The others can’t hold it without you.”
The tightness in Brandt’s chest increased a thousandfold. He grabbed her arm, felt her strength, but also her softness. No, he started to say, but the word died in his throat when he saw the look in her eyes—not weakness or a plea, but a challenge. A warning.
Love me for who I am, she had said. Make me your partner. Trust me.
Brandt froze. They hadn’t been fighting about the Akbal oath, after all. It’d been about him trusting her to make her own decisions. Maybe she had said that, but it hadn’t registered. Now it did.
Woody shot a look from Brandt to Patience and back again, and shook his head. “Don’t try to do everything yourself,” he said, as he’d said a hundred times during Brandt’s teenage years. “You’re not a fucking island.”
“Shit.” He wanted to kiss her, hold her, put her behind him, protect her with every last breath in his body. Instead, he tossed her his extra ammo clips and spare flashlight. “Tell them I’m on my way. Tell them . . . tell them that I love them.”
Her eyes flashed and a fierce smile lit her face, a brief oasis in the midst of battle. “I will.”
“Go!” he barked as the shield spell gave and the makol reinforcements rushed the chamber. And, as she bolted across the room and into the tunnel, he said under his breath, “Gods, please keep them safe.”
But as Wood yanked the autopistols off his belt and fired into the onrushing makol, and Brandt spun up his magic, he was all too aware that his prayer had stayed on earth. He was still cursed.
He just hoped he hadn’t cursed all of them in the process.
Patience raced up the dark tunnel with her heart hammering so loudly in her ears that she couldn’t hear her own footfalls, couldn’t hear anything but the lub-dub of joy, excitement, and terror. Joy that Brandt had finally trusted her to do something other than watch his back. Excitement at the prospect of seeing Harry, Braden, and Hannah. Terror at what she might find up ahead.
She turned a corner and saw torchlight coming from an irregularly shaped doorway. Killing the flashlight, she went invisible, then advanced soundlessly with an autopistol at the ready.
When she reached the doorway, she crouched low and eased her head into the opening. What she saw on the other side stopped her heart’s lub-dub in its tracks.
In the plain, unadorned room lit by a trio of torches, a single Aztec makol stood guard, facing the doorway but unaware of her invisible self. Behind him, Hannah sat with her back against the wall. The boys were plastered up against her, one on each side. Hannah had lost her bandanna, they were all dirty and bedraggled, and tear tracks marked all three faces.
But they were alive. Intact. Thank the gods.
Her heart started beating again, flaring relief through her veins. She must have gasped or made some small noise, because the makol snapped to attention, barking a string of unfamiliar words as it activated its buzz sword. But it looked around wildly, unable to pinpoint her as she skirted the room and got behind it.
Patience saw Hannah and the boys flinch away from the makol’s agitation, saw their confusion, their weary fear. Her chest hurt; her eyes stung. She wanted to hold them, touch them, tell them she was there and everything was going to be okay. Instead, she slapped a shield spell over them, and shouted, “Stay down!”
The second the shield spell took hold, the makol spun, locking onto her magic and launching its blades in a smooth, deadly move.
She dropped and rolled, still invisible, and called a fireball, launching it almost before it fully formed.
The glowing red-orange energy pulse slammed into the creature’s chest and detonated, instantly wreathing the thing’s body in flames.
It screamed in pain, a too-human sound that made her heart clutch, not because her enemy was suffering, but because her sons were seeing it.
Wanting it over with, she slammed a second fireball into the thing’s head, vaporizing half its skull with grim purpose. Head and heart. When it toppled, she followed it down and said the banishment spell.
The makol crumbled to greasy ash.
And she was alone with her sons and winikin.
Hannah’s eye was locked on the air above the ash pile, slightly to the left of where she actually was.
The boys were both staring straight at her, brows furrowed, as if they could sense her but weren’t sure of their perceptions.
“Patience?” Hannah asked, the single word carrying wary hope.
“Yes.” The word was almost a sob as she dropped the invisibility spell and rose to her feet. She had meant to cross the short distance between them, but once she was up, her legs refused to carry her.
She could only stare as Braden uncoiled himself, his eyes getting very big as his mouth shaped the most beautiful word in the world. “Mommy?” The first one didn’t have any sound, but when she hiccuped on a sob and nodded, he shouted it, “Mommy!”
He launched himself at her. Harry was a split second behind him.
She had just enough presence of mind to drop the shield spell that had protected them, and cast a new one across the doorway, sealing them in.
Then they hit her one-two, like automatic fire, driving her back under the impact, and she couldn’t think about anything but them. Finally. In her arms. Their whippet-lean bodies were an alien contrast to the toddler sturdiness she remembered, yet her heart knew them instantly.
Her legs gave out and she thumped inelegantly to her knees, then gathered them close and pressed their tear-streaked faces against hers, their bodies into hers. She was shaking—maybe all three of them were. Then Hannah dropped down opposite her, and they clung together.
Thank you, gods. Thank you, thank you, thank you. She wasn’t sure if she thought the words or said them, didn’t care, cared only that she was holding her sons again, and being held by her winikin.
For a long, shuddering moment, she let herself be at peace.
Then, knowing the fight wasn’t over yet, she broke the huddle and drew, back, keeping contact with Hannah and the boys as she did, trying to take in the reality of them, the small changes.
She had only seen Hannah bandanna-less a few times in her life, and up close the scarred flesh and partly covered socket were discomfiting, but the strangeness lasted only a few seconds before Patience’s brain readjusted and she saw only her winikin . The one constant in her life.
“Is Woody okay?” Harry asked. It was the first sound he had made since her arrival.
“Your daddy and I got him away from Iago,” she said. Which was the truth, but what was the situation now? Her pulse accelerated once more.
She tried her earpiece but got only static, which left her with precious few options, all of them bad.
Letting her warrior’s talent lead the way, she got to her feet. “Come on. We’re going to hide further up the tunnel.”
The pyramid’s collapse had blocked it as an escape route, but anything was better than staying where Iago expected them to be.
“Will Daddy be able to find us?” asked Braden, his blue eyes wide and worried.
“Always.” She squeezed their joined hands, healed deep inside by the feeling of the small fingers in hers. “He wanted me to tell you that he loves you very much.”
“Is he coming soon?”
“As soon as he and the others are finished with Iago and the rest of the makol,” she said aloud. But when her eyes met Hannah’s, she saw her own fear reflected back.