Alexis knew he never would’ve done it based on their say-so, knew that he recognized it as the right course too. But even so, she felt a sharp bite of responsibility, of worry. As the ’port magic revved up around them, she tried not to imagine what was going on back at Skywatch . . . and failed miserably. The stories of the prior massacre were too ingrained in her mind, her worry for Izzy and the others too sharp. So as the world slid sideways and went gray-green, she sent a prayer into the barrier:
Gods protect our
winikin.
They’re the only family we have left.
The Nightkeepers materialized in the place she’d described to Strike, the vapor-laden air snapping away from them with an audible pop. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of death and decay, but thin with altitude and cold. The clearing they had landed in was lit by torchlight, and Alexis clutched Nate’s hand hard at the sight of the screaming skull mouth and the dark, brackish water leading into the cave system. For a second everything inside her rebelled at the thought of going inside. Then her eyes locked on a glitter of purple and gray, and rebellion went to horror.
Mistress Truth’s headless body, still garbed in purple velour, was spiked to the wall of the cavern, pointing the way inward, a grisly sacrifice to a brutal pantheon.
Anna said quietly, “Call home. Please. I did what I could through the blood link, but it wasn’t much.” She was very pale, still rubbing her forearm where the
ajawlel
mark was clearly paining her, but she’d abided by the king’s decision to follow the battle rather than their hearts.
“Already on it,” Strike said. He had the satellite phone pressed to his ear, but shook his head and clicked it off with a curse. “Nothing.”
“Oh, there’s something, all right,” Alexis said, her own voice feeling as if it were coming from far away. She wasn’t sure if that was her talking now, or the goddess. The power conduit felt different somehow, as though it were vibrating on an entirely new frequency. “Listen. Feel.”
There was a faint whistling noise, almost a high scream, barely audible to human ears. The earth beneath their feet shimmied slightly, the faintest of tremors. The cloud forest around them, dank and ancient and rotten, was silent. The air hummed with a waiting tension.
Nate said, “I think—”
A huge, grating crack rent the air, the ground gave a massive heave, nearly throwing Alexis off her feet, and the cave mouth shuddered and started to move. At first she thought it was collapsing. Horror coalesced and built when she saw that it wasn’t collapsing at all; the upper jaw of the screaming skull was hingeing, the scream growing wider as the skull mouth stretched open.
Then, darkness spewed from the opening. Evil. A gout of foul purple-black smoke came first, followed by an unearthly howl that nearly sent her to her knees. She was barely aware that Nate held her up, that he shielded her with his body as a dark shape hurtled from the hellroad and took flight, flapping its great, leathery wings as it disappeared into the darkness beyond the torchlight. Then another. Another.
They were bats, she realized with sharp terror. Huge bats, each the size of a subcompact. Three of them, then a fourth, then two more, until all seven of the death bats had flown free of the cave. Camazotz’s sons had been freed by Iago. The powerful altar stone must have overcome Iago’s lack of the obsidian knife that Nate wore in his belt, Alexis thought. Or else they’d been wrong and the Volatile’s knife had never been one of the prophecies; it was something else. But what?
The death bats screamed as they wheeled up and dived back down aiming for the Nightkeepers, then screamed again when Michael’s shield spell sent them tumbling back.
“We’re too late,” Nate shouted over the thunder of wings. “Iago breached the barrier!”
“Not yet,” Alexis shouted, not sure how she knew, but positive she was right. “He’s torn a hole, but it’s fixable. We can weave it shut.”
It wasn’t until she said the word that she understood its import. Weaving. Rainbows. It wasn’t about fighting the demons with rainbows, never had been. Her job was to repair the barrier. It would be up to the others to fight the bats.
“Tell Leah to call Kulkulkan,” she gasped, feeling the goddess reach into her and start pulling her into the magic. Or was Ixchel pulling the magic from her? She couldn’t tell, wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure of anything beyond the fact that this was what she’d been born to do; this was her fate and destiny.
“They’re already on it,” Nate answered. He was bracing her, channeling the magic into her as the bats slammed into Michael’s shield again and again, denting it and threatening to break through. “The others are linked up. Ready for the boost?”
She nodded, so full of magic already that she thought she might burst with it, so full that she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, could only cling to him as the Nightkeepers formed the sacred circle, with Strike and Leah using their joined power to channel the golden clarion call that would bring the creator god to earth. Then Nate linked hands with Anna, and Michael reached for Alexis’s free hand, completing the circle and linking their power to hers.
And for a few seconds, she
was
a god.
Power streamed through Alexis, into her, lit her up and sent her higher than she’d ever been. She reached up and touched the sky, stretched down and thrust her roots deep underground. Then the clouds parted overhead, the night went day-bright, and a rainbow speared down, slamming into the ground at her feet and making the earth shudder with its force.
