It had resisted his every assault, but now the heart seemed to melt on Galvan’s tongue, as if eager to pass out of existence.
Or to inflict its curse.
Seven and a half ounces of muscle slid down Galvan’s throat in less time than it took Aaron Seth to lunge at him—desperation twisting the cult leader’s features into a death mask as a low wail emanated from his throat.
Galvan squeezed his eyes shut and waited to be transformed. For soul to vacate flesh, and an eternity of hunger and nameless torment to commence. For a gray wasteland to replace the lush green world, an animal craving to deaden all compassion, love, and thought.
It would be worth it.
Instead, a shock wave of energy more powerful than anything Galvan had ever felt exploded through him.
As if the heart had undergone some kind of reverse transubstantiation.
The flesh made spirit. A holy ghost swirling through his veins, turning his blood to fire.
Every cell in Galvan’s body burned in ecstasy. Fifty trillion microscopic orgasms. His entire being was being overrun. Overwritten. Reprogrammed.
This was some fucked-up shit.
He couldn’t move, or feel the ground beneath his feet—external reality gone vague, the senses focused inward to the exclusion of all else.
But where was Seth? Galvan concentrated his entire will on finding out, and his eyes popped open.
The world before him was sharper than he’d ever seen it, and Galvan had fighter-pilot vision to begin with. But these were new lenses he was looking through; this was a level of detail, a depth of range, beyond—
Beyond what, motherfucker? Say it.
Beyond human.
The air he breathed tasted as sweet as nectar, each draft filling his lungs and suffusing the mosaic of tiny cells that ferried oxygenated blood throughout his system. Galvan felt each one, newly aware of the magnificent symphony his body conducted every moment.
Seth was still hurtling at him, his snarling visage unchanged. The robed men still trailed in his wake, their torches throwing sparks into the blue-black night.
Except for one thing.
All of it was happening at half speed. At least to Galvan’s rewired nervous system.
Another breath, and he had the reins to his body back. Full muscular control. A pocket-eternity in which to map and counter the vector of attack.
He eye-checked Sherry, founded her unharmed, and felt gratitude surge within him. Tossed a look over his shoulder at the bikers and smelled their confusion, nobody overly eager to commit here in this new world order—and then Seth was upon him, arms outstretched for the choke-out, as if he might arrest the heart’s journey down the Messenger’s larynx. Galvan ducked away and answered with a compact jab to the gut, short and sweet, everything flowing like water.
The blow’s impact threw Seth back a good five feet—and it would have been more, had he not crashed into a pair of acolytes and brought them down atop him, one big puddle of melting vanilla soft-serve.
Holy shit. Did I do that?
Nobody moved. Not Seth or his disciples. Not Sherry or Buchanan. Not the Natives, clustered by the open van door. Not the doctor or the sheriff, peering out from the inside.
Nobody did a thing but stare.
Galvan followed their gazes, and realized why.
His arm was regenerating.
Repairing itself, before all their eyes. Invisible hands were stitching the appendage back into existence, cell by cell. Tendrils of sinew and muscle wrapped themselves around pure-white bone. Skin poured itself over the form, slow and deliberate as spilled milk. Tiny hairs sprouted like spring chutes from new-made pores.
Forearm. Wrist. Palm.
Knuckles, fingers, nails.
A prickling sensation, at the extremities. An intense warmth, as fierce as the blue flame of the blowtorch that had cauterized his wound, but without pain.
In ten seconds, what had been taken from Galvan was fully restored.
He held his hand before his eyes, flexing and turning his arm in awe. It was exactly as it had been—down to the birthmark on his inner wrist, the weight-bar callus at the ring finger’s base.
Time to take it for a test drive.
“Any of you bastards wanna die for your leader, now’s the time,” Galvan announced.
And with that, he darted toward Seth—covering the distance faster than he could believe and knowing there were higher gears than this one, yet to be explored.
Of the eighteen white-robed true believers, only two stepped between Galvan and his quarry.
Looked like fanaticism had its limits.
Neither man was a fighter. Galvan looked them over—fists doubled up, stances all wrong, sweat popping from their hairlines—and felt a pang of mercy, followed by a jolt of relief that he was still capable of that emotion.
Then he remembered what these men had journeyed here to witness. To sanctify. The vileness to which they had spent years, decades, in thrall.
