Then, as she watched, the blood flared to fire, though none of the torches around the perimeter of the room were lit.
“Alexis!” She thought it was Nate’s voice calling her back, thought it was his hands that reached out to grab her as she walked toward the fire, called by her own burning blood. She caught his hand, pulled him along with her. She knew this wasn’t what he wanted, and her heart clutched a little at the pain brought by that knowledge. But the humming wouldn’t be denied, compelling her to lean over the flames and inhale a deep lungful of the sacred smoke.
And the world she knew disappeared.
His words bounced off the curving walls of the circular stone chamber, which were carved with scenes of sex and sacrifice, as befitted the intersection where the earth, sky, and underworld touched one another in an unstable three-way joining that fluxed with the stars and the moon. At the top of the walls, near the ceiling, human skulls were carved protruding from the stone, their jaws agape in silent screams. Torches were set at regular intervals, with incense-burning braziers hung above. The moment Nate and Alexis had appeared in the space, flames had sprung to life, lighting the chamber and the altar that sat in its center, not a
chac-mool
this time, but a flat slab with manacles that could be fastened to the wrists and ankles of a spread-eagled victim.
The cuffs weren’t original to the chamber, Nate knew; they’d been put there by the
ajaw-makol
who had sacrificed Leah’s brother to reawaken the magic, then tried to sacrifice her to bring the barrier crashing down. But even though the cuffs weren’t vintage, they made a hell of a statement, one that pretty much said,
Bleed here. Die here.
“Oh, shit,” Nate breathed, panic gathering in his chest—not for himself, but for the woman who both was and wasn’t the girl of his dreams. The Godkeeper ritual required death and rebirth, and a sexual sacrifice on the altar of the gods. “Lexie,” he began, taking a step toward where she stood.
She was staring at the room’s single doorway, which was a flat slab of rock, dropped down to seal the circular chamber. From Strike’s description of the Godkeeper ceremony he and Leah had just barely survived, the slab didn’t respond to normal magic, only to the will of the gods. There was no way out unless the gods saw fit to send them back to the altar room.
“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “I know this isn’t what you want.”
“It’s—” He broke off, because she was right. He didn’t want to be a mated protector—didn’t want to be mated, period. He didn’t want the responsibility of being Nightkeeper to her Godkeeper, when he wasn’t even sure he wanted her. Or, more accurately, he knew damn well he wanted her—he just wasn’t sure for how long, or whether he wanted her, or a fantasy woman who looked like her but acted totally different.
Alexis was still talking, but her voice was lost beneath the roaring that built in his blood. An image slammed into his brain fully formed, with sight and sound and touch and taste. In it, she was bent over the altar as she was now, with her hands pressed flat, as they were now. Only in his waking fantasy she was naked, and he was coming into her from behind.
He’d taken two steps toward her before he could force himself to stop, force himself to lower the hands he’d raised to strip her combat clothes away. Warned by the sound of his harsh, rattling breaths, she spun to face him. He expected her to smack him across the jaw or, knowing Alexis, throw a full-on roundhouse for his thoughts.
But he was wrong, he realized when he saw the flush riding high on her cheeks and the glitter in her eyes. She wasn’t pissed. She was aroused.
“Bad idea,” he managed to say as she advanced on him, still fully clothed, but wiggling inside those clothes in a way that reminded him of before, when they’d been lovers and blamed it on the magic.
She shook her head, seeming lit from within with excitement, with a power he’d never seen in her before as she said, “The world needs a Godkeeper.”
“Patience and Brandt are married,” he countered, telling himself to move away. But his resolve wasn’t as strong as it needed to be. It was weakened by the humming in his blood, the sparkle of power in the air, and the feel of her against him when she rose up on her toes so they were eye to eye. Mouth to mouth.
Unable to do otherwise, he touched his lips to hers. She leaned into him, opening herself to the kiss. The moment she did the chamber shuddered and heaved around them. And began to descend.
Nate cursed and hung on to her as the floor dropped beneath them.
No, goddamn it!
he shouted in his skull.
Not us, not her!
He knew the theory: For a god to enter a Godkeeper, she had to be close to death, which brought her close to the gods. Then it was up to her mate to bring her back with the strongest of physical magic: the act of love. The sex would bind both man and god to the woman, linking them in an unbreakable three-way partnership.
