He smirked. “We have this brilliant plan. Adrik called Alana—telepathically, I mean—and…” He fanned his face. “Could you turn down the heat?”
“Alana’s here?” I needed godborns to be leaving, not coming!
“No, she—”
Just then, another teenager’s voice reached into my mind. Get Blood Moon out in the open, Zane.
Okay, I didn’t recognize the voice, but I for sure recognized the tone. Dad? Rosie must have found him and woken him up!
A blast of thick mist killed the flames, leaving me and Marco visible again.
“Enough games!” Ixkik’ growled. “Two godborns are even better than one. Get them, boys!”
Jordan and Bird flew toward us. Marco lifted his fake spear, and just as I raised my hands to release a torrent of fire, thunder rumbled. Lightning flashed. Everyone, even the demons, froze and looked up.
The sky split open with a crack and a boom. Hail pummeled the earth, followed by sheets of rain that doused the flames burning the jungle.
“Take that!” Marco shouted.
The water-hating demons shrieked and ran for cover.
“Come back, you fools!” Ixkik’ yelled.
The field flooded so fast, I barely had time to process where the rain had come from. As if he could read my mind, Marco shrugged and grinned. “Louie was bored in Montana.”
That’s when all Xib’alb’a broke loose.
There was a bone-rattling shriek as I felt the rush of Brooks’s wings overhead, and I thought I heard Hondo’s voice somewhere in the commotion. I couldn’t see Blood Moon’s mist anymore. Quinn’s chain vanished, and she flew off into the jungle. Jordan and Bird instantly shed their human forms, opting for their monstrous bat selves instead. They unfolded their leathery black wings, and their eyes glowed red as they took off into the stormy sky. To get Quinn, I guessed.
Marco’s face changed back into his own, and he flashed a sinister grin. He moved like lightning, racing after the demons that had taken cover under the trees. Dragon-shaped shadows rose up from the soaked earth, their wings so massive they blocked out most of the daylight.
Ren!
“Kill the gods!” Blood Moon commanded, but I had no idea where she was or who she was talking to. Were there really demons holding the gods, just waiting for her cue?
Zane, Hurakan called telepathically. Make her show her true face. Only then can you defeat her. Do you understand?
I wanted to ask my dad what the heck he was talking about, but at the same moment, a sliver of fog lifted off the Tree’s trunk and zipped into the jungle. Using Fuego, I ran after it.
I rushed into the dark web of half-burned forest. The mist snaked between the trees, faster and farther. Rain slammed against the earth, limiting my vision. I turned up the speed, bounding over fallen branches and twisted vines. Voices shouted in the distance. Thunder crashed.
And then the trail stopped. I was at a dead end. Heart pounding, I stopped and looked in every shadowed direction, but the mist was gone.
“Come out, Ixkik’!” I shouted, wiping my eyes.
In answer, a purplish-gray fog—so dense I couldn’t see my own feet—wrapped around me. All sound vanished like I was underwater.
My brain raced in a thousand directions at once, never arriving at a solution that would (a) get me out of this and (b) get me out of this alive. Waves of nausea rolled through me, combined with anger that I had been so stupidly bold that I ran right into this trap.
Shivers gripped my body, and I clung to Fuego to calm them. “You wanted me…. Well, here I am!” I increased the heat under my skin to stop my teeth from chattering, because no way did I want Ixkik’ to see how scared I was.
“Yes, here you are,” she said slowly, quietly. “I knew the real Zane would follow me.”
“Why don’t you quit hiding behind your mist and face me?”
Ignoring my request, the goddess said, “I thought you were smart, godborn. Haven’t you figured out my genius plan yet? Aren’t you dying to know it?”
“It’s not so genius if your demons are on the run and the gods are alive.”
“That’s of no consequence,” she purred. “I’m sure your friends have run into my entire army by now, and the gods are weak and worthless.”
My friends knew what they were doing. They wouldn’t walk into some dumb demon trap…would they? As for the gods…“They’ll get their powers back,” I said. “And they’ll come for you.”
“Perhaps,” Ixkik’ said nonchalantly. “But it will be too late, and I have you to thank for that.”
I tried to move forward, but the mist was like a blanket wound tightly around my legs. It swirled up my torso, sending an icy chill up my spine. The fact that Blood Moon was talking to me meant she wasn’t ready to kill me. Not yet, anyway. “Me? I’ll never help you, so I guess you’ll have to find someone else.”
“Oh, but there is no one else. You are Itzamna’s chosen scribe.”
“So?”
“The fool gave you—you—the power of the dragon.”
Yeah, and a lot of good that was doing me now. “How does that help you?”
She didn’t even hesitate. She couldn’t wait to impress me with her plot. “The dragon represents both power and magic. And that means that you and you alone have the power to rewrite all I have destroyed.”
Rewrite? That was her endgame? I pushed back my sopping hair, trying to put the pieces together. She had needed the stone to get into SHIHOM and the library, a place that Saás had said the gods couldn’t access. Then Ixkik’ had proceeded to burn the history books, but why?
“Pretty sure people will know fact from fiction,” I said, wishing I wasn’t glued in place.
“You are so simpleminded,” she said. “No one will ever know, and I am done talking. It’s time for us to begin.”
I knew better than to believe that. She was dying to show me how smart she was, to dangle her power in my face. “So how does it work, exactly? You think I’m going to use some magic dragon power to write a bogus story while you keep me imprisoned? The truth paper won’t let me.” I took a deep breath and pushed my luck just one more inch. “Seems like you haven’t thought this out very well.”
The goddess laughed. “There is no such paper anymore. When I burned history, I burned truth itself!”
Gripping Fuego, I leaned forward. “What do you mean, ‘truth itself’?”
“Those books…those words were more than history. When I destroyed them, a gap was created in the sobrenaturales’ imaginations and memories.”
A gap? I shook my head. “I still remember, and so do my friends.” I didn’t know if that last part was true, but I was pretty sure that if I could recall Maya history, they could, too.
Ixkik’ exhaled dismissively. “Oh, the forgetting will come once I fill the gap. When you write a new history in which Jordan is king. All the sobrenaturales will know him as their only ruler, and they will hate the gods and godborns even more than they do now.” She let out another exaggerated sigh. “It won’t hurt too badly, Zane. You won’t remember the past. You, too, will fall under the spell of your own words. Isn’t that magnificent?”