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ISBN 978-0-316-36054-8

E3-20170309-NF-DA

Contents

1. Cover

2. Letter from James Patterson

3. Title Page

4. Copyright

5. Epigraph

6. Chapter 1

7. Chapter 2

8. Chapter 3

9. Chapter 4

10. Chapter 5

11. Chapter 6

12. Chapter 7

13. Chapter 8

14. Chapter 9

15. Chapter 10

16. Chapter 11

17. Chapter 12

18. Chapter 13

19. Chapter 14

20. Chapter 15

21. Chapter 16

22. Chapter 17

23. Chapter 18

24. Chapter 19

25. Chapter 20

26. Chapter 21

27. Chapter 22

28. Chapter 23

29. Chapter 24

30. Chapter 25

31. Chapter 26

32. Chapter 27

33. Chapter 28

34. Chapter 29

35. Chapter 30

36. Chapter 31

37. Chapter 32

38. Chapter 33

39. Chapter 34

40. Chapter 35

41. Chapter 36

42. Chapter 37

43. About the Authors

44. Bookshots.com

45. Newsletters

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried “La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall.”

—John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci

Chapter 1

Though sometimes I regret it, I’m everything a man has ever wanted. Point a gun at somebody, he recoils. Slip me in a skintight dress, he leans in.

That’s not vanity. It’s just biology, plus a pinch of magic. My body’s more gymnast than supermodel, and you’d guess my age to be closer to thirty than twenty. I’m built to fire the pleasure centers of the male brain.

Not long ago, I met Mark Norman Harper, whom you’ll probably remember from Forbes magazine’s richest lists, not to mention his stint as an investor on Shark Tank. He was the one who crushed every hopeful’s dreams. And he’s done so much worse than that.

Although he romanced me for less than a month, I’m convinced he would’ve divorced his wife and donated his fortune to Greenpeace if he thought it would make me happy, which is saying a lot, considering that his company destroyed ten thousand acres of rainforest last year.

And although he’d give me everything, I couldn’t trust him with my real name…

I never even kissed him, not until the end, that night we enjoyed a performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at New York City Ballet. That final night.

I’ve always had a weakness for dancers’ tightly sculpted legs in tights, I admit. As we watched, I leaned over and whispered a creative suggestion for later in the evening. Mark’s only reaction was to arch an eyebrow. The man was much too refined to show his eagerness right there in the theater.

But after the curtain call? He flagged the first taxi he could find, and we rushed through snow-covered Central Park, straight to Harper Towers on Fifth Avenue. Of course he had a private car and driver, but remember, Mark was married, and we were incognito.

We clung to each other in the dark of the cab like teenagers on prom night, even though Mark was a silver fox in his fifties and I…well, he had the impression I was half his age.

Harper Towers was an art deco classic of severely etched granite. It had been the keystone of the Harper Empire since the thirties, back when Great-Grandfather Harper launched the first family trust fund.

We waltzed past the front entrance, and the uniformed doorman greeted Mark with a flustered “Happy New Year, sir.” He failed to notice me altogether. I have that effect. I can be the center of attention, or I can be a passing whisper.

In the rumbling slow elevator, my anticipation lifted like the bubbles in an uncorked bottle of champagne. It was all I could do not to ravish Mark while we climbed to his floor.

His penthouse was the type with furniture so abstract it seemed to forbid sitting. Panoramic windows showed midtown swirling with snowflakes like a giant snow globe.

A view like that can substitute for foreplay when your date owns half the skyline in sight. My nerves tingled wildly. “What a stellar night,” I said, even if I couldn’t see the stars.

“Especially from where I’m standing.” He flashed the grin of a man whose desires were always quickly met.

On the wall behind him were three mounted flintlock rifles from the Ottoman Empire. They were the most garishly decorated guns I’d ever seen. Men like Mark Harper collected relics for their whiff of immortality. They collected younger women for the same reason. Well, I planned to do something about that before the evening ended.

“I could use a drink,” I said.

“What do you have a taste for tonight?”

“You want me to say, ‘only you.’”

“As long as we understand each other,” he said, contemplating the blue glow of the wine cooler. “How about a Russian River Valley Noir? It’s been waiting three years.”

“I’ve waited longer,” I said. To be honest, the frustration leading up to this night had made me woozy with hunger. I was almost too pent up to think straight.

The massive saltwater tank inset on the wall bathed my black Dior dress in currents of tropical light. The fish flitted about in an enchanting dance. Mark saw me watching them.

“That peppermint angelfish is my latest,” he said. “Imported from the Cook Islands. What a stunning catch she was. Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Would you believe I’ve actually been to the Cook Islands? An ex-beau of mine was the extreme sports type. We did some pearl-diving, cliff-diving, other types of diving…”

“Your stories never cease to amaze me. You’re like a cat with nine full lives.”

While Mark uncorked the wine, I made an excuse to visit the bathroom. On the way, I slipped into his darkened bedroom instead, just for a peek. My breath steadied as my eyes adjusted. I could sense even then that after years of hunting for the man responsible for so much suffering, so much misery, I was finally on the scent. Yes, there’d been plenty of other marks, but none as promising as this disgusting bastard.

I opened a nightstand drawer to find a copy of the Kama Sutra. I smiled. If he caught me exploring in here, I could claim I was studying up.

Then I saw it, what I was snooping for. I gasped like a Victorian in an over-tightened corset. Just lying out in the open, clipped to a draftsman’s table by the window, was a kraft booklet envelope with a broken wax seal.

Stamped into the seal was the image of a ceremonial chalice. The sight of that icon again, after so long, gave me a shuddering chill. That symbol was synonymous with an evil most people couldn’t even imagine. How many corners of the world had I ransacked in my search?

And here it finally was, the evidence I needed.

Proof that Mark was one of them.

Chapter 2

I could barely hold back my urge to tear open the letter. But from here forward, I had to be as careful and precise as a surgeon. Mark and I had some urgent needs to take care of first. And I had to remember something vitally important—this man was a killer.

We were in his living room sipping our rich red wine while Kamasi Washington’s saxophone jazz washed over us.

He said, “I have to tell you something I’ve never told another woman, not even my wife.”

“That you’re a virgin?”

“Funny, but no. That I’m falling in love with you.”

This from a man who owned luxury hotels in Berlin, slums in Sydney, and everything in-between. His château and his wife were in France. A handful of Southeast Asian government officials were in his pocket. Ventures across the globe, but tonight he was mine.

“Let’s go out on the balcony,” I suggested.

“You’re kidding. It’s got to be negative ten out there.”

“Just for a minute. I want our first kiss to be memorable.”

Mark laughed at me but he still did what I asked, opening the frozen glass door after a few vigorous tugs. The wind made us gasp and laugh as we stepped into it. The crusted ice crunched under my high-heeled pumps.

Every sensation brought another aching surge of desire. I almost needed that arctic blast to keep me from overheating. Any moment now, the flood. It had been so long…

“Jesus, careful you don’t slip,” he said, hunched over from the biting cold.

I tucked against him and let the steam of our breath mingle. “You’ve conquered me,” I said. I’d been waiting to deliver that ridiculous line. Unlike discerning ladies, men swoon over the stupidest come-ons.

Mark was no different. He smiled lasciviously. Despite his shivering lips, he leaned in for a kiss.

I took his head in my hands and zeroed all my soul into this moment, this man. All I needed was the soft pink touch of our lips, the eager searching of our tongues, and my radiant need gushed forth in release.

My kiss told him everything, admitted every lie. We were like an ice sculpture bathed in sudden heat, and all his being rushed inside me. I welcomed everything he offered, and then, just like that, the kiss was over.

My dance was complete, my lust exhausted.

He blinked at me vacantly. I slipped my hands away, letting my fingertips brush along his cheekbone one last time.

Mark Norman Harper was free. He was weightless.

He took his final bow over the railing and then, without a sound but his fluttering jacket lapels, dropped fifteen floors toward the Fifth Avenue pavement.

From the beginning I had his heart, and now I had his soul.

Chapter 3

Like Scheherazade, the Arabian queen, I have a thousand and one tales to tell in the night. But this is the story I have to tell you, the mother story, the one that starts with Mark Norman Harper and what I read in his wax-sealed letter.

Before the police arrived, I fled Harper Towers and jumped the southbound 4 train toward Brooklyn. Fresh from that kiss, I was so abuzz that I gripped the pole with both hands to keep myself grounded.

In a better world, I’d have a chance to lay back and bask in the feeling. Instead I was hurtling through the underground, agonizing over the time I lost at every subway stop.

I hadn’t been careful enough. All my safeguards…

The letter in my jacket pocket was written a week earlier by a man in California. It was made to look medieval, handwritten in Latin, no less, sealed with a wax stamp and sent by private courier. I hadn’t seen one like it in over a decade. And I’d been searching across five continents.

The letter named two targets who lived in New York, both of them much too familiar to me. Women, of course. Their names and addresses were inscribed in elegant calligraphy, like a wedding invitation. Terra. Shanti. Girls I loved as sisters, marked for death.

I sprang back aboveground at Grand Army Plaza, just a few blocks from where the first target lived. I had to get to Terra’s apartment before something terrible happened to her. She was everything to me. All my sisters were.

Surging with worry, I probably could’ve burst down the steel door at the street entrance to her building. Instead, I thumbed the doorbells on every apartment except Terra’s until somebody buzzed me in.

On stealthy stocking feet I hurried up three floors and pressed my ear against her apartment door. Voices inside gave me hope, until I realized they came from the television. Gingerly I tested the door latch and found it unlocked.

All the simmering fire from Mark’s kiss suddenly went cold. I was too fitfully anxious to enter the studio apartment with any defensive strategy. I ignored my own safety and rushed inside, breathless with panic, my heart bashing against my ribs.

I expected the place to look like it had been ransacked by that crazed orangutan from the Poe story, but it looked tidy as ever. In the dim light from the murmuring television, the bed was made with military precision. Typical Terra.

I whipped through the room in a silent frenzy, searching, disturbing nothing. My head was in chaos, but nobody living above or below this apartment would catch a hint of my movements.

Nothing was out of place. Even the dishes in the drying rack were carefully aligned. The perfect order was almost enough to calm my heart, but I knew better. Killers like these were nearly invisible.

After a moment, I smelled it. An odor coming from the closed-off bathroom that would’ve been too faint and fresh for most people to sense. With a shuddering hand I folded back the accordion door and fell to my knees in that tiny space between the sink and the tub.

I’d known Terra since she was an infant. I chaperoned her first trip overseas to Spain, trained her on how to shoot a crossbow. I’d made so many promises, offered so many warnings. It wasn’t her fault she was born into this secret war.

But now a streetlight beam cut through the dark to fall across Terra’s arm hanging limp and pale from the bathtub lip. The glitter nail polish she always wore.

A foot-long gash ran up her arm and the floor was damp with blood only a few hours old. She’d died while I was at the ballet, taking my dear sweet time seducing Mark Harper. If I’d only moved more quickly.

I couldn’t have known an assassin had been sent to New York. Mark knew, but he’d held his cards much too close for me to read. The killer was most likely the very person who hand-delivered Mark his wax-sealed letter of introduction.

And it all happened under my watch.

Terra had been more alive and vibrant than most people I’d ever known. She embraced life. She fought for it at every turn. But now she was dead, and someone made it look like a suicide, just as I had done with Harper. The irony stung deep.

I wanted to throw open a window and howl into the street. I wanted to shatter every neatly stacked dish in her kitchen. But I had to keep it all pent up. I had to walk away unseen, a shadow trembling with vicious grief. As much as it broke my heart, I had to leave her here to be found by someone else.

There could be no trace of my visit, and there could be no more wasted time. Another name was on that list, and every second I spent paralyzed beside Terra’s body could mean another young woman’s death.

Chapter 4

I left Terra’s place untouched except for the pair of Nikes I needed for my getaway through the frigid Brooklyn night. My tears froze against my cheeks as I raced past the shuttered-up shops and the waist-high snowbanks.

South of Green-Wood Cemetery, at an F train stop, I dropped back underground and slipped past the turnstiles without paying. I had no plan to ride the rail again.

For a few minutes I lingered on the platform, my only company a hunched elderly woman who was nearly swallowed up by her own winter jacket. I kept an eye on her, in case she wasn’t what she seemed to be.

With a gust of arctic air the train came hissing into the station. The doors thumped open and I stepped into an empty car behind the old woman.

For a moment, the platform was abandoned, not a soul in sight. Then, just as the doors began to shut, I sidestepped out of the car, a last-second evasion, like I was in a 1970s police thriller.

When the train left the station, I stood alone and reasonably certain that I hadn’t been followed, though there was always a risk Terra’s killer could track me undetected. I’d seen stranger things in my time.

I entered the tunnel on foot via the narrow maintenance gangway and hurried along the narrow tile wall. The moans and sighs of trains on other tracks rose and fell all around me.

My way was lighted by intermittent bulbs until I cut through a cement concourse into a defunct section of track. Here in the pitch darkness there were no walkways, so I dropped down onto the roadbed like a madwoman in search of the gateway to Hades.

The dark forced me to move too slowly, finding my way along the damp brick walls by touch. Although the third rail was unlikely live, I stayed clear of it, purely out of caution. One wrong turn on this emergency route and I’d be lost for hours.

A collapsed chunk of wall led me onto tracks no train had run in decades. Down here, the air was almost warm, and the rats squeaked like crickets in the summer woods. The noise tightened the flesh on my back. Every time I reached blindly into the dark, I expected to grab a handful of squirming fur.

Even worse, I couldn’t shake the thought of someone else’s hand clutching my wrist. Terra’s killer, waiting for me in the dark below the civilized world.

He was faceless in my imagination. His name was written in the letter, but I knew nothing else about him. I did, however, know that the girl he murdered was no helpless, clueless co-ed. She’d been trained to survive by the Israeli Mossad. Nobody should’ve been able to overcome her, yet he did.

Finally, a pinprick of light cut through the darkness of the tunnel. I advanced more eagerly, until a small compartment materialized just off the track. The light was from a battery-powered lantern illuminating the space with pale-blue LED.

I crouched low and slid along the wall. Because it was so quiet, I was sure I’d find another corpse. And down here, there’d be no need to fake a suicide. Nobody but me would ever find her.

The thin glow was enough to help me catch sight of an iron bear trap live on the walkway. Old school home defense. Stepping over it, I almost knocked my forehead into a set of dangling tin cans. But I ducked just in time and smirked at the makeshift alarm system. Clever girl, as always.

In the compartment was a bedroll and sleeping bag, a ski jacket balled up for a pillow, some nylon grocery bags stocked with canned goods. But no dead bodies.

I allowed myself a sliver of hope that I’d find her alive.

And then a hooded figure stepped out of the darkness with a sawed-off shotgun aimed squarely at my face.

Chapter 5

“Shanti?” I said.

She lowered the gun and pulled back her hood. There she was, safe and alive. The last face you’d expect to find in an underground hovel.

“I have been waiting three days for you,” she complained in her Swahili accent. She still looked like the grave-faced biracial child with flowing black hair I remembered from my visits to Kenya.

“Thank God you’re okay.” I pulled her in for a hug. I would’ve embraced her for hours if I could, though Shanti wasn’t the affectionate type.

My tears flowed again, this time for joy. “I’m so sorry. It was only tonight I found out you were in trouble. As soon as I heard, I knew I’d find you here, at our rendezvous point like we planned.”

“No safer hideaway,” Shanti said. “I mean, if I had a better way to reach you, I would have never done this. At first, when you didn’t come, I thought I would be down here till spring.”

“I’m sorry, Shanti.”

“Yes, yes. I needed some time to myself anyway.”

Inside her compartment, we sat on the dirt floor beside her meager gear. She didn’t have to ask if I’d been cautious coming down here. I was the one who schooled her in evasion, in disappearing altogether.

“I went to Terra’s first.”

Shanti dropped her eyes, understanding the implication from just the tone of my voice. If I went to Terra’s and hadn’t brought her with me, the reason was painfully clear.

“I tried to convince her to come with me,” Shanti said, “but she is always too proud. She said, ‘Let him just try to hurt me.’”

“I should’ve seen this coming,” I said.

“You did see it coming. If not for you, we would have been killed long ago.”

“How did you know you were being hunted?”

“Three days ago, I discovered a man was looking for me. Also for Terra. A tall white man with eyes like turquoise stones. I saw him. He tried to catch me, but I was faster.”

Her small victory gave me hope amid the sorrow. Shanti had escaped this killer once already. She wasn’t going to be the easy prey he expected.

“I have this,” I began, but Shanti snatched the letter from my hand even before I finished pulling it out of my coat. Faster, indeed. She ran her fingers over the wax seal, recognizing the chalice as easily as I did.

“Deus Inversus,” she muttered. It was the name these men gave to their secret society, many generations ago when it was founded. Their chalice symbol was actually upside-down. A spilled cup, an overturned holy grail.

Deus Inversus was Latin for God Inverted.

“It’s a letter of introduction,” I explained, “sent from California to the man I killed tonight. The letter was brought here to New York by Terra’s murderer.”

Shanti’s eyes raced through the contents of the letter.

“I got to thinking I’d never find any more leads or proof of Deus Inversus,” I said. “And there it was, just sitting out in the open, like a Christmas card.”

“You must go to California, to track down this man.”

I couldn’t help taking stock of Shanti’s living space, worse than the Cambodian prison cell where I once stayed for two weeks before escaping. Shanti belonged above, in the world, and it was my fault she had to go into hiding.

“I will come with you,” she said, cocking her chin. Her pride made her look twice as old, twice as experienced as she really was. When I pressed my palm over her cheek, it was still as soft as when she was a little girl.

