“You, not so much.”
The moment Valentine took his eyes off her, Sherry made him pay. She turned her free hand into a fist, the fist into a mallet, and swung it backward at the procurer’s balls with all the strength she had.
He yelped and doubled over in pain, his gun hand falling instinctively to his crotch, the grip on Sherry’s arm slackening. She jerked free, turned, and kneed him in the face. The gun clattered to the ground, and Sherry grabbed it as he staggered, off balance, only the wall behind him preventing Valentine from going down.
“I’ve got my own plans,” she panted, and pressed the barrel to his forehead.
Ruth stepped toward her. “Sherry. Don’t.”
She scowled. “Why the fuck not?”
Ruth’s hand found her wrist, exactly as Valentine’s had.
“Because,” she said softly. “We might need the bullets.”
She lifted Sherry’s hand, the gun with it, and slammed the butt of the pistol against the back of Valentine’s head. He collapsed into a heap at their feet. The two of them stepped over him and peered out into the light.
At Cucuy and Chacanza.
The unstoppable force and the immovable object, locked in an unbreakable stalemate, that beam of savage energy suspended between them like a bridge to heaven or a slide to hell.
“Something’s gotta give,” Ruth muttered, without taking her eyes off them. “And we’ve gotta get out of here before it does. And fuck those tunnels.”
A burst of gunfire punctuated the sentiment. They both fell silent and surveyed the yard. The men roamed across it now with the swagger of Old West sheriffs, some of them still potshot-dropping the motionless girls, but most busy tensing for what came next.
Saving their bullets, just like Ruth was saving hers.
They just happened to have about ten thousand more of them.
“You’re crazy if you think we’re getting through there,” Sherry said, gesturing with the gun. Its weight felt good in her hand. Natural, like an extension of her fist, her will.
But it didn’t solve a goddamn thing.
“Well, we can’t st—”
Sherry raised her arm. Ruth saw the look on her face and shut up.
Something was happening out there. A new instability, a growing imbalance between the combatants. Sherry could sense it even if she couldn’t pinpoint it.
Much less handicap it.
Something was about to give.
And sure enough, a moment later Cucuy’s body spasmed atop the high wall of the prison, the beams lifting off Chacanza, becoming long whips, flailing uselessly against the sky. It was as if she’d pulled that old kids’ tug-of-war trick, where you released your hold and let your opponent’s own sudden lack of static equilibrium topple him over backward
For several heart-stopping seconds he teetered there, arms pinwheeling, torso spinning an invisible hula hoop.
Then two things happened at once, as Sherry watched breathlessly from below.
The black drained from Cucuy’s eyes.
And he plummeted thirty-five feet, to the hard-packed ground below.
BLACKNESS. THEN CHAOS—THE sunlight blinding, the power too much to control, Ojos and the girls and the queen, and what the fuck is going on, Galvan’s soul or whatever slamming back into a flesh-and-blood body and realizing upon impact that what he’d inhabited in the Dominio Gris was only the rumor of one, a sensation like stepping out of weightlessness and into gravity.
And then the fall.
Blackness again.
Blackness and pain, searing and sharp. His legs tingled, but he didn’t dare find out if he could make them move. Drawing breath into his lungs was challenging enough, each rib like a jagged piece of glass, stabbing him from inside.
Out of the blackness came a voice. Terrible, furious, and everywhere at once.
How can this be? The laws of the universe do not allow it!
Jess Galvan couldn’t move, but he could damn well smile. As Cucuy’s outrage spread through Galvan’s body, inflaming every cell, he felt the old strength, the old resilience, course through him as well.
His broken bones fused back together. The air moved in and out of him with greater ease until all traces of pain were gone. His eyes fluttered open, and Galvan got his legs beneath him, pressed his right palm to the warm, blood-spattered ground, and stood.
He had the sensation of having awakened into a world in which time had stopped; of the thousands of men and women arrayed before him—alive, dead, undead, dying—not a soul moved more than a pair of eyeballs.
