Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

With the message passed, the wall behind the altar returned to stone, and Alexis’s Godkeeper connection returned to a baseline shimmer at the back of her skull. The room stopped spinning, and some of her energy returned—thanks, she suspected, to the blood link with Nate.

Knowing he would need his own strength, she pulled away and forced herself to stand on her own two feet, unswaying, as she faced Strike. “We have to go where the battle is.”

Expression stony, the king glanced at Nate. “What do you think?”

“I agree with Alexis.”

“Fuck.” Strike gestured for the others to link up. “Let’s go.”

Alexis knew he never would’ve done it based on their say-so, knew that he recognized it as the right course too. But even so, she felt a sharp bite of responsibility, of worry. As the ’port magic revved up around them, she tried not to imagine what was going on back at Skywatch . . . and failed miserably.

The stories of the prior massacre were too ingrained in her mind, her worry for Izzy and the others too sharp. So as the world slid sideways and went gray-green, she sent a prayer into the barrier: Gods protect our winikin. They’re the only family we have left.

The Nightkeepers materialized in the place she’d described to Strike, the vapor-laden air snapping away from them with an audible pop. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of death and decay, but thin with altitude and cold. The clearing they had landed in was lit by torchlight, and Alexis clutched Nate’s hand hard at the sight of the screaming skull mouth and the dark, brackish water leading into the cave system. For a second everything inside her rebelled at the thought of going inside. Then her eyes locked on a glitter of purple and gray, and rebellion went to horror.

Mistress Truth’s headless body, still garbed in purple velour, was spiked to the wall of the cavern, pointing the way inward, a grisly sacrifice to a brutal pantheon.

Anna said quietly, “Call home. Please. I did what I could through the blood link, but it wasn’t much.” She was very pale, still rubbing her forearm where the ajawlel mark was clearly paining her, but she’d abided by the king’s decision to follow the battle rather than their hearts.

“Already on it,” Strike said. He had the satellite phone pressed to his ear, but shook his head and clicked it off with a curse. “Nothing.”

“Oh, there’s something, all right,” Alexis said, her own voice feeling as if it were coming from far away. She wasn’t sure if that was her talking now, or the goddess. The power conduit felt different somehow, as though it were vibrating on an entirely new frequency. “Listen. Feel.”

There was a faint whistling noise, almost a high scream, barely audible to human ears. The earth beneath their feet shimmied slightly, the faintest of tremors. The cloud forest around them, dank and ancient and rotten, was silent. The air hummed with a waiting tension.

Nate said, “I think—” A huge, grating crack rent the air, the ground gave a massive heave, nearly throwing Alexis off her feet, and the cave mouth shuddered and started to move. At first she thought it was collapsing. Horror coalesced and built when she saw that it wasn’t collapsing at all; the upper jaw of the screaming skull was hingeing, the scream growing wider as the skull mouth stretched open.

Then, darkness spewed from the opening. Evil. A gout of foul purple-black smoke came first, followed by an unearthly howl that nearly sent her to her knees. She was barely aware that Nate held her up, that he shielded her with his body as a dark shape hurtled from the hellroad and took flight, flapping its great, leathery wings as it disappeared into the darkness beyond the torchlight. Then another. Another.

They were bats, she realized with sharp terror. Huge bats, each the size of a subcompact. Three of them, then a fourth, then two more, until all seven of the death bats had flown free of the cave.

Camazotz’s sons had been freed by Iago. The powerful altar stone must have overcome Iago’s lack of the obsidian knife that Nate wore in his belt, Alexis thought. Or else they’d been wrong and the Volatile’s knife had never been one of the prophecies; it was something else. But what?

The death bats screamed as they wheeled up and dived back down aiming for the Nightkeepers, then screamed again when Michael’s shield spell sent them tumbling back.

“We’re too late,” Nate shouted over the thunder of wings. “Iago breached the barrier!”

“Not yet,” Alexis shouted, not sure how she knew, but positive she was right. “He’s torn a hole, but it’s fixable. We can weave it shut.”

It wasn’t until she said the word that she understood its import. Weaving. Rainbows. It wasn’t about fighting the demons with rainbows, never had been. Her job was to repair the barrier. It would be up to the others to fight the bats.

“Tell Leah to call Kulkulkan,” she gasped, feeling the goddess reach into her and start pulling her into the magic. Or was Ixchel pulling the magic from her? She couldn’t tell, wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure of anything beyond the fact that this was what she’d been born to do; this was her fate and destiny.

“They’re already on it,” Nate answered. He was bracing her, channeling the magic into her as the bats slammed into Michael’s shield again and again, denting it and threatening to break through. “The others are linked up. Ready for the boost?”

She nodded, so full of magic already that she thought she might burst with it, so full that she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, could only cling to him as the Nightkeepers formed the sacred circle, with Strike and Leah using their joined power to channel the golden clarion call that would bring the creator god to earth. Then Nate linked hands with Anna, and Michael reached for Alexis’s free hand, completing the circle and linking their power to hers.

And for a few seconds, she was a god.

Power streamed through Alexis, into her, lit her up and sent her higher than she’d ever been. She reached up and touched the sky, stretched down and thrust her roots deep underground. Then the clouds parted overhead, the night went day-bright, and a rainbow speared down, slamming into the ground at her feet and making the earth shudder with its force. This one’s for you, Izzy , Alexis thought, saying a prayer for the only mother she’d ever really known.

And, finally understanding what she had to do, she pulled away from Nate and stepped into the rainbow.

She heard him shout her name, but couldn’t answer. Pain speared through her, followed by exhilaration and the sense of moving, accelerating, shooting up into the air. She had a moment of free fall in reverse as she traveled up the rainbow, up the column of light to a place in the sky where there was a huge, gaping split. Only it wasn’t the sky that was split, she saw once she reached it. It was the barrier. She could look through the tear and see the other side, straight into hell. There she saw lava-

orange boluntiku and the green-eyed shadows of makol without their human shells. Behind them were black, blank shapes of unimaginable evil, Banol Kax , surrounded by their lesser demons, the armies of hell, gathered together on a wide, gray-black plain that was somehow on the same level as the earth’s atmosphere.

The creatures strained toward her, toward earth, held back only by the barrier, which was unraveling strand by strand as she watched.

And there, as she hung within the rainbow itself, Alexis heard Ixchel’s voice, faint with distance.

She couldn’t make out the words, but she understood.

Taking hold of the rainbow, she pulled on a strand of blue, looping it and tossing it across the gap to snag one ragged edge of the sky. Magic sparked at the place where the blue strand touched the edge, and again when she looped red to the other side of the gap. Then she began to pull on the strands, tugging them together, trying to seam the sky itself.