The two of them rushed him at once. Less a coordinated attack than a simultaneous bracing of nerves.
Galvan cocked two arms and threw two punches. He caught each man on the outside temple, the force of the blows driving their heads together with a surprisingly humble knock.
They were dead before they crumpled to the ground. Or very, very unconscious. Whatever. Who gave a fuck.
He stepped between them and loomed over Seth, the cult leader still sprawled atop his allies.
The man’s crumpled form filled Galvan’s visage, but he could sense the presence, the position, of every other living soul; if anybody else made a move, he’d know it before the first synapse fired. He might not have been able to dodge a bullet—then again, maybe he could—but if the Natives got frisky, Galvan felt pretty goddamn confident he could be at their throats before the guns were cocked.
He bent at the waist and watched Seth cower.
“You’ve preyed on your last innocent,” Galvan whispered, and clamped a hand around his neck.
Seth was a good-sized man—six feet, one eighty. Galvan lifted him as easily as a rag doll—straight into the air, until his elbow locked and Seth’s blanched face was framed against the giant crimson-orange moon.
Galvan started to squeeze.
Hand like a vise, electricity still jangling through him. This would soon be over. All of it.
Seth looked down at him, mouth agape, watery blue eyes bugging out of his head. Galvan stared back evenly, hardly exerting himself, and doubled the pressure. Waiting for the struggle to go out of him, the embers in Seth’s eyes to flare and die, just like that poor girl on that stone slab. And the thousands before her.
Instead, they lit up like Christmas bulbs—flashing with an incredulity no dying man had any right to. “Father?” Seth gasped with the last of his breath. “Is that—you?”
Motherfucker’s delirious, thought Galvan.
Then he heard himself reply.
In a voice he neither recognized nor controlled.
“I am not your father anymore.”
What the fuck?
Galvan felt his hand tighten around Seth’s neck, but it was not an order he had given. It came not from his own mind, but from another. From the thing residing inside him, feeding off his life force like a parasite and filling him with power.
The thing that had suddenly seen fit to let its presence be known.
From—
Aaron Seth’s neck snapped with a quiet pop, and Galvan threw his lifeless corpse headlong into the dust.
His failure is complete, the voice said, speaking inside Galvan’s head now. It did not make a sound, any more than his own voice, inside his own head, would have. It was merely a thought, in the shape of words.
But Galvan heard it loud and clear.
And this . . . , it continued. This is very . . . interesting.
Cucuy, Jess answered inwardly, as a sense of revulsion filled him. It was followed, immediately, by a panicked desire to find and destroy the monster—to maim himself, if necessary, to burn or sever whatever part this entity had colonized, to banish it at any cost.
But Galvan knew better. The presence was incorporeal. A ghost in the machine. Dim and lurking, part of him and not. Galvan sensed it moving, testing, probing. Trying to determine the contours of its power, its control.
How to take over.
Never.
Get the fuck out, Galvan screamed inside himself, realizing even as he did that it was the thought of an insane person, a textbook padded-cell line.
It seems we are related, the Ancient One said, the words slithery in Galvan’s brain. The blood of holy men runs through your veins—a great blessing, for us both. This world can be yours, my son. You have but to claim it.
“I don’t want it,” Galvan said aloud. “And I’m not your son.”
One body cannot contain two souls, he thought. Not for long. One had to dominate, to seize control. And Cucuy had about five hundred and thirty years of diabolical experience on him.
Galvan realized his eyes were squeezed shut, and opened them.
The black van’s brake lights glowed into being like enormous fireflies, the True Natives no gluttons for punishment. Nichols and Cantwell jumped away as the rear tires spit a backwash of sand and gravel, and the vehicle tore away into the night.
Galvan felt an urge to chase it down and tear the bikers limb from limb. But it was not his; it was Cucuy goading him, trying to insinuate the thought into the stream of Galvan’s consciousness undetected, like a dose into a drink. Wanting him to seal their new partnership in carnage, force Galvan to commit an act that would open his soul to the pleasures of power.
He was testing. Needling. Playing.
Galvan steeled himself and watched the big bully of a van disappear down a decline, then turned to the sixteen remaining white-robed men who knelt before him, faces raised to Galvan like confused sunflowers. Farther away, the white-clad girls scattered among the rocks had assumed the same posture.