Inside his head, Cucuy railed.
However you have done this, your return is insignificant. You cannot contain me, Jess Galvan. Not before and not now. Your mind is weak. It is only a matter of time.
“Maybe so, but you ain’t got time. I know how to kill you now, you piece of shit.”
It took Galvan a moment to realize he’d said it out loud, and another to realize that the words had set the world back in motion. Two women were striding toward him from opposite directions, each one cutting a swath through the bodies that cluttered the battlefield.
One was his reason for being.
The other was his destiny.
Chacanza walked at a stately clip, a pace befitting a queen. She had waited this long to confront Cucuy; a few seconds more or less didn’t appear to matter.
Sherry broke into a run, beat her there, and leaped into her father’s arms the way she had when she was six years old. He lowered his head, pressed his cheek to hers, and inhaled the scent of her hair.
It smelled like sweat and dust and fire, with hints of kerosene and blood. Which was different from when she was six, but he’d take it.
You can’t kill me, Cucuy sneered. And when you fail, Jess Galvan, everyone and everything you love will pay. Take a good look around you. Because every last man you see here will have his way with your precious daughter.
“Dad.” Sherry buried her face in his neck. Whatever she said next was muffled by flesh and tears, but it didn’t matter. Galvan was caught between the ecstasy of her embrace and the torment of once again being occupied, colonized. Cucuy slithered through him at blinding speed, a desperate and vicious snake.
He wasn’t going to play the long game this time around.
Then again, neither was Galvan—and the knowledge that all this was fleeting, that he had made his deal with the devil and was only here to carry it out, was almost more than he could bear.
Sherry was still glued to him, as if she knew. She’d lost him so many times already, Galvan reflected. To divorce. To prison. To Cucuy. To the Dominio Gris.
Something hard was digging into his back, and all at once he realized that Sherry was clutching a gun. He wondered if she’d use it.
If she’d have to.
He raised his eyes and found Chacanza standing before him. Sherry sensed her too, broke the embrace, and came to stand beside him.
“Dad, this—”
“I know who she is.”
He stepped forward, clasped his hands before him. “You helped me get back here,” he told her. “Whether you know it or not.”
Whatever you have seen of her, I have shown you, Cucuy raged. She is not what you think. She will destroy you.
The Ancient One’s fear thudded through Galvan’s veins; it was intoxicating, and he savored it.
“We must—” he began, then stopped short as he realized that thousands of eyes were boring into him; Cucuy’s men were utterly at a loss, and still at his command. Galvan turned away from Chacanza and uttered a proclamation that rang out across the yard.
“Put down your weapons. This fight is done.”
The men looked dubious, but they complied. The consensus slapped across their faces read you’d have to be crazy to fuck with Cucuy.
But there was one in every crowd.
And significantly more than that if that crowd happened to comprise a who’s who of the region’s biggest scumbags, who had spent the last few hours indulging the
ir basest bloodlust and sensed the sudden waning of their leader’s strength.
A jumbo-sized asshole toting an assault rifle was the first to pull a Chuck Heston and decide the gun would have to be pried from his cold, dead hands. He threw a defiant grin at the guys closest to him, then lifted the weapon and squeezed off a few rounds at the closest of Chacanza’s minions. Kept riddling her even after she lay facedown in the dirt.
Galvan gave the queen a bow.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
He was on the dude in a flash, relishing his renewed speed. Another fleeting pleasure.
Your taste is for blood. Do not be a fool. We are the same.
A moment later, he held both the dude’s hands in his own, having ripped the dumb fucking meathead’s arms off at the shoulders. He threw them into the dust and raised his eyes to the crowd.
“Anybody else forget how to follow orders?”
Nobody raised a hand.
“Now get the fuck out of here. Go to your cells. Go home to your families. I don’t care. We’re done.”
He strode back to Chacanza, to Sherry. To Ruth Cantwell, now standing by his daughter’s side.
