Son of a bitch. The Triad spell was back online.
“Woody—” he began, but the power closed in on him, shutting him down with a churning whirl of thoughts and memories that weren’t his own. Fear flared, but he didn’t keep it to himself this time.
Instead, he met Patience’s wide, scared eyes, and reached for her hand.
I need you. He wasn’t sure if he said it aloud or not, knew only that she met him halfway.
Then the lights went out.
The barrier The transition wasn’t like any other Brandt had ever experienced. One moment he was in the cave, hunched over his winikin’s body. In the next, he stood in the gray-green mists, surrounded by dozens of strangers who were all looking at him, their faces lit with hope and welcome.
Oh, holy shit, he thought. They were the ancestors. His ancestors, his bloodline’s strongest talents, who had been gathered into the nahwal and were now reborn, thanks to the Triad magic.
Their clothing came from a mix of eras, weighted heavily toward the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, as if the older souls had faded away over time. He couldn’t process anything beyond that, though. He could only clear his throat and rasp, “Tell me what to do. We don’t have much time.” The solstice was approaching fast.
There was a stirring in the crowd, and two men pushed to the front.
Brandt’s throat closed as he recognized his brothers, Harry and Braden. They looked exactly the same as they had twenty-six years earlier, at the time of the massacre. Exactly the way he had remembered them, though no longer bigger and older than him. Instead they were ten years or so younger, frozen at the moments of their deaths.
“Hey,” he said, voice gone so thick with emotion that he couldn’t get out anything better.
They didn’t say anything, not in words. But the cool mist warmed around him, bringing a deep thrum of magic and a sense of awesome power hovering just at the edges of his consciousness.
Braden held out his hand in invitation.
Brandt hesitated. Then he heard Wood’s voice whisper at the edges of his mind: Have faith.
He took a deep breath. Clasped his brother’s hand. And became a Triad mage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
El Rey Patience tried to catch Brandt as he fell. Instead she wound up pinned beneath him, with his head in her lap, in a position that was too close to the way Hannah had held Woody as he died.
She leaned over him, held on to him as her pulse beat so heavily in her ears that she could barely hear anything above the drumbeat throb.
“Please, gods, not now. Not like this.” She was barely aware of whispering the prayer aloud as the others gathered close, Jade taking the boys off to one side while Hannah wept silently.
Then, without warning, the jun tan bond flared to life and Patience could see what Brandt was seeing, feel what he was feeling, as the skills, thoughts, and experiences of dozens of eagle warriors whirled through him in a maelstrom of power. But it wasn’t the terrifying possession she had expected, the one the library had warned against. Instead, it was more like the downloading Rabbit had described, a transfer of information rather than the loss of free will.
What was more, it wasn’t chaos. As she watched, mental images of high wooden filing cabinets materialized within his consciousness. Moments later, the glowing bits of information, which had been whirling madly around, all started sailing toward the cabinets, which thrust out their drawers to snap up the information, sorting the whirl by skill, spell, subject, and whatever other filing system Brandt’s highly ordered brain could devise.
Understanding broke over her like the dawn. The sun god might have almost chosen Rabbit as the Triad mage, but whatever god had saved Brandt from the accident years ago had known the truth: Brandt had been destined for this all along. He was, for better or worse, perfect for the job.
His analytic, linear thought process, combined with the strength of an eagle warrior, had given him an almost terrifying ability to compartmentalize. And although that had caused problems before, now it would allow him to continue functioning as both a Triad mage and the man she loved. She hoped.
As if that was what he had wanted her to see, the filing-cabinet images shimmered around her, then dissolved, and she was back in her own body, blinking down at Brandt. Moments later, he stirred, groaning. He opened his eyes and looked up at her, his expression awed.
“Gods,” he croaked, finally able to call on the sky deities after all these years. “All their powers, their talents. The battles they’ve fought. The things they’ve seen . . .” He trailed off, expression clouding.
“You can handle it,” she said.
The full impact still seemed to be catching up with him, though. “If I can do almost anything an eagle mage has ever done,” he said softly, thoughtfully, “how can I tell what, exactly, I’m supposed to do?”
“You’re not alone.” She gestured to their teammates, then to Hannah and their sons. “We’re all in this together.”
His eyes never left her face. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not alone. And thank the gods for that.”
They were going to be okay, she thought. “I think—” A train-track rumble erupted beneath them, around them, cutting her off. The teammates braced as the tunnel shook and shuddered in short, rhythmic bursts, then in one long, drawn-out shimmy before the movement stopped.
There was dead silence for a moment, as the miniquake brought home an ominous fact: The magi might have prevented Iago from enacting the first-fire ceremony, but the threat of Cabrakan remained.
And the clock was ticking.
Brandt moved to where Woody lay, still and gray. Hannah sat beside him, the boys beside her.
Patience joined them and burrowed in, needing to touch them, feel them, be reassured that they were there, they were okay, for the moment at least. Brandt, too, crouched to be with his family, and to reach out and touch his winikin’s face, stroke a hand along the gray-shot hair. “Woodrow’s a good name,” he said softly. “We won’t forget it.”
He reached for Patience and folded their fingers together, and she felt a surge of power, sensed a reshuffling of the cabinets. When Sven started to say something, she shook her head and mouthed, “Wait. Let him work.”
After nearly a minute, Brandt broke the contact and looked up at the others. “Okay. Triad-magic time. When I concentrate on the solstice-eclipse and Cabrakan, I get two images from my ancestors.
The first is a hand-drawn map of an island with four straight causeways leading to it and a bunch of buildings on the island, like a city, or maybe a sprawled-out palace. The second is a painting from an old wall mural, or maybe part of a codex. There’s a bunch of people standing near a broken wall that has a repeated eagle motif carved into it. They’re holding hands beneath a full moon that’s painted dark orange, like it’s in full eclipse, and lines of red light are radiating away from them.” He paused.
“I think we need to link up right near that wall. Problem is, I don’t have a clue where it might be.”
“I do,” Patience said. When he glanced at her, she said with some asperity, “I tried to tell you about it earlier.”
“Sorry.”
“I get a freebie on our next fight.” There would be one, of course. But this time she wouldn’t have to wonder if he loved her. She knew it—believed it—deep down inside. Feeling an inner glow at the thought, despite everything else, she continued: “What I figured out was that big earthquake in Mexico City wasn’t just the year after the Solstice Massacre. It was less than two days before the fall equinox. What’s more, there were two major aftershocks: a seven-point-five on the day of the equinox, and a seven-point-six exactly six months later, a few days after the spring equinox.” When she paused, there was dead silence.