Slaughter them all, my son. Baptize the New World in blood. Explore your newborn strength, your newborn glory.
There was something newly honeyed to the sound of Cucuy’s words in his head, something alarmingly mellifluous about the way they slid into his consciousness. Already, Cucuy was growing more dangerous.
Galvan drowned him out with the sound of his own voice. “Get the fuck out of here,” he bellowed at Seth’s followers, cutting a path through their midst, toward Sherry and Buchanan.
Later for the Natives; later for the brainwashed. Later for Cucuy and for himself. The world could fall into a goddamn black hole, as far as Galvan was concerned. Hell, maybe it already had. He’d deal with all that only after his daughter was free. Whatever ordeal was beginning for Galvan, Sherry’s was going to end. Right now.
Forward march.
Seth’s thug had a knife to her throat, an elbow crooked around her windpipe. But his wolfish eyes were jittery. He’d seen what had happened, what Galvan could do. He knew there was no percentage in this. Just couldn’t figure out another way to play it.
Galvan stopped before him and fixed the man with a wordless stare.
Less talk, more rock.
The knife clattered to the ground.
Cucuy’s voice raged inside Galvan’s head, like a prisoner rattling the bars of a jail cell. This girl is no longer your daughter. Her value to us lies elsewhere—a value you cannot begin to fathom . . .
With a tremendous, strength-sapping effort—a whole-body exertion he felt in every fiber of every muscle—Galvan tuned him out. He could feel Cucuy straining against him. Within him. Trying to push words through Galvan’s mouth, scrabbling toward the puppet strings behind his limbs.
“What are you?” Buchanan whispered.
And then, stepping away from Sherry, he straightened his spine, lifted his eyes to Galvan’s.
“I can be of use.”
Jess’s impulse was to kill him where he stood—this beast, this kidnapper, this man who’d served Seth in so many unknown and abhorrent capacities. But he could not be sure that the impulse was his; what if it was Cucuy’s? What if that monster, that ancient master of sorcery and deceit, had already found some more subtle way of exerting his influence? Realized the limits of his sway, the dilute nature of his blood link to Galvan, and resorted to other tricks?
There was only one thing he could be sure Cucuy would never truck in.
Mercy.
“Get out of my sight,” Jess told Buchanan, and opened his arms to Sherry.
A flash of panic, as she stepped toward him. What if this, too, was a trick? What if Cucuy’s power over his body was greater than Galvan thought, and as soon as Sherry was in the monster’s clutches—
She buried herself in his arms, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He still had Cucuy locked down—the effort constant, a dull ache spreading through his body and his mind.
But still.
“You okay, baby?” he asked her.
Sherry nodded, into his chest—then pulled away and looked up at him with tears trembling in the corners of both eyes. “Are you?”
Some shit you keep to yourself, Galvan thought. This was a war no one could fight on his behalf—a custody battle that even two-time State Bar Association Family Lawyer of the Year Baxter Shanley wasn’t going to be able to swing.
And if he couldn’t win, Galvan reflected, as a chill went through him, he’d have to make sure Cucuy lost, too. Fall on his sword, before anybody could stop him.
Easy, Jess. You’re getting ahead of yourself, here.
“I’m good,” he told his daughter, willing it to be true. “Better than good. I’ve got my baby back. Now let’s get out of here.”
Fear jumped into her eyes, and for an instant Galvan wondered if it was him—had Cucuy seized hold of a hand? He ran his eyes over his frame, spot-checking for irregularities, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
But Sherry’s panic was directed elsewhere. “My friend Eric—he’s still locked in that asshole’s trunk!”
Galvan’s head snapped up, but Buchanan, true to form, had already disappeared into the deepening night.
“Stop him!” Sherry crowed, and sprinted toward the shit-brown sedan just as the engine turned over, the brake lights glowed to life.
“Hey!” Galvan yelled, breaking into a run.
His body knifed across the clearing, and a moment later, Galvan was bent over Buchanan’s window, pounding on the hood.
Seth’s thug killed the engine. Placed his hands at ten and two, as if he’d just been pulled over for running a red light.
“Open the trunk,” Galvan demanded as his daughter caught up, stood by his side. Her breath was hard with hate; he glanced at her and saw more of himself than he cared to recognize.