“Shanti,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. You’ll expose yourself to attack, and we can’t take that chance. I’m going to stay and find this murderer with you. I can’t leave you here a marked woman.”

“But you must go. You must follow the path, and it is not here in New York anymore. It is with this creature, this…Diego Mellado. In California. I’ll handle the assassin who’s in New York. This Asmodeus. The man with the turquoise eyes.”

She didn’t seem to recognize the name of the man who wrote the secret letter, Diego Mellado. But I did, as would anyone who followed the news of drug wars out west.

“If I go, I have to go alone,” I said.

“Always alone. How long can you live this way?”

“Shanti…” I began, but she balled her hand into a fist and held it against her breast. Our symbol of sisterhood, and a shrewd way to shut down any further argument.

“You know me,” she said. “If you will not take me, I will stay down here for three more days, then I will do what I must for Terra. Then I will join the cause on my own.”

I smiled at her, brimming over with affection, though I feared her heart beat stronger than her skills could match. Terra had ten more years of experience than Shanti, and she was slain so quietly, as if she’d passed away in her sleep.

I couldn’t let that happen to Shanti, too. I always sought to protect these girls from the life I lived. They weren’t hunters or vamps. They didn’t share my thirst for blood and I never wanted them to develop a taste.

But I couldn’t leave her defenseless against a killer. I pressed my eyes shut, weighted with the decision I had to make. It had been so long, but what happened to Terra weakened my resolve.

“Before I go, I want to offer a gift. Will you take it?”

Shanti’s eyes lifted, much too bright and eager.

Chapter 6

Just when every paper in the country broke the news of Mark Norman Harper’s apparent suicide, I boarded a morning flight to Los Angeles.

My first stop after landing was the Santa Monica Pier, where the swaying palms, miles of sandy beaches, and two delectable fish tacos thawed me out. Of all the places fate might’ve sent me, at least it was somewhere warm.

Then I checked into my private villa at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. I loved the illusion of being secluded in a lush tropical garden while I was still in the heart of LA. I also loved the hour-long Swedish massage from the Channing Tatum look-alike who soothed my tension-wire muscles into silk.

And then a drive in the hotel’s complimentary Infiniti Q50. Then pumpkin agnolotti and duck breast at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, a trip to Rodeo Drive for a new wardrobe, new fragrances, the winding curves on Mulholland Drive…

…where I stopped at an overlook to watch the sun set over the sprawling city in the valley. A shadow of guilt passed over me, a memory of poor Terra riding in a gondola in Venice, peeking out from under her sun hat. A memory of Shanti feeding an orphaned lion cub from a milk bottle.

Judge me if you will, but I depended on these moments of peace and indulgence before battle. After all I’d lived, a taste of high society was the spark that kept me lit. A reminder of life’s joys, my personal reward for all this sacrifice. Shanti might have been content to live the life of a reclusive monk, but not me.

Diamonds and designers were the huntress’s cloak…

By now you’ve probably guessed I’m an assassin. I suppose that’s true, but I’m not some kind of Mafia contract killer hired out with a briefcase full of cash. I follow my own path.

Before Mark Harper, I took down a pair of crooked investment bankers in Charlotte—twins, in fact. That story made national news as an apparent Cain-and-Abel murder-suicide.

And before them was the Chicago pimp who sold underage girls, trafficked from Southeast Asia, for five thousand dollars a night. Mysteriously drowned in his own Jacuzzi.

You could trace my work back to Central America, those chaotic days of Contras and Sandinistas. Before that, China and Southeast Asia. My time in the Middle East was so long past, I can’t always recall the faces of my targets. And Europe—all that unrest—is ancient history.

I confess, I confess. But before you sentence me, at least allow me to argue my case. Men like Mark Harper and Diego Mellado deserved to die.

In the days that followed my arrival at LAX, I became a new woman with a new name. Lilly Anna for Los Angeles. It’s the closest I’ve come to my real name in years.

I visited a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, a very old and discreet friend. It was a last-minute drop-in, but he found time for me in his schedule.

I didn’t need his scalpel because I was losing my youth. I needed it because I had dire reasons not to be recognized.

Within a week, I was headed back to my higher calling: the death of Diego Mellado, the man who sent an assassin named Asmodeus to New York, the man who ordered Terra’s murder.

From what I heard, they called Mellado the Angel Czar because Los Angeles was his territory, and he ruled like it was still part of lawless Mexico.

He was considered untouchable, but I’d come to LA just to touch him. For the moment I had no other reason to exist. And eight days after landing, I took my chance.

Chapter 7

Diego Mellado’s favorite nightclub was Sapa Inca, just off Hollywood and Vine. The place was fit for South American royalty, three floors of pillars and arches and tiered balconies. He might as well have owned the club, and probably did.

An anonymous guest like me could waste all her wiles convincing the door staff to let her inside. Better to hide behind a gigantic bodybuilder covering a big-haired Latina as the bouncers let her past the velvet ropes. Invisible is too strong a word, but I knew how to deflect attention.

There were security cameras, yes, but I wasn’t concerned about those. Recording equipment always had trouble capturing me, like a blurred photo of Bigfoot in the woods.

At Sapa Inca, being natural meant catching glances. A modest appearance would raise suspicion, so my bright-red high-low ballroom dress did exactly the trick. It even had a plunging back that showed off the angel-wing tattoos on my shoulder blades.

To the beat of the live salsa band’s bongos and timbales, I sashayed up to the bar and ordered a double Astral tequila on the rocks. Pink neon light shot up through the glass-top bar and the drink as well.

I watched the dance floor from a leather diamond-tufted Chesterfield sofa. A few young club-goers shared my booth, but none of them noticed me.

For a moment, I savored the bright whirling costumes, the digital murals thrumming on the walls. Four stone statues of Incan gods glared from above, as if waiting for a sacrifice.

Below, Diego Mellado commanded the dance floor, even if he moved like a trained bear. He was a thoroughly modern Colombian drug czar, celebrated and envied, at least tonight in this club.

His dance partner caught my breath when I recognized her. Her long gown billowed like heat waves with each graceful spin. She was a sight to behold, but her presence here was heartbreaking.

Her name was Isabel and she was Colombia’s most renowned pop star at only twenty-three. She had a hit record in the US, cross-over success, a mantel full of Latin Grammys. She was also outspoken against corruption and drug violence in her native country. For her to be here, dancing with him, was a perversion of all her beliefs.

And a testament to Mellado’s inescapable reach.

When the dance number was done, Mellado handed Isabel off to an elderly Hispanic man wearing, of all things, a sequined red and gold traje de luces, or matador’s costume.

The old man, stooped a few inches shorter than Isabel, looked ridiculous in his outfit, though clearly he was too important to care. The way he leered at her churned my stomach with disgust. Like he believed he was her suitor for the night.

Diego Mellado slipped with ease through the crowd, kissing women and embracing men, snatching the reins of every conversation. He was a puppeteer in a billowing button-down, skintight jeans, and a pristinely mussed Benicio Del Toro mop of hair.

His looks were another reason they called him the Angel Czar. He was one of the most beautiful men I’ve set my eyes on. I noticed every detail about him from the way he agitated the ice in his whiskey glass to how his fingertips played a melody on women’s bare shoulders when he whispered in their ears.

Meanwhile, many thousands of his drug-war victims slept in mass graves from Bogotá to Joshua Tree. He often cut out their hearts as a sick ancestral tribute. Women and children, artists and activists, whole families. When Mellado was finished, the desert swallowed them all.

Maybe his admirers thought it was all a myth. Media defamation. Maybe they were afraid to believe, but I’d seen his heroin and cocaine plague spread as far west as Cambodia, east to Bulgaria.

I was here to slay this monster, or die trying. Either way, those four watchful gods would have their blood sacrifice.

Chapter 8

My only weapon was hidden in the tresses of my hair, a silver blade disguised as a decorative hairpin. It was originally forged in Japan during the Sengoku Period and stolen from the Tokyo National Museum almost a hundred years ago.

But I couldn’t exactly stroll up and slit Mellado’s throat.

He was fortified by a virtual army of men. His secret guard. They were spaced around the club, decked out in fashionable clothes, mingling with the other club-goers. But their eyes roved, keeping watch.

I counted more than twenty of these ghoulishly stone-faced men. Likely more of them lurked in the alcoves and passageways feeding off from this main hall.

As a test, I threw back my tequila and lurched toward the dance floor. I faked a stumble and clutched for a steely-eyed Latino man in a black cowboy hat. He made no move to catch me.

“Oh, my God, I’m such a klutz. Too much tequila!” I squealed in my best imitation of a sorority girl.

“No inglés,” he muttered.

“Oh, lo siento, señor,” I apologized. He should’ve been impressed by a lily-white woman speaking Spanish in a Mexican Altiplano variant. But he sneered at me like I was a beggar child selling gum on the street. His eyes were vacant.

That’s when I knew. I didn’t want to believe it, but my instincts never lied. My throat went dry and my muscles clutched with the urge to take flight.

I should’ve guessed the moment I laid eyes on that Deus Inversus chalice symbol. Diego Mellado wasn’t just a member of that exclusive fraternity. He was their pater dominus, their king.

He could enslave their minds and he had. They were living zombies at his command.

These men would gun down everybody in this club to protect him, including one another. One mistake and I’d be dead. I could almost feel my pupils tighten to a pinprick, the fine hairs on my forearms stand upright. I had to think fast.

At the bar sat another one of Mellado’s men. He had the same build and dress code as the others, the same telltale distance in his eyes, but there was something off about him.

He wasn’t groomed like a soldier. His face was a few days unshaven. And unlike the others, he sat thumbing the condensation on the outside of his highball glass.

Men enthralled by a pater dominus were supposed to have too much single-minded focus to even swat a mosquito.

“Buy me a drink?” I asked him in Spanish, my nerves on edge.

Up close I could see he was also delectably handsome. I clasped my hand over his taut shoulder. His heat radiated like a campfire in winter. I wanted to bask in it, steal it for myself.

But he shook his head curtly. His foggy blue eyes seemed unnaturally frozen over, a climate zone away from his body. A soul trapped under the ice. The longer I gazed at him, the more I wanted to break through and drink it all up.

How satisfying it would be to take him, drain him.

I dropped my elbow on the bar and cocked my hip, obscuring his sight line to Mellado. When he tried to stand up, I pinched his bristly chin in my hand.

“You’re not being very friendly, hombre,” I purred.

“Some other time,” he said, in English, no Spanish accent.

A born American, then. Another surprise.

“What happened? Did your dog run away today? Did somebody mess with your head?”

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he said.

“Promise? What’s your name?”

He put a hand on my hip and swung it against his own. His lips brushed my earlobe. A tequila-tinged gasp escaped my throat.

“My name is Vincent. I’ll say it once. Walk away.”

A bead of sweat dripped down his cheekbone. I dabbed my tongue to that hot salt water. Condensation. I was chipping through. Another few seconds and Mellado’s spell over the man would be broken.

Then Vincent would be mine to control.

Chapter 9

But before I could play my card, the band abruptly quit. The whole crowd erupted in applause and hoots. I turned away from Vincent to see what the commotion was about.

All the roving searchlights converged on Diego Mellado as he stepped into the open DJ booth, his arm around an angelic but bashful young man with jet-black hair. I could see the family resemblance at once.

Mellado grabbed a microphone and called out to the crowd, “My Roberto is fifteen years old today, a grown man.”

Young Roberto was frail and morose in the midst of all this excitement, but the crowd roared in agreement anyway. Mellado encouraged them with wild gesticulations and threatening eyes.

In my moment of distraction, Vincent had slipped away.

Also nowhere to be found were the famous starlet Isabel and her gargoyle chaperon. Her absence gave me a rumbling sense of unease. Knowing she didn’t belong here, I felt bonded to her well-being.

“Give this man a drink!” Mellado roared, and young Roberto was passed a tequila shot filled to the brim.

The boy tried to sip, but Diego forced it into a gulp. The room howled with delight as Roberto coughed and spat the liquor all over his crisp white shirt.

It was like some bullish male version of a quinceañera. Except poor Roberto didn’t seem to want any part of this initiation.

The boy was bound by blood to his father’s hell. It was going to be a sickening education, and I couldn’t stop my mind from dredging up a memory of my own fifteenth birthday, my own initiation.

The day my father betrayed me.

On a farm not far from Boston, my father had only his wife, his sickly daughter, and a few stunted crops to his name. But he cherished us, at least at first.

My world was his two acres. Father coaxed me awake every morning to hear me recount my dreams. He believed he could read prophecy into them, but that was a power I’d never actually wield.

When I was fourteen, Mother became pregnant again after a string of miscarriages. It was joyous news, but as her belly swelled, she was bedridden with illness. On the morning of my fifteenth birthday, she was coughing blood.

It was late winter, but that afternoon Papa led me on a hike into the western woods. He refused to tell me why we walked for hours through overgrown forest and snow drifts as high as my knees. After a while, I cried and begged to go home.

He cursed at me in anger. The cold seeped into my hands and feet until I couldn’t feel them anymore, and still we walked, and my father never explained. I thought I’d failed him somehow, that I hadn’t loved him or worked hard enough.

By the end I was so exhausted he had to carry me on his back. We reached a spot where huge slabs of granite formed a gorge full of natural passageways and caverns.

I stood at the mouth of a dark cave that seemed hardly wide enough for a raccoon to slip through. My father insisted I crawl inside. I refused. I cried and wailed until he threatened to leave me there to die. When I tried to embrace him, he shoved me away.

The cave was damp and pitch black and full of rock crags that dug into my flesh. I was terrified we’d stumble on a hibernating bear or something worse.

Then there was light, an inner chamber open to the sky, draped with tanned animal skins and warmed by a healthy fire. After what I’d suffered, this place could’ve been heaven for all I knew. Except the hooded figure sitting at the edge of the fire looked nothing like an angel.

I couldn’t see his face, but I saw the black robes, the low-hanging necklaces of tiny bones that clattered in the wind.

This was the devil incarnate, I was certain. I screamed, I turned to run away, but there was nowhere to go except back through the cave that my father now cruelly blocked. All the affection drained from his face forever.

“I brought her in exchange,” my father said to the hooded devil. “Please, save my unborn son.”

The full weight of understanding fell over me just then. I saw it in my father’s pitiless eyes. He was afraid to lose the only thing that mattered to him, a male child. To prevent that loss, he’d sacrifice me to the devil.

All the love he’d ever shown was swept away by that one damning condition I couldn’t change. I was a girl.

Chapter 10

My attention pulled tight again. Mellado was still beaming with parental pride, one arm slung around his boy, jostling him. And I’d just made a fatal mistake.

I’d failed to cheer. I hadn’t even applauded. It was suddenly as if one of the overhead searchlights had singled me out.

Several of Mellado’s goons locked their eyes in my direction.

How many could I take down with my hairpin blade? What if I grabbed a bottle and smashed it into a makeshift weapon? I could stop at least one attacker’s heart with a thrust of my open palm.

Many ways to kill, but no way to kill so many.

Instead I went dark. I became a shadow of myself. Surrounded by bright colored lights, roving and flashing, I could cloak my movements like a chameleon on a leafy branch.

Almost. No amount of stealth could keep me camouflaged for long. I chose the nearest escape, a long passage painted with ornamented cosmological wheels that seemed to dial like gears as I passed.

As I hurried away from the dance hall, a sense of urgency called out to me like a beacon. I stalked toward the VIP rooms. The feeling strengthened; I was catching the signal of someone’s distress.

Just as I passed a stainless steel door, a blast of psychic pain lashed out at me. It screamed at a frequency beyond sound, and it tore through my mind with such force I had to brace my hand against the wall. My stomach heaved, my eyes burned.

Someone behind that door was dying. I knew. This was what I’d been moving toward by instinct.

I wrenched open the door. Against a velvet curtained backdrop, Isabel, Colombia’s icon of purity and grace, stood stark naked with her arms splayed out like a crucifixion, yet nothing visible held her in place.

Her eyes had a distant cast. Her mouth was wide open, mute. But the worst of it, what made my knees buckle and my stomach lurch, were the dozens of disfiguring crisscrossed slashes and puncture wounds across her body. I could barely see the damage through all the streaming blood.

And that ancient little imp of a man in his ill-fitting matador’s outfit…he pranced around her, his face concealed by a devil’s mask, cutting and thrusting at the helpless girl with a bull-slaying sword.

It was like a sick perversion of a child’s game.

Each time he thrust, her body jerked, but she made no move to defend herself. How could she let herself be painstakingly slaughtered without putting up the slightest defense?

I knew how. Because Diego Mellado had possessed her mind. He’d sent her off with this trophy hunter as if she were a tranquilized panther. She was powerless to stop what was happening to her.

Only her soul resisted. It lashed out, rushing me like a blast of radiation. She begged God for help, but I was the one who heard.

Chapter 11

“Stop!” I bellowed.

Strangely, the old man complied. He slumped into a claw-footed smoking chair and pulled away his mask. Leathered with age, he looked like a corpse already. He heaved for breath and dabbed a handkerchief at the milky corners of his lips.

“You’re too old,” he grumbled, cocking his chin at me. “I told them to send me fresher meat, a Latina.”

In an explosion of pity I rushed for Isabel. She dropped her pose the instant I swept her into my arms. Her limp body draped against me, the damp warmth of her blood seeping through my dress.

I had nowhere else to lay her but the cold tile floor. She was far beyond help. I could see that now. Half of her puncture wounds were mortal, spilling lifeblood with every beat of her heart.

