Brandt’s fingers closed on hers hard enough to hurt, but she barely felt the pain. Every fiber of her being was focused on the phone, on the hiss of connection and the rustles of movement on the other end.
Then a small, scared voice said, “Mommy? Daddy? Are you there?”
The world stopped as she stared at the phone. She hadn’t heard the voice anywhere but in her dreams for the past two years, but she knew it instantly, intimately. Braden.
“Nooo.” The whisper leaked from her lips, taking air and hope with it. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t possible.
Only it was possible. And it was happening. Please, gods, no.
“Sonofabitch!” Brandt moved around her, headed for the phone. His face was dull red and etched with rage.
She grabbed his arm and tried to yank him back. It was like trying to stop a moving vehicle by pulling on a door handle—impossible—but she couldn’t let him get to the handset. Training and instinct took over, and she spun, kicked out, and caught him with a foot sweep. By the time he’d regained his balance, almost beyond himself with fury, she had darted around him and put herself between him and the phone, arms outstretched.
“Don’t,” she warned in a low voice. “That’s not Iago right now. It’s Braden, and he’s terrified.”
She was shaking. Behind her, small breathing sounds came down the line, making her picture Braden clutching a phone and trying to be brave while Harry watched, wide-eyed. The image nearly killed her. But at the same time it brought her the strength to stare down Brandt, holding him off until some of the wildness left his eyes.
He let out a long breath, then stepped up beside her as she turned back to the phone. He took her hand, gripping hard. He was shaking. They both were. Voice almost breaking with the effort of holding it together, she whispered, “We’re here, baby. Are you and Harry okay?”
“I’m here,” said a second version of the same voice, this one softer and more hesitant, not from shyness but because Harry weighed each word so carefully. He added, “We’re okay.”
“Hey there, champ,” Brandt said, using the daddy voice she hadn’t heard from him in so long.
Hearing it now nearly broke her. He continued: “You’re going to have to help each other be brave.
We’ll be there soon.” The promise was underlain with a threat aimed in Iago’s direction.
“Are Hannah and Woody there?” Patience asked.
“They’re in the other room, sleeping. When are you—” The heartbreakingly young voice shifted away, followed by a yelp of “Mommy!”
“Wait!” She reached for the phone, but stopped herself because it wouldn’t do any good.
Brandt put his arms around her, holding her close. She leaned on him hard, but didn’t take her eyes off the phone, knowing her babies and the winikin were on the other end.
In a low, dangerous voice, Brandt grated, “Talk to us, Iago. What do you want in exchange?”
“Who said anything about an exchange?” The Xibalban’s voice was as oily as his magic.
“You didn’t just call to torture us,” Brandt said flatly.
“Didn’t I? I’m getting a kick out of it, actually. Better yet is telling you that I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without you two. Ix lied and said he was going to the hellmouth down in the cloud forest that night. Once I knew which ruin he’d actually been at, it was easy to find the dark-
magic entrance. I’ll be there when the passageway opens. Me and the other members of your little family.”
“Please,” Patience whispered without really meaning to.
“Which is worse, I wonder—for me to have my brother vanish, leaving me with little more than spellbooks and lies . . . or for you to know that your sons and winikin are going to help me start the new fire and call an army?”
She swallowed a sob, refusing to give Iago the satisfaction. But she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but cling to Brandt.
Voice resonating with fury, he rasped, “Patience and I killed Ix, not the boys and the winikin.
What’s more, I’m a Triad mage. That’s what you really want, isn’t it? You want the power of the Triad backing up your magic. Even better, you want to take one of the Triad magi out of the equation.
That’s right, isn’t it?”
“You’re not a Triad mage yet,” Iago countered.
“Your intel is dated,” Brandt said without hesitating. When Patience frowned up at him, he glanced at Rabbit and tapped his temple, indicating the jade circlet that had—they hoped—cut off Iago’s connection with his embedded spy. Then, hardening his voice to a last chance, asshole growl, he said, “Do you want to make the trade or not?”
“Four for one? I don’t think so.” A beat of silence. “You and wifey-poo together. Four for two.”
Half a second before Brandt could no-fucking-way Iago’s counteroffer, Patience said, “It’s a deal.
When and where?”
“Eight tomorrow night, on the other side of El Rey, near the palace.” Iago paused. “Don’t be late.”
There was a click, and the line went dead.
Silence filled the great room.
A shudder racked Patience. “Oh, gods.” She let go of Brandt and staggered away, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth as vicious nausea ripped through her, nearly folding her double. “Oh, shit.
I’m—” She broke and bolted for the bathroom just past the kitchen, cracked her knees on the marble flooring, and puked miserably in the toilet, hanging on to the seat and sobbing in between bouts. Then she was just hanging on to herself and sobbing, folded into a huddle on the bathroom floor. Brandt didn’t try to get her up. He just sat on the bathroom floor to gather her against him and hold on tightly, rocking her as long shudders ran through his big body.
She clung to him as the first terrible wave of grief and fear passed, leaving her wrung and miserable.
“We’ll get them back,” he said, whispering the words into her hair, over and over again. “We’ll do whatever it takes. I swear it.”
And even though she knew he couldn’t make that promise, she tightened her arms around him.
“Thanks. I needed to hear that.”
He stilled. “I didn’t say anything.”
They pulled apart, looking at each other, and then at their forearm marks. Her jun tan didn’t look any different, didn’t feel any different. But she had just heard him in her mind.
When they returned to the main room, Strike was waiting for them, face drawn. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I swore to you that they would be safe off the grid. I was sure they would be . . . but he’s stronger than any of us thought.”
Patience swallowed the surge of bile that came at the thought that, in the end, the boys probably would have been safer staying at Skywatch. Exhaling against the pain, she said only, “Then we’re going to have to be stronger than he thinks.”
“He won’t know what hit him,” Brandt said, voice low with menace. But she knew he was thinking about what he had been saying about Iago only minutes earlier. Things like “serial killer,” “monster,” and “escalating.”
Before, the Xibalban had been too unsure of his powers to attack them directly. Now he had no such qualms.
Strike said, “Based on the cement blocks and old radiation signs Rabbit saw through Iago’s eyes, we think he’s hiding in a bunker or a fallout shelter.”
“Carter put together a list of possibilities,” Jox reported from the kitchen, where he stood with a cell to his ear. “Jade cross-referenced them against power sinks, prioritizing Aztec and Mayan ruins, and got the list down to a hundred and twenty-four possibilities. It’s going to take time to check them out.”