To be chosen was the greatest honor in Nightkeeper lore. Yet if he’d been a teleport, he would’ve zapped them both the fuck out of there the moment the chamber started dropping down into the water table. He didn’t want this, didn’t want to be involved in a screwed-up cosmic business arrangement that exchanged sex for power. But the gods didn’t seem to care what he wanted, or whether he was ready for a mate, for the responsibility. He was a conscript, plucked up and press-ganged into a position that Brandt was so much better suited to, with his wife as his mate.
“The gods are fucking crazy,” he snapped, bracing his legs when the inconstant motion of the chamber rocked the floor beneath them. “Where’s the emergency exit?”
But the door was shut tight and there was no other way in or out. They were stuck there until a god’s power brought them out again. Assuming, of course, that the transition spell worked, they didn’t die in the process, and the god didn’t get stuck between the planes, as Kulkulkan had done during Leah’s transition. Which was a godsdamned lot of assumptions, as far as Nate was concerned.
Rock grated against rock as the chamber sped its descent. Alexis gave a low cry and clung to him, then seemed to realize what she was doing and tried to push away. He didn’t let her break free, holding her close until she stopped struggling and sagged against him, breath shuddering.
“I’m scared.” Her words were muffled in the fabric of his shirt, and nearly drowned out by the sound of the subterranean river that was being diverted by ancient mechanisms and magic, to fulfill the need of the gods.
“So am I.” He wrapped his arms around her, cursing the gods for taking away their free will, forcing them into a union they’d tried once before and failed to make work. He and Alexis weren’t prepared for this, hadn’t ever thought it would be them going through the ritual. He could only assume the problems between Patience and Brandt went deeper than he’d thought, or else the gods wouldn’t have bypassed them. Hell, if he and Alexis were better candidates for the spell, then the White-Eagles’ marriage was in serious trouble.
The chamber finished its grating descent, coming to rest with a resonant thud and a shudder. Scant seconds later jets of water burst from the carved skulls at the perimeter of the room. The skeletal mouths screamed the water, dousing Alexis and Nate instantly with fire-hose pressure and cold. There was no preamble, no steady build like the one Leah had described. This was a mad rush to fill the chamber. Either the gods were impatient or something was very wrong, Nate thought.
As in
the fucking chamber’s broken
wrong.
It wasn’t entirely clear how much of the die-and-be-reborn trick of the sacred chamber was magic and how much was thousand-year-old engineering, and that was a seriously chilling thought, because if whatever was in charge of the water flow had been broken in the cave-ins the tunnels had suffered during the fall equinox, then the chamber might not drain the way it was supposed to when the transition spell was complete.
Game over,
he thought as the water climbed past his knees.
“What if this whole place is broken?” he said softly. The water was to their upper thighs now and the pressurized jets continued screaming from the skulls high above.
“It isn’t,” she said without hesitation.
“You don’t know that.”
“I have faith.”
“You
want
to have faith,” he contradicted, feeling dread curl. “But it’s too simple to say that what has happened before will happen again, or that it’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy. What if all that’s bullshit, just like every other religion out there, just a construct used to frame some commonsense rules?”
She looked as though she pitied him. “It must suck to be stuck inside a belief system like yours.”
“At least I’ve got a system,” he snapped. “You just let your
winikin
tell you what to think.” Inside, though, something said,
What are you doing?
He was being a jerk; that was what. And he was doing it because he was scared. The water was cool, almost cold, reaching past his chest and threatening to buoy him off the floor. He let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I take it back. I’m being an ass because I’m not sure what else I can do.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we
can
do at this point.” Her words were matter-of-fact, but her eyes were wide and scared, and she was trembling. Then the water snuffed the torches, plunging them into darkness. She gave a short scream, then muffled it.
He caught her arm and drew her close, making sure they could find each other in the darkness. The water wasn’t glowing, and there wasn’t any noise or wind, which didn’t match up with how Strike and Leah had described their experience. Those details only added to his worry that the chamber mechanism wasn’t working right.
If this was the end for them, he didn’t want the last thing between them to be anger. Softening his voice and gathering her close, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Lexie.”
Her voice went hollow and very small. “Me too.”
Working by feel and instinct, he found her lips with his in a kiss that was part apology, part wish that things had, in the end, been different for them.
Then the water closed over both their heads. He couldn’t hear the incoming rush anymore, couldn’t hear beyond the pounding of his heartbeat, couldn’t feel much of anything in the cool numbness except her lips against his. She hung on to him, her fingers digging into him for a moment, then two . . . then loosening and falling away.