When her eyes caught mine, a flash of clarity passed between us, a glimpse of heaven in a dream. Then her psychic anguish went silent forever.

The senselessness enraged me. Isabel was brought here tonight to be paraded on the dance floor, then murdered, cruelly and anonymously. And why? Because she was young and beautiful and spoke out against men like Diego Mellado.

The murder of innocents was tragic enough—but this? A girl so beloved and admired, who’d be mourned by millions? It was an intentional affront to all humanity.

And Mellado was so unstoppable, he could let himself be seen in public with her, just moments before her death. Nobody would ever come to arrest him.

I turned back to the old degenerate, heaving furious breaths through my teeth. In this raw moment, that feeble old bastard embodied all the power I was determined to destroy.

“Why?” I asked.

He smiled, licking his lip. “I killed the legendary Isabel! I paid a king’s ransom for that pleasure. Worth every penny, too. Now run off and get me a bitch who won’t ask questions.”

I pulled my hairpin from where it was tucked above my ear. My dress slipped upward along my thighs as I straddled him. The seat leather groaned against my bare knees. “I’ll give you just what you need,” I said.

His final breath came through the new orifice I cut in his throat. Slowly, a wet red bib mushroomed across his shirtfront. The matador, gored.

I licked the single stray drop of blood from my fingertip and slipped the hairpin back into place. But killing this shriveled old soul was an empty thrill. I still craved, still ached for a more substantial reckoning.

The steel door opened again. A girl tumbled inside as if she’d been pushed. Meat thrown to a lion. The door slammed shut behind her.

She fell to her hands and knees in front of me, a trembling thing in a tight sequined dress. Barely fifteen, by the looks of it. A fresher whore. Her huge wet eyes darted from Isabel’s corpse to the old man’s.

Her scream filled every corner of the room.

Chapter 12

Any second, this room could be flooded with armed men, and we’d have no escape. Both of us would die if we didn’t make a move.

The girl scrambled to her feet and backed against a wall. She was panting with fright, warding me off with her hands. For all she knew, I’d murdered both these people and would do the same to her.

“Shhh…” I told her. “I won’t hurt you.”

The poor girl was plastered with lipstick and eye shadow, a sad parody of a grown woman. A sex slave for Mellado’s cartel, no doubt.

I held her narrow face with both my hands and thumbed the running mascara from her cheeks. She was just a wisp of a thing, but I caught a healthy defiance behind the terror.

That dead pervert in the chair had been expecting her. He’d wanted her to witness Isabel’s slaying. Her fear would’ve been his aphrodisiac, and when he was done with her, he would’ve killed her, too.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Gloria,” she whispered. Her eyes fixed firmly on mine, her muscles loosening, like settling into a warm bath. An understanding passed between us, between women.

“Let’s get out of this room,” I told her.

I slipped my toe under the hilt of the sword and kicked it up into my grasp. For good measure, I gave it a quick twirl at my hip. Then I yanked open the door.

The slick-haired guard out in the hall suddenly found himself leaning against thin air. He threw out his hands to grab for the doorframe. I ran the blade through him from behind, center mass.

He’d die quickly, but he’d spend his last living moments on the floor, grasping fruitlessly for the hilt lodged against his back.

Gloria deliberately kicked him in the back of his skull as she passed. This girl had a fire in her. No doubt she’d seen too much human debasement in her life already.

We raced back toward the main corridor. My only viable exit route took me past the dance hall again, past all those guards. Drenched in blood, I wasn’t going to slip by unnoticed. I desperately needed a distraction.

Just as we entered the rumpus of lights I swung the girl in front of me and grasped her shoulders. “Listen, Gloria. This is Roberto Mellado’s night. He just turned fifteen. Every girl in this place will line up to dance with him, but you…”

The girl was transfixed as I spoke to her. Much like Diego Mellado, I could also be convincing.

Neural pathways rewired as her whole understanding of herself reversed course. In her mind, she was the most beautiful woman in the room, the best dancer. Roberto would be honored to share a song with her.

No, I wasn’t proud of what I did to this girl, but all is fair when your life’s on the line. When there are many lives on the line.

Gloria rushed back onto the dance floor, shoving club patrons aside. At the top of her lungs she wailed, “Roberto Mellado! Dance with me!”

Just as I hoped, she instantly stole the room’s attention. Mellado’s men locked their mental radars on this crazy kid prancing toward their pater dominus’s boy.

The entourage parted. Young Roberto stood baffled, pinching another tequila shot, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his hairless chest. Gloria charged at him, wobbling on her precariously high heels.

At the last moment, Gloria threw herself at Roberto. The boy thought fast, dropped his drink, and grabbed for her hips.

It was a better diversion than I could’ve possibly dreamed. Nobody could look away, especially as Roberto lost his footing and collapsed with Gloria still riding him.

The band stopped cold and the roar of laughter started. Hundreds of fools who should’ve known better.

I weaved to an emergency exit through the converging audience, dropped down the stairs, pushed through the exit door. An alleyway. Cool night air and welcomed silence. I inhaled a calming breath.

From behind, a pair of arms grabbed my stomach and wrenched me upward with such force that my feet came out of my pumps. My mind reeled. After a daring escape, one man had managed to ambush me. How could this happen?

“Hold it, darling,” he grumbled. Vincent from the bar. The feel of his chin bristle against my bare shoulder gave him away.

I could’ve severed his carotid with my hairpin, but I didn’t want it to be that easy, that fast. Vincent was pulsing with a forceful life. If I was patient, he could be so exquisitely satisfying.

I slipped into a crouch and swept my leg around clockwise. The lightning-fast move struck his calf and knocked him against the Dumpster with a resounding metallic clang.

I squeezed his bolo tie in one hand and pricked the hairpin knife against his throat.

“I warned you…” he grunted. His irises quivered, searching me. Then he winced as if a sudden harsh light had broken through the darkness.

Vincent had a willpower that those other goons didn’t. A passion. He was desperately fighting against Mellado’s mind control trap.

“Who are you?” he gasped.

“I’m the girl who’s going to break you out of prison.”

He shook his head, like trying to dispel a mirage.

“It’s going to hurt a little,” I added.

“What will?”

“This,” I said, and smacked my forehead against his.

Chapter 13

I dragged Vincent behind the Dumpster where he’d stay unconscious long enough for me to escape through the alley behind Sapa Inca.

My pumps wouldn’t help me run, so I left them behind. Barefoot, I had a clear path of escape through a pay parking lot next door. Once I started sprinting, nobody would be able to catch me.

But I was stopped cold by the sound of a woman’s tearful pleading as it echoed across the buildings: “No, please, I didn’t mean to do it. Please! It was a mistake!”

Gloria’s voice.

I crouched behind the unmanned lot attendant’s booth and watched a pair of men drag Gloria toward a black Lincoln MKT. The poor waif twisted and thrashed against her captors.

The trance I put her under was worn off by now. Panic replaced it. She knew she’d humiliated Roberto Mellado, but she hadn’t the faintest clue why she did it. An impulse she couldn’t resist. She was dragged by an invisible chess master’s hand.

Her apparent prank wouldn’t go unpunished. The men shoved her in the car and positioned themselves on either side of their captive. Most likely, they’d take her into the desert, execute her or worse, then bury the body.

A pang of guilt tugged at my throat. I’d caused this. I’d seen enough collateral damage, sacrificed enough pawns. Justifiable losses. But tonight something caught me. Maybe it was Gloria’s young age, maybe it was the raw ache of losing Terra.

The Lincoln turned into the alley I’d just left. I had only seconds to react before they stole that poor faultless young woman away forever. I couldn’t just let her be murdered because of me.

Even through the tinted windows, my sharp vision caught five silhouettes. A driver, a passenger, and Gloria in the backseat, flanked by her would-be executioners.

If I miscalculated, if I gave them even a hair’s breadth of time to react, they’d kill her right there in the car.

The narrow alley kept the driver moving slowly enough for me to slip into a walking crouch beside a passenger door and test the handle. Locked.

So I leaped catlike onto the glass vista roof and slid far less gracefully down the windshield, offering the men inside a racier view of my backside than they deserved.

The driver slammed the brakes, and I planted both feet down on the street just ahead of the car. In unison, both back doors flew open to form shields for the two men raising their handguns at me. At least I’d lured their attention away from Gloria for a moment.

I pivoted and leaped back at the car, tucking my body into a midair roll aimed straight for the windshield.

It was a reckless maneuver, so I was nearly as surprised as the front passenger when I burst straight through and dropped into his lap amid a shower of glass.

“Mierda—” the driver squawked, but I kicked out my bare heel and drove his skull into the doorframe. Suddenly unmanned, the car lurched forward again.

“Shut your eyes, Gloria,” I said, but I doubt she heard past her own hysterical screaming.

The passenger pulled his SIG Sauer .45 and pressed the barrel against my forehead. Good reflexes, but nothing close to mine.

Faster than the naked eye could see, I snatched his wrist and whipped the gun beneath his chin. It was even too quick for his brain to stop the nerve impulse it had already sent to pull the trigger.

The noise was deafening but the mess was worse.

In the backseat, Gloria tucked herself into a fetal ball and went quiet from shock. Either that, or I couldn’t hear her through the tinnitus.

I wanted to wipe the splattered blood from her face. I wanted to reassure her she was safe. But that would have to wait.

The rolling sedan veered right and struck the Dumpster where Vincent and I had danced our violent tango only a moment before.

In the same instant, I bolted upright and shouldered my way through the moon roof. Another burst of glass. Shards bit through my skin. Adrenaline dulled the pain, for now.

One of the remaining thugs dropped to the pavement while the other was wedged in the backseat foot well, his rear hanging out the door. Neither of them saw me perched on the car roof.

It was almost a pity, how determined they were to catch me. They’d die without ever laying their eyes on me again.

I plunged my hand back down into the car and tore the steering wheel from its column. Then I whipped it like a discus at the man getting up from the street. The impact threw him back. He wouldn’t be getting up again.

In almost the same motion, I dropped silently to the street just behind the last goon. He grasped for Gloria’s ankle, brandishing a thick hunting knife in his other hand.

Her fear rushed through me like an electric jolt. Nothing mattered in that instant but saving her.

My hairpin blade slid between the vertebrae at the base of the attacker’s neck. His groping hand went limp. It was an instant and permanent off-switch.

Regret chilled my heart just then. I’d binged on violence. I’d taken too much. I was drunk and filthy with it.

But these men weren’t innocents. They were Mellado’s vicious dogs even before he tinkered inside their heads with his voodoo. Putting them down was almost a kindness.

“Gloria…Gloria,” I called, brushing her hand with mine. Her eyes snapped open, stark white in the shadows. She flinched away from me and whimpered.

What else should I have expected? To her, I must’ve seemed like a demon who’d just burst out of hell.

“Listen, you’re safe,” I began. “You can—”

“Drop the weapon!” came a voice nearby. Vincent.

Standing in the beam of the single working headlight, he held a gun on me two-handed, with unwavering aim. Even with that welt on his forehead.

“Vincent,” I sighed. “Don’t point that gun at me, please.”

“Lady, what the hell did you—”

“There’s a girl here who needs your help. Take her to safety, right away. Your game is up.”

Vincent cocked his head. “What game?”

“You’re not one of them,” I told him. And then I burst into a sprint toward Vine Street.

Chapter 14

A woman sprinting down Santa Monica Boulevard in a bloody and tattered dress wasn’t going to go unnoticed, not even in West Hollywood.

So I took to the backstreets, slinking when I couldn’t outright run. It was almost an hour before I reached the Peninsula Hotel.

I slipped in through the garden and entered my villa without disturbing a soul. I didn’t dare step on the Oriental rug. Instead, I peeled away my bloodstained clothes in the bathroom.

As I drew a hot bath, the mirror reflected a stark, full-body view of my injuries. Lesions and punctures all down my shoulder and back, embedded pebbles of glass. My left hand was singed from the gun’s muzzle flash, and my soles were a mess from my barefoot run.

I could barely look at myself, especially knowing most of the blood on me wasn’t mine. Even when the men I killed deserved it, murder left me sick and hollowed out, wondering what fraction of a soul I had left.

The bathwater stung, but it was almost a relief. Here, I could finally regulate my heart rate and focus on healing both my body and my mind.

I had to push away thoughts of that other bloody bathtub with Terra inside it, and the killer Diego Mellado had sent to New York to murder her.

It took single-minded concentration, but I willed the wounds to contract, pushing away the embedded glass and stopping the blood flow.

After a few minutes, I released the red-stained tub water and scooped the handful of glass from the drain. Most of my cuts were now only slightly worse than shaving nicks. They’d vanish completely by morning.

Let me tell you, healing at this rate wasn’t exactly a field of roses. The pain was like standing naked in a campfire, and soon I’d have to eat like an Olympic weight trainer to recuperate the energy I’d expended.

I had to cut and dye my hair every week to prevent six fresh inches of exposed roots. I trimmed my nails every other day. My face-altering plastic surgeries, no matter how radical, always reversed themselves within a month or two.

And the amputations on the tips of my shoulder blades would soon start breaching like new teeth through gums. Not a chance in hell I could expose that secret to the world.

Once, in Saudi Arabia, I lost my left hand to a scimitar. It took a year to grow back, but it did grow back, a miracle that surprised even me.

I’m not invincible. I’ve seen the deaths of others like me, when once there were other women like me. Decapitation, disembowelment, defenestration, immolation, starvation, hanging…I’ve seen far too much.

And tonight was much too close. I’d taken my worst misstep in decades. I’d stumbled right into the lair of a creature I didn’t even fully understand. I failed to kill him, and now I would most certainly become the most wanted on Diego Mellado’s hit list.

I’d never been this close to cutting off the head of Deus Inversus. And as far as I knew, he’d never been so near me, either. After so many years of searching and sacrifice, I had to see it through.

For Terra and for all the girls I lost before her. For Shanti and the ones I still had a chance to save. For myself, and the treacherous road I’ve been traveling since that figure in the cavern transformed me on my fifteenth birthday.

Three hundred and fifty years ago.

Chapter 15

Healing wounds brought fitful sleep. Even in a luxe bed with down pillows and Italian sheets, the pulsing nerves kept me half awake and haunted by distant memories.

The winter of 1666. That first night in the gorge alone with the figure in the woods, abandoned by my father. My despair cuts through time as sharply as ever.

The fire burns almost white, but I can’t feel its warmth. I’m shivering with cold and fear, too exhausted and petrified to move. I’m alone with this hooded stranger. The figure’s robes quiver behind the flames, but he doesn’t move or speak.

Maybe he’s not alive at all, just human remains propped upright. I’m going to freeze or starve to death. I’ll end up like this robed skeleton.

When he finally moves, I’m struck all over again with terror. I scurry against the rocks like a cornered animal. He reaches a bare hand toward the lip of his hood.

He’s going to show himself. A wild man who will steal my virtue. A wolf-man who will eat me alive. I don’t want to see, but I can’t turn away from seeing…

Under the hood was no monster. No man, either.

She had a look straight out of a biblical story, a maiden only a few years older than me with bronzed skin and almond eyes, a race I’d never seen before. Proud cheekbones and spiraling tresses of black hair.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Your father thinks he can barter you for miracles, but you are free now. I can do nothing to help your family. Fate decides for them. I can only save you.”

She brought me back to the fire and wrapped me in thick animal skins, but even after her comforting gestures, nothing could still my violent shivering.

Then, never taking her eyes from mine, she offered me my first clear glimpse past the horizons of the natural world, past everything I knew.

She drew her sleeve back from her dark and slender arm. I thought she wanted me to admire her flawlessness beside my scrawny, weathered limbs…

Until she thrust her arm into the fire.

I cried out like I was the one being burned. Her face was wrenched with pain. She growled curses in a foreign tongue. But still she didn’t pull away. Full seconds passed before she finally took her arm from the fire, and it sizzled and smoked and cast off a noxious stench.

I couldn’t speak. I could only gawk and retch at the rippled and twisted burn consuming her arm. It wasn’t some magic trick. She was in terrible pain, grunting and hissing as she pressed her forearm into the fresh-fallen snow, desperate for some measure of relief.

And then, after a moment, her face settled into a meditative calm. She showed me her burnt limb. Sweeping her fingers lightly over the damage, she flaked it away, as if it was nothing more than settled ash.

Underneath, her skin was as pristine as it had been a moment before. The sight of it stopped my shivering. I knew what I’d just witnessed. I’d heard warnings my whole life.

Witchcraft. The kind that got you hanged on the gallows tree on Boston Common.

“Do you want this power?” she asked.

“Yes,” I gasped, with a longing I never felt before.

“You are wrong. This power brings loneliness you cannot imagine. Forty generations have lived and died, and I am left behind, alone. Always alone.”

I couldn’t possibly appreciate what she was offering me that night, a curse and a miracle in equal terms.

Now, here I was in Los Angeles, centuries and a continent away from that gorge in the Massachusetts woods, smack in the middle of twelve million people, one of the biggest populations the world has ever known.

But I tossed and turned alone on a California king–sized bed so large I couldn’t reach the edges. I’d seen the birth and death of twelve generations, and still I remained. Here among all these strangers, and my need for human connection only seemed to ache even more deeply over the years.

An hour before dawn, I got out of bed and showered again. This time my cuts were totally gone. Fresh skin vibrating with expectation. My bloody dress went into a plastic bag, then inside the handbag I carried. Leaving it around to horrify the maid would be a foolish move.

The valet out in front of the hotel hunched against his podium, yawning. But when he saw me, he snapped to attention, suddenly eager. I asked him to fetch me the red Infiniti Q50 the hotel was letting me borrow.