The men began to drift away, this way and that, like so much flotsam and jetsam. There was a downtrodden, meandering quality to them; they had been given freedom, but it was a poor substitute for the purpose that had been so cruelly snatched away.
“Yours too,” Galvan said to the queen. “You don’t need them anymore.”
Chacanza nodded. “So it must be,” she said, and like a single organism, the girls began to stream toward the prison gate.
He wondered if they were happier here or there: as Chacanza’s slaves, or Tezcatlipoca’s. Given an equal measure of dominion, was the queen of the Virgin Army any better than the king of the Grey Realm?
Then again, perhaps happiness was beyond their capacity. Perhaps suffering was, as well.
Lucky them.
“He speaks to you, does he not?” Chacanza asked.
“He does.”
She came closer. Closer. Stopped a foot away from Galvan and stared into his eyes, her gaze no less hypnotic than in his dreams, visions, the Dominio Gris. Only the smell of her breath was different: rotten where it had been sweet. But Galvan noted it without revulsion; somehow, the tinge of suffering made her all the more alluring.
“What is he saying now?”
Galvan felt as if his spirit was pulling away from his body and floating toward hers. He couldn’t separate his desire from her magnetism, cause from effect, and maybe such distinctions were pointless.
“He’s quiet,” Galvan told her. “It’s . . . I’ve never felt it before. It’s like he’s paralyzed or something.”
“He is in conflict,” Chacanza said. “He feels both love and hate. As do I.”
She stepped even closer, took Galvan’s face in her hands, stared through his eyes, into whatever cavern or crevice in which Cucuy lurked.
Her voice was lush, low, but the edges of her words were razor sharp. “Cualli. Listen to me now, and listen well. I do not blame you for betraying me. You were a man who served a god. You knew not what you did. But this ends now.”
She let go of Galvan’s face, stepped back a pace. “Say your good-byes and follow me. There is somewhere we must go.”
The moment she turned away, Cucuy swelled, his presence flooding every pore of Galvan’s consciousness. His panic was wordless, but unbearably loud—a screeching, seething, fulminating protest that filled every register with notes of terror and rage, resistance and persuasion. Galvan wanted to scream, to tear at his hair, to beat his brains out against the nearest wall.
Instead he squared his shoulders and staggered to Sherry, found tears streaming freely down her cheeks.
“Don’t leave me.”
He had to read the words off her lips, the buzzsaw wail in his head was so loud.
“I gotta go, baby,” Galvan said, or thought he did.
“Then take me with you.”
But he knew Sherry understood that was impossible. They were just words. Galvan took her in his arms, put his lips to her ear, told Sherry he loved her and assumed she said the same.
The blood in his veins felt as if it were boiling now. He pulled back, looked his daughter in the eye, memorized every last beautiful detail.
“Who knows,” he said, and tried to smile. “I came back once, right? Maybe I can do it again.”
He didn’t believe it for a goddamn second, but it looked like maybe, just maybe, she did. Sherry gulped and nodded, and Galvan squeezed her hand one final time and trudged away, toward the waiting Chacanza, crying himself now. He threw his daughter one mournful over-the-shoulder glance after another until the darkness of the tunnel fell over him like an executioner’s hood, and the world of sun and tears and people became a thing of memory.
SHE HAD NOT traveled this system of tunnels in five hundred years—not since the world was alive with promise and the presence of the gods filled it with grace. Not since she was a radiant young bride, and this cobwebbed labyrinth of misery a monument to divine and everlasting glory.
But Chacanza knew exactly where she was going.
Nothing was ever lost. Not while memory lived on.
And here, at the end of her days, time had become a serpent, eating its own tail.
She was leading her husband to their wedding chamber. The sacred place of transformation. Where one life was meant to end, as a new one began.
Now, as ever, it was where Chacanza would find peace.
The tunnels wound, branched, and spiraled, leading downward and onward, but Chacanza never hesitated. The path was imprinted on her consciousness. She could have walked it blind.
