CHAPTER FOUR
Kaleidoscope images
flashed across Jade’s perceptions: She saw a vibrant green rain
forest cloaked in gray fog; a screaming skull carved into the base
of a mountain, its gaping mouth forming the opening of a dark,
forbidding cave. To one side of the cave mouth, a picked-clean
skeleton was spiked to the cave wall, incongruously wearing
tattered purple velour. Then darkness whipped again, a shock wave
detonated, there was a sense of wrenching disorientation, and she
was slammed flat onto a gritty surface that drove the breath from
her lungs. Heat slapped at her first, then a bright, searing light
that radiated through her lids and made her squint even with her
eyes already shut.
Gods! She rolled onto her side, curling partway
fetal as she fought to get air into her chest, then coughed when
hot, dry air rushed in, starkly contrasting with the cooler
moisture of the earth plane.
Heart hammering, she
rolled onto her back, conscious of the way the surface beneath her
yielded and crunched, sandlike in its texture. She cracked her
eyelids and blinked until the light resolved itself into a pale
reddish brown overhead that shone brighter than the dull orange
days she’d gotten used to on earth. The span was cloudless and
sunless, radiating a uniform wash of light and heat; she wasn’t
sure if it was a strange sky, or a ceiling far above them. There
was no breeze, no sound, and the dry air smelled faintly of foreign
spices, or maybe overdone barbecue. Wherever they were, it wasn’t
the barrier.
The realization
brought a tremor of fear, but she squelched it as best she could.
You wanted to be involved? Here’s your
chance.
“Are you hurt?”
Lucius’s face crossed her field of vision, his head casting a
shadow over her. His eyes held concern, but behind that was a layer
of reserve, of battle readiness. The old Lucius would’ve been
jittering with a combination of fear and exhilaration, resolved to
do his best but not sure it would be good enough. The man he’d
become seemed to be waiting for additional intel before panicking,
or else he’d gotten better at hiding his feelings. Maybe
both.
Either way, it was
comforting solidity, especially given that neither of them had the
warriors’ skills of shield or fireball magic, and they didn’t wear
warriors’ knives or automatic weapons loaded with jade-tips. With
them unarmed, she could only hope that wherever they were, it was
safe. Considering that Lucius hadn’t taken one look around them,
grabbed her, tossed her over his newly massive shoulder, and taken
off at a dead run, she was hopeful. For the moment, at
least.
“I’m okay.” As the
churn of the strange barrier crossing subsided, she found it was
true. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually; despite the mad
rush to yank on their clothes as they’d been vacuumed into the
magic, her body still hummed with deep satisfaction. Her skin was
acutely sensitive, open-pored and prickling in the heat, giving off
the faint, shared scent of sex. Some of that realization must have
shown in her face, because his eyes suddenly locked onto her with
new intensity, bringing a heightened curl of sensual awareness, an
added kick that notched her temp up even further. In an instant,
she wanted him inside her, though he’d been there only minutes
before. Or maybe that was why the desire was so much more acute
now; she knew what it could be like, how his big body felt against
hers, inside hers.
She had reached for
him before she was aware of moving, cupping his angled jaw in her
palm, then sliding her hand around to the softer skin at his nape,
up into the thickness of hair that had gone from unruly to
luxurious with the magic-wrought changes that had taken him from
the man she had known as a friend and pleasant diversion, to one
who compelled her, fascinated her. She wanted to strip him naked
and stare at him, wanted his solid weight pressing into her,
grounding her. Pounding into her. Caught in a spell of heat and
sensation, she levered herself up as he leaned down. Her heart
raced; her eyelids eased shut even as her lips parted on a low moan
of anticipation.
The sound emerged
very loud in the strange silence around them, shattering the
moment. Jade froze, and felt Lucius’s neck go tense and tight
beneath her caressing hand. When she opened her eyes, she found him
staring back at her, his expression mirroring her own inner shout
of, What the hell are we
doing?
They were in a
completely unknown situation, brought there by a type of barrier
magic she’d never experienced before. Gods, she hadn’t even looked
around. One glance at Lucius, one touch, and she’d lost all sense
of rationality and self- protection. Love
isn’t a miracle, she remembered writing once in a patient’s
notes; it’s a damned mental illness.
Here was her proof, and this wasn’t even love. It was just good
sex.
Okay, really,
really good sex. But
still.
Lucius’s face went
shuttered, but one corner of his mouth kicked up. “I think I’m
starting to understand why sex magic is such a driving force for
you Nightkeepers. If that’s what this is, it’s powerful stuff.” He
eased away from her, shaking his head. “Somebody should’ve warned
me it’s like hammering a double Red Bull with a Viagra chaser.” He
cut her a look. “Not that I’ve ever tried that, mind you. I’m just
saying.”
