Chapter 22
Komodo stopped, and it wasn’t lost on her that he’d given her the courtesy of commanding him.
It came to her all at once, clean and cold and certain.
Eva hadn't come to win. Eva had come to be chased.
Every second spent hunting her through the folds was a second away from the font, and the font was the whole game, the one thing Chaos needed them to be too scattered to reach.
She'd taken Bagh and O-voo to pull Lechuza here.
She'd let herself be made. She wanted the chase.
"Let her run," Lechuza said. "That's the trap. She's bait. The font is everything, and Chaos knows it. The second we follow her, he wins. He’s had me chasing for a year, and if it wasn’t for Flash, I’d still be chasing her." She turned away and put it at her back. "We'll meet again."
The bond flared gold in her chest, Fly's voice driving down it, tight and stripped to the bone. I need you back. Now. I know where the knife is.
The knife. The thing that wasn't in any record, the thing that had ended Cisco, the thing she'd spent her whole life afraid to remember. Her pulse kicked hard against her ribs.
Twister was doing his group healing thing, his face paling, his jaw tightening.
Bagh was stable, O-voo already whole, Bondo’s gash healed, and Flash showed nothing of the wound he’d received.
Komodo held her eyes a beat, then dipped his chin, the hunter standing down, and Krait wiped her blade with the last of her doubt gone, burned off in a room where she'd watched a woman peel Lechuza's face away like a mask.
Lechuza crouched and took O-voo's battered hand. "We've got you," she said. "You're going home."
* * *
The font was exactly as it had been the first time she discovered it.
Standing before the massive, featureless rock, Lechuza could feel the age-old blueprint of her past life humming beneath her skin.
As Quri, she had stood in this exact glade, determined to lock the Spaniards out of the Veil.
She had turned a swirling, blue-lit basin of pure power into this solid, dead stone monument.
But standing here now as Lechuza, the rock didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a tomb.
This was the third time she had stood before it.
The first time, it had given her immeasurable power, transforming her into the great white owl and forcing Flash into his eagle form.
The second time, they had relived a vision that sent them crashing toward each other in a savage need to join hearts, flesh, and souls.
She shook, the tremble reaching into the very core of her.
Fly always knew what he was doing, but touching this weapon and reliving the inevitable vision of that night in detail terrified her.
To her attuned senses, the stone was radiating an unearthly, pulsing heat. A phantom wound. Beside her, Flash shifted on his feet.
"Only you can answer these questions, Lechuza," Fly said, his voice cutting through the humid silence of the glade. He was terrifyingly deliberate. His ethereal wings rustled alongside her owl’s and Flash’s eagle, but the air pressure in the glade dropped, dense with his visionary focus.
"Is this the weapon that you used to kill Cisco, to seal the font, to try to save the world? I’d say yes.
As I said, I don’t guess. I think it’s why the font makes you relive his bleeding wound. "
Lechuza stared at the blank, impenetrable rock face.
The heat coming off it was suffocating. Her mind fractured, the memories of Quri overlapping with the present.
She remembered the absolute terror of that night.
The pursuing shadows dancing around the glade.
The heavy, metallic clank of conquistador armor, steel-shod hooves, and deadly blades echoing in the darkness behind her.
Vargas and his men were butchering her people.
He had caught her, threatened her, stabbed her in the side, and she had been dying.
She had set the ceremonial crescent blade on the font, ready to tie the final knot of the ritual. “It is the blade I used.”
Then, a silhouette burst through the darkness.
Flash cried out, doubling over. His hand went to his side, blood instantly soaking through his shirt.
It’s not real, her mind screamed, but her mind was wrong.
It had been real. She had committed the act.
She freely accepted it. Then the realization hit her so hard her knees buckled.
Flash’s bloody hands reached for her, catching her and holding her upright against him.
His face twisted in the agony of the memory.
"Because I stabbed the wrong man," she whispered, the words scraping against her throat like gravel.
She stared into magnificent gray, the eyes of a man who had given up everything to ride to her.
