Chapter Ten

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I lost my footing when the floor reappeared. Jem found my hand again, and I clung to him. We clung to each other. Emma had somehow stayed on her feet. We were in another cave, but this one was small and oblong and became a tunnel behind us. The feathered man had red all down his back. That needed help, now. His companion lifted a fist, and a door shimmered from thin air to meet it. He pounded on it. I could have sworn I heard footsteps on its other side—in the rock—a moment before it swung open.

There was a doorway into a hallway into the rock behind the door in the air. This made as little sense as I could fathom. A woman in a green skirt stood with one hand on the doorknob and another on the wall. Her glare turned to a gasp. "Tlaloc, get over here! Quet's hurt!"

The arrow shaft had snapped in the fight. It caught on the second man's clothing as they sank to the ground together, one supporting the other's fall. A huge man appeared behind the woman in the doorway. Actually, "huge" was an understatement. He was broader than a bear and solid as a rock, and made Abraham look like seven-year-old Miguel. His steely eyes remained expressionless behind large, round glasses, but in a motion he had swept the feathered man up and carried him inside. The woman followed.

We were left in the cave with the second man still kneeling on the floor in front of us. A faint pain clued me in to the fact that Jem and I were nearly breaking each other's hands. We both eased up our grips, but didn't release them. Emma, by some miracle, was still on her feet. I wasn't sure I could even get up right now, let alone stand that steady. Even Grifo had dropped to a panting flop beside me.

Breathe, Adriana.

We were safe. That was a start. Why exactly this met my definition of "safe" wasn't a feeling I had the mental capacity to unpack right now, but there were no warriors and no arrows flying through the air, and no giant, feathered snakes. There were dogs, but they were normal-sized dogs. The three Xolos from the cave. They circled the man in front of us, whining and poking their noses at him. He looked as in-shock as we were.

It took me a probably-impolitely long gape to register what I was seeing when I looked at him. It was as if someone had taken the feathered man and copied him: his face, his figure; even the way he held his hands. They even had the same shell-spiral pendant about their necks. Their hair at least was different: this man's was featherless and cropped just above his shoulders. He wore snow clothing like Emma's, thin and black; and a hat like mine, only in the form of a Xolo, not a coywolf. He had his twin brother's blood all down his front.

"Shut the door!" shouted a voice from somewhere in the house.

The sound roused the man. He struggled to his feet, petted a dog, and tipped his head for us to follow him inside. We stumbled up and obeyed. Gods, there was an entire world-before-sized house embedded in the rock here. The man closed the door behind us and pressed a hand to it. Gold flame raced around its edges. The whole thing sealed itself into the wall with a satisfying clunk.

A magic house. Also, did he just make that fire? I blinked. The blood on his clothing had vanished.

The man caught our stares and managed a smile. It slipped again as another man poked his head around the doorway across from us. The room behind him was occupied by what looked like chairs and a very large table. I'd never seen furniture that size.

"What did you and Quet get yourselves into this—who in Ōmeteōtl's name are those?"

"Descendents."

It was the first time the dog-man had spoken. He was quieter than his brother, but assured in a way that was just as familiar. He made a twitch of a gesture, and there was another weird shift around us. I found myself in an indoor version of my outdoor clothes: coywolf-coloured pants and a shirt that I promptly pushed up the sleeves of.

The habitual motion revealed properties of this transformation that made me want to freak out more than a little. Where had my snow clothes just gone? The new clothing was fabric, thin and soft. My boots were gone, too. The stone floor was warm beneath my socked feet, just as strange as the feeling of walking around in socks. My belt, thank the gods above, had stayed the same. I checked for my knife and lost a full breath in relief when I found it in its rightful place.

The dog-man was in a black shirt and pants, but his Xolo cap remained in place. I don't know why, but it suited him.

The man in the dining room doorway watched us curiously, like a cat deciding if it had found a mouse to toy with, or something more interesting. He bore a definite family resemblance to the twins and even the big man, though his skin was the same rich black as burnt wood or Fuego smoke. His straight hair was cropped to a fuzz with a low crest over the top of it, from forehead to nape. A sheen of air around him seemed to absorb the light when he moved.

In the room behind him, an impossibly beautiful woman with a live butterfly on her shoulder threw us a wave. There was yet another man beside her, perhaps the most unusual of all. He was golden from head to toe. Not pale with a yellow undertone: genuinely golden. He was stockier than the others—except the giant of a man, of course—and his round head was bald save for a wispy fuzz of pale hair. He didn't look older than the rest of them, though.

Okay, so none of these people were normal. Jem's hand in mine steadied me more than I cared to admit. We had found a place that was magical, and people who lived in it and hadn't killed us yet. Was this the pendant's end goal? It had led us to the cave where Quet had found us, but I didn't have the evidence yet to say the two were connected.

The family features on these people were even more striking the longer I looked. There was no way I was about to ask, so I decided to assume that all this house's residents were siblings until proven otherwise.

One of the dog-man's dogs put her paws up on him, and he put his focus into rubbing her ears. If his brother in the doorway was waiting for a longer answer, he wasn't getting it. He sighed and dropped the act. "Xol, he's going to be fine. Chal and Tlaloc are both in there with him. C'mon, bring the"—there was an exaggerated pause in which he looked Jem and I over—"descendents in. Itztia, you hungry?"

Emma crossed her arms, her eyes fierce. She moved closer to me. How did all of these people know Emma?

Xol—Xolotl?—glanced at his brother, and their eyes met in what looked for all the world like a telepathic exchange. The brother's eyebrows went up. "Well, then. Cihua's got some things to answer for. Bring them in. You've been standing there for ages."

Jem caught me and pulled me back as we followed Xolotl. "Why's he named after the dogs?" he whispered.

There was a woof. I looked down to find Chimalli wagging serenely in front of me. In that moment, the familiarity and the feathered snake and the magic all clicked, and everything fell into place.

"He's not named after the dogs," I said. "They were named after him."

"Xolos have been around for millennia."

"And so have these guys. Quet, Jem. Quetzalcoatl. Xolotl. Tlaloc. They're not humans. They're gods."

"

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