Jesus Christ, Galvan thought suddenly. What in the hell has she been through? I don’t even know the half.
He stared at her a moment longer. The look on Sherry’s face said, in no uncertain terms, that giving this cocksucker a free pass was the wrong move.
Buchanan climbed laboriously out from behind the wheel, keys in hand. “It’s an old car,” he explained. “Trunk opens by hand.”
He offered the keys to Galvan, who shook them off. “Do it yourself. And if that boy is hurt . . .”
“He’s fine,” Buchanan rasped, walking over. “He’s a tough son of a bitch.” He slid the key into the latch, then turned to look at Galvan, at Sherry.
“Listen, I was just following ord—”
Galvan saw Buchanan’s knife in Sherry’s hand an instant before she flew at him.
He could have stopped her.
Didn’t.
The knife plunged easily through fabric, skin, and muscle. Whether it found Buchanan’s heart was a matter for a physician to determine; all Galvan knew for sure was that the motherfucker clawed at the world for a few seconds and then keeled over, flat on his face, no longer anybody’s problem.
It was Sherry who stole forward, pried the keys out of his grip, and popped the trunk.
The smile that bloomed across her face took Galvan back a whole shitload of years, to when he’d been the world’s only recipient of that adoring, puppy-dog look.
Times changed.
“It’s okay,” Sherry told the begrimed, dark-haired boy who hauled himself up out of the trunk, blinking and rubbing at his eyes. “It’s over.”
The kid, Eric, looked down at Buchanan, and the pool of blood seeping into the parched ground around him.
Then he wrapped his arms around Sherry and burst into tears.
Galvan liked him immediately.
He eased up on the resources he’d been devoting to blotting out Cucuy. Doing some testing of his own. Hoping against hope that a few hostile, muted minutes might have been enough to make the Ancient One disappear.
Realizing, at the same time, that Cucuy had nowhere to go.
Couldn’t leave even if he wanted to.
Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been so many undead girls pockmarking the goddamn desert.
Sure enough, as soon as Jess eased off the throttle, Cucuy’s presence returned. The priest didn’t speak; he merely was. A cyclone of intention, whipping through Galvan’s still-electric body under his own power.
Having a look around.
It was excruciating. A searing, diffuse pain that did not involve the body, but something else. Perhaps the soul.
Galvan forced himself to look outward, to take stock of the moment. To pretend nothing was wrong.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
He found Nichols and Cantwell hugging Sherry and Eric, the four of them locked together in a tight, sob-racked embrace. Nothing was left of the robed men, the white-clad girls. They had rushed off silently, as Galvan had commanded, and the desert had swallowed them up.
Though not as it had swallowed some.
Nichols broke away from the others, turned to Galvan, and extended a hand.
Galvan took it. Nichols’s grip was firm. They locked eyes, Galvan wondering what the sheriff saw—hoping, suddenly, that Nichols saw it all, that he understood, that he could help. That together, they’d defeat this thing that had taken refuge inside him. This thing he’d sacrificed himself to kill, and instead sacrificed himself to keep alive.
If Nichols understood that all was not well, his eyes did not betray it. At the very least, thought Galvan, he had to be sizing Galvan up, wondering what powers he’d absorbed, what price he’d paid.
Sherry loved him too much to wonder. The kid had never given up on him, not even when he was incommunicado, rotting in jail, the defense silent, the prosecution railing against Galvan day and night. She’d always look at her old man and think of safety.
But a man like Nichols knew there was no such thing as a free lunch.
God does not die for man, Cucuy hissed inside him, breaking through the firewalls. Man dies for god.
Did he just read my mind? Listen in on what I was thinking?
Galvan clamped down with renewed vigor and shut the priest back out.
The handshake had run down its natural rhythm. Reluctantly, Galvan dropped Nichols’s hand.
They both gazed across the plain, the carnage, the giant moon presiding over it all—milk-white, now that it had ascended far enough above the earth to shed the planet’s scrim of blood.
“You know what they say about the one-armed man,” the sheriff said, jarring Jess out of his reverie.
Galvan raised an eyebrow and shook his head.
“I don’t believe so. No.”
Nichols rubbed a palm against the grain of his stubble.
“He stole the show single-handedly.”