Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

He’d screamed when pain racked his entire body, and again when he’d seen the hellmouth mark appear on his arm and he’d jacked in, not to the barrier, but to the first layer of hell.

Vicious, glorious power had whipped through him, and suddenly Iago had been inside his head, using him, forcing him to pray to the Banol Kax , to give himself to them. Through him, Iago had exhorted Cabrakan to collapse a cave down south somewhere. But even as the Xibalban had been using him, Rabbit had found himself catching thought snippets from the other man: impressions and images, emotions and bits of conversation. From them, he’d learned that Iago needed him for his wild half-

blood magic, and was somehow using that magic against him through the quatrefoil mark, turning Rabbit’s mind-bending powers inward, on himself.

Shock one had been learning that he was a mind-bender, and that the talent worked on other magi.

Shock two had been realizing that Iago was a borrower, capable of siphoning another magic user’s talents.

After he’d figured that out, Rabbit had gone digging a little deeper, taking his mind off what his body was used to doing. As he’d sat cross-legged opposite Iago with the bowl between them, working the dark magic, he’d learned that Iago’s borrowing talent worked at close proximity with any mage, but better when that mage wore the quatrefoil mark, which was why he’d needed Rabbit bound to the Xibalban magic. Since Iago couldn’t risk fouling the bonding process with a mind-bend, he’d needed Rabbit to take the mark more or less willingly. Having seen Rabbit and Myrinne together at the pizza joint and seeing that she was important, the Xibalban had located her, captured her, and then waited to grab Rabbit. He would’ve taken him from the museum, but Strike and Leah had shown up, looking for him and he hadn’t wanted to risk their detecting the magic.

Even knowing that much had helped Rabbit, because it meant that at least they’d searched for him a little. It also gave him hope that they’d take him back . . . except for the part where Strike had forbidden him to bring Myrinne into Skywatch, of course, but he’d blow up that bridge when he got there. The first order of business was getting the hell free.

Then he heard it: the crunch of a footfall on the packed snow outside, too close, not giving him enough time to prepare.

“Shit!” Rabbit scrambled for the magic, lunging to his feet while Myrinne gasped and dove for the corner. Rabbit tried to latch onto Iago’s mind, but he wasn’t jacked in right; he was in the barrier, not the hell layer. Breathing fast, heart hammering in his chest, he tried again and failed. Another footfall came outside, and the doorknob rattled, and Rabbit shouted, “No!”

The universe blinked out. Then it blinked back in, and he was in another of the cabins, this one entirely bare save for a woman lying on the floor, bound in a rope cocoon. She was dark-haired and smooth-skinned beneath the bruises that marred her face and bare forearms. She was in her mid-

twenties, maybe, wearing ragged, outdoorsy clothes, like she’d been grabbed in the middle of a camping trip. Her eyes were dim with drugs, but she was aware enough to be terrified.

“Please,” she whispered, her eyes locked on Rabbit. “Please don’t.”

Iago swung the door shut behind him, closing them in.

“Son of a bitch !” Rabbit spun on him, his gut clenched with fear, with rage. He lunged at the other mage. “If you did anything to Myrinne, I’ll—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Iago said, effortlessly grabbing hold of his mind and shutting him down through the quatrefoil mark.

The Xibalban pulled the demon prophecy knife and blooded his right palm without a change in expression, then tossed the knife to Rabbit, who caught it haft-first, and blooded his palm similarly, all without wanting to.

Rabbit felt powerless. Impotent. Like he was fourteen all over again, and being pounded on by the bullies at school, the ones who called him Bunny-boy and teased him about his zonked-out old man.

Only this was so much worse, because he wasn’t just worried about saving his own ass anymore.

“As you’ve no doubt figured, I’ll be needing your assistance the day after tomorrow,” Iago said.

“However, since there’s no guarantee you’ll live through the equinox ceremony, I thought I’d call on you beforehand to help me deal with a small problem.” He clasped Rabbit’s bleeding hand in his own, and the surge of uplinked power nearly lifted them both off their feet. The floor shifted beneath them, and the air crackled with fire magic, with transport magic, with all the borrowed talents the Xibalban held within him.

An invisible net tightened around Rabbit, binding his limbs, his brain. It grew tentacles that dug into him, writhed through him, searching for something. He arched against the invading pressure and screamed at the top of his lungs, but the tentacles kept coming, kept searching. Then, as if one of them had plugged into a socket within his brain, suddenly he could see through Iago’s eyes and Iago could see through his. They were two and they were one, with Iago in control, Rabbit shoved to a corner of his own mind.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything except watch as Iago used his body as a puppet, forcing it to focus on the dark-haired woman, forcing it to call on something Rabbit didn’t know he’d possessed, a grayish intensity of magic he didn’t recognize.

Then Iago and not-Rabbit spoke in synchrony, asking the woman, “Where is the library?”

Her drug-dulled eyes blanked for a second, and her mouth opened as though to answer, but only a strangled cry emerged, one that went to pain as the woman bit down on her own tongue and blood flowed. “I don’t know,” she said.

The gray haze in Rabbit’s brain thickened, and he could feel the magic, feel the pressure as Iago and not-Rabbit said, “Tell us where your father hid the library.”

“Fuck. You.” Her words came from between gritted teeth.

Iago leaned on Rabbit for more power, dug deeper into the woman’s mind for an answer. Grinning a horrible rictus of pain, she writhed against her bonds, emitting high, inhuman mewling noises that made Rabbit’s blood freeze with horror at the knowledge that he was helping Iago torture her.

Stop it, he told himself. Make him stop! But he didn’t know how to use his own mind-bending powers, hadn’t known he had them until the Xibalban had pulled them to the surface.

The woman was screaming now, deep, raw cries that started at the back of her throat and rose up through the octaves, each one a little weaker than the last.

“Your father found the library and recovered it from the caves,” Iago pressed in his and not-

Rabbit’s voices, their talents amplifying each other, the mind-bender and the borrower, locked together to break a human woman who was so much stronger than she should have been. “Where did he take the codices? Where did he hide them?”

She was beyond speech now, but speech wasn’t necessary, because they were inside her head.

Rabbit could see flashes of an older, gray-haired man, and a busy restaurant. And over it all was the refrain of a song, one that he almost recognized.

She was using the song to block the invasion, Rabbit realized, and was impressed. More than that, he was free to go after the magic, because Iago was pissed, and entirely focused on the melody that blocked the information he wanted. Hustling, Rabbit fought to track the grayish mist to its source, only it didn’t seem to have a source; it was all over, all around him. And then, somehow, it was inside him, inside the small knot of Rabbit-consciousness that he’d managed to retain within the prison Iago had made of his mind.