Jade didn’t say
anything; she wasn’t sure she could’ve managed to meet his wit,
given the sudden hollowness that had opened up inside her. It
wasn’t that she minded his attributing the intensity of what had
happened between them to sex magic—she was relieved by the
explanation, though a little embarrassed that she hadn’t figured it
out first. No, what had her breathing deeply to fill the emptiness
was the knowledge that she’d bought into it so quickly, so
thoroughly. And that she’d been helpless in its throes, vulnerable
in his arms, without the slightest thought for safety or the job at
hand. For all that she had bragged inwardly about not losing
herself to the sex magic before, she had come damned close this
time.
You’re a mage, she reminded herself. Use the magic. Don’t let it use you. But deep down
inside, she couldn’t escape the fact that she wasn’t much of a
mage, and didn’t know bupkes about using the magic, not really.
Shit.
“Well,” she said,
blowing out a breath that did little to settle the churning in her
stomach, “the magic got us here. Let’s see where ‘here’ is.” Though
even as she straightened to look around, she remembered the strange
downward lurch of the magic. Had it been her imagination, or had
someone really whispered, “Beware”? And if so, who? The only true
occupants of the barrier were the nahwal, a group of strangely withered ancestral
ghosts that spoke with many voices all in synchrony. This had been
a single female voice. At least, she thought it had.
Then she got a look
around herself, and she stopped thinking about the voice, about the
magic, and even about the man beside her, because all she could do
was stare as her mouth fell open.
They were . . . Dear
gods, she didn’t know where they were. They had materialized
roughly in the center of a long, perfectly rectangular canyon—or
maybe a pit? an enclosure?—that was a mile or so long, a quarter
mile wide, and open to the mauve sky. Red rock walls rose up around
them, sheer and unbroken, stretching several stories high before
ending in perfectly straight lines. The sand underfoot was a gritty
version of the same reddish stone, with something else that
sparkled faintly in the unchanging light. Huge, unadorned columns
sprouted from the sand, one right beside where Jade and Lucius had
landed. More important, several hundred yards away from where she
and Lucius crouched, in what looked like the exact center of the
enclosure, sat a huge four-sided pyramid made of three tiers that
descended in size from bottom to top, forming god-size steps
leading upward. At each corner was carved a humanoid head, easily
ten feet tall, with a fiercely scowling face that was surrounded by
a halo of radiating lines. She couldn’t immediately place the
image, but thought it was familiar. Each tier was painted a
different color: red at the bottom, black in the middle, white at
the top. As was the case with many Mayan pyramids, human-size
staircases ran down the center of each of the four sides, with
rectangular doorways set on either side of the staircases on the
upper and lower tiers. Practically every available surface was
worked with intricate glyph carvings that were the traditional
blend of art and language. Unlike the other pyramids she’d seen in
person or studied at UT, though, this one didn’t culminate in a
ceremonial platform, or with a boxy temple built at the top.
Instead, the center of the pyramid was an open, empty space crowned
by a series of stone archways running parallel to one another,
looking like some ancient creature had died atop the temple and
gone to fossil with its rib bones bared to the bright, sunless
sky.
Wonder shimmered
through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own
way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a
computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might
have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.
“Do you think that’s
the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the
library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be
accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels.
The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient
spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since
then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when
their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the
library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to
retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated
the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy
milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any
ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s
spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier
or traveling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to
connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it
while he stayed on the earthly plane.
Instead, he—a human
who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the
title—had somehow been sucked . . . where?
When he didn’t answer
her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath.
“You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain
with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas.
Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba,
but somehow they had gotten through.
Lucius nodded. “Yeah.
I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like
the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was
the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the
makol demon had been in full control of
his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing
entrance to Xibalba.
“The library is
hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the
underworld already, the Banol Kax
wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his
people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s
makol. Which suggested the library
wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were they there? “Do you think someone—or
something—pulled us here?”
“More things are
possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but
she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her
hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other
in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where
we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing
the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the
pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get
weapons, maybe reinforcements.”
“You’re assuming the
way spell is going to work.” The homing
spell that was supposed to return an out-of-body mage to his or her
body was notoriously fickle. “And that we’ll be able to get back
here afterward.” What was more, the same skitter of excitement she
saw on his face was running through her veins, urging her onward.
“Let’s check out the pyramid.” The suggestion came partly from
duty, partly from her growing need to do something . . . and also from her growing
suspicion that whoever had brought them there would have to be the
one to send them back. The day of the new moon wasn’t one of
barrier flux, which meant she and Lucius shouldn’t have been able
to enter the barrier, never mind get all the way through the
hellmouth.
Beware.
“We’re unarmed. Shit,
we don’t even have a pocketknife to blood our palms.” But he wanted
to do it. She saw the building excitement in his face, felt it race
in her own system, as though they were daring each other without
saying the words.
