A Blood of Killers Read online

  The Beast’s dormancy made it easier for him to maintain control. There was only one rage to deal with.

  “Death isn’t always easy to find, is it?” Osiel continued. A few fireworks exploded over the sprawling house, too early in the twilight to have much effect. “Surprising, really. In all the blood and pain, the doorway that is death is so often forgotten. One can become lost, so far from home. Used, by anyone, and wasted.” The Oz slowed, slumped. The red dog whined, darted forward, nudged the man’s leg with his nose. “Death should never be taken for granted.”

  “I don’t understand,” Max said.

  Osiel stopped. Turned. His fingers went to his chest, where the bone centerpiece of his necklace would have rested had he not surrendered it to the women. “You can’t. Not now. Perhaps never. But just as I must sacrifice to mend the wounds of the past, so must you sacrifice to become what you were made to be.”

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. I care only that you are my brother in death who will deliver me home, and I will help you as I can.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?” Max asked.

  Osiel’s eyes opened wider. Sancho jumped on him, paws to his chest, and yipped. “I’m afraid of not bringing one message I carry to the dead who wait for my return, and of not giving the other the living need with my passing. Both spoken in blood.”

  “Now?”

  The Oz’s eyes narrowed. He smiled, though his expression was cold, as if the emptiness he contained pressed against flesh and bone for release.

  Max wondered suddenly if Osiel carried his own Beast.

  “Soon, my friend. There are preparations to make. This is a journey for both of us.”

  “I’m here. Waiting.”

  “But to kill me you must follow me, and I’m going just a little farther. Are you coming?”

  “Until you give me the word.”

  “Then enjoy the festivities. Be yourself. As I will be.”

  Osiel headed for the villa, its white walls capturing the colors of the setting sun and reflecting them in a brief, fiery golden blaze. Sancho took a few steps after him, then stopped. He watched, along with Max, both still, until the Oz had entered the house through a great, nail-studded door. And when he was inside, Sancho raced away, through the festival, now louder, raucous, the music laced with cries and screams. As the dog ran, others followed. They stopped fighting, playing, feeding, sleeping, fucking, and took off with one mind ruling over a hundred lithe bodies, sleek and speedy, sprinting into the sunset as if to catch the sun.

  The goats, pigs and cows stayed, tied or penned in place. No one else seemed to notice.

  Watching the dogs fade into the dust of their passing, Max realized he hadn’t seen any cats, nor heard birds singing. Unusual. He always paid attention to animals, since they so easily gave up positions of both predators and prey. And here he’d been free, except for the dogs.

  Max strolled back to the festivities, hands in his pockets, tasting the air. Gusting breezes twined smoke from charred meat with strings of dust. Amid the brass and guitars, the clear chime of bells rang as if carried like a leaf on a breeze from another country. One of the tourists, the young blond man who’d danced with Osiel along with his wife, now alone and naked, stabbed himself in the groin and sawed a hollowed space between his legs before collapsing, gagging, eyes wide open to the sky, his mouth a volcano of vomit and blood. Max watched to see if he’d drown or bleed to death.

  The smell of raw meat, of blood and the terror of mind-expanding pain, teased at the Beast’s attention. Without Osiel’s emptiness to keep it in check, his demon emerged, hungry.

  But the dead man was not to their taste. Pain’s seasoning had already faded.

  Max found his escorts waiting for him. Carlos stood arms crossed over his chest, on duty, an obelisk of muscle and murder impervious to the desires unwinding around him. Manny flirted with two young women, twins, Max suddenly realized, but acknowledged Max with eye contact.

  “Where’s the German?” Max said.

  Manny pointed to a tent a hundred meters away. Shadows danced on the fabric walls, some slow, others in short, sharp bursts of motion. The tent walls billowed, as if holding back a storm. Colors seemed to bleed through in windows of light looking in on strange, restless shapes shifting too fast for recognition.

  “No, he wouldn’t be in there,” Max said.

  Manny looked at where he’d pointed. His eyes narrowed for a moment, and he stiffened, eliciting frowns from his escorts.

  “This isn’t like any Day of the Dead I’ve ever seen,” Carlos said, head lowered as he scanned the crowd.