This one’s for you, Izzy
, Alexis thought, saying a prayer for the only mother she’d ever really known.
And, finally understanding what she had to do, she pulled away from Nate and stepped into the rainbow.
She heard him shout her name, but couldn’t answer. Pain speared through her, followed by exhilaration and the sense of moving, accelerating, shooting up into the air. She had a moment of free fall in reverse as she traveled up the rainbow, up the column of light to a place in the sky where there was a huge, gaping split. Only it wasn’t the sky that was split, she saw once she reached it. It was the barrier. She could look through the tear and see the other side, straight into hell. There she saw lava-orange
boluntiku
and the green-eyed shadows of
makol
without their human shells. Behind them were black, blank shapes of unimaginable evil,
Banol Kax
, surrounded by their lesser demons, the armies of hell, gathered together on a wide, gray-black plain that was somehow on the same level as the earth’s atmosphere.
The creatures strained toward her, toward earth, held back only by the barrier, which was unraveling strand by strand as she watched.
And there, as she hung within the rainbow itself, Alexis heard Ixchel’s voice, faint with distance. She couldn’t make out the words, but she understood.
Taking hold of the rainbow, she pulled on a strand of blue, looping it and tossing it across the gap to snag one ragged edge of the sky. Magic sparked at the place where the blue strand touched the edge, and again when she looped red to the other side of the gap. Then she began to pull on the strands, tugging them together, trying to seam the sky itself.
Slowly, very slowly, the tear began to narrow.
A trumpet scream sounded behind her, and she glanced back to see a snakelike slide of motion, a glowing gold-and-crimson dragon with an elongated snout and whip-like tail. Kulkulkan.
The creator god rose up in the sky and spread his great feathered wings as he hovered above the rainbow, bugling a battle cry, becoming the serpent and the rainbow as they had been carved on the ceiling of the stone temple. Then Kulkulkan screamed again and pinwheeled in the air, locking onto the death bats, directed by the mental link he shared with Leah and Strike, who stood near the hellmouth with their warriors.
The king and queen had her back, Alexis thought, and was warmed by the knowledge, steadied by knowing she wasn’t alone, even though she felt so lonely up there in the sky, sitting on a rainbow, sewing the world back together. But the rainbow strands held. The barrier was closing. Slowly, but it was closing.
For a second she actually thought she was going to pull it off. Then there was a massive heaving on the other side of the barrier, a concerted rush as the
Banol Kax
sent their forces toward the weak spot, a massive battering ram of evil seeking to force its way through to earth. The creatures hit the barrier at a spot below the tear, and the fabric of psi energy bowed under the pressure, straining at the torn spot.
Shouting, Alexis pulled on the threads with both hands and hung on to the rainbow with her legs, fighting to keep the gap from widening. Then a long, squidlike tendril of evil snaked through the opening, wrapped around her, and yanked her off the rainbow.
And pulled her through the gap to hell.
Flames lashed at him; lightning struck at him as he was transported someplace else, someplace between the earth and sky, another layer that wasn’t the barrier, but was so much worse. He twisted in the lashing wind and rain, suspended in the midst of a terrible storm. “Alexis!” he cried, shouting so hard his voice cracked on the word.
“Lexie!”
But she wasn’t there. They’d been separated by the magic, because she belonged in the rainbow and he didn’t, never had.
He thrashed, screaming, not with the pain, but because he needed to get to her, needed to protect her. “Gods
damn
it!” he shouted into the storm. “She needs me! I won’t let it end like this. I can’t. For gods’ sake, let me help her. She’ll die without me!”
And, he realized in the extreme of his panic, he would die without her. A sudden parade of impressions flashed through his mind, kaleidoscoping images of the two of them together in the past, the good times and the bad. Then he saw himself in two different futures, one that continued for many years, one that cut short in 2012, both without her in them. Both unacceptable. Lightning slapped at him, arching him double in pain as he contemplated a future without Alexis and realized that all along his so-called honesty had been a front, a terrible lie. He’d been trying to be honest with her, and in the process had lied to himself. He might not have started out wanting a life with her, a future with her, but now that he was facing one without her, he realized it was the last thing he wanted. The one thing he wouldn’t tolerate.
“Give her back!” he shouted to the storm, to the gods. “She’s mine. I love her!”
The moment he said the words, the moment he truly accepted them for what they were and what they meant, his powers bolted wildly, careening to a new level he’d never experienced before. The magic whiplashed through him, fighting the storm, fighting captivity.
Feeding on the power, he tipped back his head into the storm and roared, “I. Love. Her!”