“We’re just going to
go look around.” But he had a point; stupidity didn’t favor
survival of the fittest. So she took a deep breath. “I’ll shield
us.” At his sharp look, she shook her head. “I know it’s a
warrior’s spell, but there’s something—” In
the air, she started to say, but broke off because that
wasn’t it, precisely. The faint glitter of red-gold magic and the
hum of Nightkeeper power were right there in front of her, misting
the air between her and Lucius, close enough that she thought she
could reach out and grab the power if she was brave enough.
Do it, her instincts said. She didn’t
know if it was the residual vulnerability from the sex magic, the
barrier crossing, or something about the strange canyon, but the
magic suddenly felt as if it were a part of her, in a way that was
both foreign and compelling.
Acting on instinct,
her body moving without her conscious volition, she bit down
sharply on her own tongue, drawing blood. Letting go of Lucius’s
hands, she stepped back and spit onto the sparkling, red-tinged
sand, offering a sacrifice of both blood and water to the gods. The
red-gold coalesced around her, then around Lucius, as it had done
before, when they had been lying together in the aftermath. Magic
spurted through her like lust, hot and hard. It caught her up, spun
through her, making her want to scream with the mad glory of
it.
Lucius said
something, but she barely heard him over the hum of magic that
gathered around her, inside her.
“I can do this,” she
said, or maybe she only thought it. Either way, the certainty
coiled hard and hot inside her, and the shimmering magic that
hovered in front of her coalesced into . . . what? She could almost
see shapes in the sparkles as she reached out to the magic, touched
it. A soundless detonation ripped through her, a rush of power that
strained toward something that stayed just out of reach. If she
could just—
“Jade!” Lucius’s shout broke through, shattering
her concentration. He had her by the arms and was shaking her, his
eyes hard. “Pull it back, now!”
The magic snapped out
of existence in an instant, without her volition. The loss of that
vital energy sapped her, had her sagging against him. Her head
spun, but his urgency penetrated. “What? What’s
wrong?”
Then she heard it: a
dog’s mournful howl coming from the other side of their concealing
pillar. Lucius crowded her closer to the column, pressing her flat
against it with his body. Against her temple, he whispered,
“There’s something going on in the pyramid.”
The carved stone was
warm and rough where Jade’s fingers clutched at the grooved
surface, grounding her even as her mind spun with the power of the
magic she’d just touched on, and the sharp grief that she’d been
unable to do a damned thing with it. Her heart banged against her
ribs as she and Lucius eased around the edge to take a
look.
“Oh, shit.” She
wasn’t sure which one of them said it. Maybe they both
had.
Whereas before the
pyramid had seemed deserted, now a man stood on the first of the
three big, god-size steps. He was wearing a simple white loincloth
and had dark hair and strangely gray- cast skin, and after a moment
of standing motionless, he raised a carved conch shell to his mouth
and blew a shrill note. Moments later the call was answered by
movement at the darkened doorways on the lower tier; then five more
men emerged, but these guys were wearing ceremonial regalia and
full-face masks carved to look like various creatures: a snake, an
antelope, a white jaguar, a bird of prey, and a wolf. The masks
were topped with elaborate feather-and-bone headdresses that
created colorful halos, and the men’s bodies were asymmetrically
shielded on their left sides, leaving their right arms free to
wield the short- handled clubs they wore at their
belts.
Jade just stared,
stunned. The skin of the men’s arms and legs was gray-cast in
places, missing in others, peeled away to show reddish meat, even
down to glimpses of stained bone. Worse, the animal shapes weren’t
masks; those were the actual heads of the man-beasts who had come
from the pyramid. For a second, denying the horror of it all, her
brain locked on the image: five armored men and one musician
against a background of rusty hues. It was just like the painting
that’d been showing on Lucius’s flat-screen. But why? How? What did
it mean?
“They sensed the
magic,” she said, forcing the words. What had she been thinking,
trying to wield a warrior’s spell? Worse, she’d let the magic take
over, let it use her—or at least attempt to use her.
“I think so.” But he
squeezed her shoulder in silent support. “Now the question is
whether that’s a good thing.”
Jade held her breath,
though it wasn’t as if that was going to change
anything.
Without hesitation or
consultation, the five armored men—demons? what were they?—headed straight for their hiding spot,
with Jaguar-head in the lead and the others grouped behind him. He
pulled the short club from his belt, held it out to the side, and
uttered a sharp command. The weapon shimmered momentarily and a
malicious rattle skidded through the air as the short club
elongated to become a long, deadly looking shaft with a wickedly
barbed spike at one end and a bulbous knob at the other. The blunt
end roiled greasy brown.
Dark magic!
A cry caught in
Jade’s throat. She locked eyes with Lucius as their question was
answered all too clearly. “Not good!” they said in
unison.