Spellfire Read Online Free PDF Page B

to send her image into Skywatch to contact him. To corrupt him.
    And right now, there was no fucking way he could use the stones without his own link to the dark magic.
    But he had to follow her. Had to find a way.
    Tightening his grip on his makeshift weapon, he advanced on the stones as a cloud covered the sun, throwing him back into the shadows. The temp dropped and the palm fronds rattled in a sudden downdraft, sounding like giant wings and making the back of his neck crawl, just like—
    “Shit!”
Rabbit flung himself to the ground and rolled.
    A huge
camazotz
hit right where he’d been, with its wings and claws outstretched and its tail scything the air. The creature wore a stone yoke tied around its hips, which didn’t just make the demon damn tough to banish; it signified that it was a ’
zotz
leader. Bigger and meaner than the soldiers, they were tough as shit to kill . . . and they rarely traveled alone.
    Sure enough, as Rabbit ducked a tail-swipe and missed a grab for the barbed end, the sky went dark, clouding over with more huge
camazotz
, dozens of the fuckers, all zeroing in on their leader.
    Grim reality broke over him. He was screwed, finished. He couldn’t get to the stones, couldn’t get back to the cave, couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except bare his teeth at the hoard, brandish his puny-assed knife and shout, “Come on, motherfuckers. You want a piece of me? Come and fucking take it!”
    “Rabbit, get
down
!”
    The sound of Dez’s voice froze his brain, but his body obeyed the king’s order, pancaking him face-first in the sand. Then the ice cracked and his mind raced. That hadn’t just happened, couldn’t have happened, he hadn’t heard—
    A salvo of fireballs blasted right over him, crackling red-gold and burning like fury and proving that the impossible was real. The Nightkeepers had found him, they had come for him.
    The fireballs hit the ’
zotz
line and detonated. Flames roared, and the demons shrieked as Rabbit lifted his head and squinted through watering, disbelieving eyes at the carnage. And carnage it was—a dozen of the enemy were down and smoking, including the leader. But the sky was still dark, the air still full of the leather-boom of wings and the screams of incoming demons.
    He wasn’t alone anymore, though.
    Lurching to his feet, he started to turn toward the others, choking out, “How in the hell did—”
    “Save your questions,” said a deep, grating voice behind him, nearly drowned out by sudden bursts of gunfire, which went ripping into the oncoming
camazotz
. Rough hands spun him back around, shoved a heavy machine gun in his hands, and jammed a sheathed knife in his ragged waistband. “Fight!”
    Then a hard spine slammed into Rabbit’s and he was back-to-back with something he never thought he’d have again: a teammate.
    Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. The Nightkeepers were all around him—huge, strong, beautiful and so damn glossy it almost hurt to look at them. There were dozens of
winikin
, too—smaller, lighter and more agile than the magi, they fired machine guns filled with jade-tipped ammo from behind shield spells as if, while he’d been gone, they had somehow turned into an actual magic-wielding army. At their core, Sven and Cara fought shoulder to shoulder—a Nightkeeper and a
winikin
teaming up, aided not just by Sven’s huge coyote familiar, but also by a smaller, darker coyote that stayed close to Cara’s heels.
    Rabbit’s head spun. Jesus fucking Christ. How long had he been gone?
    A second round of fireballs detonated, biting into the enemy line and filling the air with fury and pain, but he barely flinched. He was too busy staring.
    He saw Anna and Strike, huge and regal, and the closest thing he’d had to siblings; Patience and Brandt, who had taught him what a real family could feel like; Lucius, the human researcher who was more of an outsider than Rabbit had ever been, yet had somehow become one of them. And so many