Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Then, suddenly, she wasn’t following anymore.

Sudden urgency gathered in Alexis’s chest and mind, grabbing onto her. She gasped as the power hum increased, then her lungs vised on the exhale. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream.

Panicking, she opened her eyes, not having realized she’d closed them until that moment. She looked for help and latched onto Nate, saw the surprise on his face, the concern. He said something; she didn’t catch what it was, couldn’t hear him over the humming, yearning buzz. She could hear Patience, though, could hear the spell, could feel it grabbing onto her.

Sudden pain tore through Alexis’s hand, though she’d sheathed her knife. She yanked her hands away from the magi on either side of her and looked down in horror. Blood ran from her palms, pooling on the floor and then running uphill to the chac-mool , where it streamed up the lines of the rain god’s carved body in defiance of gravity. The blood collected in the bowl the statue held in its lap, pooling there.

Then, as she watched, the blood flared to fire, though none of the torches around the perimeter of the room were lit.

“Alexis!” She thought it was Nate’s voice calling her back, thought it was his hands that reached out to grab her as she walked toward the fire, called by her own burning blood. She caught his hand, pulled him along with her. She knew this wasn’t what he wanted, and her heart clutched a little at the pain brought by that knowledge. But the humming wouldn’t be denied, compelling her to lean over the flames and inhale a deep lungful of the sacred smoke.

And the world she knew disappeared.

One moment Nate was in the altar room, doing the spell-casting thing, and the next thing he knew, he and Alexis had somehow gotten their asses zapped into the buried chamber. And that was so not a good sign.

“No, goddamn it!” he shouted. “You’ve got it wrong. You don’t want us; you want Patience and Brandt!”

His words bounced off the curving walls of the circular stone chamber, which were carved with scenes of sex and sacrifice, as befitted the intersection where the earth, sky, and underworld touched one another in an unstable three-way joining that fluxed with the stars and the moon. At the top of the walls, near the ceiling, human skulls were carved protruding from the stone, their jaws agape in silent screams. Torches were set at regular intervals, with incense-burning braziers hung above. The moment Nate and Alexis had appeared in the space, flames had sprung to life, lighting the chamber and the altar that sat in its center, not a chac-mool this time, but a flat slab with manacles that could be fastened to the wrists and ankles of a spread-eagled victim.

The cuffs weren’t original to the chamber, Nate knew; they’d been put there by the ajaw-makol who had sacrificed Leah’s brother to reawaken the magic, then tried to sacrifice her to bring the barrier crashing down. But even though the cuffs weren’t vintage, they made a hell of a statement, one that pretty much said, Bleed here. Die here.

“Oh, shit,” Nate breathed, panic gathering in his chest—not for himself, but for the woman who both was and wasn’t the girl of his dreams. The Godkeeper ritual required death and rebirth, and a sexual sacrifice on the altar of the gods. “Lexie,” he began, taking a step toward where she stood.

She was staring at the room’s single doorway, which was a flat slab of rock, dropped down to seal the circular chamber. From Strike’s description of the Godkeeper ceremony he and Leah had just barely survived, the slab didn’t respond to normal magic, only to the will of the gods. There was no way out unless the gods saw fit to send them back to the altar room.

“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “I know this isn’t what you want.”

“It’s—” He broke off, because she was right. He didn’t want to be a mated protector—didn’t want to be mated, period. He didn’t want the responsibility of being Nightkeeper to her Godkeeper, when he wasn’t even sure he wanted her. Or, more accurately, he knew damn well he wanted her—he just wasn’t sure for how long, or whether he wanted her, or a fantasy woman who looked like her but acted totally different.

Alexis was still talking, but her voice was lost beneath the roaring that built in his blood. An image slammed into his brain fully formed, with sight and sound and touch and taste. In it, she was bent over the altar as she was now, with her hands pressed flat, as they were now. Only in his waking fantasy she was naked, and he was coming into her from behind.

He’d taken two steps toward her before he could force himself to stop, force himself to lower the hands he’d raised to strip her combat clothes away. Warned by the sound of his harsh, rattling breaths, she spun to face him. He expected her to smack him across the jaw or, knowing Alexis, throw a full-on roundhouse for his thoughts.

But he was wrong, he realized when he saw the flush riding high on her cheeks and the glitter in her eyes. She wasn’t pissed. She was aroused.

“Bad idea,” he managed to say as she advanced on him, still fully clothed, but wiggling inside those clothes in a way that reminded him of before, when they’d been lovers and blamed it on the magic.

She shook her head, seeming lit from within with excitement, with a power he’d never seen in her before as she said, “The world needs a Godkeeper.”

“Patience and Brandt are married,” he countered, telling himself to move away. But his resolve wasn’t as strong as it needed to be. It was weakened by the humming in his blood, the sparkle of power in the air, and the feel of her against him when she rose up on her toes so they were eye to eye.

Mouth to mouth.

Unable to do otherwise, he touched his lips to hers. She leaned into him, opening herself to the kiss.

The moment she did the chamber shuddered and heaved around them. And began to descend.

Nate cursed and hung on to her as the floor dropped beneath them. No, goddamn it! he shouted in his skull. Not us, not her!

He knew the theory: For a god to enter a Godkeeper, she had to be close to death, which brought her close to the gods. Then it was up to her mate to bring her back with the strongest of physical magic: the act of love. The sex would bind both man and god to the woman, linking them in an unbreakable three-way partnership.

To be chosen was the greatest honor in Nightkeeper lore. Yet if he’d been a teleport, he would’ve zapped them both the fuck out of there the moment the chamber started dropping down into the water table. He didn’t want this, didn’t want to be involved in a screwed-up cosmic business arrangement that exchanged sex for power. But the gods didn’t seem to care what he wanted, or whether he was ready for a mate, for the responsibility. He was a conscript, plucked up and press-ganged into a position that Brandt was so much better suited to, with his wife as his mate.

“The gods are fucking crazy,” he snapped, bracing his legs when the inconstant motion of the chamber rocked the floor beneath them. “Where’s the emergency exit?”

But the door was shut tight and there was no other way in or out. They were stuck there until a god’s power brought them out again. Assuming, of course, that the transition spell worked, they didn’t die in the process, and the god didn’t get stuck between the planes, as Kulkulkan had done during Leah’s transition. Which was a godsdamned lot of assumptions, as far as Nate was concerned.

Rock grated against rock as the chamber sped its descent. Alexis gave a low cry and clung to him, then seemed to realize what she was doing and tried to push away. He didn’t let her break free, holding her close until she stopped struggling and sagged against him, breath shuddering.