Domingo Valentine had never known why the Great One had chosen him, of all the men at Ojos Negros, as his personal servant, and he had never asked.
Perhaps it was Domingo’s piety. He had always been a man of faith, and it wasn’t hard to transfer his allegiance away from a pussified, wan Christ and a Virgin Mary who’d never done shit for him except grace the candles lining the walls of his brothel. How could you worship a mystery, when a flesh-and-blood god was right in front of you?
On many occasions, Domingo had borne witness to Cucuy’s wrath, visited upon the men of the prison and the girls delivered to him. It only strengthened his devotion. What good was a god too busy to care? Whose divine plans were so grand and arcane that the spiritual higher-ups cautioned you against even trying to understand his mind?
Domingo much preferred a god who was just like him. Ruthless and terrible. Fearful and ambitious and obscurely sad. A god no freer than the prisoners upon whom he preyed.
Domingo’s task was to deliver unto the Timeless One that which he required for sustenance. To procure young female flesh, just as he’d done on the outside. It had been six years now, twice the length of his sentence, and Domingo was the only servant who’d lasted so long. Perhaps it was his faith; perhaps it was because his skill set made Domingo hard to replace. For his part, Domingo’s only desire was to remain at the right hand of his master. The outside world seemed callow and distant to him now—devoid of meaning and crammed full of the lies men told themselves.
Now, as he wound his way through the damp labyrinth of chambers, holding a torch to guide his way, Domingo reflected on how similar to the human body it was. The corridors were veins. The rooms, organs. Wherever Cucuy happened to be was the heart.
Domingo’s audience with the Ancient One was a standing biweekly appointment. They met in the great library, the grandest of the rooms, a place that never failed to fill the procurer with reverence. There, Cucuy listed his needs, and Domingo committed them to memory. Virgins, always. Less frequently, large quantities of guns or drugs, to be delivered to various cartels and gangs and factions, on both sides of the border.
Whatever the god requested, Domingo made happen. No questions asked, no problems tolerated. The vast sums of money Cucuy put at his disposal made his work go smoothly most of the time—and when it didn’t, Domingo was resourceful and unflinching enough to find solutions.
The fixer peered into the chamber, prepared to greet his master.
Something was wrong.
A powerful stench accosted him—a smell of rotting flesh. Domingo’s eyes roved the room, found nothing. Only the usual haphazard stacks of books, the flickering light of the candelabras.
He crossed the threshold, and what he saw made Domingo Valentine drop to his knees.
It was not possible.
The Eternal One’s body lay supine the floor.
Or what remained of it.
Domingo knew for certain—from the latest of Cucuy’s always short-lived attendants, who had unbarred the great door guarding the god’s inner sanctum—that the Ancient One had been alive no more than a few hours before.
According to the man, the god had called for a telephone, of all things.
But the body Domingo confronted had been dead for a very long time. It was in a state of advanced putrefaction, the flesh fallen away from the bones, the face unrecognizable, the prodigious amulets submerged in a half-liquefied stew of internal organs.
Perhaps, Domingo thought, he has never really been alive.
And then, mustering up his faith, he threw the thought off. This cannot be as it appears, he told himself. The Timeless One persists. It is merely his body that has given out.
Cucuy’s trusted procurer stepped closer.
Give me a sign, Great One. I serve you still.
He knelt beside the husk of the god and noticed the scrap of material clutched between the chalk-white bones of his fingers. With the greatest of care, he slipped it free and held it up to the light.
It was a small oil painting—unframed, but well preserved.
The woman it depicted was the most beautiful Domingo had ever seen, and women were Domingo’s stock in trade. Jet-black hair, framing a face that looked sculpted from ivory. Sumptuous curves, encased in a dress of rich yellow. A pair of piercing emerald eyes.
A shiver went through him as he stared at her. Who was she? Domingo wondered. Why had the master chosen to depart from this realm with her likeness clutched close?
The fixer stood, and slipped the rectangle of canvas into his back pocket.
There was only one person she could be.
DAWN KISSED THE clouds pink, streaked ruby and ginger ribbons across the canvas of the sky.
Closer to earth, the cold blanket of night still clung to the desert. In a few hours, the sand would scald; men’s skin would redden and blister from the heat. Right now, right here, they were just as likely to freeze to death. Curl up in search of a few hours’ rest, and never open their eyes again.
But there were far more dangerous things afoot than heat and cold.
For all the legends and campfire tales, very few men had ever seen the killing drones of the Virgin Army and lived to tell the tale. The un-girls sought the heart and only the heart; unless they sensed its presence, they remained inert—trapped in a netherworld, a limbo, a Dominio Gris, and blissfully unaware of it. They possessed no consciousness to torment them; when they were not stalking a Messenger, they were essentially at peace. More or less dead.