The man, the vessel, followed behind, a torch in his hand. Before long they were so deep that the earth muffled all sound, and there was nothing to hear but his labored breath and both their footfalls, nothing to see but their own deformed shadows, bobbing against the walls. She wondered what Cualli was thinking as he floated in his prison, what poisonous bile or honeyed words spewed from him at this very moment.
Whether a part of him craved this. Longed for sweet obliteration, as she did.
The answer depended on how much of him remained. Whether some spark of the sweet and noble man she’d once known had managed to sustain itself inside the corrupted, blackened thing that was Cucuy.
You will never know, she told herself. Soon all you have seen and done will be as ash in the wind, and the world will be cleansed of abomination. Perhaps the gods will feel a ripple in the fabric of the cosmos. Perhaps they will return.
Chacanza smiled.
She was ready. And they had arrived.
DO NOT ENTER that room if you value your life. Not even I have dared set foot there since—
The blare of Cucuy’s voice cut off abruptly, like a radio losing its signal, as Galvan followed Chacanza across the threshold.
There was nothing inside but a wooden platform covered in disintegrating, mildewed linens.
The marriage bed.
Galvan leaned the torch against a wall. Chacanza stared down at the bed, and Galvan followed her gaze, saw the stains. Burgundy.
And lying atop it, covered in rust, the sacred knife.
It hit him with the force of revelation, though he had known it all along.
“This is where you died.”
“Yes.”
She met him at the foot of the bed. “Tell me what I must do.”
You know not what you do! Cucuy bellowed, so suddenly that Galvan startled. Destroy me and you loose Tezcatlipoca on this world! Let us rule it together instead! Use my strength, Jess Galvan. Make yourself a god. Rule them with wisdom. Show them justice. I wanted those things too once. When I last stood in this room. I give you my word, I will not interfere.
For a split second, a vision flashed through Galvan’s mind.
Himself atop a golden throne, munificent and all-knowing.
Nice try, motherfucker.
; Galvan shook it off.
“You’ve got to kill me,” he told Chacanza, stepping around the bed so that they stood only inches apart. “The same way he killed you. Rip out my heart. Eat it.”
All that you know will be torn asunder. Do not do as I have. Do not dabble in the arts of the gods.
Chacanza’s eyes were wide and earnest.
“That will unmake him? Unmake us both?”
Galvan nodded. “But there’s one more thing. We’ve got to be . . .”
She waited for him to tell her.
He waited for her to get it.
Expel me from this realm and I shall avenge myself against you with a fury you cannot begin to fathom.
“Fucking,” Galvan blurted, when Cucuy’s rant had run its course. “We’ve got to be fucking.”
The word meant nothing to her. It was not of Chacanza’s world.
“You know . . .” Galvan rifled through his mind for the phrase his compadre Brittanica had used, three months and what seemed like an entire lifetime ago, when the convict had first told Galvan the tragic story of Cualli and Chacanza.
For a long moment, the only thing that came to mind was an awful pun, talk about going out with a bang, Galvan’s brain determined to spend its final minutes deploying the same laugh-to-keep-from-breaking dumbassery that had gotten him this far.
At least he was consistent.
“Joined as one,” Galvan remembered at last.
That, Chacanza understood.
“It is the only way,” she said. It was not a question but a statement, and Galvan didn’t bother to reply.
Instead, with trembling hands and a heart gone hummingbird inside his chest, Galvan unclasped his belt and let his pants drop to the floor.
He’d been trying not to think about this part.
Chacanza watched him, somber, her green eyes like shimmering pools, and then lifted her dress over her head and stood naked before him.
“I’m ready,” she said, and she climbed onto what remained of the bed.
Galvan looked over at her, and then down at himself.
“I’m, uh . . . not,” he said.
Your children. Your children’s children. All your issue, until the end of time. I will drive them mad, one after the next, until your name becomes a curse that men and gods alike despise to utter.
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