Final Prophecy 05 - Blood Spells Read Free Page B

old times all the time, and he couldn’t promise that anymore.
    Which meant he shouldn’t have touched her at all, despite the lure of sex magic and the way their link had seemed suddenly stronger than it had in a long time, more alive than it ever was back at Skywatch. It wouldn’t last, he knew. Never did. But still, he held on to the feeling of connection as he materialized in the barrier: a gray-green, featureless expanse of leaden skies above and ground-level fog below.
    The magi zapped in a foot above the ground and dropped, landing on their feet and then fighting for balance when the ground gave a watery heave and rippled outward in concentric circles that were mirrored in the calf-deep fog. The water-bed effect was new . . . probably another sign of the barrier destabilizing as the countdown neared T minus two years.
    Brain working on the multiple levels of a warrior, Brandt filed the detail and scanned the scene—fog and more fog, no surprises there—while another part of him double-checked that the others had made it through okay. Especially Patience.
    She was right beside him. And she was pissed.
    Pulling her hand from his, she broke their uplink. “If you didn’t think we had enough power to trigger the spell, you should’ve said something instead of just leaning on me for sex magic.”
    “I didn’t—” Shit. It might not have been a conscious decision, but that was exactly what he—or rather his warrior’s instincts—had done. “Maybe I did. Sorry.”
    He knew it wouldn’t matter to her that it had worked; she would care only that it hadn’t been about them . She didn’t want to believe that for the next two years and five days, they belonged entirely to the Nightkeepers and their blood-bound duties.
    “Yeah. Well.” She shrugged and avoided his eyes.
    Wearing no makeup, and with her long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, she didn’t look much older than the nineteen she’d been when they met. Which just made him achingly aware of how far they had drifted, how much momentum they had lost. He wished he knew how to talk to her. Everything used to be easy between them. So why the hell was it so hard now? “Patience—”
    “We’ve got company,” Rabbit interrupted. His eyes were locked on a section of the fog.
    Brandt turned, annoyed, but also a bit relieved. It wasn’t like there was anything new he could say to her. And even if he had something new to bring, this wasn’t the time or place.
    Following Rabbit’s line of sight, he didn’t see anything at first. But then the seemingly random curls of vapor took form, darkening to shadows and then coalescing into human-shaped figures that weren’t quite human. He tensed and automatically took a half step in front of Patience.
    She moved away from him, snapping in an undertone, “It’s the nahwal . And I can fight my own battles.”
    “Keep your guard up.” He wanted to tell her to stay safe, to duck the Triad spell, to . . . hell, he didn’t know. The words kept getting screwed up inside him, which was why he stayed silent. That, and the knowledge that destiny and the gods didn’t give a shit what the Nightkeepers wanted when it came to the end-time war.
    The fog swirled as the nahwal approached. Brandt’s pulse picked up a notch. The Triad codex had mentioned that the creatures, which held the collected wisdom of each of the Nightkeepers’ bloodlines, would be needed for the second layer of spell casting, but the part of the accordion-folded text that had explained exactly how that was supposed to work had been damaged beyond recovery. For the next part of the spell, the magi were flying, if not blind, then with some seriously low visibility.
    The nine naked, sexless, hairless humanoid figures formed an outer ring concentric to that of the Nightkeepers. As before, the creatures had black, expressionless eyes and were adorned only by the bloodline glyphs they wore in stark black on their inner forearms. But where the nahwal had