The morning was as sharp and promising as an orange plucked fresh from the tree. The valet said, “You sure know how to greet the sunrise,” looking me over with a tad too much enthusiasm.

“Thanks,” I said. “Believe it or not, I have a date.”

Chapter 16

I weaved with two-hundred horsepower up the Pacific Coast Highway, blasting KROQ. Past Malibu I took a beach access road toward the towering, craggy headland of Point Dume, the famous site of the final shot from Planet of the Apes.

And there he was, my dawn date, lounging on the sand just beyond a lifeguard tower. He was the only soul on the beach, nursing a take-out coffee as he contemplated the rolling waves.

The sight of him gave me an unexpected rush. My hunger ought to have been sated after last night’s events, but sometimes I swear the priestess preserved me in a perpetual state of youthful hormonal unrest.

I cut across the beach in my Spiritual Gangster harem sweats and Puma sneakers, sensible shoes for once. My long shadow caught his attention.

I had no idea what he’d do when he realized who I was. I silently mouthed the seconds it took. At two, he lurched to his feet in a burst of kicked-up sand.

“You!” Vincent said. “You followed me.” He dropped his coffee, hands splayed and ready to fend off whatever martial art I might throw at him this time.

“You could read it that way,” I admitted.

“Tell me what the hell is going on here.”

“I spared your life last night. Twice.”

“I saw you kill four people. Expertly.” He was just about shouting, but amid the waves and the surrounding cliffs, nobody would hear. I’d picked the perfect hideaway for whatever I decided to do.

“They were going to rape and murder an innocent woman,” I said. “Please tell me you got Gloria out of there safely.”

“She’s safe,” he said, marching past me toward the parking lot. I didn’t want to plead with his backside, no matter how tightly sculpted he was in those cargo pants and white tee.

So again I called out “Vincent!”

He spun around. “How do you know my name, anyway?”

“You told me.”

“But why did I tell you? Why did I wake up at four a.m. with this unbearable urge to take an Uber out to Point Dume? I’ve got all of Diego Mellado’s horses and men hunting me down, but what the heck, I decided it’s a beach day? In January?”

I’d seen this all before, the confusion and anger and terror when you can’t even trust your own head. I felt sick for him, even if it was all my fault.

“Vincent, please. If I tried to explain, you wouldn’t listen.”

“You did this to me, didn’t you? You…hypnotized me somehow. Planted the idea in my head. Go to Point Dume at sunrise.”

I made an inch of space between my thumb and index.

“Aw, God,” he said, going pale. “What are you?”

“How long did Diego Mellado have you on puppet strings? Admit it, you know what it’s like to be controlled with no will of your own. What I did to get you here was make a suggestion.”

When I laid my hand on his back, he didn’t move away. Nor had he bothered to shave that alluring scruff from his face. We were getting somewhere, just maybe in more ways than one.

I longed to feel his energy coursing inside of my body, but did I want all of him, or just a moment’s gratification? I couldn’t decide.

“Mellado’s going after all of us,” I said. “You, me, Gloria. We have to take him down.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Who says?”

“The United States government, I’d guess. FBI? DEA?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t already know?”

“Last night I saw what you really were, and I let you go free.”

Restless, he headed back toward the ocean. Like Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles, Vincent didn’t know where to aim his urge to fight.

“Maybe you kept me alive just to use me,” he said.

“That goes without saying.”

He knew what it was like to have his mind shackled to another person’s whim. He had to know I wasn’t playing any tricks on him now.

“Tell me who you are,” he said.

“My name is Lilly Anna. I’m one of the good guys.”

“Reassuring,” he muttered.

The unanswered questions were overwhelming him, even if he struggled to hide it. With his attention on the sea, a strange ease fell over his face. He whispered, “Would you look at that?”

The sun was just cresting over the bluffs behind us, casting light through the face of an oncoming wave. At that very moment, a playful pod of dolphins surfed along the barrel, sleek gray bodies dancing just under the surface.

In the midst of a crisis, Vincent could stop to marvel at dolphins. I couldn’t help breaking out in a smile.

“Gloria will be Mellado’s easiest target,” I said. “She escaped with you last night, so he’ll think she’s involved. He’ll go after her first. You need to take me to her, right now.”

Chapter 17

“Somebody’s following us,” Vincent said. He hunched forward in the passenger seat, eying the mirrors.

“It’s the 405. Everybody’s following us.” As I weaved the Infiniti between slow-moving cars on their morning commute, I was serenaded by a chorus of horns.

“A motorcyclist, four cars back in the center lane.”

“If you just give me an address…” I said. All I could picture was Gloria with a bag over her head in an unmarked grave.

It was no surprise the morning news said nothing about Isabel or the bloodbath outside Sapa Inca. Mellado could bury more than just bodies.

My burner cell phone buzzed. Vincent seethed with annoyance while the caller and I spoke in rapid-fire Czech. After ten seconds, I hung up.

“An associate of mine,” I said.

“What kind of associate?”

“Think of it as a very exclusive sorority.”

“Ask a stupid question…” he grumbled. “What was that, Russian? Are you in the SVR?”

“That was Czech, but I do know Russian. I can get by in twelve languages and read thirty, if you count the dead ones.”

“Is that all?” Whatever government agency employed Vincent, I suspected he was top-shelf, ex-military, the kind that was always the smartest in the room. Being around me had to hurt his pride.

“The biker is following your exact lane changes,” he said.

The Ducati Scrambler was five car-lengths behind us. Its rider wore a black leather jumpsuit and a helmet with a mirrored faceplate. At any moment that bike could overtake us. I could appreciate Vincent’s concern.

“Tell me where we’re headed, and I’ll lose the biker.”

“Fine. Gardena.”

“What’s in Gardena? Please don’t say Gloria’s relatives.”

“She’s fifteen and terrified. The kid was kidnapped, sold as a sex slave. She needed her family, and I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game after you knocked me—”

“First place they’ll look for her.” I cut onto the right shoulder and stomped hard on the gas. Truth be told, Gloria’s vulnerable situation was an asset. Bait on the hook, as long as she wasn’t already dead.

Gloria’s abuela lived on a street of squat adobe housing units behind black iron fences, which felt more like a prison compound than a neighborhood. Gloria herself stood in the dirt patch front yard, tapping away at her cell phone. She didn’t even notice me pull up.

I leaped out of the car, hit the sidewalk, and vaulted over the five-foot security fence. When I landed in a crouch at Gloria’s feet, she dropped her phone and slapped both hands over her mouth, too stunned to cry out.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” I snapped.

“I couldn’t get any bars inside.”

I scooped up her phone and crushed it into a handful of miniature parts. “Let’s talk in the house, where it’s safe.”

“Should I just chill out here?” Vincent asked sardonically from the other side of the locked security gate.

While Gloria let him in, Vincent kept his eyes on the neighborhood. For now it seemed we’d lost the biker on the Gardena side streets.

Inside, a teacup Chihuahua burst toward us across the tile floor so suddenly that its feet couldn’t get traction at first. Gloria tucked the dog under her arm, but it still kept on barking.

The Price is Right was on the TV. Gloria’s grandmother was so tiny, I almost didn’t notice her sitting on the recliner watching it.

“Okay, listen,” I told them. “Nobody’s safe here. If Mellado knows your family connections, he’s going to find you here and finish what he tried to do last night.”

The grandmother made the sign of the cross when I said Mellado’s name. She had the same look on her face as all the suffering saints in the paintings on her walls.

“Why would he care about me?” Gloria asked.

“Because of what you saw and what you might know.”

“What did she see?” Vincent asked.

My admonishing look kept Gloria quiet for a moment, but then her eyebrows came together in a scowl. “Lady, I don’t know who you are. You messed with my head and almost got me killed. But you also saved my life and set me free.”

“She’s a whirlwind of contradictions,” Vincent agreed. He was checking the sight lines from the living room window.

“There’s a safe place for you to stay,” I explained to Gloria. “You and your abuela and the dog. A woman—”

“Damn it, I knew it,” Vincent said as the biker pulled up behind the Infiniti outside, clad all in black, more like a shadow than a person.

The biker planted her boots on the ground and lifted off her helmet. A mane of silver hair cascaded down her back. Her face was as creased and wizened as an Indian chief’s in an old portrait.

“That’s Hannah,” I said. “She’s with me. She’ll take you to the safe house.”

“Your Czech associate,” Vincent realized aloud.

I stepped out into the dirt yard and raised my fist against my chest. Hannah’s return gesture struck me with an unexpected wave of sadness, maybe even regret.

We’d talked on the phone since my return to LA, but this was my first time seeing Hannah in more than a decade. I trusted all my girls with my life, but most of them weren’t girls anymore. For them, time kept on marching.

Hannah was pushing seventy and showing her age, even if she was still sharp enough to pilot a speed bike and handle the firearm hidden in her saddlebag. At least, I had to believe that.

“Vincent, you can follow Hannah in my car.”

“You’re not coming?” he asked. “You think I’m just going to let—”

“I could make you all go, but I promised I wouldn’t.”

I dangled the key fob. Vincent clutched my whole hand in his. He squeezed my fingers in his grip as our eyes debated trust against lust and trickery.

“Six o’clock, Madeo’s in West Hollywood,” I said.

“Are you asking me or programming me?” he said.

“You’ll know. Don’t get killed before then, please.”

Chapter 18

A trio of thugs showed up twenty minutes later in a Toyota 4Runner. When I saw them through the window, my stomach tightened. My shoulders hitched. I had no choice now but to see this through.

The thin one with arms too long for his jacket jumped the neighbor’s fence. He’d be coming in through the back to prevent any escape. The short one with the pompadour waltzed through the open gate like he owned the place. Last came the thick one with the bulldog face.

None of them wore bandannas or balaclavas, a clear sign they didn’t intend to leave any witnesses. They weren’t entranced, either. They carried themselves with too much swagger, high-ranking Mellado soldiers loyal enough to use their own brains. It made them smarter and faster.

I sat down in the recliner and pulled the grandmother’s quilt over my shoulders. I actually did feel a sudden chill. Maybe this time I’d slip up, fatally. Even experts in five types of martial arts eventually misstep.

A portrait of Jesus looked down on me. On the side table was a bronze cast of life-sized hands clasped together in prayer. I put the prayer hands on the floor between my feet. A bread knife from the kitchen was tucked snugly beside my thigh.

The abuela’s game show was still airing on the television as Pompadour stepped inside and gave me a crocodile grin. “Well, hello there, hot stuff. I know you ain’t Gloria, but I don’t think you’re her grandmother, either.”

“Maybe I’m the big bad wolf,” I said.

Pompadour guffawed and slapped his buddy on the shoulder. Bulldog didn’t appreciate my joke. Neither man seemed to recognize me, either. Was it possible I’d escaped Sapa Inca without getting identified?

Pompadour stepped in front of my recliner while Bulldog went around the back. Scrawny in the undersized jacket came in through the kitchen and stood at the front door. He folded his hands at his crotch with a snub-nosed .38 Special peeking out from between his fingers.

I sensed Pompadour’s nasty plans like a gust of foul fumes. They’d positioned themselves so I could only see one man at a time, vulnerable from two directions. My breath tightened.

“You a friend of Gloria’s?” he asked me.

“I’ll ask the questions,” I said. My voice sounded unnaturally slight.

“Oh yeah?” He rolled his shoulders like a boxer stepping into the ring. Then, in Spanish, he asked his friends, “Can you believe this bitch?”

“Believe,” I answered in Spanish. “That two of you will die. One will survive, for questioning. Believe, because I’m the bitch who caused the pandemonium at the club last night.”

Scrawny said, “No way, we know that narc Vince—”

“Shut up, Renz,” Pompadour scolded.

“Tell you what,” I explained. “I’ll let you three decide who will be my informant. Last man standing.”

“Lady, you’re something else,” Pompadour said, a note of uncertainty in his voice. He kept on smiling, but his Adam’s apple quivered.

“We should take her back to Mellado,” Renz suggested. He was young and uncertain, too thoughtful for his line of work. Even his peach fuzz mustache didn’t suit him, poor kid.

“What you got under that blanket there?” Pompadour asked me. He tossed back his jacket lapel and drew out an impressive blued-steel 9mm.

My world focused in, down to the size of that living room. Every nanosecond an impossible feat. I sought the quiet calm between the beats of my heart.

Then, I said a little prayer and threw open the quilt. Pompadour’s eyes traveled down to the bronze hands clasped tightly between my Pumas.

I threw back the footrest lever and kicked the prayer hands off the floor, dead center against Pompadour’s face. The recliner slapped horizontal and I rolled backward with the momentum, kitchen knife in hand.

My somersault knocked Bulldog against the wall. I launched to my feet and pinned him there, blade through the sternum, down to the hilt. I savored the sleek efficiency of his death, inhaled it.

Renz’s eyes were as wide as headlights. He raised his arms in surrender, jacket cuffs stretched back to his elbows. The gun was still in his grip.

I panted like a lioness on the verge of a kill. I could fill myself with his life, his youth, and it would be glorious. But a promise was a promise, at least for the moment.

“I’m the last guy!” he pleaded, in English, no less.

Pompadour groaned and grabbed for some leverage on the windowsill. His face was a battered mess, but he was still breathing.

“Not so fast,” I told Renz, nodding at Pompadour.

He glanced between me and his captain. Then he made his choice. He squeezed off all six shots, and dropped the empty weapon like it was burning his hand.

Chapter 19

It took a little convincing, but Renz drove me to Koreatown in the 4Runner. Fresh from two more corpses, I was electric with vital energy, overflowing.

I could barely sit in the passenger seat. Colors seemed more vibrant, sounds more acute. I felt like three people struggling for space in one body. And my next move wasn’t going to do anything to calm my nerves.

We took Olympic Boulevard past the ornate Da Wool Jung pavilion with its upturned tiled roof. Renz dropped me at a plaza cluttered with Korean signs for barbecues and laundromats.

I programmed him to drive around every ten minutes until he saw me again, although this plaza wasn’t my actual destination. I wouldn’t lead the enemy there like that.

On foot I zigzagged the two blocks to Seoul Market and entered to the chime of bells and the tangy smell of fresh kimchi.

Miss Seong gave me a shy bow from behind the counter. The most demure woman in our sisterhood, she had a childlike air, even though she was past fifty.

Seong knew the drill. I’d already stopped by her shop, twice every day since my arrival, in fact. She gestured toward the beaded curtain behind the counter and asked me if I’d like some tea.

“Something relaxing, please,” I said.

“Let me take your clothes, for disposal,” she added.

I glanced down at my tracksuit and gasped. Blood was spritzed across my chest as if by a spray nozzle. I’d just walked through part of Koreatown like this.

I needed peace. And I wasn’t going to get any, not soon.

Seong took care of things. She traded my clothes for a silk robe. She wasn’t the inquisitive type, thankfully. We didn’t need to discuss the threat Mellado posed to all of our sisterhood. She knew what was at stake.

The tiny storage space behind the curtain housed a single computer patched into the most secure network I could access in LA. Short of meeting in the flesh, this was the only other way I dared to communicate with my sisters. From this location, on our dark-web chat room.

I was desperate to hear from Shanti, the girl who was risking her life because of me, who was hiding under the streets of New York. I couldn’t dispel the shame that I’d left her to fend for herself with tools she was only beginning to learn how to use.

I had no way of knowing if she was safe, if she was alive or dead. Twice a day I came here on my vigil, only to find an empty message board. It was driving me mad with worry.

In a rush of anxious hope I logged on to our private board, balling my bare toes against the bamboo mat.

I braced myself for the usual anguish of no new threads. But then my heart leaped at the sight of the new-message icon from swahili_sister, Shanti’s user name.

She was still alive, still fighting. Even before I opened the message, I couldn’t hold back the tears of relief. I was a wreck.

All my life I’d been protecting these girls, loving them, training them, mourning them when they grew old, when they died.

Almost too much for one soul to bear. I couldn’t bring myself to put my sisters at risk anymore. Not after what happened to Terra. I had committed my life to arming and training them against Deus Inversus, but their defenses had been limited, like those of all human beings. I had been too wary to share my demonic nature with any of the sisters.

Part of me wanted to turn my back on my relentless river of emotion. If I was alone, if there were no sisterhood, I wouldn’t have to care. I could retreat to a Tibetan temple and let the world crumble around me. But that would be no way to live. I needed a reason for my life.

I clicked on Shanti’s message:

Turquoise took wing to Angel Town this morning. Don’t face him alone.

What might’ve sounded like a riddle to most was a sobering chill for me. I knew exactly what she was saying. Asmodeus, the murderer with the turquoise eyes, was headed back to Los Angeles. Was here already, as Shanti’s message was eight hours old.

For a moment, I considered the possibility that Deus Inversus had hacked into our chat room and posed as Shanti, trying to draw me out. Maybe Shanti was dead, and even as I sat here, I was being tracked. Maybe this was how they’d found my girls in the first place.

There was an attachment at the bottom of the message. I almost didn’t dare open it, out of some vague fear that I’d announce my location. But I couldn’t let the paranoia infect me. I couldn’t hesitate. I had to keep pushing through.

I wondered if that last line was more than a simple warning. Don’t face him alone. I couldn’t take my eyes off the words, the possible implications. These dangers were converging too fast, even for my fast reflexes…

Behind me, the beaded curtain shimmered, and I nearly leaped through the drop-down ceiling.

“Very sorry to startle you,” Seong said.

She set down her serving tray and poured tea into a jade-green cup. The steam was chamomile scented, the calming herb.

I sipped the tea and drummed up the nerve to open the attachment. The computer clicked and clacked through its excruciatingly sluggish download, one line of pixels at a time.

