Jade just stared, stunned. The skin of the men’s arms and legs was gray-cast in places, missing in others, peeled away to show reddish meat, even down to glimpses of stained bone. Worse, the animal shapes weren’t masks; those were the actual heads of the man-beasts who had come from the pyramid.
For a second, denying the horror of it all, her brain locked on the image: five armored men and one musician against a background of rusty hues. It was just like the painting that’d been showing on Lucius’s flat-screen. But why? How? What did it mean?
“They sensed the magic,” she said, forcing the words. What had she been thinking, trying to wield a warrior’s spell? Worse, she’d let the magic take over, let it use her—or at least attempt to use her.
“I think so.” But he squeezed her shoulder in silent support. “Now the question is whether that’s a good thing.”
Jade held her breath, though it wasn’t as if that was going to change anything.
Without hesitation or consultation, the five armored men—demons? what were they?—headed straight for their hiding spot, with Jaguar-head in the lead and the others grouped behind him. He pulled the short club from his belt, held it out to the side, and uttered a sharp command. The weapon shimmered momentarily and a malicious rattle skidded through the air as the short club elongated to become a long, deadly looking shaft with a wickedly barbed spike at one end and a bulbous knob at the other. The blunt end roiled greasy brown.
Dark magic!
A cry caught in Jade’s throat. She locked eyes with Lucius as their question was answered all too clearly. “Not good!” they said in unison.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Come on!” Lucius grabbed Jade’s hand and dragged her to a skidding run that churned up the sparkling sand and pebbles underfoot. He kept his body between her and their pursuers, impelled by a vicious, bloodthirsty sort of protectiveness he’d never felt before. For all that he respected the hell out of the Nightkeepers’ egalitarian use of both men and women in the warrior caste and on the front lines, this was a different situation, a different woman. She shouldn’t even be there, damn it. Neither of them should.
As they burst from cover, the jaguar-masked warrior shouted something that probably translated to
“Halt, intruder!” or the equivalent, though Lucius didn’t know what language they were using. It wasn’t Mayan; at least, not any version of it he’d ever studied or heard.
From within the stone enclosure, the dog stopped howling and started barking, and was soon joined by a second set of snarling barks, feral-sounding and mean. Then, half a heartbeat later, the barks were drowned out by a roar that wasn’t made by anything so mundane as a canine. The noise shook the canyon floor and made the arched top of the temple start to seem less like an artistic flourish and more like the top of a cage.
Lucius glanced over his shoulder. Their pursuers were gaining fast, in a blur of ceremonial armor, ragged flesh, and flashing fangs. And what the hell were they? Animal- headed zombies didn’t feature in the Nightkeepers’ legends, at least, not that he knew. A connection nudged at him, but he couldn’t think about that right now. They needed to find a way out of the strange canyon, which was starting to feel too much like a gladiatorial pit. Gods knew that concept wasn’t outside the legends.
“Look!” Jade pointed toward one of the corners where the canyon ended—only it wasn’t a corner anymore. As they drew nearer, the optical illusion of a dead end gave way, showing where their canyon made a T intersection with another running at right angles. Maybe that was a way out!
They tore around the corner, hand in hand. Twenty feet into the narrower canyon, they slammed into an invisible, unyielding surface stretched across the opening. Lucius’s breath exploded from him on an “oof” that became a howl when unseen coils snapped tight around them both, jerking them off their feet to dangle in midair.
“Fuck!” He struggled to get to Jade, to free himself, to do something, anything. A harsh rattling noise surrounded them, marking the invisible force as the dark magic wielded by the denizens of the underworld. He had a nauseating image of him and Jade being caught in a huge, invisible spiderweb, with something terrible and eight-legged advancing intangibly toward them.
If you’re ever going to connect to the magic, now would be a good fucking time, he thought, and bit down viciously on his tongue. Pain flared and blood welled in his mouth, but that was it. No magic. No power. No nothing.
“Lucius!”
Jade’s shout was scant warning as Jaguar-head grabbed Lucius’s ankles and yanked, pulling him free of the web magic. Lucius hit the ground hard and let himself go limp, though his heart hammered in his chest, impelled by rage and the pounding need to get to Jade, to protect her, to somehow get her back to safety, though he wasn’t the mage she needed him to be.
Then Snake-head leaned over him, hissing in satisfaction. Revulsion lent added force as Lucius lunged to his feet, kicking hard at the demon warrior’s kneecap. He hit his target, felt a hell of an impact, and heard the sick pop of bone and cartilage. Snake-head howled and went down. Lucius kicked him in the face, connecting with a watermelon crunch that was disgustingly satisfying.
Blood pounding, he scrambled up and spun—straight into the stubby end of Jaguar- head’s spear.
The weapon rattled and belched greasy brown smoke, which whipped around Lucius, immobilizing him in the same invisible coils as before. Then Wolf-head stepped up and smashed Lucius in the temple with his short club. The impact thudded through him and the world spun as he dropped with the grace of a corpse. Jade screamed, but her cry cut off midway, choking to silence. Lucius roared in answer, struggling against the unyielding bonds. “Jade. Jade! ”
As the world faded around him, he tried to fight his way back to full consciousness, all the while praying, Gods, don’t let it end like this!
It didn’t. When he came to a short time later, he was being carried head and foot between two of the animal-headed warriors. Beside him strode Jaguar-head, who carried Jade over his shoulder; she lay still, but her eyes were open and reflected her relief when Lucius sent her a wink. He didn’t dare do more, though. Not until he better understood what the hell was going on . . . and what they could do about it.
He couldn’t see who had shoulders, but Snake-head was at his feet, not even limping. The damn things have healing magic, he realized. But what the hell were they? Not Banol Kax or makol, he knew. The dark lords of the underworld were huge and inhuman, and the archive said the demon souls of the makol took on a shadowy, green-eyed form when they weren’t possessing human hosts. So what other classes of badasses existed within Xibalba, and how could they be taken down for good?
Unfortunately, that was yet another example of the Nightkeepers’ critical need to fill in the gaps.
Someone, at some point in the past, must’ve known what these things were, and how to kill them. But that knowledge, like so much else, had been lost.
So think it through, he told himself. There’s got to be something we can do here. But unfortunately, the whole “everything happens for a reason” religious tenet of the magi had a major flaw in this case: With the skyroad destroyed and the gods unable to communicate with the Nightkeepers or directly influence things on the earthly plane, logic said that it hadn’t been a god that had brought them to the canyon. More likely, one of the Banol Kax or a powerful demon underling had detected the sex magic and the stirring of the Prophet’s powers and usurped the energy flows somehow. Which would suggest that he and Jade didn’t have a destined role to play in the underworld; the dark lords were just looking to cut down on their enemies.