He had deserted, he had refused to kill her people, he had gone against his church, his beliefs, his upbringing, and his country. He had disavowed everything…for her.
She touched his face, the feel of his skin like oxygen in her lungs. His stubble scraped her fingertips, tingling with life. His mouth was tantalizing and irresistible, the need for his body aching in the core of her.
Fly stayed quiet, his analytical eyes narrowing as he let the admission hang in the damp air. He didn't press. He just watched the pattern snap into place.
Every barrier she had ever erected between her and this fear of being vulnerable shattered in the wake of his faith.
"Babe?" he breathed, his eyes searching hers with a terrifying amount of trust.
The sight of his face, the modern-day warrior, the soul who had been her Cisco, shattered the last dam holding back the timeless grief. The centuries of confusion fell away, leaving only the raw, bleeding truth.
"Oh my God," she choked out, tears finally spilling over her cheeks, hot and stinging.
She reached out, her hands trembling as she touched the fabric over his ribs, her palm and fingers wet with his blood, right where his scar burned.
She pressed her mouth to his lips, murmuring against them.
"I thought you were Vargas. I stabbed him... I thought I stabbed him, not you.” Her mouth dragged over his, and he groaned softly, leaning into her as his pain and sorrow washed over her.
“It wasn't until I saw your face in the dying light that I realized.
In my fear...in my absolute desperation…
the hoofbeats, the armor, he was chasing me…
I thought it was him on my heels. I didn't know it was you.
I'm so sorry. Jae, my heart…Cisco, courageous and mine.”
She took his mouth completely, her senses on fire with the need to make him understand, to soothe what she had done, to own every bit of his love. “You’re mine. I'm so sorry."
Flash pulled her against him, so tightly she couldn’t breathe.
She reveled in the weight of him, the heat, the madness he stirred in her.
Their chakanas touched beneath their clothes and discharged.
She cried out as pure gold light from his and aching blue light from hers intertwined, impacting the font.
The blood disappeared, his breathing hitching as the hallowed echo of Cisco’s final breath seemed to ripple between them.
The moment the truth was fully owned, the stone reacted.
A sharp, crystalline sound, like a heavy sheet of ice fracturing under immense weight, echoed through the glade.
Right where the impalpable heat had been pulsing, a circular section of the solid rock began to lose its density.
The gray stone dissolved, turning into a dark, liquid-like swirl that pulled inward, as if melting back into the energetic fluid of the font.
The font itself remained sealed, the deep structural lock holding fast against the apocalypse, but the stone had finally given up its secret.
As the localized rock liquefied, something metallic caught the dim light.
Suspended in the center of the dissolving stone, a heavy, semi-circular blade emerged.
The Tumi. Its silver surface was untarnished by the centuries, etched with the intricate, sharp lines of the sacred Inca glyphs.
It floated for a fraction of a second within the dissolved pocket of the font, freed from its lithic prison, waiting to be claimed.
"Well, fuck me, the boy genius was right," Shark said, his voice breaking the stunned silence of the glade. He crossed his arms, staring at the floating silver blade with a mixture of awe and standard operator skepticism.
Easy grinned, shifting his weight. "Wouldn't 'open sesame' have been much easier?"
Twister immediately shoved him in the shoulder. "It's not the cave of wonders, you tool," Twister muttered.
"Nothing is easy about this fucking op," Tex growled, his deep voice putting an immediate end to the joking. His hard eyes scanned the liquid-like swirl of the font before he turned his head to look directly at Fly.
Fly stood there, his chin tilted up just a fraction, the insubstantial wings of his Veil form settled flat against his back.
Tex stared him down, ruthless and entirely unimpressed by the magic. "Now what?"
Lechuza stared at the floating blade, her gut tightening. She knew what the next step was, and it terrified her. The vision. Fly needed the vision, and she was the only one who could unlock it.
In this fracturing moment, North’s sacrifice flared vividly inside her. He had given his life to save Fly’s. The Visionary had to survive, or everything they were fighting for would be over. In the face of North's courageous act, how could she do any less?
She reached out and touched the silver handle of the blade.