Wishing he’d done it differently, that he’d been a better man all along, he held Alexis close and pictured the woman of his dreams. He whispered her name and let himself imagine the impossible as he kissed her and let out the last of his air, resigning himself to death.
White-gold light detonated in his skull. And then he was falling.
She cracked her eyes to find amber torchlight reflecting off carved stone walls, and Nate sprawled across her, motionless. For a second she thought she was dreaming again. Then she saw that the chamber was curved rather than rectangular, and the dripping noise came from droplets of water trickling from one stone to the next, rather than from an underground pool. More important, she wasn’t alone in her skull. There was a tiny kernel at the back of her brain, warm and sparkling with colors. When she focused her attention on it, though, it dimmed and grew distant.
Come back!
she thought, quick panic sparking her fully awake. But it hadn’t gone away, she realized after a moment; it’d moved lower, the warmth shifting and the sparkles dispersing until she thought she could feel each nerve ending as a separate entity, an individual thought. Even as she reveled in the sensation, another came to her, the feel of Nate shifting against and atop her. He was sprawled facedown with his cheek on her belly, his arms loosely encircling her hips, and his big body more or less centered between her legs. The realization of their intimate positioning sparked the warmth to a blaze, and when he turned to look up at her, dragging the faintly roughened skin of his jaw across the sensitive skin above her navel, she saw the same heat reflected in his eyes.
“It’s the magic,” she said, her voice cracking around the edges. “The god.”
But Nate shook his head. “If I’d seen you in Newport, I would’ve wanted you long before I’d ever heard the word
Nightkeeper
.”
She would’ve argued, would’ve demanded an explanation, but he surprised her by casting a mild shield spell, one that pressed against her, held her pinned. The magic caressed her skin, sending ripples of excitement and power rolling through her, the pleasure holding her captive as much as the spell itself. Then, before she knew what he’d intended, he moved down her body, somehow taking her combat pants to her knees as he put his lips to her, his clever tongue delving deep and slicking her sensitive folds, which were already swollen and ready for him.
Alexis cried out and arched against him, or would have, but the shield kept her flat, binding her to the stone floor of the sacred chamber hard enough to excite but not hurt her. They had played with restraints once or twice before, but not like this, not so she could feel his magic. The power was brutally erotic, as were the touch of his tongue and hands as he simultaneously drove her up and held her down.
The kernel of colored light within her expanded, reaching outward and straining toward a distant, unseen goal. She writhed as pleasure suffused her, sent her outside herself, hurtling through time and space to a world of hue. The spectrum surrounded her, light and color combining into tangible shapes and audible sounds. On one level she was aware of Nate’s mouth leaving her, and his big body moving up to cover hers. Another part of her, though, was caught, spinning out in a world of blue and gold, with ribbons of color twining around her, trailing from her in all directions.
She was in the sacred chamber with Nate; but she was in the sky too, in the realm of the gods. She saw them, impossibly beautiful, impossibly colorful. She was one of them, yet not, just as she was herself, yet not.
Then the shield spell was gone and she was free to move. She didn’t go far, though, only enough to roll with Nate and rise above him. He was naked now, and so was she, their sodden clothing piled off to the side. The earth and sky combined within her for a second, letting her see his face, letting her see his reservations and his needs. Her heart cracked and bled at the knowledge that he didn’t want this, that he was sacrificing himself for a cause he didn’t fully embrace, compelled by the magic rather than choice.
Perhaps he saw her sadness, maybe just saw her hesitate; either way, he reached up, rising up to meet her, to cup her face in his hands and look into her eyes. “It’s okay, princess,” he said, and for the first time in many months, maybe ever, the term didn’t sound like an insult coming from him. It sounded like an endearment. Like a love word. “We’ll make it work.”
“Yes.” Somehow they would, she knew. There was no other option.
Letting herself sink into that promise, she touched her lips to his and let him guide her down, let his hard length fill her, stretch her until he was seated to the hilt. The feel of him inside set off a chain reaction of pleasure, each pulse showing a different color behind her eyelids as she let them drift shut.
“Lexie,” he said, his voice ragged on the syllables, his palms bracketing her hips, his fingertips digging into her skin.
“Yes,” she said again, because there didn’t seem to be anything more to say as she leaned over him, shifting so the sensitive tips of her breasts brushed against the hard contours of his chest and her lips aligned with his as she began to move against him.
