That was the problem, she realized suddenly, or one of them. She’d seen the end of so many relationships that she entered each new affair preparing for its end, creating a self- fulfilling prophecy that made it easier, safer, and less dramatic to not bother trying to keep it going. What would happen if she threw herself into it heart and soul?
She might be crushed, she realized. But she might also succeed.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that inner peace is highly overrated.” While he was trying to puzzle that one out, she stepped into him and kissed him, hard. What was more, she opened herself fully to her own emotions and damned the consequences.
The magic shimmered within her, in the air around them, and a hidden door opened inside her, letting in the power of the solstice, and the power that was hers alone. She stepped away from Lucius, taking her place directly between the companions, facing nothing.
Only it wasn’t nothing, she saw now. It was everything.
The bright sparks she’d seen as part of the shifting pattern of power in Rabbit’s sublet had come from sex or emotion, maybe both; the fluid magic she’d sensed covering the hidden tunnel at Skywatch had been an ancient spell imbued with modern hopes and fears. But seeing those things was just half of her magic. The other half was in the spell words themselves, and her ability to morph them from one thing to another. She had created ice magic, it was true, but she hadn’t been able to use that part of her talent since.
Now, as she laid herself open to the magic, to the possibilities, she saw it. In front of her, rising from the dried-up cloud forest floor to the wilted canopy above, stretching the width of the clearing in either direction, was a wall of magic. It was bright sparks and flowing power. It was the code beneath the chatter, the structure underlying the fabric of the earth. At the same time, glyph strings crawled across the undulating surface of the spell, morphing and mutating as she watched. How in the hell was she supposed to alter a spell that was altering almost faster than she could follow it?
Gods, she thought, stomach twisting. It was too complex, too mutable. She could see the structure but she couldn’t get a grip on it. The spell was a slippery ball of power, sliding through her grasp each time she thought she had it.
She stared at the nothingness, sweat prickling on her brow.
“Jade.” It was Lucius’s voice, low in warning. On either side of her, the companions were growling, their shoulder fur ruffling.
“They won’t hurt me. I think they’re worried. The magic of the game brought them through, and now they can’t get back to him. Unless . . .” She trailed off as a glyph glinted in the flowing string. It glowed, floated off the spell surface, and locked itself into a single pictograph. As she watched, a second followed. Then another. Her magic churned and spun, but she wasn’t quite there yet. The magic wasn’t quite there.
Without another thought or hesitation, she opened herself to the task, to the power and the potential for failure and drama. Take what you need . Something shifted inside her, a sharp lurch beneath her heart, and she gasped. Then it was there: The counterspell flared in front of her, burning itself into her mind’s eye.
She reached back for Lucius’s hand, felt their fingers twine and link. Whispering a small prayer in her heart, she recited the counterspell.
The shimmering curtain of power and spell words disappeared as though it had never existed. There was no explosion, no power surge. One moment all she saw in front of her were more trees, more dying vines. In the next, she was staring at a mountainside with a terrible skull carved into it, jaw gaping wide so it screamed the dark, ominous entrance to a cave. Just inside its mouth, a skeleton hung skewered to the cave wall, still wearing the remains of what had been a purple velour tracksuit.
Overhead, heretofore silent monkeys screamed in fear, and parrots took wing in a thunder of brittle feathers. For a second, nobody moved. Then, without warning, an unearthly shriek split the air and terrible creatures with twisted, humanoid bodies and the heads of animals boiled out of the blackness of the tunnel. Snakes, jaguars, eagles, hawks, crocodiles, every sacred creature was mocked in twisted Egyptian parodies arising from dark magic. Their human parts were gnarled and gray skinned, with some parts grown too large, others shrunk to vestiges.
Jade screamed; she couldn’t help it. These were the creatures that had captured her and Lucius before, only now they were damaged even worse and pissed about it. She could feel their rage as a palpable force against her magic, and instinctively tamped down her power, her vulnerability.
Strike roared an order and the warriors let fly with a fireball salvo that detonated against the front line of animal-heads, sending body parts flying in a spray of blood, fire, and flame. Their screams were terrible; the smell was worse. Gagging, Jade reeled against Lucius. He grabbed her. “Back to the trees!” he yelled over a roar of fire as flames napalmed from Rabbit’s outstretched palms, turning the second rank of attackers to a pyre. “We need to take cover!”
Jade was turning to comply when sharp teeth seized her arm and dug in, pulling her the other way.
She screamed and swung out with her cudgel; it slammed into the shoulder of one of the big black dogs. For a second, she thought she was dead, that it was going to tear her throat out then and there.
But it simply glared at her and bore down on her hand, almost—but not quite—breaking the skin. Its legs were braced, its ruff standing straight up in a vicious line along its spine, making it look like some prehistoric, spiked creature.
Lucius cursed and rounded on the companion, but she waved him off as understanding dawned. “We have to fight through,” she said urgently. “Kinich Ahau needs our help!”
At her shout, the warriors knotted together in a defensive formation. “We can’t help shit if we’re dead,” Michael said, then spun to unleash a stream of deadly silver muk into the horde; the death magic cut a swath as animal-heads crumbled to dust. Sasha stood behind him, her hand on his waist, her eyes closed as she fed him her lifegiving magic, balancing out the danger of using the ancestral magic that melded both light and dark halves.
The animal-heads kept coming, their ranks swelling to overrun the clearing. Some of the creatures climbed over their own dead, uncaring, while others stopped to feed on the bodies with a ferocity that made Jade’s gorge rise.
“The whole world is going to die if we don’t rescue Kinich Ahau,” Strike countered. “If Akhenaton’s ascension doesn’t spell the beginning of the end, our failure to rescue the last god remaining outside the sky plane might.” He looked from the companions to the cave mouth and back again, and Jade could see his anguish. His father had ordered the Nightkeepers to their deaths under far better odds. He didn’t hesitate long, though. Sweeping his cudgel in a high arc, he pointed to the tunnel mouth and shouted, “Go!”
The big dog released Jade’s hand, spun, and bolted away, with its twin right behind.
The other warriors picked up the cry and charged, clearing the way with fireballs and Rabbit’s humanflamethrower routine. Jade found herself screaming, “Kinich Ahau!” and running with them.
Ice magic raced through her veins but she held it in, not sure whether it would douse the flames.
Lucius was right with her, solid at her side, his fierce loyalty not up for question, even if their relationship remained hazy and uncertain.