Final Prophecy 05 - Blood Spells Read Free

blood. The contact brought a flare of heat and magic, increasing the champagne fizz of magic in her blood to an Alka-Seltzer bubble as he squeezed her hand in a show of support, or maybe more because he was nervous. It was hard to tell what Sven was thinking most of the time.
    To her right, though . . .
    When her hand hovered midair, unclaimed, ice frosted the hard knot in her stomach. Don’t do it, she thought fiercely at Brandt. Not here. Not now.
    It was her darkest unvoiced fear, that one day he would decide that, with the twins gone and the two of them living mostly separate lives, he didn’t want to bother with a shared suite and matching rings, that he was sick of their strained politeness and the way both of them tried too hard to pretend things were getting better.
    Once, their mated bond had been so strong that he would have heard her whispered thoughts even without the bloody handclasp of an uplink.
    Not now, though.
    She looked over at him, and their eyes locked, her sky blue to his gold-spangled brown gone dark and forbidding in the torchlight. The skin was tight across his high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and wide brow, and shadows ringed his eyes, but his hair was neat, his shaved jaw smooth, his eyebrows the matching curves of a gliding eagle’s wings. She felt sweaty and desperate in comparison.
    “Don’t do it,” she whispered into the silence that had fallen as the others waited for her and Brandt to complete the circle.
    “What’s wrong?” His voice rasped slightly, though she didn’t know if the roughness came from impatience or something else. She couldn’t read him when he was this deep in the magic.
    The magic fizz went flat inside her. Everything’s wrong, she wanted to say, but that was the answer of the woman she’d been for too long, the one who had turned inward and self-pitying, becoming depressed after he and Strike had sent the twins away. She wasn’t that person now, though, which meant the quick, knee-jerk answer didn’t fit anymore.
    The woman inside her, the one who still loved the memory of the man she had married out in the human world . . . that part of her wanted to tell him to be careful, to stay strong, and even—gods forgive her—to reject the Triad power if he was chosen. She wanted to tell him to think of the twins, of her, of the future they had once imagined.
    The warrior inside her, though, refused to go there. The spell wasn’t about being careful; it was about fulfilling a three-thousand-year-old prophecy and maybe—hopefully—gaining the power they would need to defend the barrier during the upcoming winter solstice, when a total lunar eclipse would destabilize the hell out of the barrier.
    What was more, both the warrior and the woman inside her knew that she couldn’t turn her back on the war. Between now and the end of 2012 the Nightkeepers needed to hold the rapidly weakening barrier against the Banol Kax . If they didn’t, her future plans wouldn’t matter worth a damn because there wouldn’t be a future, not for her, and not for mankind. The lucky ones would die outright in the first wave, when the dark lords broke out of the underworld. The rest would be horribly trapped as the Banol Kax first fed on their souls, and then used their half-animate bodies to create new armies aimed at conquering the sky itself.
    She hadn’t let herself imagine marching as part of that army, had forced herself not to think about the fact that twins were sacred to the old legends, and therefore a threat to the dark lords. But the knowledge haunted her nightmares with shifting shadows and luminous green eyes.
    And because of all that, there was only one answer she could give Brandt.
    Calling on her warrior self, letting the magic blunt her emotions and bring determination, she stretched out her hand to him, palm up, so the bloody sacrificial cut glistened dark in the torchlight. “The only thing that matters today is calling the Triad. The rest can wait.”
    It was