Math had never been her forte, but right now Sherry Richards was running through calculations like her life depended on the results.
Maybe because it did.
One girl a week? One girl a day?
If it was only one a week—and even that number was staggering, if you stopped to remember that it wasn’t a number but a life, snuffed out in panic and agony long before its time—that added up to fifty-two a year. Round it down to fifty, multiply it by five centuries, and you got twenty-five thousand girls.
Subtract a few thou from that number, on the assumption that not every one of them remained an able-bodied warrior. Certainly, men like her father must have cut some down over the years, and perhaps Chacanza had chosen not to roust others from their slumber to join this siege; maybe she even had favorites who were exempt from combat. There had definitely been some kind of lesbo vibe going on back at the cave.
A conservative reckoning of the force sweeping toward Ojos Negros, then, would fall somewhere in the range of twenty thousand.
That was a lot of fucking girls.
Sherry lifted her eyes and threw a furtive look across the palanquin at Chacanza, who sat rigid backed against the opposite wall.
The queen’s eyes were closed, not that Sherry would have dared speak to her anyway. Her sole words to Chacanza had come untold miles back, when they’d run across Fuentes in that little shitstain of a town.
Don’t get it twisted, she told herself, watching Chacanza’s eyes dart back and forth beneath their closed lids, her smooth unlined face more expressive in repose than in waking life. Don’t let looks deceive. She’s not human, any more than that thing was my father.
Sherry’s eyes drifted to the sleeping Gum, and she silently repeated the warning.
Surrounded by monsters.
What else was new?
She flashed on Cucuy and the offer he had made.
You can live, you can die, or you can join him.
It took her several moments to realize that the sound filling the makeshift room came from Cantwell, and another few to process the noise and realize her friend was sobbing.
Had been sobbing for some time.
“What’s wrong?” Sherry asked, and instantly felt idiotic, given the circumstances of the conversation.
What wasn’t?
Cantwell’s hands cradled her belly. “I don’t wanna lose him,” she whispered, voice ragged and hoarse.
“Oh, so it’s a boy now?” Sherry said, trying for levity. The kid was Tic Tac sized, after all.
Cantwell didn’t seem to get the joke. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head gravely, and then seeming to forget how to stop.
Sherry peeled away one of Ruth’s hands and clasped it between her own. It was clammy, despite the overwhelming heat.
“Look at me.”
Cantwell blinked out a few more tears, then complied.
“I’m not gonna let anything happen to either one of you, okay? That’s a promise.”
How the fuck she intended to make good on that, Sherry had no idea. But she felt her spine stiffen and knew she believed it.
From the look on her face, so did Cantwell.
That was something, anyway.
Just then the smoothness of the ride gave way to a rhythmic bumpiness, as if the bearers had stepped onto a more even, less forgiving surface. Sherry pulled back the curtains and saw asphalt below. She craned her neck to look forward, and there it was.
Ojos Negros. Squat and giant, shimmering in the midday sun, and by all appearances blissfully unaware of the approaching hell.
The gates stood partway open, and even from a quarter mile’s remove, through the moving scrim of female bodies, the place bustled with industry. The sliver of yard Sherry could see afforded a glimpse of a line of men unloading parcels from what looked like a large military truck, and another group assembling some kind of contraption made from gleaming metal parts. The guard towers looming above all stood vacant, as if no further supervision was needed—and indeed, the yard looked like a factory floor operating at peak efficiency.
What it looked nothing like, Sherry realized, was a prison.
Nor did these men look like prisoners.
Prisoners didn’t carry guns.
They didn’t build cannons.
Chacanza was awake now, her energy like a frigid blast of air on Sherry’s neck.
She turned and found herself eye to eye with the queen. Sherry fell back and watched as Chacanza took in the scene, the prison.
The army.
Any second, one of those men would look up, see their approach, and sound an alarm.
The battle would begin.
And sooner or later, the monster shaped like her father would appear.
