“Keep it. We found a cache of codices and a couple of modern notebooks in the elder’s place.
Lucius and Jade are going to go through them as soon as we get back. Maybe one of them will have something about the eccentric.”
Rabbit hadn’t realized he’d tightened up until the tension eased. “Okay. Good. That’s good.
Thanks.”
“No problem,” the king said, like it was no big deal, but as Rabbit turned away, he caught Strike’s almost imperceptible nod.
The thing was, he also caught Myrinne’s fleeting scowl. She lost it the moment he turned back to her, but he was sure he’d seen it. That brought back some of the tightness, because he sure as shit didn’t want to wind up caught between her and Strike. He’d let her jealousy ease him away from Patience—he’d even kind of liked that she’d cared enough to be territorial—but Strike was family.
“Myr?” he asked. You’re everything to me, he wanted to tell her, but you can’t be the only person I care about. At the same time, though, he didn’t know if he could’ve coped just now if she hadn’t been there.
She smiled, though the warmth didn’t make it all the way to her eyes. “Time to do your thing, Pyro.”
He nodded, feeling none of the anticipation that usually accompanied the prospect of fire magic.
“Yeah.”
He took his place in the circle, with his back to the stone archway that would long outlive its builders. He refused to call on the dark lords, but knew the villagers’ souls wouldn’t appreciate him praying to the sky gods. So in the end he blanked his mind of everything but the magic as he called fire . . . and finished burning Oc Ajal to the ground.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Skywatch It was early afternoon before the teammates reassembled in the great room, showered, changed, and more or less recovered from the morning’s ordeal. Physically, anyway. Brandt had a feeling that the Oc Ajal massacre was going to stick with all of them in one way or another.
Whatever had gone down between Strike and Rabbit had cleared the air between the two of them, but that didn’t come close to offsetting the pall cast by the villagers’ slaughter. The magi drooped, tired in body and soul, tended by somber winikin.
Sitting beside him on the love seat, Patience said, “I don’t care who they worshipped. That was . . .”
She trailed off.
“Yeah.” Horrific, inhuman, vile, evil, and a hundred other words applied, yet none could fully encompass what had happened to the almost forty victims. There had been at least ten bodies in the village itself, and twenty-eight more in the surrounding forest, probably cut down as they had run toward the village, no doubt called by the screams.
Maybe a dozen of them had been kids, including twins a few years older than Harry and Braden; they’d been lying just beyond the elder’s hut, near a pair of dead coy-dog pups.
At first, Brandt had tried not to wonder whether the woman in the elder’s hut had been their mother.
Then he decided their memories deserved his pain, so he let himself picture the boys trying to get to her, hearing her screams and calling her name as the makol shot them down. Or had the makol shot the boys and pups first, while their mother watched, and then dragged her into the hut, lashed her to that damned pole, and gone to work on her?
He could still smell the smoke and blood, as if it had leached into his skin and hair, permeated his soul. He hadn’t known any of the victims. Hell, they were the enemy. But it was far, far too easy to imagine his family in that village. He kept picturing Patience in the woman’s place, Harry and Braden lying in the dirt near those pups, Woody cut down defending his charges, Hannah sprawled facedown with a grindstone near her outstretched fingertips.
Even worse, he could picture the scene there at Skywatch, with bodies scattered in the mansion and out near the picnic area.
Was that how it would happen? Would the Nightkeepers be cut down in their homes, ending the war before it truly began?
The villagers had hidden behind glamours rather than wards, he reminded himself. And they had been priests and acolytes, not warriors.
“So why kill them?” he said. “How the hell were they a threat to Iago?” When the room went still, he realized Strike had been talking, that he’d totally zoned out on the start of the meeting. Way to engage, dickhead. “Sorry,” he said with a guilty look at Patience. “I was thinking out loud. I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop thinking,” Strike said wryly. “You could, however, work on the timing.”
He didn’t seem that upset, though, probably because they were all feeling pretty damned fragile, and the exchange eased the heavy mood in the room. Not by much, but it was something.
After a raised-eyebrow pause to see if Brandt was going to jump in, Strike said, “It’s a valid question. As far as I can see, there are three main answers that jump to mind: One, Iago wanted to finish his father’s work by destroying the other Xibalban sect, and he didn’t know where the village was until he got the info from Rabbit.” He ticked off a second point on his fingers. “Two, he doesn’t want Rabbit to get any further on his search for his mother. That’s intriguing, because it suggests there’s a weakness we don’t know about, some way the other side of Rabbit’s heritage could harm Iago.”
Rabbit unbent from the elbows-on-knees slouch he’d assumed on a couch next to Myrinne, expression pensive. “It’s possible. Iago knew her. He has to have known her. The timing—”
“Hold it,” Leah broke in using her cop voice, which was guaranteed to stop Rabbit in his tracks.
“Promise me you won’t dip into his head for the answer until and unless the royal council clears it and you’ve got spotters standing by. Better yet, promise Strike you’ll wait until then.”
A year ago, asking for Rabbit’s promise would’ve been about as useful as trying to stop up the bathroom shower with a single finger—sort of effective, but not really. Now, though, he actually winced and thought about it for a second before he met Strike’s eyes, and said, “I promise I won’t connect with Iago to find out about my mother until you give me the go-ahead.” Myrinne shot him a look, but didn’t say anything.
The king considered that for a moment, no doubt looking for loopholes. Then he said, “Let’s make this a fair trade. Once this solstice-eclipse is behind us and things—gods willing—settle down a little, I promise that I’ll do what I can to help you figure out as much or as little as you want to know about that side of your family. Deal?”
Rabbit’s eyes widened. “Deal.”
Strike nodded. “Good. Now, last but not least on the list of ‘possible reasons why Iago would send the makol to attack Oc Ajal’ is because they were looking for something. Question is, did they find it or not? We can assume they were looking for the knife the elder mentioned—the Moctezuma connection is too obvious. But were they also looking for Rabbit’s eccentric?”
Lucius said, “Unfortunately, the eccentric isn’t showing up in the library, archive, or any of the outside searches I’ve done so far.” He looked over at Rabbit. “I’ll talk to some of the more out-there Aztec scholars I know, see if there are any rumors that might not’ve made it into the official press. My gut says that’ll be a dead end, though. Eccentrics were common, but we know almost nada about what they actually symbolized or how they were used.”
Rabbit shrugged. “Well, on the bright side, it doesn’t come with a ‘touch this and die’ curse.”