Spellfire Read Free

magic, that is. She didn’t realize the gods had already taken back their gifts.
    Biting off a vicious curse, she snapped, “More. I don’t care what it takes—I want him
broken
, damn you. We’re running out of time.”
    Rabbit braced himself, knowing the first few blows were going to hurt like a bitch. He didn’t close his eyes, though—it was worse not knowing when the whip was going to hit. Instead, he glared at Phee, hating her for what she’d done to him. And hating himself for what he’d let her turn him into.
    An animal. No, worse—some subhuman creature that couldn’t tell truth from lies, couldn’t recognize love and loyalty when he had it.
    He still knew what hatred felt like, though. Knew it very well. It was his blood, his bones, his very existence.
    The lash whined, then cracked across his shoulder and chest, and agony slapped at him, bright and brilliant. He kept his eyes fixed on the demoness, using the rage to weather the pain. Little by little, though, blow by blow, agony whittled away at his humanity, his capability for rational thought, until he became no more than a whipped dog that refused to die, living only because it dreamed of escaping its chain and tearing into its captor.
    By the tenth blow, the hot agony of each whip strike had turned cold and his body was shaking with chills. By the twentieth he was nearly numb, his eyes going unfocused as his consciousness threatened to take a hike.
    And then the weirdest fucking thing happened. He saw his father, in all his hatchet-faced, pissed off, Wes Studi from
The Last of the Mohicans
–channeling glory.
    It wasn’t a memory or even a vision. It was more like Red-Boar was really there, sitting in midair near the doorway with one booted foot crossed onto his opposite knee. He was a little on the transparent side, but he was wearing brown fatigues and a camo-green T-shirt, and scowling at whoever sat opposite him, giving them his trademark don’t-be-an-idiot look. It was so real that even knowing his old man was dead and gone, anger lashed through Rabbit.
    But then the image wavered and disappeared, leaving a faint tingle of magic behind.
    Son of a—
He roared and went after the vision, surging against his chains and hitting the ends with a body that was still big and strong despite his captivity, though marked now with new scars. The manacles bit into his wrists and ankles, giving only slightly against the pins that held them in place. And as blood flowed from the cuts, old, unloved memories came at him from someplace deep inside, a flip-book of remembrance that battered at his inner defenses and threatened to turn the beaten dog back into the boy he’d once been.
    *    *    *
    He was a kid—six, ten, sixteen, whenever, it was all pretty much the same—watching his father turn away from him with that same old don’t-be-an-idiot look because he’d fucked up again.
    He was nineteen, seeing his old man do real magic for the first time as he brought the Nightkeepers’ desert home out of its magical shield and back to earth with Strike and Anna’s help. Not Rabbit’s, though, because he was only a half blood and his father didn’t trust him with the magic.
    He was in a dark tunnel beneath the ruins of Chichén Itzá, fully a magic user now, though not by his old man’s doing. He raced ahead of a fiery lava creature and then darted into a side passage to hide, but tripped over a limp, yielding body. When he lit its face, he saw Red-Boar’s slashed throat and open, staring eyes.
    He was torching his old man’s pyre and watching it burn, not sure how the hell he was supposed to feel, and feeling nothing, really.
    After that, the time blurred into a gooey mess of mental sameness—not because the months and years had been the same as he had grown and aged, his powers accelerating the process until he was huge and looked closer to thirty-three than twenty-three—but because his old man had been the little devil that rode his