Slowly an image formed. A head of close-cropped hair so blond it was almost white. Eyes like gems set inside a skull. A face so eerily bland it looked like a digital composite of all European male faces.

This attachment explained why Shanti knew the assassin had flown back to LA. It was a scan of his identification, his Canadian passport with no personal details. None, except the supposed real name of the killer we’d been calling Asmodeus: White, John Jay.

A nobody, a cipher. Except for those eyes.

Chapter 20

“We’re going after Mellado tonight,” I told Vincent. We were at Madeo, the classic Italian joint just down from Cedars-Sinai in West Hollywood.

His only reaction was to take a sip of his wine, a 2010 Bourgogne Pinot Noir. I just about melted at the calm he exuded, the self-assurance.

“Listen, you’re the most intriguing woman I’ve ever met,” he said. “You saved my life, saved my mind, and you’ve got guts…”

“Keep talking,” I said, nudging him. Frankly, I was basking in this momentary relief. Vincent had shown up on schedule, safe and alive and rested. He’d also shaved, and alas, now I wondered what his smooth cheek would feel like against mine.

“…but I’m not sure you realize what you’re facing here.”

“Aw, you ruined the mood, Romeo.” I ate a forkful of my antipasti, the crespelle al salmone. I chose only the best, in the event that this would be our Last Supper.

We were huddled close at our little table. Madeo was an intimate place, belowground, lights dimmed, with dark wood beams crossing just overhead. At a restaurant this crowded we had to sit tight, especially when our conversation was more private than a national security secret.

“We need to strike before Mellado finds out about me,” I argued. Mellado was already at least one step ahead. He’d called Asmodeus back from New York, almost certainly to deal with the incidents I caused at Sapa Inca.

I hadn’t mentioned Asmodeus or New York to Vincent. I’d told him nothing about what happened in that room with the dead starlet Isabel and the old man. Not yet.

Ours was a game of murky, half-revealed truths. Neither one of us would give too much away to a relative stranger, even if we’d established some halting trust.

I let Vincent think he understood the scope of the threat. He knew nothing about Deus Inversus and the influence they held over dummy corporations, shadow governments, military regimes. Generations of my sisters lost to their brutal genocide.

The waiter came with freshly deboned branzino alla griglia for me and the lobster spaghetti for Vincent. After Vincent requested a small mountain of shaved Parmesan, we were left alone again.

“He’ll be back at Sapa Inca tonight,” I said. “He wants to send a message to the man who neutralized his men. Seven men, as of a few hours ago. He’ll refuse to be intimidated. That’s his weakness.”

“You know all this how?” Vincent asked.

“My afternoon chauffeur told me. They’re loyal as dogs once you strip their will. No offense.”

“Don’t even tell me,” he said.

Vincent was wise not to ask about Renz and whatever I might’ve done with him. Most men couldn’t hold my interest for long.

“Here’s the interesting part,” I said with a grimace. “Mellado thinks the assassin was you.”

The spaghetti unwound from his fork. “Really?” he said.

“But that’s good news,” I insisted. “It means I’m still your secret weapon. Tonight, you waltz in with me on your arm, you’ll throw Mellado off his beat, guaranteed.”

“Or take a bullet on the spot.”

“He’s too proud for that,” I said. “More likely he’ll want to humiliate you first, torture you. Steal your date right out of your grasp.”

Vincent dropped his fork and leaned back in his seat. As the shape of my plan became clearer to him, he shook his head in disbelief.

“You really are remarkable. After what I’ve seen from you…look, I’m MIA from the cartel and the Feds. It’s been two weeks since I last made contact, so they’ve got to figure I’m dead or defected. When I suddenly reappear…”

“This can work, Vincent.”

“Why are you even bothering with this discussion right now? You’re used to convincing people more efficiently than this.”

“I’m trying the old-fashioned way.”

He sighed with resignation. “Seems the most efficient way to clear my name is to put Mellado’s head on a pike out front of Grauman’s Chinese. I don’t mean that literally.”

I grasped his hand in mine. Vincent was a rare specimen, eager to fight but humble enough to set aside his ego and let a skilled woman lead. In all my time, I’d met only a few such men. Most others were milquetoasts or monsters.

When passion arose in me, I never quite knew if it would sway toward darker tones. That was the constant quandary of my heart, whether to love a man or take his soul.

Once, they put a name to my kind. Demon lover, succubus. But long since then we’d fallen into myth, obscured and disavowed, wiped off the face of the earth. It had been more than a hundred years since I’d heard rumor of any others. For all I knew, I carried the final bloodline.

I wanted to see how far I might draw Vincent into my world. Could I lure him back to the club? Was he that brave? That committed? Questions falling away like clothing in a striptease.

“One more thing,” I said. “Do you know this man?”

I’d loaded John Jay White’s passport photo on my phone. The man known as Asmodeus. That stark and empty face, that cold menace. One look and Vincent lost all traces of a grin.

“Yeah, I know that bastard all right.”

Here was a tantalizing surprise.

He unzipped his jacket and pulled down the V-neck of his white undershirt. In the valley between his pectoral muscles was a burn scar, still blistered and healing. An upside-down chalice, branded into his flesh.

Chapter 21

The night was lush. City lights glinted along the chrome of passing sports cars and clubs rumbled their drums like rival tribes. On my car radio, Isabel’s pulsing electro-dance song “Seductress” played like a private call to arms.

Sapa Inca threw its vibrant energy out into the street. Last night’s horrors were wiped clean, like they’d never happened. Never mind my thumping heart, my restless eyes. The blanket of dread that kept trying to smother me.

At the entrance, six of Mellado’s guard stood breathing like bulls as Vincent and I approached them. No slipping through unseen this time. I wanted an audience with the king.

“Welcome back, hombre,” the bouncer told Vincent. He shrugged and waved us past the ropes as if to say, hey, your funeral.

The live music inside synced with the breakneck chatter of my mind. Prismatic lights swept across the dancers like a lighthouse beam over a storm at sea.

Vincent and I took our positions on the dance floor, poised for the one-beat, Los Angeles style. In that last second of stillness, we merged into a single current of energy and danced.

Amid all that rollicking percussion and brass we marked the beat of the clave. We aimed our steps like fencers, forward and back, thrust and parry. We learned each other’s contours.

Vincent’s hand spread wide on the small of my back. Our cores kept centered while our limbs brushed together to the rhythm. It was sleek seduction.

With bolder force, he ushered me through each new cross-body lead, each spin, testing what liberties I’d allow. My dress wound against my thighs and whipped free again. I swayed back against his solid chest, jacketed in his arms.

Never had I danced with such raw synergy. A devil in a black cocktail dress and the man she’d unleashed. When it was done, he held me at arm’s length. His chest heaved and his face glistened.

The silence that followed was fraught. I sensed the anxious tremble of the others around us. We’d drawn all eyes to our dance, but nobody dared to openly admire the scene we’d just made in Mellado’s lair.

Then came the applause. One lone pair of hands. The crowd disbursed from around Diego Mellado as he stepped down onto the sunken dance floor in his alligator boots.

“Bravo! How about that, folks?” Mellado cast about for approval, but it was just theatrics. It pleased him to command the room as if he had every single club-goer by the throat.

Vincent positioned himself in front of me. I had to forgive his mistaken bravado. He wanted retribution. This creature had stripped his free will and branded him like cattle.

Vincent didn’t realize Mellado could kill with a whisper.

“Relax, my friend,” Mellado said. “You have my respect. I’ve never known a man to refuse my gifts, and then come back to the party, parading such a beautiful woman. Hollywood could hardly do better than you.”

“What you did to me wasn’t a gift,” Vincent said.

“Careful now. Don’t be crass in front of your lady.”

“I’m my own lady, thank you,” I said, insolent despite myself. I’d marched into this place like a warrior, but I’d never faced an enemy like this. A pater dominus presenting himself to the world in the guise of a human.

Ancient names were all we had to describe what he was. Demon. Incubus. But it was even worse than that. He wasn’t simply one of the horde of incubi I’d pursued all my life. He was an emperor among their kind, like the devil himself, lording over the rebel angels.

My own flesh crawled at the thought of it. Mellado reached his hand out to me, a debonair smile on his lips.

He had that sensual allure, like all incubi. They basked in an aura that blinded people to their true beastly nature. Charisma was the key to the human mind, the first step to possession.

I was smitten, yes, but I wanted to believe I could resist complete mind control.

Yet what did I ever know about pater domini besides legends? Witch hunts, inquisitions, stoning and mutilations. Through the centuries, they’d driven my kind, my sex, to extinction.

“May I have this dance?” Mellado asked.

The indifferent Incan gods gazed down from above. I could see Vincent’s rage simmer just below the surface, but he didn’t interject. He had to have understood it would come to this.

“Of course,” I said, taking Mellado’s hand.

The band slowed their tempo, and we danced like swaying cobras, searching for the moment to strike. Every slip of his hand across my torso was a rush of pleasure. His animal magnetism was nearly overpowering, his scent like a potpourri of spices. His strength rippling through every move.

To just give into him, like drifting off to sleep…

His black eyes penetrated mine. The surrounding crowd melted away. Had they taken Vincent? I had visions of men encircling him with knives like Caesar on the Ides of March.

That rakish grin. Could Mellado sense that I was a succubus? Even at the height of my power, could he turn my thoughts to his?

When the dance was done, Mellado led me away by the wrist. Maybe I didn’t care where we were going or what happened to Vincent. So freeing, such a relief to end my resistance and simply let myself be led.

We reached a secluded booth with tufted leather-back seats. It seemed remote from the rest of the club, though I could still feel the heat of the crowd. A glass center table cast a red glow over the semicircle of strangers gathered there.

Wait, not all strangers. One face I recognized. A thin white man with a sweep of silver hair. That same blank gaze, that same nothingness, had almost deflected my attention away from him.

It was the gemstone eyes that gave him away.

Chapter 22

On the way to Sapa Inca, Vincent had told me who had burned the Deus Inversus insignia into his chest. A symbol of his enslavement. It wasn’t Diego Mellado. It was Asmodeus, at Mellado’s command.

Undercover with the FBI, Vincent had infiltrated a distribution ring in Las Vegas, but two weeks ago a deal in the desert was sabotaged by Mellado’s men.

Gunshots resounded across the canyon. Executed informants. A hot muzzle on the back of Vincent’s skull, the absolute certainty of death.

Instead, they took him to Mellado. The cartel knew his secrets, as if reading his mind. They bent him to their will. And Asmodeus marked him.

“Sit,” Mellado insisted. As he took his place across the table from me, a glassy-eyed blonde handed him a cigar she’d already lit in her mouth. Mellado’s men gazed at his exhaled smoke like they could read the future in it.

All except Asmodeus, whose eyes tracked only me. I felt molested, like he was reading invisible glyphs written onto my flesh, tracing my centuries of history. I wanted to gouge those eyes right out of his skull.

“You haven’t told us your name,” Mellado said.

“Lilly Anna. I should be getting back to my date.”

“What would you like to drink, Lilly Anna?”

“I don’t drink, Mr. Mellado.”

“Is that so? Tell me, what do you know about me?”

His eyes sank almost shut as he toked his cigar, waiting. His entourage sat riveted, their cocktail glasses poised in their hands, against their lips.

“They call you the Angel Czar,” I said. “You have influence across the globe. You’re the true rule of law behind a dozen state figureheads. You command armies, but your deadliest weapon is narcotics.”

Mellado flicked ash into the lap of the woman beside him. After a breath of strained silence, he laughed. His underlings followed in an uncertain, off-key chorus. Except Asmodeus, of course.

“Every night, I find the most beautiful woman in the club and reward her with a dance,” Mellado said. “Tonight, she rewards me back. So here’s another gift. Some advice. Your date isn’t what he appears to be.”

“Isn’t that true of everyone?”

“Maybe so,” he said.

I strained to keep my attention on Mellado, but that unceasing glare from Asmodeus made me almost sick. Those same eyes had watched Terra’s life drain away in her bathtub. I wanted to leap across the table, but a deep uneasiness made me hesitate, a primal fear that seemed to have no source.

I couldn’t stay sharp. A voice was in my head, whispering my name. The victim of an incubus won’t know she’s been afflicted. Not until the spell is broken does she realize and say, What have I done?

Maybe I could outrun them, save myself, but any display of my superhuman abilities would mark me as a succubus. They’d tear the world in half to bring me down.

“I have something for you, from New York,” Asmodeus said to Mellado. The accent was European, faintly German. He thumbed a small coin into the air and Mellado snatched it into his palm, displayed it to us.

Not a coin after all, but a small copper ring, worse for wear. My heart clenched at the sight of Shanti’s jewelry. I’d given it to her myself when she was still a child. In adulthood she’d taken to wearing it on her pinkie finger.

“Not much of anything, is it?” Mellado asked.

I couldn’t let my breath quicken in panic, couldn’t betray even the slightest reaction as I struggled to remember if I’d seen the ring on Shanti’s finger when we met underground.

Asmodeus’s souvenir didn’t have to mean she was dead. It couldn’t mean that. She’d written me after Asmodeus left New York, unless…

Unless Shanti wasn’t the one who posted on the chat room. Maybe these incubi had hacked the system and lured me here with a sham. Maybe they knew what I was all along.

“It was a pleasure to dance with you,” I told Mellado in a measured voice. “But please respect my wishes. I’d like to go find Vincent now.”

Mellado peered at me through his trophy ring. I couldn’t show my fear, my impotent rage. My last defense was this game of tense civility we continued to play.

“You are under the influence of a bad man,” he said.

“Tell me then.”

“What do you know about who you came here with tonight? What is his business with me? I won’t hold you hostage at this table, darling. But understand, that man is a sinking ship. He’s already hit the iceberg. He’s drowning.”

Another shadow of uncertainty darkened my mind. My hands were clenched in fists, fingernails cutting into my palms. A hunger stirred, but I didn’t know what would satisfy me, what would bring me clarity.

Mellado wasn’t wrong. I knew nothing about Vincent or his loyalties except what he’d told me himself, and what my intuition supposed.

I’d offered Vincent glimpses of the world’s deepest secrets, and for what? What could he offer me? Why had I even spared his life that first night?

“Think about what I’ve told you tonight, Lilly Anna. Let my advice be your guide. Tomorrow, come to my home and tell me what you’ve decided. I can show you so much more.”

“Yes,” I said flatly. I felt so impossibly tired just then, like the suspect who confesses guilt, just to put a stop to an endless interrogation.

“But come alone,” Mellado said. “No Vincent.”

“No Vincent,” I repeated. “I’ll take care of him.”

Chapter 23

Vincent lay on my bed with his blazer and tie stripped away. The television gave the room its only light, dim and blue. The news told of an elderly Argentinian, Hector Perez, found dead on his yacht at the Port of Long Beach.

A picture of the man, taken at a political fundraiser, flashed on the screen. “I know him,” I said, and told Vincent the rest of the story. How I’d found the man torturing the starlet Isabel to death, how I’d sliced his throat with my hairpin blade.

Vincent shook his head. It was all too much to bear, this unrestrained reach of Mellado’s cartel, crushing humankind like the hand of an angry god.

But I had no more reason to withhold the truth from him. When I pulled out the weapon to show him, my hair tumbled loose over my shoulders. The blade glinted blue in my hand.

“I’ve seen your knife, thank you very much,” he grumbled. He’d been brooding since we left the club, weighted with uncertainties. My fresh revelations only unsettled him further.

Even when I reported nearly every detail of my conversation with Mellado, Vincent still couldn’t fathom how we’d been allowed to waltz out of the club untouched, alive.

“Would you prefer the alternative?” I asked.

“What did he want with you? That’s what I’m trying to…” His thought trailed off. There was a rough edge of jealousy in his questions, and it made me all the more excited.

I was still flush with the thrill of confronting Mellado and Asmodeus. My skin was charged. I wanted to break Vincent out of his funk, drape myself over his body.

Seated on the edge of the bed, I brushed my hands through his thick hair. At first he resisted, but when I traced my fingertips across the outline of the chalice scar on his chest, he couldn’t ignore me anymore.

I wanted to kiss his wound, drink the pain into my own body, but I didn’t have that power. My gift of healing was only for myself. But I could still blanket the hurt with pleasure.

“I thought I was fighting a drug war,” he said. “But this is something deeper. I can’t wrap my head around it. Or you. I don’t even know what to think of you.”

“I like it that way.” I laid on a sultry tone, vamping up the femme fatale. Men had sought to grasp me and failed. Once, in the northern fells of England, a poet came close, but he died too young. He called me a beautiful woman without mercy.

Finally Vincent met my eyes, brushed his thumb across my cheek. “You’re trying to misdirect me,” he said. “We could’ve been killed.”

“Instead, we danced. And it was transcendent.”

“With me or Mellado?” he asked.

My answer was to press my lips where his jugular pulsed, just below the skin. When he exhaled his tension, I knew I had him.

He took my face into his hands, guiding my lips toward his. I couldn’t blame him. A kiss was the most natural human need, the first blush of intimacy, the end of conversation, of resistance.

But I tilted my face away, kissed his open palm instead. I rose from his arms and turned toward the television set. It was dark now, though I hadn’t touched the remote. Sometimes devices just responded to my whims.

“I’m sorry if I—” Vincent began.

“Unzip me,” I said.

Vincent sat upright and lowered the zipper on the back of my dress. He turned away the folds like peeling a fruit, exposing my bare shoulder blades. The slip of his fingers spread delight to every region of my body.

The soft light through the shades kept me half in shadow. If Vincent saw the feathery wings inked onto my back, he didn’t say a word. I stood up before his kneading thumbs found the pair of crescent scars.