The universe seemed to pause, seemed to take a breath. In the sudden stillness a door unlocked in his mind, and he suddenly saw his own dreams. He’d dreamed of his mother and father as his infant self remembered them. He’d dreamed of being with Alexis in the temple cave, of losing himself in her as she’d pressed back against a twin column of stalagmites and cried his name at the back of her throat.
And all along he’d dreamed of flying. Of being free, not of love or duty, but free of gravity. Free of the earth.
A warm, magical glow kindled in his heart. Only it wasn’t his heart. It was the hawk medallion.
Son of a bitch,
he thought.
The fucking thing really is magic.
Acting on instinct, on impulse, he palmed his knife from his belt. Only it wasn’t his usual knife; it was the ceremonial blade Strike had given him. The weapon felt like an extension of his own arm, cool on his flesh as he nicked first his tongue, then each of his palms in sacrifice.
Cupping both bloodstained hands around the medallion, he lifted it and pressed a kiss to the etching, where the hawk became the man, and the man became the hawk. “I love her,” he said simply. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” And, in accepting that deep down inside, he let himself go fully to the magic, relinquished control, and gave himself to destiny. He tipped his head back as the storm began anew, now rotating around him in a funnel cloud of gray-black and lightning, and he roared, “Gods take me!”
And, keeping Alexis in his mind, his love for her at the forefront, he dived headfirst into the funnel.
The winds whipped at him, ripping at his clothing, at his flesh. His skin stretched tight and tore; his whole body split apart. Pain slashed through him, beat at him, and he screamed with the pain, with the power. His clothes shredded and fell away. The wind screamed with him, and then he heard another voice, an inhuman screech that reached deep inside him and brought recognition, longing, and a sense of the freedom he’d always sought, the freedom he’d thought love was trying to take away.
He flailed his arms and legs against the whirling vortex, screaming again and again, the creature’s cries drowning out his own. His skin burned, his bones ached, his flesh and tendons sang with unfamiliar tension.
Gradually, though, his flailing gained purpose and rhythm. He waved his arms and felt them bite into the storm winds, arched his spine and felt the motion alter his course. An unfamiliar slapping noise surrounded him, filled him up, and he waved his arms harder, and started to make progress.
Then he saw a flash of color and light up ahead; a place where the storm had cleared, leaving a rainbow behind.
“Alexis,”
he shouted, and heard only the creature’s scream, but didn’t care about that, cared only about getting to her. He started swimming through the air, flapping arms that had become fifteen-foot wings, spreading something that felt like fingers but seemed to have sprouted out of his ass, wide and flat and feathered—a tail? what the fuck?—and letting his legs flatten out behind him, curling his talons, each the size of the forearm of his human self.
Understanding was both a shock and a relief, and a sense of rightness like he’d never before experienced.
He was the sacred black hawk-eagle, and the hawk-eagle was him.
The medallion banged against his breastbone as he flew. It was still hanging around his neck alongside the king’s eccentric, both of the chains having somehow grown to accommodate his new size and shape. He carried the sacred knife with him too; it had changed when he did, becoming an obsidian band that hung around his ankle, marking him not just as a shifter, but as the Volatile.
He wasn’t supposed to challenge the sky by fighting the gods.
He was supposed to fly.
Before, he’d rejected his destiny. Now he just freaking rolled with it, because he’d chosen the path, and the woman, and she was what mattered right now. She was everything.
He screamed again, this time not even trying for a human word, but going only for volume. He was a predator, a raptor calling his challenge against the enemy, a male trumpeting possession of his mate as he broke free of the funnel cloud and found himself on the earth plane, high in the sky. The air was thin, the world very small below him. With night-bright vision he saw the mountains and cloud line, the bumps of ancient pyramids, and realized with a shock that was more acceptance than surprise that he was seeing things now from the angle in his father’s paintings.
This, then, was what had kept Two-Hawk apart, what had tainted the others’ perceptions of the bloodline—the fear of shifters, and the secret he had carried for his son.
Well, shift this,
Nate thought, then pressed his wings close to his body and dived. The wind whipped past and sang freedom in his ears as he plummeted from the heights where the funnel cloud had left him. He flew toward the bright spot near the cloud city, fear gathering in his chest as he saw the tear in the sky and the darkness beyond.
“Lexie!” he called. “Lexie!” The words came out as a raptor’s scream, but, incredibly, he heard an answer.
Nate.
It was a whisper in his mind, a faint connection through the love bond they’d shared, the one he’d tried to sever because he’d been too set in his old patterns to see that things had changed around him, that
he’d
changed.
He called her name again and she answered again, and he tracked the response not to the rainbow or the tear in the sky, but to the darkness beyond.
Gods.
She was on the wrong side of the barrier.
And oh, holy hell.
The split was getting bigger by the second. The starry night sky strained on either side of the gash, while red blackness oozed down, bleeding evil onto the earth.