The mere thought made Sherry feel like her heart was about to explode inside her chest.
“It’s a trap,” she heard herself say. “We’re too late. He’s already got an army.”
Chacanza didn’t seem to hear. She murmured something under her breath, craned her neck to the sky. Her eyes zagged wildly across the landscape, memorizing it.
Or, perhaps, remembering.
“What’d you say?” Sherry asked.
All at once, the soldiers came to a halt. Twenty thousand girls stood motionless, and the air seemed to throb with silence. The absence of footfalls.
“This was a temple once,” the queen repeated, still gazing beyond her—beyond everything, it seemed to Sherry. Into a past far realer than any danger the present had to offer.
Something like a smile touched the corner of her lip.
“And a temple it shall be again.”
DOMINGO VALENTINE STOOD beneath the flickering candlelight of the Ancient One’s library, nestled along the deepest corridor of Ojos Negros’s many warrens. His attention was in high demand elsewhere; there were takeoffs and landings to schedule, prison uprisings to coordinate in Arizona, Florida, Chiapas, and Guadalajara, monies to be couriered to various overseas accounts, cartel operations to be scheduled and consolidated, redundant personnel to be retired.
Corporate restructuring was a bitch.
His weapons of choice beckoned: the satellite phone lying atop his desk and the triple-encrypted, military-issue laptop that sat next to it. But until the Great One dismissed him, Valentine would stand right here, watching Cucuy pore through the blood-burgundy pages of his sacred book, and marvel at all that the Great One had wrought and all that was to come.
It was in this very room that he’d discovered the master’s putrefying body. But had he doubted? Abandoned his belief or his post? Not for an instant. His faith had been unstinting, his work dogged.
He had prepared the way—just as John the Baptist had done for Jesus, according to the boy-fucking priests of his youth. Without Valentine, the master might not sit before him now, resplendent and reborn, ready to rise up from the depths in which he had been mired and retake the world.
His strength was a rising tide that would lift all ships.
Especially the S.S. Valentine.
It was time to think big, to envision his place in the new world that was coming. And in whatever spare moments he could find, the procurer found himself remembering the countless childhood hours he’d spent watching the ocean. Reading the surf as if it held the secret of his future. Gazing out at the distant ships sitting so placidly atop the clamoring, crashing waves, their bellies full of cargo, monuments to both freedom and service.
Valentine pictured himself standing on the top deck of a massive yacht, its prow jutting through turquoise waters, the ship simultaneously tranquil and perpetually in motion.
He would be the ruler of all he surveyed, his reach second only to Cucuy himself. And perhaps, just perhaps, in gratitude for all he had done to turn adversity to triumph—perhaps a door could be opened for him and Valentine could become more than a man himself. The sorcery of the Timeless One knew no bounds, now that he had cast off his weakened form as the wasp did the chrysalis. Surely there must be some way to—
With a dry slap of parchment on parchment, Cucuy shut the book and raised his head. The black of his eyes seemed to swirl, to suck the meager light toward themselves like twin black holes. He stood, the faint luminescence of his body intensifying, turned on his heel, and strode into the corridor.
Valentine scurried after, the Terrible One’s light filling what had been a pitch-black passageway, the question out of his mouth before he could stop it.
“Is something wrong, master?”
Cucuy spun toward him, and Valentine instinctively threw up his arms in fear.
As if that would do anything, in the event that the master chose to strike him.
But it was not anger that played on his lips.
It was a smile.
Cruel and wide.
“She is close by,” he said, and stalked down the hall.
Valentine panted as he sprinted to keep up. Cucuy appeared to be walking but moved at a phenomenal speed, as if the Timeless One existed in some sped-up version of reality, the glow of his body streaming out behind him like the phosphorescent tentacles of a jellyfish.
Cucuy took the steepest, most direct path, the grade forcing Valentine to walk nearly doubled over, thighs burning with the effort. The temperature rose as they left the cool, damp underground for the parched, scorching surface.