“Do you know what I am?” I asked him.

“You’re the scariest, sexiest woman I’ve ever met.” He stood with me as if to dance again. His hands slipped along my ribs, my thighs, dragging the dress along with them. It fell in a heap at my ankles, the only stitch of clothing I was wearing.

Naked before him I said, “You know why he let me go.”

Vincent held back. He knew, but he searched my eyes for some hint that it wasn’t true. “What did he do to you?”

“He wanted me to seduce you, like this.”

I spread my hands across his chest and pushed him back onto the bed. For a human, Vincent was fast. Even as he collapsed, he clutched my hips and rolled over me, pressed me into the mattress.

My chest heaved. My hands worked furiously at his belt. No more resisting this current that flooded my body. It carried me along, and my only anchor was this man.

I felt his eagerness. He wanted to have me, to expose everything about me. Like the black widow’s mate, he was blind to the threat I posed.

Again he sought me with his lips, brushed my cheekbone but nothing more. Yes, oh yes, I ached for his kiss, for that primal surge that launched everything else, but it was the only forbidden act.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “When I danced with Mellado, I could feel how easy it was to give into him, to do whatever he wanted.”

“What did he want?” Vincent asked. He moved his mouth away from mine, toward more willing flesh elsewhere.

“He wanted me to kill you.”

Chapter 24

Diego Mellado’s compound was set among the manicured hedgerows of the Los Angeles elite, up in the hills of Bel-Air. It was no surprise his criminal empire polluted every strata of society.

For a dash of irony, I drove the cartel’s lost 4Runner to the black iron gate that barred Mellado’s driveway. Let them scan me with their mounted security cameras. I had nothing left to hide except the most important thing, my secret weapon.

As the gate slid open, the first cold stab of worry struck my heart. Men in riot gear and anonymous balaclavas surrounded the car, all of them wielding AK-47s.

I marked time by the ticking engine. With merely a word, the guards could’ve raised their rifles and fired.

But Mellado drew me here for a purpose other than my death. He didn’t yet know what I was. I had to believe this wasn’t just a trap.

The man outside my door made a crank gesture. In response, I slid down the automatic window. With halting English he asked, “Where is you find this car?”

“It was a gift, from my boyfriend Renz,” I said.

The guard narrowed his eyes, shot a glance at his team. I silently cursed my own smart mouth as he stepped away to grunt into the radio unit on his epaulet. The steering wheel groaned beneath my grip.

“Step out,” the guard said.

I complied. There among the paramilitary clones I must’ve made quite a jarring sight in my belted gold-lamé Yves St. Laurent dress and lace-up sandals.

Five men searched the SUV. Another removed his gloves and ran bare hands across the skintight curves of my dress. In all his lewd attentiveness, he missed my decorative hairpin.

Satisfied, they let me back behind the wheel and nodded me onward. I drove at parade speed through the gauntlet of men. There had to be at least a hundred of them patrolling the grounds.

The gate shut behind me and my stomach dropped as well. I was locked inside walls one story high and topped all around with concertina wire.

I parked among the European sports cars on the wide turnaround drive. Mellado’s Federal-style mansion spread its austere wings across a lush green lawn, but even the house couldn’t contain the party inside.

With the doors to the great hall thrown wide, servers weaved trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres among the sharply dressed men and women lounging on the front steps, chatting on their phones.

Inside, the reflective marble floors and nude statuettes evoked the Parthenon in its glory days. I might’ve guessed Mellado’s tastes would be more Mission-style, but maybe Greco-Roman touches struck an even deeper chord, imperial and Elysian.

“You look like part of the architecture.”

Mellado’s voice froze me at the base of the stairs. He stood above on the midfloor landing, doused in golden sunset through the Palladian windows. I couldn’t look away from his sinister beauty.

“Should I call you Lilly Anna or Athena?” he said, admiring my fashion excesses.

He was somehow beside me then, as if a thread of time had been snipped away. His scent lulled me like an opiate. Every other soul in the room turned ghostlike with insignificance.

That inner voice, urging me to love him…

This was our power over mankind, over each other. We seduced and tempted the world. The incubus destroys while the succubus inspires.

Just think, there among the paintings in the grand hall was a portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a somber woman in a field of posies. Mellado couldn’t have known it, but the model was me. He and I, we permeated history.

“I came alone,” I said.

“I hope he didn’t take it badly.”

“He couldn’t be trusted.” I echoed Mellado’s own words back to him, spoke them in a convincing sleepwalker’s monotone.

He whispered against my ear, “Make yourself at home, Lilly Anna. I have to go play war games for a while, but I want to see you when the sun goes down.”

His lips drifted so invitingly close to mine that a shudder ran through my loins. I lowered my chin, flushed and ashamed. It was all too intense, pining like this for his kiss.

Chapter 25

I caught a glimpse of the dining room before Mellado shut the door behind him. The men gathered around the table were all prize stock, fit and groomed, most in their prime. More than one wore the dress uniform of some foreign military command.

Could this be the inner circle of Deus Inversus, gathered to drink Scotch and smoke cigars while they plotted how they’d burn the world? I feared it was, and I committed their faces to memory.

In a corridor off the main hall I came across a collection of ancient armor and weapons. Medieval Europe, feudal Japan, the Spanish conquistadors. Display lights outlined the telltale fatal blows each warrior had sustained. A dented helmet, a cleaved breastplate, a punctured shield.

Maybe Diego Mellado himself had claimed a few of these trophies from the battlefield. I didn’t know how old he was, or how many identities he’d worn over the ages. What I did know was this: if I didn’t tread wisely, my golden dress would join his collection.

My eyes were drawn to a mounted broadsword. I wondered about its weight, how sharp it might be after centuries of rest. If I took the sword and burst into that meeting room, how many of those Deus Inversus incubi could I cleave in half before their numbers overwhelmed me?

A nearby samurai with a demon-faced mask let out a giggle, just before a dark-haired boy leaped out from behind the armor and growled at me, fingers spread out like claws.

He looked no older than six or seven, wearing nothing but swim trunks and a bathing cap. Even his contorted monster face was fetching. I had no doubt of his parentage.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“You’re supposed to be scared.”

“I’ve never been more scared in my life.”

The boy searched my face, unconvinced.

By all the laws of science, he was exactly what he appeared to be, a normal human child. But with Diego Mellado for a father, he was something stranger. A cambion, the half-human offspring of an incubus.

“Are these your costumes?” I asked the boy.

He admired his armory as if his inheritance had only just occurred to him. “They’re Papa’s,” he said. “And my brothers’. I can touch them when I’m older.”

“Exciting,” I said. “How many brothers do you have?”

The boy thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I see them everywhere.” With that he ran off, his bare feet slapping on the marble.

His fate was still undecided. Only the most promising male cambion were transfused with the power of the incubus. The choice belonged to the pater dominus.

At Diego Mellado’s whim, the boy might be made into the monster he was now only pretending to be.

Then he would become my enemy. I felt a hollow pit grow in my stomach, thinking of the innocence we’re all born with.

I followed the boy to the sprawling back patio. A pink sunset fell behind the Santa Monica Mountains, and a trio of violinists serenaded the pockets of guests gathered in conversation.

It was all just as unsettlingly lifelike as a corpse dolled up for a wake. I snatched a champagne flute from a passing server and watched the boy hurry across the yard.

He was headed to an Olympic-sized pool where many more children splashed and laughed. I recognized Roberto among them. Another cambion, one of many brothers. It seemed he’d returned to childish things after a night of swilling tequilas at Sapa Inca.

A gorgeous woman no older than twenty approached me. She beamed with a zealous smile, swirling sangria in an oversized wine glass.

“You must be her. Diego’s guest,” she said. She had a French accent and a pageboy haircut. She was also pregnant, proudly splaying her hand across her taut belly.

“Congratulations,” I said, motioning with my glass.

“Thank you! He’s a week overdue. We’re looking forward to the end.”

The girl spoke dreamily and gazed off toward the pool as if imagining her own child among the revelers.

A stir of revulsion passed over me. Down by the pool, yet another young woman lay in a chaise lounge rubbing sunscreen onto her own bulging belly.

I knew now why I’d been brought here. Like so many other women, I was being primed to receive Mellado’s seed. I was to be an incubator. Who knew how many of his cambion were spread across the world, how many were still in utero?

“You must be honored,” I told the French girl.

“I never would’ve dreamed.” Her full-toothed grin was unshakable. “And you. My god, I know exactly how you’re feeling now.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

As night fell, Diego Mellado came for me. I was seated at a candlelit tea table enjoying the Spanish guitarist who’d relieved the violin trio.

“Not a bad way to live, is it?” Mellado asked, taking a seat beside me. My mind reeled with his deadly allure, a sweet-smelling poison you couldn’t help but drink.

“As long as you don’t let your guard down.”

He belted out a laugh. All eyes gave us a glance, then quickly looked away again. “Tell me, Lilly Anna. Why did you come here tonight?”

It was a puzzle box of a question, full of traps.

“You opened my eyes. I came to thank you.” I traced my fingers along his biceps, leaned close enough to breathe against his open shirt collar.

“I hope you weren’t too cruel to Vincent.”

“He never even knew what hit him,” I said.

Mellado smiled. I could charm the sense from any man. Even most incubi, like Mark Norman Harper, had leaped eagerly into the oblivion I delivered to them. But Mellado was another beast altogether. He was the pater dominus, after all.

“You’re like Salome,” he said, “calling for a dance with the head of John the Baptist.”

“You’re offering me another dance?”

“We’ve already danced for the crowd, haven’t we?”

“Then the next one should be private,” I said.

Chapter 26

With a wave of his hand, Mellado released the two guards attending his bedroom door. They pulled back to the main staircase at the head of the eastern wing, out of earshot but still within a few seconds’ reach.

Behind us, the automatic lock on the double doors engaged. A wood fire flickered the shadows of the grand bed on its pedestal. Thick velvet curtains canopied the bed and draped the walls, obscuring any hint of windows.

Firelight gave the illusion of movement to a menagerie of taxidermy. A pouncing Bengal tiger, a mounted polar bear head, a perched bald eagle. With a shudder I imagined my own dried skin stretched on Mellado’s floor, like an area rug.

“You’ve played a dangerous game, Lilly Anna.” He slipped his hands over my shoulders, inhaled the scent from my hair. Gingerly, he pulled away the pin that held my tresses in place.

“Have I won or lost?” I asked.

“You’ve won your place in my bed. But in here, there are no more games, you understand? In here, I’m the law. Please me, and you’ll have your pleasure, too.”

I offered him the length of my neck to kiss. When he looked in my eyes, he’d see obedience, all of my mind at his command. My life depended on it.

In one violent strike he ripped the back of my dress from my shoulders. I gasped like I’d been struck, braced myself against a bedpost. Since I didn’t need to pretend I wasn’t afraid, I let him see me shiver.

As my ruined dress fell away, I spun myself against him, tucked my arms against his chest. The fire reflected in his glowering eyes. Maybe he sensed my deception, maybe this was how I would die, and civilization along with me.

He lifted me onto the bed and poured me across the downy blankets. He lowered his face over mine and grappled my bare breast in his hand. I felt caught in the talons of a bird of prey.

I cupped my hands behind his ears and drew him in for a kiss. With impossible reflexes he snatched my wrists and pinned them down. Fast as a single frame of film.

The pressure tightened my bones to the breaking point. I grit my teeth, desperate to keep calm. Any attempt to struggle free would prove I was more than human.

“I am the law. I take what I want. I decide when.”

“Y—yes…” I panted.

“You enjoy it.” He wedged his knee against my inner thigh, forcing me onto my side. I cried out. He snapped his teeth beside my ear like a rabid dog on the end of its chain.

If I played the helpless damsel any further, he’d crush me, violate me, destroy me. The bed groaned under the sheer force of our struggle. The two of us held too much pent-up power. We were bred to clash among the mountain tops.

Mellado snickered at my efforts until I braced one sandal against the footboard and shoved with all my gathered strength. The bed buckled like an arrow-pierced animal.

Together we rolled across the sudden slope, our bodies tangled in the drapes as they fell from the canopy overhead.

Mellado released my wrists only to clutch my throat. Wrapped in red velvet, my windpipe choked shut, I felt like I was drowning in a sea of blood.

And Mellado laughed with wilder abandon. I sought his face with my fingernails but caught the curtains instead. Black inkblots burst across my vision.

I’d come so close, hunted so long, forged my mind and body into a limitless weapon. But it wasn’t enough. I teetered on the edge of final darkness. Mellado’s face seemed to burst into flames, his true demonic self.

“I know what you are,” he growled.

Chapter 27

My age was the number of days in a year. Five human lifetimes, and how often had I tempted death? How many slain incubi had I climbed across to reach the head of Deus Inversus?

Only to die defeated on the floor of a Bel-Air mansion?

Any second now, my windpipe would be pulverized in his grip. Deep in my sluggish head an instinct screamed out. It refused to end with a whimper.

“I know what you are,” he repeated. “You’re the bitch who leads men on your leash. Yes? You want to control, never submission. Right? Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to you. To discipline you.”

And just like that, he threw his hands wide, laughing again. Oxygen exploded into my lungs. I coughed and gagged and thrashed as that sweet air kept filling me again and again. My head resumed its solid shape. My limbs felt tingling life again.

Mellado still straddled me with his shirt thrown open. He gawked as if drunk with his own power. “I’m the master,” he insisted.

I couldn’t speak, but I nodded vigorously. Yes, yes, of course. Anything you say. Whatever it took to convince him I was dominated, obedient. That I would join his harem and provide my womb for his cambion.

“That’s it. Repent, Lilly Anna. Be at peace.”

“You want—to—kiss me…” I said.

“Of course, and much more.”

“Kiss me…please…master.” I propped my elbows on the floor to raise myself toward him, begging with my eyes. My lips were broken and bleeding, swollen, as if aroused.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” he snapped. Still, he lowered himself to me, held my skull like he’d tear it from my body. But when he shut his eyes, we were lovers, giving in to our passion.

In the end, that was all Diego Mellado wanted to believe. I gave him his illusion. I pressed my open mouth against his, delved with my tongue. I searched for the spirit inside the flesh.

I was the succubus who lies with men to take their souls.

I watched his face for that delicious moment when he realized.

His eyes snapped wide and his pupils narrowed to pinpricks. His scream, trapped in my mouth, was no more than a grunt. He struggled to break away, but there could be no escape. Not even for an incubus.

I cloaked him in my full embrace, two souls merging into one. I drank his horrified awareness and it tasted of ambrosia, the nectar of the gods that surpassed all other pleasure.

His soul poured into mine. This was my raison d’être, my glory. Every nerve flooded with pleasure. My mind stirred up a dervish of memories, my own and Mellado’s alike, long silenced emotions rising up in chorus again. A universe spun inside me.

Flashes of history. Diego’s mother, whipped and naked and dragged to death behind a horse-drawn carriage. A rifle’s weight in a child’s hand, the surprise recoil of that first shot.

The taste of blood from a golden chalice. The psychotic thrill of crushing a woman’s throat with his hands. So many women, mothers of his offspring who had served their purpose.

We whirled ever deeper into the past, beyond Mellado’s own lifespan. Memory was carried in the incubus blood like a virus, passed down from the pater dominus at the moment of transfusion.

I saw their history in a glimpse, stretching back to ceremonies atop the step pyramids, the constant blood sacrifices, red streams trickling down to the masses who worshiped them as gods.

An eternity in a kiss. Mellado’s spent body dropped to the floor in a stupefied heap, and only then did I wake back into the present. The soul-flight left me heaving, like orgasm intensified a thousandfold.

The husk of Diego Mellado meant nothing to me. An autopsy would find no signs of trauma, no cause of death, but I had stolen his essence.

The Death Kiss. In these ecstatic aftermaths, my memories always lingered on the first time I saw its power. In a Boston church, I watched the priestess kiss a minister who’d been touching young girls in his flock.

He was so eager for her mouth, and when it was done, she let his corpse drop to the floor of the nave, like soil spilled from an opened palm.

“His kind sets men against us,” she said. “So we fight.”

I slumped against Mellado’s broken bed, my body exhausted but my mind euphoric. I’d killed a pater dominus. I’d toppled an empire in one fell kiss. All the minds he imprisoned would be unchained. All his cambion disinherited.

That boy downstairs didn’t have to give up his innocence.

Only the fire moved. Mellado’s shadow swelled and shrank in its wavering light. No soldiers, no guards appeared.

Slowly, a cloud of doubt drifted in. The distant murmur of the party carried on. Nothing changed. How could a creature with such power make this fatal mistake? He’d died like Mark Norman Harper did, like nothing at all.

It shouldn’t have been this easy…

Diego Mellado was the Angel Czar, certainly the most powerful demagogue I’d ever killed. Yes, he was the head of Deus Inversus, but only in name. I realized that now. He was a puppet for the real mastermind, the real pater dominus.

There had to be another force keeping all these soldiers in thrall. And Vincent had already told me who, though neither of us recognized the truth. It wasn’t Mellado. The incubus who branded Vincent was also the one who enthralled him.

Shanti tried to warn me, too. Don’t face him alone.

And now Asmodeus had me trapped.

Chapter 28

I had to get out, but my dress was a tattered mess. So I peeled the button-down shirt from Mellado’s corpse and wore it as a makeshift outfit. I retrieved my hairpin blade and slipped it back in place.

I threw back the curtains to the unwelcome surprise of bare walls. Mellado’s room was a windowless cell. I swallowed the urge to scream. Even in death the bastard strove to ruin me.