He countered the rhythm with his hands and hips, bringing new pleasure, new colors that wrung a moan from her as the ribbons of light spiraled inward, contracting around her body in a swirl of heat and power, pleasure and madness.
It was as though she were hovering above them, locked in a prism, looking down on them both, locked together in sex and madness. But she was also within herself looking out, seeing Nate’s eyes hard and hot on hers, feeling the clench of his hands, the thrust of his body. Then the world spun as he grabbed her and rolled them both and rose above her to quicken the pace, pis-toning against her as his eyes went distant and glazed.
Can you see the colors?
she wanted to ask, but didn’t, because it was all she could do to hang on and lock her legs around him and rise up to meet him halfway, driving the pleasure higher, and higher still.
The orgasm grabbed her and held her poised at the precipice for a long moment. Blue and green flashed through her, and orange-red. Then Nate’s eyes sharpened and locked on hers, and it wasn’t about the colors anymore, wasn’t about the god-power that flowed through her, at least not entirely. It was about the two of them, about the connection they’d always found through the sex, if nowhere else.
He thrust fully into her and stayed there, pressing against her inside and out, and sending her over the edge.
She arched and cried his name as the throbbing pulses swept her up, tightening her around him and drawing him in, holding him fast. There were no more colors, no more god; there were only the two of them and the feel of his hard, slick flesh and the tight bands of his arm as he held her, pressed his cheek against hers, and cut loose with a low, rattling groan that didn’t sound like her name.
They held on to each other, shuddering and bucking, gripped by a force that simultaneously anchored them and sent them beyond themselves.
Eventually the pulses slowed, then faded to echoes, to rainbow tremors that floated through her, warning her that everything had changed. The kernel of power was gone from the back of her brain. In its place was a hum of connection, not to the barrier, but someplace beyond, some
one
beyond.
Gods,
she thought, then corrected herself.
Goddess.
Because there was no doubt in her mind that she was connected to a female entity, one that was lush and bountiful, a goddess of the sky, the light, and all the colors of the rainbow.
Ixchel,
she thought, the name a soft sigh in itself.
As if aware of her thoughts, Nate levered himself away from her, rolling onto his side and propping himself on one elbow, gloriously male, gloriously naked and unashamed. His medallion glinted in the firelight as he took her right hand and turned it palm up in his own, baring the place where her sacrificial scar had already closed, the healing impelled by the magic. “Show me,” he said softly.
She didn’t know where the word came from, or how he knew to ask, but she said,
“Kawak.”
Rainbow. And a glimmering colored light appeared in her hand.
The magic didn’t rise in her, but rather flowed from the sky to her outstretched fingers, through the conduit connection at the back of her brain, kindling a glow that started as a firefly pinprick and quickly expanded to the size of a softball, then flickered from white through each of the colors of the rainbow, slowly at first, then cycling faster and faster until the hues melded together once again, going blue-white.
“It’s beautiful.” He closed his fingers over hers, folding her hand shut and extinguishing the magic.
“But not very practical,” she said, starting to get a trapped, panicky feeling at knowing Strike had wanted a war god. “Pretty lights won’t do much against the
Banol Kax
.”
“Don’t,” he said, tightening his grip. “Not yet. For right now, just enjoy it.” He shifted and touched his lips to hers, murmuring, “Let’s enjoy this.”
“We can’t.” She held him off, though she was strongly tempted to give in to the heat, to the one thing that had always been easy and right between them. “We have to go back.”
She didn’t question whether they could return to the others, or how. She could feel the power inside; it would undoubtedly decrease some as the barrier thickened with the passing of the eclipse and the skyroad was once again separated from the earth. But for now, for this moment of magic, she had no limits.
She and Nate pulled on their soggy clothes, putting themselves back together as best they could. She tried not to think about the others seeing them, and knowing what had just happened. But sacrifice and sex were the cornerstones of the magic, particularly the Godkeeper ritual. There was no shame in it.
Even as those thoughts swirled in Alexis’s brain, she felt the presence of the goddess, her quiet reassurance, not in words but in a wash of love that told her she could do this, she could. Knowing it, believing it, she turned and touched her lips to Nate’s. And the gods, feeling them together, sent them back to the antechamber to be reunited with the Nightkeepers . . . bringing the rainbow goddess, Ixchel, with them.