But no matter how much he wished for it, no matter how much he loved her, the gods hadn’t marked them as a mated pair. Not yet, anyway.
“Try another question,” she suggested. “Maybe one that’s more personal. Something about you rather than the Nightkeepers.”
“Are—” He broke off, ashamed to realize he didn’t have the chops to ask if he and Myrinne were destined mates, partly because he didn’t want a “no” from the candle flame and partly because he didn’t want one from her. So he fudged it, saying aloud, “What is my destiny?” Inwardly, though, he asked the question he really wanted the answer to: How can I make Myrinne mine?
Nothing happened. He sighed, frustrated and more disappointed than he would’ve thought, given that he hadn’t really believed her so-called scrying spell was going to work in the first place. “I guess I’m not—” He broke off as the reflected flames suddenly turned liquid and blurred together before his eyes. “Holy shit. I think it’s working.”
Myrinne said something, but he couldn’t hear her, couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of blood in his veins, in his head. His heartbeat sounded like ritual drums, his bloodstream like a waterfall.
What is my destiny? he asked inwardly. How can I make Myrinne mine?
The world went silent, as though his heart had stopped entirely. The liquid flames merged and separated, merged and separated . . . and then they roared up, reaching for him. And when they touched him, they burned like fury.
Rabbit felt his mouth stretch wide in a scream, but couldn’t hear his own voice, could hear only the horrible roar of flames. He was dimly aware of Myrinne shaking him, then leaving him to beat at something nearby. He saw her mouth move in panicked shouts he couldn’t hear, couldn’t respond to.
He could only curl in agony, screaming silent howls of pain that quickly turned to denial as he blinked back into the vision and saw himself standing over Myrinne, who lay at his feet in a spreading pool of blood, her lovely eyes wide and fixed in death. As he watched, a drop of blood fell from the ceremonial knife he held in his fist, to land on her upturned, waxen face.
“No!” He writhed, pushing the image away, rejecting it, rejecting himself. “No, I won’t do it;I won’t!” He heard the words now, heard them echo inside his skull.
And in those echoes was embedded another voice, deeper yet familiar, growling, “Then fucking get rid of the hellmark, shit for brains! As long as Iago can find you, he can control you, and the gods can’t touch you. Get rid of the godsdamned hellmark, or you’re godsdamned screwed.”
“Red-Boar?” His voice cracked on the name as his lungs filled with the acrid smell of char. He doubled over, coughing and retching, dimly aware that Myrinne’s dorm room was full of smoke, the fire alarms shrilling. “Dad!”
“Come on!” Myrinne hauled him up. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
The room was aflame around them. For real. Rabbit’s head swam, he was nauseated as shit, and he felt like he had one foot on the earthly plane, one foot somewhere else. He couldn’t wipe the hellish visions out of his head, couldn’t do anything but moan and lean on Myrinne as they staggered out into the hallway and joined the stream of bodies headed out of the dorm.
There were a few screams and a surge of the traffic flow when they staggered out of the burning dorm room and the other students realized that there actually was a fire, that it wasn’t a drill.
As they shuffled down the stairs, packed cattle car- tight with the other evacuees, Myrinne yanked Rabbit’s cell out of his pocket and speed-dialed. Shouting over the din, she said, “Anna? We need you.
Meet us outside your office building. And bring me some clothes.” She was still wearing her black silk robe, and didn’t have any shoes on. Rabbit noticed those details as if from a great distance away.
When they hit the great outdoors, his breathing eased but his head didn’t clear. If anything, the spins were getting worse and he was feeling less and less connected to his body by the second. “I d-d-
don’t think we should leave when the fire’s in your room . . .” he got out, then lost the thread of his thought.
Waxy face. Blood dripping from a knife.
“Anna will fix it,” Myrinne said, hustling him away from the crowd. “She’ll call admin and tell them where we are, and some version of what happened.”
That had him glancing back over his shoulder to the dorm, where flames licked out an upstairs window. He moaned, a low, broken sound, and turned away, hanging his head and gulping oxygen as he and Myrinne staggered to Anna’s office.
Strike was going to fucking kill him this time, he thought. But behind that thought came another, a whisper in a dead man’s voice: Get rid of the godsdamned hellmark, or you’re godsdamned screwed.
Which made sense, because the hellmark not only connected him to the first level of Xibalba, it bound him to Iago, giving the Xibalban bastard access to Rabbit’s head under certain circumstances. So getting rid of the hellmark made sense . . . but it wasn’t exactly an original concept. Strike and the others had tried everything they could think of to break the hellbond, but none of the spells had worked.
“What about it, old man?” Rabbit croaked, earning a wide-eyed look from Myrinne. “Want to tell me how the fuck I’m supposed to get rid of the damned thing?”
The darkness rose up, grabbed Rabbit, and dragged him down. He pitched forward, nearly taking Myrinne down with him as he collapsed against the side of the art history building. An he passed out, an image flashed through his brain, that of a carving, rough-hewn and powerful, showing a glyph that wasn’t Mayan, but far older: a scorpion with a double zigzag line beneath it.
Skywatch Michael stood on the upper level of the great room with his back to the wall, watching over Sasha from afar because he didn’t dare get within touching distance. She sat on one of the big sofas, describing the barrier vision the nahwal had sent her into. When she was done, Michael filled in with a few of his own observations.
Finally, Strike summed it up: “So it seems like a good bet that the library scroll is somewhere in the temple, and Sasha is probably the key to gaining access, given that the thing we’ve been calling the mad nahwal is Ambrose’s ghost . . . or I guess demi- nahwal is as good a term as any.” He paused, his lips curving. “Meanwhile, on the ‘oh, holy shit’ front, Sasha got her bloodline mark, the warrior talent, another talent we’re going to have to look into, and—hello, bonus—the royal ju.” He was playing it pretty cool, but blinking a little too much, evidence of what it’d meant to him to gain a sister.
Sasha’s answering smile was strained around the edges. “That’s going to take a little while to sink in, I think.”
“For all of us,” Leah said from her position beside Strike. She dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed. “So can I be blatantly practical and suggest we call it a night and reconvene tomorrow? We all pulled a fair bit of magic tonight, and probably shouldn’t make any major decisions until we’ve recharged. Let’s eat and crash.”
“I second that,” Sven said from his position flat-out on the floor in the middle of the great room.
“I’m whupped.”
As if that’d been the signal they were waiting for, the winikin moved in and started shepherding their charges toward food and then bed. Jox beelined for Sasha, his face alight, as if to say, This one’s mine! On one level, Michael was overjoyed for her. If any of them had needed to step into a ready-