hope of escape.

He couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except scream inside his own soul as Iago pressed his palms flat against the edge of the cave mouth and said a quiet spell, drawing on Rabbit’s power and his own to open the ancient hellroad, which had been locked tight more than a thousand years earlier, when the ancestral Nightkeepers had driven the demons from earth in the wake of the slaughter that had leveled an empire. Those Nightkeepers had trusted their true descendants to hold the barrier, and they had, for more than a thousand years.

It’d taken a half-blood to fuck everything up.

Lucius’s journey back from death seemed much quicker than the trek out to the archway; one minute he was on the roadway, putting one boot in front of the other. Then suddenly he was at a set of double doors. There was no wall or anything, just the doors, sitting in the middle of no-frigging-

where.

Taking a deep breath, he grabbed one of the door-knobs, twisted, and opened the panel slowly, so he could stick his head through and take a look.

Without warning the door, the road, and the world around him vanished, and he was falling. There was blackness all around him, the sensation of gravity and air whipping past him, but no sound or smell. He opened his mouth and screamed but nothing came out; there was only silence. He couldn’t even hear his own rapid heartbeat or his pulse.

Then he hit bottom, landing sprawled out on a giving, yielding surface. It was still dark but he could hear again. There was pain too. Monstrous, crushing pain that split his head and made him scream in pain, the howl coming out alien, like that of an animal, not a man.

He writhed, digging his fingers into his scalp, tearing at his hair, trying to make the agony stop, make it all stop. Oh, sweet Jesus. If this is what living feels like, send me back to death!

Slowly, though, the pain leveled. His skull felt overstuffed, but he could think now, could almost focus his eyes. He blinked, saw a fluorescent light overhead, and realized that it wasn’t really dark after all; it had all been in his mind. A nightmare, maybe, or a warning. He was in a bare room, lying on a cot. And wonder of wonders, he was seeing normally, with no luminous green haze obscuring his vision.

He looked around, recognized his surroundings from his first night in New Mexico, and thought, I’m still in Skywatch, back in the dungeon, or whatever they want to call it. Which meant the Nightkeepers hadn’t sacrificed him, after all. They’d locked him up until the green haze passed. That must be why the voice had sent him back; it’d known that he wasn’t quite dead yet. Gratitude washed over him. He hadn’t wanted to die; he wanted to live, wanted to help the Nightkeepers in the battle ahead.

His internal clock said it was nighttime, but he was pumped up, invigorated, ready to get rolling.

Riding that energy, he stood and headed for the storeroom door, gave it a jaunty knock. “Yo! Anyone out there? Feeling human again, here.”

There was a startled clatter from out in the hallway, then the sound of footsteps. A moment later the door opened a crack to reveal Jox’s face, pale with shock. “Did you just knock?”

Lucius frowned and almost looked behind himself, to see if he’d missed there being someone else in the room. “Um, yeah?”

“You shouldn’t have been able to reach the door. It’s warded.”

“Apparently not so much.”