He could sense the creatures on the other side more than he could see them, could sense the tentacled thing that held Alexis, draining her energy from her and using it to tear the barrier. Her strength was fading, her connection to the goddess almost lost, and all because of him, he knew. He’d been almost too late figuring out what she meant to him, almost too late accepting that sometimes the gods got it right, destiny or not.
But almost doesn’t matter worth a damn,
he thought, trumpeting the attack.
I’m here now, and watch out, because I’m coming for my woman!
He dived through the gap with his curved beak gaping wide and his razor-sharp talons extended in attack. In an instant, blackness enveloped him, slowing his wings and wrapping around him like a heavy, viscous oil, weighing him down and driving him away from Alexis. He could see her, a rainbow shimmer up above him, could hear her cry his name as he fell.
No!
He tumbled, losing the rhythm of flight as the black goo flared to
boluntiku
orange, lava-hot and cloying.
NO!
He fought the creature’s hold as it went solid and slashed at him with a raking six-clawed hand.
Nate howled and reached for his power, calling up a fireball, shaping and throwing the fire magic with his mind because his hands had turned to wings. As he did so, his medallion heated and flashed bright white, and it was as if he’d just thrown a fucking atomic bomb. There was a deep, thrumming thump, then a pause as the world went still.
Then all hell broke loose.
The fireball’s detonation roared, vaporizing the goo in an instant and slamming Nate to the gray-black ground. The shock wave kept on going, radiating away from him, blowing the
boluntiku
and disembodied
makol
back, sending them tumbling end over end, their gods-awful screeching noises nearly lost beneath the thunder of the explosion. Then light flashed, pure, golden, and brilliant, and so bright Nate had to close his eyes and look away. When he looked again, the
Banol Kax
had been driven back to the horizon, and the creature that had been holding Alexis aloft was gone. She was safe from the explosion behind a rainbow barrier, but now she was falling, screaming, “Nate!”
And the gap in the barrier was even wider than before, hanging open, blown larger by the explosion. Worse—the
Banol Kax
had regrouped and were headed for the opening freight-train fast.
Fuck me.
Nate didn’t hesitate. He turned his back on the gap and the demons, kicked hard off the ground, and arrowed toward Alexis. The king’s writ might say that Strike had to prioritize other things above his family, but Nate was bound by no such scripture. And he was damn well prioritizing Alexis, the way he should’ve been doing all along. He powered to her, got above her, and then dived, matching her free-falling speed as the rocky, gray-black surface rose up to meet them.
At practically the last second he got ahead of her and swooped up, scooping her from the air. She shrieked and grabbed on, but then started struggling, trying to bail off. He didn’t get it for a second; then he realized she had no idea who—or what—he was. “It’s me!” he shouted, only it came out as a hawk’s cry.
But she stilled, lying flat on his back, hanging on to his feathers, pulling hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to keep her in place if things got tough. “Holy shit,” she said, voice rattling with fear, with shock. “Nate?”
Which pretty much proved she could hear him through the screeching, maybe because she loved him. Or at least she had; that might be open to some debate in about thirty seconds or so, he realized with a deep clutch of dismay. She’d been raised by the most traditional
winikin
of them all. What if she couldn’t deal with what he was?
“Wh-what’s going on?” Her voice shook; her whole body was trembling.
With fear of rejection lodged deep inside, knowing there was no time for fancy explanations, Nate put himself into a glide, his body somehow knowing just what to do even though his brain didn’t. “It’s a long story, obviously,” he said, “but the short version seems to be that I’m an asshole and a shape-shifter, in whichever order you prefer. I’m the Volatile. And I love you.”
She went very still, letting him know she’d translated from “hawk” to English just fine. Then, moving slowly and keeping a death grip on whatever piece of him she could get hold of, she sat up and straddled his shoulders, hooking her legs into the thickened chain holding the medallion, and using the eccentric’s chain as a handhold. Then she leaned into him, getting out of the whip of the wind as she said, “Let’s do our job, Nightkeeper. We’ve got a barrier to seal and some demons to kick back to hell. It’s like we agreed before: The other stuff doesn’t belong mixed-up with the gods.”
It wasn’t what Nate had hoped to hear, wasn’t what he’d said, and the hollow opening up inside his gut warned that he might not get what he wanted. Not being what he was. But she was right that they had a job to do and not much time to do it, so even though her response cut deep inside his soul, he screeched a battle cry of agreement. “Hang on!”
Then they were arrowing up toward the tear in the barrier, toward where the creatures of the underworld had gathered, waiting for the rip to reach the surface of their world, setting them free on the next.
Trumpeting the attack, Nate gathered his fireball magic, felt Alexis lean on her rainbow magic, and then together, as one, they dived into the battle they’d been born for.