My only escape route was back through the halls, but if I was to go out there, I had to look the part. A monogrammed bathrobe from his armoire helped me look convincingly like a lover in post-coital bliss.

The double doors were thick mahogany and bolted shut. Still, they gave me no trouble besides the awful racket of the locking mechanism as I ripped it from the wood.

I held my breath in anticipation of the guards, though none of them came running. I was almost disappointed. The spirit of Diego Mellado still raged inside me.

But I had to resist. The compound was crawling with more men than I could count, powerful incubi, and Asmodeus himself. I had no hope of battling my way out.

So I headed away from the active heart of the house, out to the far end of the eastern wing. A thick-necked guard manned the back stairs landing, but the evening shadows let me slip past him unseen, down to the armory I had already explored.

Tucked away back here was a bathroom, and inside it, a window overlooking a stretch of lawn and botanical garden. Beyond that was the ten-foot wall that separated me from freedom. If I could slink through without raising alarm…

But once again, a boy stepped out from behind the armor. Not the child cambion from before, but his older brother, Roberto. In swim trunks and a damp muscle shirt, he wielded a Japanese katana as bright and sharp as the day it was forged.

“Where are you going, whore?” he asked.

My heart sank at the sound of his voice. It was barely verging on manhood and it tried desperately to sound commanding.

“I asked you a question,” Roberto said.

“I came down to use the bathroom.”

“Where is my father?”

“Upstairs, sleeping.”

“He never sleeps.”

“Roberto, I don’t want to hurt you…”

My warrior fire went dim with the thought of killing this boy. It struck me as perverse, like bedding a child. Sex and death were the reverse faces of a single coin that only adults should spend.

A stark white hand clasped Roberto’s shoulder from behind. A featureless face took shape, then the unmistakable eyes. The true pater dominus.

“Shhh,” Asmodeus whispered to the boy.

“No,” I gasped.

But it was done before I could breathe the word. Asmodeus slipped the sword from Roberto’s hands. With a silent flourish he passed its blade across the boy’s slender neck, like the final brushstroke of a masterpiece.

“Succubus,” Asmodeus said, brandishing the sword at me.

Panic gripped my heart with such force I almost fell to my knees. Somehow, I lunged for the bathroom door and smashed it clean off its hinges.

The window was straight ahead, but I lost my footing over the splintered wood. Inertia threw me headfirst into the wainscoting. I saw it coming, such a thundering impact, my spine would be shattered, my brain wiped clean.

But something else happened instead. Grass between my fingers. Crickets in my ears. I was dusted with Sheetrock powder and crumbled brick, my head a vibrating gong. But somehow I was conscious, alive.

I shot a glance back at the hole I’d created when I ran through the side of the house. No time to marvel at that feat. Asmodeus was just behind the window now, sword in hand, an unstoppable force.

Despite the throb in my head, the nausea, I sprang up and bolted for the palms and cypress trees ahead. The encumbering bathrobe fell away.

Boots thumped the lawn like a cavalry of horses, closing ranks from all directions. Black-garbed mercenaries blended with the night. Guttural shouts. Spears of white light flashed to the snarl of automatic gunfire. Rounds ripped up the dirt around my feet.

A savage bite at my calf, another in my buttocks. Cartridges finding their marks. Just as I reached the cover of thick palm fronds, three banks of sodium-vapor lamps doused the garden in broad daylight.

“Lights out, you idiots!” a voice shouted.

I had my advantage. Long black shadows mottled the pine-straw ground and gave me cover. I crouched and leaped and spun my way through the garden, hairpin in hand. A soldier cried out, swiveled his gun.

My blade should’ve found its easy mark. But I stabbed him off-target, left him howling instead of dead. The gunshot wounds were taking their toll on me, blurring my vision, clouding my muscle memory. How many hits had I sustained?

I rushed the security wall, but my injured legs were slick with blood and spasming in protest. When I leaped, I barely clutched my fingertips over the ledge. Hoisting my body took every last drip of endorphins.

I teetered above the concertina wire a second too long. One final burst of gunfire erupted from below. Rounds threaded up my arm and plunged between my ribs. I heaved for a breath that wouldn’t come.

I dragged the coils of sharp-toothed wire along with me as I fell. No sight, no sound. A plummet down the rabbit hole.

And then I floated in a vacuum, in total nothingness.

Chapter 29

I drifted in the timeless dark, cast back to the moment of my second birth, another kiss.

Ten years I was her apprentice before my clock stopped ticking. I was twenty-five when I became a succubus, cloistered in another cave, this one decked with drawings of ancient men.

My priestess was a mystery to the end. I followed her to France, fleeing war in the colonies. I was young and desperate to learn the secrets of her craft.

Together, we charmed our way into Louis the Fourteenth’s royal court. We destroyed incubi. Scandal and death trailed us, fair accusations of witchcraft.

Then came the cave initiation. The two of us hidden away together, we mingled our blood, we blended our breath and our tears. Her kiss was like a mother’s breast to the suckling child. It was Holy Communion.

In the heat of my transformation, my mind bloomed with her memories. I saw the ebbing tide of time, the open sea from the prow of a ship, men singing her praise around a ring of stones.

Through her eyes I gazed into the bottomless well of history she’d witnessed. I saw the ziggurats of Babylon from on high, felt the ripple of her wings as they reached full span and held her aloft. A whisper of her most ancient name…Lilith.

Did I want to become a succubus, to know the secrets, to see through the veil, to be ageless and always ecstatic in my senses? For this, would I set myself to the Sisyphean task of hunting down monsters, seducing them, destroying them?

Yes…yes…yes…

She gave me everything, a deluge of power that nearly drowned my mind. Her kiss left me dazed and agonized for hours. My scapulae broke through the skin and ossified long hollow growths of new bone. Like an opium fiend I lay curled on the cave floor, chanting in long-dead tongues.

She gave me everything, even herself.

When I finally came to my senses, our campfire had dimmed to embers. But my eyes were sharper now. Even in that weak orange light, I saw her desiccated corpse seated across from me, still wrapped in its robes.

I held her body and wept. I raged at the soul she’d poured inside of me. I pulled at the fledgling wings still sprouting from my flesh, desperate to give it all back if only she wouldn’t abandon me. But she lied, just like my father had. I held her memories but I was still alone.

The priestess knew the ceremony would kill her. Neither a succubus nor an incubus could transmit its power to a mortal and survive. Only a cambion could inherit the gift without destroying the giver. She knew, but she let me take it anyway.

I carried my bitterness for two more years before I finally found closure. My travels brought me back to Massachusetts, and one morning I crossed my family’s farmland through a dense fog.

The fields were barren and the farmhouse derelict. I expected to find that my kin had been run off or killed by natives, until Father stepped onto the porch. His spine was withered and his hair faded white, but he held his musket as surely as ever.

“You cursed me, witch,” he said.

The priestess robe obscured my face. He mistook me for her, though in a way, he was not wrong. Father spat in the mud and denounced me, denounced her, as a fraud. Despite the human sacrifice he made of his daughter, his wife had died in childbirth.

“What of the child?” I asked.

“She lived,” he sneered. “Sent her off with relatives.”

Approaching my father, I pulled back my hood. His face went slack with horror. The musket sagged in his weakening arms. And then in a gust of insight, I understood why I had come back after so many years.

To end my grief, to accept that I was alone.

I said, “One kiss, father, and all will be forgiven.”

Chapter 30

An eternity passed in seconds. I was floating, weightless, but only because I’d plunged into the deep end of the neighbor’s pool.

I surfaced with a gasp that barely found air, still tangled in the razor wire. The clouds of my blood were vivid in the underwater lights.

Somehow, I found the strength to lift myself onto the deck and wrench away the last of the wire. My body wanted rest and my mind begged surrender. But I was a succubus. I carried a world of memories in me, and I refused to die. Not here, not tonight.

The soldiers were scaling the wall. Any second they’d have their guns in position. Though even my slightest movements were torture, I had to rise, I had to run.

Gunfire sputtered, the air buzzed with rounds. I cut through a hedge and startled a flurry of birds to flight. South and westward I trespassed yards, stumbling now and then, flushed of all thought except escape.

Bel-Air came alive with flashing lights and sirens. A helicopter passed overhead, trailing a searchlight.

I collapsed on a patio behind a darkened house. A ringing in my ears, my eyesight blurred. The next time I dropped would be the last, I knew.

I hadn’t a clue whose house this was. The digital alarms shrieked when I broke open the locked French doors. By a stroke of luck, the cordless phone was there in its charging cradle on the kitchen counter.

When Vincent answered, I dragged a ragged breath into my only functioning lung. “Hilgard…and Sunset. Meet me…there.”

After hanging up, I drank ravenous gulps from the sink. The razor wire teeth had shredded Mellado’s shirt and slashed long cuts across my torso. I couldn’t bear to take stock of the gunshot wounds.

Shuffling more than running now, I skirted the eastern edge of the Bel-Air Country Club, a few blocks from UCLA. I must’ve looked for all the world like a zombie freshly risen from its grave.

With a flush of new hope I staggered onto a walking path. A college kid waited with his skateboard at the intersection. He jolted when he saw me, then raised his phone for a photo. I couldn’t care less.

A pair of headlights washed over the pavement. When the car screeched to a stop, I was standing just outside the passenger door. My Infiniti, and Vincent in the driver’s seat.

At the sight of him my drive was depleted, like a marathon runner breaking through the ribbon. I slumped against the car and pawed at the door handle with my limp hand. I couldn’t even hook my fingers.

What happened next is a jumble in my memory. A man caught my fall, draped me in his arms. I felt his body tremble and balked at the alarm on his face.

He laid me across the backseat, shouted questions in a language I couldn’t interpret. Blood seeped into the upholstery.

Vincent. It was Vincent. He was jostling my head to keep me conscious. “Hold on, Lilly Anna! Hold on! The Medical Center is right around—”

“No hospital! Just…drive…”

“Lilly Anna, you—you’re in bad shape,” he breathed. “I don’t even know how you can be…”

I knew how close I was, hanging by a thread. Strangest of all, I had Diego Mellado to thank, if I survived. Against his will, he’d sacrificed the life force I needed now to fight these grievous wounds.

Another stretch of time disappeared. Vincent was driving, though I didn’t know where. Overhead, streetlights and towering palms flitted past.

I was at peace in my backseat cocoon. Already I felt my lung tissue binding itself. My breaths deepened, and the oxygen sharpened my mind.

“Mellado’s dead,” I said aloud, testing my voice.

“Are you kidding me?” he said with an incredulous laugh.

“Don’t go back to the hotel. He’ll track me down.”

“Who will? You said Mellado—”

“Asmodeus,” I said. “He knows what I am now.”

I reached through the center console and Vincent took my hand. He held it firm and resolute, like we were tandem skydivers in free fall.

“You mind telling me, then?” he asked. “What you are?”

So I did. I told him everything I needed him to believe.

Chapter 31

No matter how much I refused to retreat, I was Vincent’s helpless passenger. At least until I recouped some strength, until I could think straight again.

He took me into the suburbs north of Burbank, to the home of a fellow agent he knew would be away at Quantico. An old flame, he admitted, who still hid her spare key under the same potted cactus.

I found fleeting solace in her backyard Japanese garden, no bigger than a boxing ring. Just a moment to breathe, freshly showered and bandaged, I lay in a lounger beside a laughing clay Buddha. My naked body burned like a furnace as it mended.

The glass door finally slid open. I could feel Vincent’s reticence even before he stepped outside. He was enduring the aftershocks of what I told him. I’d known men who pined for their ignorance back, like a prophet refusing the voice of God.

“I can get you a blanket,” he said.

“The cool air helps.”

He splashed mineral oil onto his hands and kneaded it into my neck. I leaned forward, suppressing the pain that fired all through my torso. His touch was exquisite. It nullified the ache left over from Mellado’s hands.

Vincent’s breath quickened as his touch passed over the knuckles of my spine. Cautiously, he traced the calcified ridges of bone now barely obscured by my tattoo.

“Mellado thought he could make me kill you,” I said. “He thought he could control me. But he didn’t know what I really was.”

“So you’re my guardian angel? Wings and all?”

“I’m no angel.”

His fingers circled the bandage taped over my exit wound. “You were shot five times, Lilly Anna. With high-powered rounds. I’ve never known a woman to survive…”

“If it helps, I’m not exactly a woman.”

“A succubus,” he said, testing the taste of the word.

I leaned back and watched the stars shimmer overhead.

“But you clipped your wings?” he asked.

He was right to wonder. I could be soaring above all the wretchedness of this world.

“I wanted to be down in the dust with humankind,” I said.

Vincent withdrew his hands, brooding again. He was a man of decisive action. He thrived most when his worldview went untested, but now?

He said, “When we made love…I didn’t know…”

“I have a human body. I have a human soul.”

My fingers brushed his jawline. Even through our secrets, our bodies told the truth. In that bed with him last night I felt invincible. I flew, even without my wings.

But now I was chasing heartache down its fated path.

“So where do we go from here?” Vincent asked.

“You? Back to Vegas to tell your story and get your reputation back. Minus the demon lover.”

“Lilly Anna, you can’t go after Asmodeus alone.”

I’d escaped Mellado and his firing squad, yet I should’ve known letting go of Vincent would be the thing that finally broke my nerve. I suddenly felt shame for my nakedness.

“Vincent,” I insisted. “I’m a demon. The urge to take a man’s soul always lurks inside me, with every man I meet. I fight it every time I’m with you, do you understand?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What if I asked you to make love to me now?”

“If I didn’t think I’d be causing you a world of hurt…”

“Then kiss me, at least,” I shut my eyes, inviting him.

The moment Vincent’s lips touched mine, I drank from his well of memory. I savored our lovemaking again through his bliss, awed at the dolphins in the waves, suffered the trauma of that branding iron. I saw myself, colored with his affection.

His vital being soaked into my wounds and numbed them.

I stopped at the first taste of his soul. I pulled away, trying to hold him but he staggered from my arms, shoes disturbing the zen of the sand’s perfect waves. He knocked the clay Buddha aside, aghast, until he dropped to the ground and slipped unconscious.

“Forgive me, Vincent,” I said.

I stood beside him, seething with regret. Ashamed that this stolen kiss had given me vigor enough to rise to my feet. Ashamed that I couldn’t spare the strength to carry him into the house like a strange inverted version of Snow White.

The best I could do was straighten out his legs, brush sand from his cheek, drape a blanket over his body to ward off the night chill.

Morning would wake him. His last two weeks would remain forever hazy in his memory, like a vaguely recalled dream. I would be the only one to carry the history of what happened between us. In a better world, he wouldn’t have to forget, but there are never memories.

Not for them, the humans I loved.

Time was running short. I couldn’t spend this fresh bout of energy keeping vigil over Vincent. In the agent ex-girlfriend’s closet, I found a black Ann Taylor jacket and trousers combo and a sensible pair of casual flats. Everything fit like a charm.

I drove the Infiniti despite the moisture blurring my eyes. One stop, an In-n-Out for five Animal-style burgers, quick and dirty fuel for the furnace. Just maybe I was feeding my sorrow as well.

I wanted to turn back and wake Vincent from his sleep, make him fall for me all over again, but love was never my lot in life. I had to reach Koreatown. I had to warn my sisters.

Chapter 32

A steady rain was falling when I hit Olympic Boulevard past five in the morning. I had to get on the network, and I knew Seong would be camped on her cot in the back of her store, vigilant as a soldier in the trenches.

But when I turned toward Seoul Market, blue and red emergency lights painted the wet streets ahead, colored the clouds, flashed in storefront windows.

“Please no,” I begged the indifferent night. Let this be someone else’s horror for once. My body went so weak I could barely steer. I should’ve turned around, but some shred of hope, or maybe despair, forced me to pull alongside the curb.

Police cars choked the parking lot, and the lone ambulance sat idling. All the shops were dark except Seoul Market, where figures moved without haste behind the display windows.

Officers loitering everywhere. I longed to burst out of the car and banish all of them. This wasn’t their world. They had no authority here.

But what purpose would that serve? I knew full well that Seong was dead at the hands of Deus Inversus. The certainty struck me like an air-bag blow. I heard a guttural moan and then realized it was mine.

“Move along!” shouted a cop on the sidewalk. He motioned me on with his flashlight, but I lowered my window instead. I didn’t know what I was doing, couldn’t think straight. If this attack was a trap meant to lure me in, I was blindly taking the bait.

The cop pulled back the hood of his rain parka and crouched to get a look at me through the window. “Ma’am, we need you to keep—”

“What happened?” I snapped. “The woman who owns Seoul Market. Seong Lee. She’s my…friend. I know she stays here at night.”

He stretched back upright, glancing toward the crime scene behind him. I had to restrain myself. I wanted to leap from the car and throttle him for answers.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You mind telling me why you’re out here checking on your friend at five o’clock in the…”

He seemed to be gawking at my chest. I followed his eyes to the heart-shaped patch of blood dampening my blouse. And in the backseat where I had sprawled out bleeding, the upholstery surely looked like a slaughterhouse floor.

He let out a yelp when I twisted his parka in my grip.

“Listen to me. This is only blood. It’s nothing at all.”

“R-right,” he said.

When I let him go, he didn’t grab his gun or shout for backup. He stood obediently and let the rain patter against him. The officer had come around to my way of thinking.

“Tell me what you know,” I said.

He spoke of Seong’s murder with the heartless inflection of a crime statistics report, never once altering his tone, even when I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and sobbed.

Broken glass on the entry door, a concerned neighbor. Asian female victim, approximately fifty years of age, discovered in a storage room containing only a computer terminal, undeniable evidence of a struggle.