The sound so overwhelmed at first that it didn’t register in the procurer’s mind—the clamor filled the whole auditory spectrum, canceling itself out like the crash of surf or the blare of traffic.
And then, as the sunlight penetrated the wide mouth of the tunnel, it hit him all at once.
The bloodcurdling screams of killers, and the moans and prayers of dying men.
The staccato report of thousands of guns, the cacophony as dense and oppressive as the acrid clouds of smoke floating toward him.
He turned the final corner and braced himself, knowing he was about to look upon the face of war.
But nothing could have prepared Valentine for what he saw when he stepped into the light.
This wasn’t just war.
This was Armageddon.
The besieging army poured into the prison yard unchecked—their numbers unfathomable, the desert black with their bodies. The men had commandeered the guard towers, were spraying barrages of AK-47 fire into the oncoming horde. But it made no difference; they might as well have been firing into the ocean.
The wave swept on.
And all at once, Valentine understood who the enemy was.
That they could not be killed, because they were already dead.
Each and every one of them, at Cucuy’s hands.
Already, they swarmed over the men, like some time-lapse nature film showing how piranhas turned a cow into a skeleton. Their teeth were lethal weapons; their numbers overwhelming. The elaborate weaponry of the prisoners was useless at close quarters, obsolete in a battle that seemed torn from mankind’s most ancient, terrifying past.
Valentine’s head darted from left to right. Everywhere he looked, a tableau of utter carnage unfolded.
Two blood-spattered girls pinned down a man, his handgun firing uselessly into the sky as a third found his carotid artery and a geyser of blood arced through the air. They were up in a flash, swarming their next victim.
A pair of prisoners stood back-to-back, their faces contorted in wide-eyed, last-stand roars as they spun and fired, heedless of the comrades they might take down. The girls converged on them from all sides, as if by telepathic consensus, absorbed the shelling until they were close enough to pounce. The men disappeared in a writhing frenzy of arms, legs, hair, tits, ass.
The will of the men was at its breaking point. Utter derangement hit some full on; they tried to scrabble their way up the prison yard’s unscalable walls, or turned tail and fled toward the tiered cell blocks—though even in the blind flush of their panic, not a single prisoner headed for the tunnels; either they were unaware of the netherworld of chambers that lay below the prison, or they feared it more than death.
The girls chased them down, triangulating and herding, lions after antelope. The iron scent of blood was everywhere, mingling with the gun smoke and the spreading stench of shit as doomed men’s bowels voided in a last act of release.
Valentine stepped back into the corridor, the protection of shadows. He might be a killer, but he was not a soldier. This death was not for him.
The thought cleared his mind, like a sudden gust of wind dispersing clouds, and Valentine realized that the Timeless One had disappeared—charged out of this very tunnel moments before—and was nowhere to be seen upon the battlefield. His heart surged with new confidence, and he castigated himself for his momentary lapse in faith.
What were these abominations to the master?
A moment later, Domingo Valentine had his answer.
A thunderclap boomed across the sky, so sharp and deafening it felt like a slap across the eardrum. The procurer rushed forward, reached the mouth of the tunnel just as the sky went dark.
The sun had been snuffed out, abruptly and completely, casting the prison yard into a midnight blackness.
For an instant, everything stopped, as if both commanders—Cucuy and the unseen consciousness masterminding the invasion, the she who had brought that wicked smile to the master’s lips—had agreed on a time-out, their forces frozen like the warriors adorning the frieze of some Greek temple.
And then, slowly at first, light returned to the world.
The sun had changed shape.
The sun was a man now.
He stood atop the prison wall, legs spread and arms raised to the sky. The glow emanated from his heart; Valentine could see it pulse, grow hotter.
Orange red.
Pale blue.
Pure white.
And then, as if the proper conditions for combustion had been achieved, the heat began to spread, to flow like magma through the intricate, filigreed system of his veins, each one becoming visible as it spread.
