Her eyes lit. “It’ll amplify. Maybe even enough to override Cabrakan’s dark magic.”
Rabbit stepped forward. His eyes were stark hollows in his angular face, but intensity burned at their depths. “If you can show me how your jun tan works, I can transmit it to the others.” He glanced at Strike. “Okay?”
Overhead, through the torn spot in the roof, the last sliver of white moon disappeared. “Do it,” the king said implacably, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line. “We do whatever it takes. That’s why we’re here.”
But it wasn’t the only reason they were there, Brandt thought as he held out his hand to Patience.
Because what was the point of the war if they weren’t also fighting for the smaller, equally important parts of themselves? Love, family, a personal future . . . it was all worth fighting for.
It had taken him a long time to see that. Almost too long.
Patience took his hand and they closed for a kiss, with Rabbit tapping in via touch link. Brandt put everything he had into the kiss and their jun tan connection, not just giving her his body, strength, heart, and soul, but taking hers in return, until it wasn’t his strength versus hers anymore—it was their combined power that fired his bloodstream and lit him from within with a level of power he’d never before experienced.
The magic came from the solstice-eclipse, and from the way the stars and planets were beginning to align as the end time approached. But it also came from him and Patience, and the new level of connection they had forged from the ashes of their old lives.
Thank you for not giving up on me, he sent through the jun tan.
He got a wash of love and acceptance in return, and a whisper of, I might’ve given up on you . . . but I couldn’t give up on us .
And thank the gods for that.
He slanted his mouth across hers and took the kiss deeper, hotter, harder, until sex magic sparked and crackled around them and his body tightened with the need for privacy, the need to bury himself inside her. The need, quite simply, for her.
Red-gold power responded, washing from him to her and back again. His jun tan heated, activating; he could feel her pleasure and his own, along with Rabbit’s discreet contact as he fed the jun tan pattern to the others, showing them the feedback loop. Then he felt the incremental increases in his power as the mated pairs came online, each adding their own distinctive flavor to the burgeoning mix of magic.
The power cycled higher and higher, until, without warning, a soundless detonation slammed into him and then out again, down through his feet and into the earth itself.
And the Nightkeeper magic took on a life of its own.
Brandt broke the kiss as the power surged beyond sex magic to something incandescent. It wasn’t coming from the jun tan connections anymore; it was using them, flowing through them and drawing light magic from the survivors and the strength of their gods-destined pairings.
The ground heaved beneath them in a tremor that was far stronger than any of the others. A roaring noise welled up from beneath them, sounding less like a subway now and more like the cry of an angry creature, a demon trying to fight its way to freedom, bent on revenge and destruction.
Out in the street, the screams intensified, and Brandt heard the first few ominous cracks and rumbles of major structural damage. He flashed on the TV images of the big earthquake: crumbled buildings, ash-coated figures, and child volunteers crawling through narrow gaps to pull babies out of a collapsed hospital wing. The threat of failure tunneled his vision. This wasn’t going to work. They didn’t have enough people, enough power, enough—
Focus! The word echoed in Woody’s voice. And for fuck’s sake, have a little faith.
The memory—or was it something else?—snapped Brandt out of his downward spiral. He blinked, clearing his mind of the noise out on the street, and the TV images. Within the relative calm that followed, an image formed: that of a huge lake with an irregularly shaped island rising out of the center, connected to the mainland by four causeways built up out of stone and rubble.
And he freaking got it.
“I’m not an island,” he said, “but this piece of Mexico City used to be.”
He opened his eyes to find Patience, limned in sparks of magic, staring at him in wonder. “Your eyes are gold,” she whispered.
He caught her hands, using her to anchor him as he reached out with his mind and found the inner filing cabinet where he had put the scariest, most tempting and terrifying part of the Triad magic: his ancestors’ powers.
The eagle magi had designed the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica using math, physics, and arcane schematics painted onto fig-bark codices. Now their combined talents expanded his senses, letting him perceive the structure of the city around him. He sensed the buildings above the surface, their cracks and stresses, and the places where they had been shored up against earthquake damage.
Beneath them, he perceived the layers that represented five centuries of habitation, with Moctezuma’s capital city of Tenochtitlán at the very bottom.
He perceived the ghostly foundations of the ancient palaces, temples, and markets. More importantly, he saw where the causeways ran across the lake bed, two from the northern end of the island, one from the west, one from the south. The causeways had long been buried beneath the rubble that the Spanish had carted in to expand Mexico City beyond the island. But their structures were still there . . . and they were the only things holding Cabrakan in check.
The demon strained against them, drawn to the place where generations of terrible blood sacrifices had weakened the barrier enough for him to punch through during the solstice-eclipse, but held back by the four causeways, which had been built by the slave labor of captured Maya, and held the power of their sky gods.
The big earthquake two decades earlier had weakened the causeways, and the recent miniquakes had further crumbled their stone bases and compressed paving. One or two more good tremors, and the demon would be free.
Not on my watch, Brandt thought fiercely. He bore down, pulling power from his ancestors, his teammates, and Patience—his wife, mate, and partner. His forebears had once built vast cities from stone and the images in their minds. Now their knowledge, along with the combined magic of his teammates, gave him the power to rebuild the roads that anchored the center of Mexico City.
A spell whispered in his mind, coming in a man’s voice that sounded oddly like flutes and drumbeats, and brought the icy chill of river water to touch his skin.
Brandt said the words aloud. And the world turned bloodred.
Power detonated. Fiery magic streamed out of him and blasted along where the four causeways had been, going from crimson to translucent as it passed the limits of the ruin. The ground heaved and shuddered, nearly pitching Brandt to his knees as Cabrakan fought back far below them.
The magic poured out, draining Brandt and making his head spin, but he kept going, pulling strength from the depths of his soul and beyond. And the causeways responded, beginning to realign into the form they had taken a thousand years ago. The changes were infinitesimal at first—a stone returning to alignment in one spot, a fracture sealing in another—but then the alterations mushroomed, gaining speed.
Brandt sensed Cabrakan’s rage against the magi who had killed his brother and now barred him from the earth. The dark lord slammed against the earth beneath Moctezuma’s palace, which had been at the center of the bloodshed and was now the weakest spot of all.