So she didn’t stop. Instead, she opened to him, twined around him, and moaned as the sizzling energy pumped from her to him and back again, racing through the connection she had hated before, but now couldn’t get enough of.
Then, suddenly, boom! The magic flared higher and hotter, not sex magic anymore, but spell-cast magic. It whipped around her, caught her up, sucked her in.
“Rabbit!” She clutched at him, fear surging as her senses pinwheeled and then accelerated, spinning faster and faster. Wind came out of nowhere, screaming suddenly inside the cave to buffet them, circle around them, suck at them.
She screamed as the tornado dragged at her, coming somehow from her and Rabbit’s magic. She couldn’t block it, though—the connection was wide open, the magic racing between them, and from there into the gaping vortex.
“We have to shut it down!” Rabbit shouted. “We need—” The tornado roar cut him off.
Myr grabbed for her wand. It was gone, though, and the fire had been blown away. She slapped the panic button on her comm device, but the indicator didn’t light up; the magic was interfering with the signal, even with the transponder nearby. Rabbit yelled something, but she couldn’t hear him, didn’t understand. How had they gone from a kiss to this? Fear slashed—she was defenseless, vulnerable—
No! She wasn’t giving up. Her wand might be gone, her backup faraway, but the magic was still inside her. Digging down, she fought to summon her powers, just like she would’ve if she’d had her wand and crystals, if she’d been surrounded by scented oils and sitting in front of a fire pit shaped like a five-pointed star. They’re just props, she told herself, and tried to believe it.
Rabbit put his mouth next to her ear and yelled through the whirling whip. “Shields on three!”
She nodded, though she wasn’t sure she could cast the spell. What other choice did she have, though? Sand blasted her skin, dragging her toward the funnel. They had to stop this!
He counted it on fingers she could barely see. One . . . two . . . On “three” she cast the strongest shield spell she could summon, slamming the green-hazed magic into place around her body. And it worked! The force field materialized around her just as Rabbit cast his shield, which was fiery red, and crackled with tremendous power. The two shields met as they had a hundred times before when the two of them trained together—but where before they had melded together, now they repelled violently.
Boom! Energy flared at the point of contact, and a huge explosion flung Myr across the cave. She landed hard and slid in the sand, screaming as something tore inside her—not in her body, but in her mind, at the base of her skull. The shield spell protected her from the shock wave and the pepper of rocky shrapnel, but it didn’t blunt the impact, which left her dazed and gasping for breath.
She heard the sizzle of magic and Rabbit’s vicious curses, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t focus. Her head felt terrifyingly empty—had she banged it, injured it? No, this wasn’t pain, it was—Oh, gods. Her heart raced as she realized that she couldn’t feel their connection anymore. She couldn’t sense his emotions, his life energy or even the flow of magic between them.
The separation spell had worked!
Maybe it had been triggered by their kiss, maybe by something else, but it had triggered, giving him back his magic and breaking the connection between them. More, she had kept her own version of the Nightkeepers’ powers. The shield still surrounded her, and magic still pulsed in her veins. Relief and fierce joy hammered through her, brightening the threads of green flame surrounding her. She was a mage!
“It worked!” Killing the shield, she lurched to her feet and turned toward him. “We— No!” Her heart stopped at the sight of the oily brown cloud pulsing around him.
Dark magic. She stumbled back, lifting her hands to ward off the sight, along with the realization that their bond had been blocking his hell-link. Now that the connection was broken, the evil magic was coming for him. “Rabbit!”
She flashed back on the memories she’d tried so hard to forget, or at least move past. Only she hadn’t moved past them, she realized now. The terror was still there, the pain still fresh and sharp.
He burst into the cave, eyes brilliant with fury, and for the first time she was truly afraid of him. She didn’t know the man storming across the sand toward where she knelt over a small fire. His face was set, unrecognizable, and he had his ceremonial knife in one fist.
“Rabbit.” She rose, holding out her hands. “Wait. It’s not anything bad. I’m just—”
“Don’t!” he thundered. “No more lies!”
“I’m not lying. I—” She screamed as the scented oil she’d been using to purify his eccentrics blazed suddenly red, and the stones erupted in twin sprays and winged to him, landing in his outstretched palm. Flaming oil burned her face, her arms, but the pain was nothing compared to the terror of suddenly hearing the rattlesnake rasp of the dark magic he’d sworn not to use anymore. Her throat closed, strangling her whisper of, “What’s happening to you?”
Stuffing the stones into the pocket of his jeans, he advanced on her. “Were you going to destroy them right away, or were you going to summon her first? What were you going to do to her? Damn it, tell me!”
Tears tracked down her face. “I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. I was just trying to help. After what you said about the stones, I got this idea—”
His lips pulled back in a feral snarl. “This was what you wanted, right? You wanted me to use the dark magic again. But why? Who are you working for?” He leaned in to yell, “Damn it, what are you trying to do to me?”
Mercifully, the flashback cut out, leaving her bent over and gasping for breath, dizzied by the memory and the knowledge that it had gotten worse from there. And, more from the reminder that at one point, she had pushed him to rekindle his link with the darkness.
She hadn’t understood what it meant, not really. All she had known was that the old Xibalban shaman had named him the crossover and said he would be the key to winning the war. She had been scared—of the end of the world, of the way things had been cooling off between them—and she had pushed him to experiment with the other half of the magic.
Gods. She didn’t want to remember that.
She could barely see him now; he was lost in the greasy brown mist. But then a blue-white light kindled within the cloud, and her heart leaped. It was a Nightkeeper’s foxfire, made of pure light magic. He was fighting the darkness!
“Rabbit!” She surged forward, calling up her magic, not as a shield now, but as a fireball that crackled and seethed green. But could she launch it without frying him?
“No,” he shouted hoarsely through the fog. “Don’t, Myr! I can do this.”
Do what? She let the fireball fade, but kept her magic revved up. She couldn’t see him. But the darkness was threaded through now with sparks of red-gold.
“What are you . . .” She trailed off, throat locking as she got it. She freaking got it. He wasn’t trying to fight the magic. He was trying to gain control of it. He wanted to reforge his hell-link and then shut the magic away, back behind the barriers that used to hold it. The ones that had failed before. “Dear gods.” Her voice was a whisper, her emotions a hard, hot ball lodged in her throat.
The words from the children’s book shimmered in her mind: The Crossing Guard stands at the bridge between day and night. This was what the gods had intended; it was part of him becoming the crossover. Again, her head might’ve known that this needed to happen, but the rest of her hadn’t wanted to believe it. Her heart, stupid organ that it was, was clinging to two versions of him—one was the dark, dangerous mage she wasn’t supposed to trust, while the other was the man she’d spent the past ten days fighting alongside, the one who had kissed her just now.