Valentine dropped to his knees.
I will never doubt you again, Great One.
The light or heat or energy or whatever the fuck it was reached his fingertips, and Cucuy’s raised arms shot downward, like a pianist sounding a concert’s first notes.
The light cut through the darkness, ten blinding high beams forked and divided in midair, branched and rebranched.
By the time they reached the combatants on the ground, there were hundreds of them.
Each one found the chest of a Virgin Army soldier and lit her up like a paper lantern. They thrashed, tried to escape, but the light was like a tractor beam; it held them immobile, penetrated their bodies until they, too, glowed from within.
The scent of burning flesh rose from them, and Valentine flashed on childhood afternoons spent immolating ants with a magnifying glass.
But this was something else.
A moment later, in perfect synchronicity, every last girl caught in Cucuy’s clutch exploded into a fountain of charred flesh and black blood.
They spattered the ground like tiny storms of hail, and Valentine released the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
The sun was back in the sky now, shining down on a very different war. Cucuy raised his arms toward it again, and Valentine understood, with a rush of elation, that he was reloading.
SHERRY WATCHED FROM the palanquin, perched high atop a hill that afforded a perfect sight line into the prison yard.
Chacanza had startled when the beams hit, and she twitched when the girls went down, wrenched as if she could feel their pain.
By the time the monster destroyed a second cadre of warriors, the queen’s face was a mask of dismay and hatred. Her army was in disarray; some of them sprinted away from Ojos Negros and others fought on, flailing at the rejuvenated prisoners as if the goal was to savage as many as possible before their own inevitable demise. But their coordination was off, the hive mind ruptured; they no longer moved in orchestrated collaboration.
The mind controlling them was divided against itself, Sherry thought. She glanced over at Chacanza, but the queen was gone.
Cucuy’s third strike took down as many as the first two combined. The sun blinked like a loose lightbulb in the sky, and Sherry braced herself for more, wondered how far his reach extended, where the limits of his power lay.
If there were any.
She found Chacanza standing just outside the conveyance, staring straight at him. Sherry couldn’t begin to fathom the look on her face. How long had the queen lain in wait, in secrecy, building her strength, spoiling for war?
The answer, it seemed, was too long.
And now she was exposed. Routed. Hemorrhaging soldiers, forced to watch as the enemy’s tentacles began their insidious creep across the face of the world.
Sherry had been wrong. He did not think he was invulnerable. He was invulnerable.
And if she was to keep her promise to Cantwell, they had to get the fuck out of there right now.
Sherry wasn’t afraid to say so.
She stepped before the queen to block her view. “Hey. We gotta go. Now. Before it’s too late. Before he sees you.”
“He cannot kill me,” Chacanza answered, but her voice was hollow, flat. “He cannot even see me, unless I allow it to be so.” She moved a step to her right, reestablished her vigil.
Sherry stepped in front of her again.
“Yeah, well, he can kill me. And my friend. We’ve gotta fall back. Make another plan.”
“No.”
The voice came from behind her. Sherry turned. Gum was hauling himself out of the palanquin, rubbing the crust from his eyes.
“We’ve gotta stay the course.”
Sherry felt her sap rise. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” She jabbed a finger toward Ojos. “Take a look. While you’ve been sleeping, we’ve been getting slaughtered.”
Gum’s lank body vibrated with urgency, the man suddenly a tuning fork. He wrapped one clammy hand around Sherry’s forearm, then reached out, grabbed Chacanza with the other, spun her toward him.
“Galvan,” he said. “I seen him. And Tezcatlipoca. I was with ’em both.” He found Chacanza’s eyes. “I seen you too.”
“What did you see?” Sherry demanded. “What’s happening?”
Another web of light flashed down from Cucuy’s hands, and Chacanza buckled at the knees as hundreds more of her followers were obliterated.
Gum watched it happen, then turned back to them and swallowed hard.
“We’ve gotta buy him more time.”