I don’t know why I thought of Seong’s father just then, his nimble fingers folding dumplings in his steamy kitchen, that muted smile I could provoke only after a few shots of whiskey.

He had passed his serenity down to Seong. Among the sisters, the rest of us could be so brash, so impulsive. She deserved to be kept out of the fray.

“By all appearances,” said the officer, “the safe and cash register were left untouched, though the perpetrator left bloody fingerprints on the computer keyboard.”

At that last detail, I belted out a rueful laugh. Fingerprints. As if there would be an investigation and an arrest, an efficient exhibit of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles.

As our talk stretched on a moment too long, another nearby cop stitched his brow and stepped toward us. I eased my foot off the brake and let the car drift forward. In my rearview mirror, the two police converged in the glow of my retreating taillights.

I howled my grief into the confines of my car. Seong was dead, and it was surely my fault. I was struck certain that Asmodeus had followed me here from Gardena. He’d sent those three Mellado soldiers as decoys to flush me out of hiding. The silent hunter, tracking his prey.

The devastation made me want to crawl into a cave for a century of mourning, but other sisters remained, and I had to warn them, had to protect them.

Those bloody fingerprints on the keyboard could only mean that Asmodeus tried to hack into our message board. If he succeeded, the entire sisterhood, usernames and locations, could be exposed.

Hannah was the closest now. She was at her desert safe house with Gloria and her abuela, far beyond the reach of any cellular network. The only way to reach her was in the flesh.

I veered onto the freeway and floored the accelerator.

Chapter 33

I raced into the Mojave dawn, and my heart beat just as fast. Out in the desert, the rain clouds gave way to wide blue sky. I swear I saw a vulture circling, just on the edge of my vision, but it could’ve been my weary eyes.

The surrounding wasteland was like the surface of Mars or some mythic underworld. Asmodeus would be out there. I knew it in my soul.

On the edge of a basin, amid a few Joshua trees, sat Hannah’s dusty trailer and outer sheds. I could see it from several miles out. The final approach was a test of my nerves as I looked for signs of life in vain.

There could be no stealth in this terrain. I took the access road straight up to the trailer, then circled the car around in preparation for a fast exit.

This hardscrabble land held a silence as deep as death. The only noise was the clatter of the dried snake skins hung from the awnings.

Instead of knocking or announcing myself, I wrenched the trailer door from its hinges and ducked inside. The energy I’d borrowed from Vincent was flowing through me, rejuvenating me.

But there was nowhere to direct it. All I could see of the trailer was empty. One rifle was absent from the wall-mounted gun racks. Dust danced in the slatted sunlight coming through the blinds. My pumping breaths felt amplified.

“Hannah?” I called, crouched in a defensive stance. Distress prickled in the deepest regions of my brain, that same signal from the ether I’d caught so often these last few days.

“Gloria, it’s me, Lilly Anna.”

The response was a muffled yip from beneath the floor. I flipped the area rug aside just as the trapdoor beneath it lifted open. Gloria peered from the bunker below, aiming a trembling pistol two-handed. Her abuela cowered behind her, clutching her miniature dog.

“Where’s Hannah?” I demanded.

“There were lights outside,” Gloria explained. “Just before the sun came up. She told us to hide down here until she got back.”

As Gloria climbed up the ladder I asked, “How long?”

“Maybe half an hour? Please tell me you’re getting us out of here.”

“You get me out!” the grandmother squawked in Spanish.

We helped her up while the dog skittered around us snarling. When she was on her feet again, she kissed the crucifix on the end of her necklace.

After all the hot and frenzied exploits we put her through, I couldn’t bear to tell her what a mess I’d made of her Gardena house. I just wanted to get these women out of harm’s way.

I pressed the key fob into Gloria’s hand and instructed her to head east nonstop until Vegas. There, she was to make contact with the FBI field office and tell them Agent Vincent Medeiros had facilitated her escape from the Mellado Cartel.

“But what…”

“Go now. There’s five thousand dollars in cash in the glove box.”

The money seemed to settle things. Gloria nodded resolutely, still clutching the pistol. She’d probably never handled a gun before Hannah whipped her into shape, just like she’d done for so many sisters over the years.

“Wait,” Gloria said with a frown.

“You don’t know how to drive,” I realized.

The abuela hiked her chin, scooped the keys from Gloria’s hand, and marched out the door with her dog tucked against her bosom.

While Gloria’s getaway car threw dust in its wake, I loaded a shotgun with shells. Close combat was my style, but out here, a ready gun was better than nothing.

Outside, the harsh sun was already spiking the heat index. When my eyes readjusted, I sighted the tracks of Hannah’s ATV headed off toward the ridge out back.

I threw aside my jacket, ignored my bloody blouse, and hurried along the tracks. Hannah was a half hour out. I buried the thought of what that must mean. I had to reach my darling girl in time to protect her, just this once, after so much loss.

My girl, at seventy years old. But I remembered her birth at that hospital in Prague, her blast of jet-black hair, how downy it felt on my fingers. Her father was a Czech resistance fighter. She was conceived in a Nazi prison camp, just before her father and I escaped.

I wished I could’ve sheltered her forever, but this was war. Sooner or later your soldiers must fight, even when you’re desperate to keep them safe, even when they’re family. You call your daughters, your sisters, and you send them out to battle.

Only a hundred paces out, I paused. The growl of a motor rose above the ridge mere seconds before the ATV appeared with Hannah at the helm. She was just a distant blur, but I recognized her telltale silver mane rippling in the breeze.

I fell to my knees and dropped the shotgun in the sand.

In my centuries of life, forty-eight women had joined my cause. I loved them all, the living and the dead, with a primal frenzy that only a mother could appreciate.

They were my legacy, my history, born of my womb, every last one of them. My cambion daughters, the only souls in this world I could truly trust.

While I sobbed with relief, Hannah drove her ATV down the rocky slope within fifty yards of where I knelt. There, she raised her scope rifle into position. For a moment, I was too lost in reverie to accept what was happening.

Then my instinct kicked in. I snapped my head to the left just as a bullet screamed past my ear. The shot echoed on the distant hills.

My daughter was trying to kill me.

Chapter 34

Asmodeus had turned my own daughter against me. He’d lured her from shelter and then violated her mind. The thought of his penetrating gaze bearing down on her…

I scrabbled over the desert rocks in a frantic bid for escape. The sandy turf threw my steps off-balance, but I couldn’t stumble, not even once. If I hesitated, however slightly, I’d die.

Hannah was an expert sniper, trained since the day she was old enough to hold a gun. Her second shot punched through the trailer’s aluminum siding just as I dove for cover. It was a hairline escape, close enough to leave me rattled.

Her ATV snarled back into motion, closing the distance between us. I’d left behind the shotgun, but it hardly mattered. I wasn’t about to fire back at my child. My only choice was to subdue her and dispel the trance.

Just as the vehicle fishtailed onto the front access road, I leaped inside the trailer through the doorless entry I’d made. The chorus of my wounds sang out, and I howled right along in harmony.

“Hannah! Stop! Hannah!” I yelled, knowing full well my voice alone wouldn’t break her trance. I slid behind the kitchen counter and prayed she’d come inside.

The ATV went quiet. Hannah’s boots scuffed the rocks as she dismounted. She’d always been a woman of few words, and she had none to spare for me now.

I armed myself with a cast iron skillet from the stove top. It wouldn’t shield a bullet. The idea of smacking her head made me sick. My own flesh and blood. How I’d dreaded a catastrophe like this. How I’d known in my heart it was inevitable.

Her shadow cut through the light cast along the kitchen backsplash. I held my breath and gripped the skillet handle. Her boots trudged, then faltered. She slumped to the floor with such force that the plates in the cupboards rattled, the blinds shivered in their windowsills.

She grunted, her breath fast and obscenely wet.

The sound of her suffering dropped my defenses. I crawled to her aid, oblivious to the threat, ignoring the chance she could be baiting me.

She turned onto her back, her face flushed and drenched with sweat. I swiped the damp hair from her eyes and watched the clouds clear there. With just a glance, she was herself again.

But I had no cause to celebrate while her bloody hands worried at the hilt of a bowie knife stabbed into her stomach. She reached for me, but her fingers fell short.

“A man in the desert…” she said.

“Hannah…just please hold on. I’m going to give you—”

Behind me, Asmodeus called my oldest name, “Lilith.” The word lingered in the air of the trailer like dust motes, everywhere at once, yet he wasn’t inside with us.

He stood out on the dirt road where I’d parked my car only a few minutes before. His scalp was shorn bald, as if in some war ritual, and he wore only a pair of weathered dungarees. The sunlight cast his colorless chest almost blue.

Here was the devil who tempted Hannah in the wilderness, who stabbed her with a knife on her threshold. He spread his upraised hands and said, “All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me.”

Chapter 35

I went out to him. I didn’t bow down, even though my trembling knees fought to defy my will. This time I couldn’t run away.

Don’t face him alone, Shanti had warned.

My eldest living daughter was dying nearby. It was too much to bear, but I had no choice. If I failed, if I died, Asmodeus would slay my daughters one by one. First Hannah, then Shanti. Hester and Claire in Chicago, Amelia in Toronto, Nalini in Mumbai. He’d find them all, eradicate my line.

“What an honor, to kill the last succubus,” he said.

“Why didn’t you do it days ago?” I asked.

He paced a small circumference of ground, as if anticipating my attack. “I was curious. I wanted to admire your work. The Mellado strain, it had become too volatile, too crazed with power. They had to be put down.”

The earth around him was alive. It moved like a mudslide in sleek, undulating currents. When I realized what I was looking at, a shudder rocked my spine.

Snakes. Kings and Sidewinders, Diamondbacks and Whips. They trailed him by the thousands. In one great mass they slithered, weaving atop one another, all of them bound to their pater dominus.

I’d heard legends. Scales for the incubus, wings for the succubus. I might’ve soared above their fangs if I hadn’t crippled myself, just to walk with humankind.

I spotted Hannah’s rifle propped against the footrest of her ATV. In a flash I took it in hand, leaped onto the seat, and vaulted off the rear cargo rack.

I landed amid a hissing, thrashing horde and thrust the gunstock at Asmodeus’s bare head. He lurched out of my reach with a derisive laugh, but I struck my knee against his chest hard enough to end his gloating.

The ground was alive beneath me, sliding like a current. I couldn’t keep my balance. A cacophony of rattles arose as I swung my makeshift fighting staff again. It cracked Asmodeus across the chin and shoved him against the wall of a shed.

I slapped the gun against my hip and took aim, but even as I did, serpents twined my legs in caduceus pairs. Another reared back and thrust its fangs through my pant leg, into the meat of my calf.

My only shot went far afield. Asmodeus crushed the distance between us, faster than my eyes could track, and twisted the rifle from my grip. A blow to my temple, a bolt of blinding light, and I was down in the sand spitting blood.

The snakes circled in with their malicious black eyes and their darting forked tongues. Asmodeus tracked the gun toward my head, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. He’d let the snakes do their damage.

“Your sisterhood,” he said. “They’re all your cambion. You could’ve offered any one of them your gift. You could’ve had an army at your side. But instead, you die alone.”

Chapter 36

“Kill me and you’ll get your Kingdom on Earth,” I said. “But you’re a destroyer. How long before you ruin everything?”

Asmodeus smiled. The sun cast its brilliance around his body, like he was the Angel of Light himself.

And then came the eclipse. A long shadow passed overhead, like a low-flying plane, though I heard no engine sound.

Asmodeus snapped his head skyward just as a second flying object followed the first. Massive birds, bigger than the vulture I thought I’d seen.

I flung away the snakes that had managed to slither onto me. Another pair of fangs sank into my wrist as I rolled away from the mass of serpents.

Thick wings stropped overhead, like the crack of a canvas tarp in a windstorm. Above me, they spread to a majestic span, the sharp and wide-slotted feathers defined against the sky.

Three of them. Too large, too elegant, to be scavenger birds. And those smooth-skinned bodies wrapped in leather and cloth. My heart lifted with rapture as I recognized my angels, my Valkyries.

Asmodeus raised the rifle, but two of the winged creatures were already swooping down behind him. In perfect accord, two pairs of human hands snatched him like talons, raised him off the ground. He never made a sound.

I knew the faces of my daughters, my Hester, my Claire. And the third, who circled around to help her sisters ascend with the incubus in tow, my brave Shanti, who would not abandon me, who had refused to let me fight the pater dominus alone.

My head reeled, watching them rise to such dizzying heights. So high, it looked like they might fly their quarry straight into the sun.

The snakes fell into chaos without their Pied Piper. They fought among themselves, fleeing to rocks and crevices. I didn’t have to fear them anymore. Their venom would make me ill, but a few stray bites were hardly enough to kill a succubus.

I rose to my feet, gasping, laughing. I wanted only to sleep, and maybe forever this time, knowing that the gift I gave Shanti in that dark Brooklyn cave would be worth the cost. My lineage would survive, and perhaps the world along with it.

I knew what my daughters meant to do. They broke formation like fighter jets as they let the incubus free. He dropped through the stratosphere, almost pirouetting as he fell, a lonesome final dance like the expulsion of Satan from Heaven.

Asmodeus struck a shelf of rocks so far off, the impact was silent to my ears. A fatal fall, even for an incubus.

Back inside the trailer, I knelt at Hannah’s side. She held eternity in her sights, but a pulse still beat in her neck. There was still a chance, and like the end of so many fairy tales, all I had to do was enchant her with a kiss.

Why had I been so resistant all these years? Before Shanti, I’d offered none of my daughters their inheritance, not since Victoria died in New Orleans in the year of the American centennial.

How often had I been tempted to hex them with the succubus curse, transform them into demons, with some vain hope it would help them survive this war? But always I feared how it might engender in them a dark lust for human souls. They were warriors, not temptresses.

Already Shanti had spread her gift. She’d sought out her Chicago sisters and passed the power onto them, without my knowledge or consent. I should’ve felt betrayed, but they’d come to save my life. For that, I couldn’t muster an ounce of spite, or even disappointment.

Shanti descended from the sky like a novice hang glider, tumbling a bit on her running stop. She fell to her knees and laughed, sifting sand through her fingers. I hadn’t seen her this joyous in years.

“You finally kicked me from the nest,” she said.

Chapter 37

My daughter, you’ve asked me to give you a few details about your father, but I’ve gone and told you everything. I’ve told you about the time before we met, about the impossible battle I was fighting, about your father’s role in saving my life.

I’ll tell you about the day I first sensed your presence. An unusually balmy afternoon in the city of Johannesburg. We were in the Melville district, at an outdoor café where box fans were set up to cool the patrons at their tables.

Shanti sipped a red wine and fanned herself with a menu. Just a glass-bottle Coke for me. Two months since her transformation, the girl was bristling with nervous anticipation, a kind of hunger she’d never known before.

Soon after her desert air strike, she chose to clip her wings, preferring the grit of the earth and people over soaring on the mountaintops. She took after me in that respect.

A white limousine pulled up to the Portuguese restaurant across the street. The place was nothing flashy, but it was only a front. Bodyguards piled out of the car and ushered our target into the building.

Felix Lombard was the name he used here, though he’d been known by others. A suave incubus in an Italian suit, he didn’t so much as glance at us. Two young ladies on holiday, no threat at all. Later, Shanti would find a way to introduce herself.

I kept incognito in my wide-brimmed sun hat and dark glasses. Otherwise, there was a chance Mr. Lombard might recognize me from my fateful visit to the Mellado compound. He was there among the gathered members of Deus Inversus, one of several faces I’d managed to identify since.

Soon a new pater dominus would rise from among their ranks. That was the way of things. But after tonight, after Shanti made her move, Felix Lombard would no longer be among the candidates.

I played a subtler role in this campaign. Chaperone, adviser, overprotective mother. A long time ago, a priestess granted me an extraordinary second life, but she left me to discover it alone, abandoned me to dark desires I could barely control.

I wouldn’t forsake my daughters like that.

As a bus rumbled by, a Vespa darted out from behind it and pulled along the curb outside our meeting spot. The driver removed her mirrored helmet and whipped the sweat from her close-cropped, jet-black hair.

A gorgeous young woman of Eastern European stock, no longer content to stay cloistered in her Mojave Desert hideaway.

For now, Hannah would occupy a table by herself. She’d pretend we were strangers until such time as we needed her help. Still, I couldn’t help stealing glances at my daughter, marveling at what the succubus curse had done to her. The age-reversion had been a surprise even to me.

Yes, I was anxious for my girls, fretful of the humanity they might’ve lost when they took my gift, but this wasn’t the hell I’d feared. I had my girls with me, my family. I rented apartments instead of hotel rooms, I sat in the facing seats on trains, I made reservations.

Maybe I was fooling myself. We were still in the midst of a war. For all I knew, the first hint of loss could trigger a landslide of regret. But today we were alive, we were on the hunt.

I felt the first clutch of nausea just as I threw back the dregs of my Coke. I grunted and slapped the glass bottle on the tabletop.

“Everything all right?” Shanti asked. Even Hannah chanced a look at me from over at her table.

“I’m fine,” I insisted, suppressing a smile. I’d been through this enough times before to know the telltale signs. It was eight weeks since my night with Vincent at the Peninsula Hotel. I knew you were on your way.

So that’s the truth, my daughter. It’s what I owe you. It will be your legacy, your inheritance, no matter what you choose.

All it will take is a kiss.

About the Authors

James Patterson has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He lives in Florida with his family.

Derek Nikitas is the Edgar-nominated author of the thrillers Pyres and The Long Division and the young adult novel Extra Life. He lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Letter from James Patterson

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

About the Authors

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