The being whose will animated theirs—of whose desire they were all simply extensions, enslaved to her as surely as worker bees served the queen—was not so lucky.
There was no rest for her.
Only hunger.
It was his blood, his flesh, for which she lusted. But she had to keep her strength up, and so she fed on whatever and whoever crossed her path. The dawn was her preferred hour; last night, a wayward smuggler has provided her a windfall. Today, less famished, she would settle for a rabbit or a snake.
There was no name for what she had become. Not in the Old World, nor in the New. The god whose folly had created her, the man who had betrayed her—neither had deigned to invent a word. And her own name, her true name, had slipped away some centuries ago. It did not suit her anymore.
She wanted only peace. But though she could suffer—hunger and heartbreak and fury had been her diet for five hundred years—she could not die.
As long as he lived, so did she. A part of his soul resided in her—that, she was sure of. That, she felt. Whether the reverse was true, and she kept him alive, she had no means of knowing.
It was a war of inches they had waged. He, trapped in his lair, the grains of time slipping through the hourglass of his life. She, roaming a cage far bigger, but a cage nonetheless, counting out those grains and exulting in the coming of oblivion.
He, sending forth his minions, each one shielding the delicate flame of his future.
She, sending forth her own, to extinguish them.
But now, their stalemate was over. She’d felt it, some hours ago—a surge of knowledge washing over her, electric and terrible. Her husband and killer had succeeded. He was ensconced within a new suit of corporeal armor. Renewed. Believing himself safe. He would turn away from her now, thinking the battle had been won. He would devote himself to far more grandiose tasks. To subduing the world.
That would be his mistake.
He’d won the battle. She would win the war.
He faced new adversaries.
She would win new allies.
There was still strength. There was still time.
There was still hope.
NICHOLS, HAVING SUSTAINED the least bodily damage, was behind the wheel of what had been Marshall Buchanan’s car. Cantwell rode shotgun; Eric, Sherry, and Galvan were wedged shoulder-to-shoulder in the backseat. Sherry in the middle, holding both their hands.
Galvan would settle for that.
The road stretched out ahead, shimmering and indifferent. The moonlight, bright enough to read by, would have rendered the lampposts redundant if they’d worked.
There was a lot of night left before dawn.
Nobody spoke. Not even to ask Nichols where he was taking them, or what he intended to do when he got there. At first, Galvan had guessed he was trying to run down the True Natives, his lawman instincts ruffled at the bikers’ getaway. Figuring that when they set eyes on Galvan, they’d spook and fold.
Either that, or everybody would find out how the new, improved Jess Galvan fared against buckshot.
But Nichols wasn’t driving like a man at the head of a posse. He was driving like a man trying to stay awake after the longest fucking day of his life.
Galvan was torn between passing out and fear of what might happen if he gave in and allowed sleep to overtake him. What stronghold might Cucuy establish, absent the vigilant perimeter Galvan had set up around his consciousness? Every time his eyes dipped shut—and he’d drifted a few times already, in the fifteen minutes they’d been driving—he plunged headlong into terrifying dreams.
Dreams, he suspected, that were not his own.
Dreams that felt like memories. Horrific ones. As if when his mind rested, Cucuy’s took over and forced Galvan to see how his other half had lived.
And killed.
And died.
It was a losing proposition, Jess thought woozily, this struggle to stay awake. He couldn’t put off somnolence forever; if he didn’t rest soon he’d be too feeble to stave off Cucuy’s power.
And perhaps, he thought suddenly, there were other reasons to embrace the dream state. Perhaps Cucuy was not showing him these things on purpose; just as likely was that Galvan’s subconscious was probing Cucuy’s. That the knowledge he’d acquire while asleep would hold the key to understanding his enemy, uncovering his weaknesses.
There is some way to kill you, Galvan thought as his eyelids grew too heavy to restrain. And you will tell me what it is.
He felt Cucuy recoil, inside him—as if the monster had drawn back all his tentacles.
Good, Galvan thought as the noise of the road faded and the world went black. I’m onto something.
The image that appeared before him, as Galvan floated halfway between reality and dreamscape, was of a woman.
Stunning. Raven haired. Her eyes hypnotic, greener than springtime itself.
He had seen her before, but not like this. The clarity of the vision was transcendent. He could smell the warmth of her body, reach out and touch the supple smoothness of her skin.
He yearned for her.
Come for me, she whispered, the words twirling through his weary mind like tiny plumes of smoke. And for the life of him, Galvan could not tell whether it was an invitation or a threat.