  “Sorry,” Manny said to Max. “I saw him heading in that direction, but I guess he’d never— “ He shook his head, unable to look anymore, or finish his thought. He hugged his women closer to him, and they surrendered after a moment of resistance, as if unable to fight off the larger mood of abandon all around them. “Too bad nobody’s got a camera,” he said, and gave Max a sly grin. “People pay good money to see this kind of action.”

  Another scream shot through festival din, this time ending in a whimper the Beast found enticing. Manny was right. This was not a celebration of the dead from any common countryside tradition. The shadows haunting the darker corners of the festival grounds quivered, too large for the spaces containing them, too deep for the dusk light. They roared, like the Beast.

  There was no reason for them to be moving.

  Max didn’t believe in ghosts, or else he might have tasted the shadows. He saw no threat in oddities, and had experienced enough of the inexplicable to know that if something couldn’t kill or be killed, it didn’t matter.

  What mattered was the flesh, and the Beast’s arousal, and his frustration over not being able to complete the Osiel contract just yet. “Do you want us to find the German?” Carlos asked.

  Max waved him off, ignoring the assassin’s disappointed expression.

  The man needed to relax. He’d never last in the field. Unlike Manny, who had the right idea.

  Let everyone wait as long as they wanted. Let everyone do whatever it was they needed to do. Osiel, the German, the assassins, even his employers didn’t matter. Not now. Not this instant. What mattered now was the festival and all that it offered.

  He took a step in the direction from which the last scream had come.

  A crack, louder than a lightning strike, split the air at his back. Everyone in his line of sight jumped, then froze for an instant. No storm clouds. No flash of lightning.

  In the less-than-a-heartbeat of silence that followed, the now of Max’s life fractured.

  Shattered.

  He wanted to breathe, but didn’t have time.

  Past and future, never close, fell over Max’s horizons. He floated in the instant’s rubble. He couldn’t remember where he was, or what he needed to do. He was hungry, but didn’t know what would fill him.

  The Beast shrank from the dislocation, burrowing deeper into Max. But it could not sink its claws into him, slipping over the glassy surface of Max’s confusion. Max missed its familiar rage. They were each adrift in a strange and silent sea, free from each other, caught in contrary currents.

  A short burst of sound, like the rush of water from a broken dam, filled the peace. Shattered fragments of the instant flew back together, gave way to the next.

  The sharp report of bombs going off brought the world back into focus.

  Max and the Beast fell into each other like long lost brothers rediscovering one another in a strange land. Max sucked in a breath. Alive. And very nearly back in the now.

  People ducked, fell to the ground, turned to the villa. The explosions lit their faces in fiery flashes, revealing a melding of joy and terror in their expressions.

  Carlos smiled. Manny laughed. His women leered.

  The Beast found its nest in Max’s heart and peered out at the world with searing hatred.

  Max faced Osiel’s house. Parts of the roof were sti
ll coming down, tiles spinning as they arced through the air. The porch was in the final stages of crumbling, portions of its roof and colonnade afire. Walls collapsed inward around gaping holes from which flames leapt. Wrought iron window guards vanished in clouds of dust. A staccato run of smaller explosions popped through the wreckage, as if the stars were strafing what the night had already destroyed.

  Festival attendants streamed past him, many still singing and dancing, others raising their arms to the heavens and crying out. They rushed to the fire like fish to bait, some crying out “Malverde,” others making sounds that might have been a language, or just expressions of their madness.

  Max fought to absorb the reality of what had just happened. When the smoke reached him and the chemical stink of explosives confirmed he was in familiar territory, that reality slammed into him. Someone else had killed Osiel.

  He’d failed his employers. They’d instantly lost face with Osiel’s business associates. The careful planning, the escorts, the boots, had all been for nothing.

  Their troubles didn’t concern him except for the consequences to him: the removal of protection and resources, giving way to the problem of fending for himself in a world grown so small there was no place to hide.

  He might be forgiven. But he’d been forgiven for so much. More was expected from him, after all these years.

  Someone would have to take the blame. The German, the assassin bodyguards, a few local drug lords, wouldn’t be enough. There would be interrogations. Executions. Examples made. He’d seen it before.

  No. There was no going back to the States.

  No matter what Osiel said, he wouldn’t be tolerated here, either, a stranger to these people, their failed assassin, a predator even more dangerous than the ones they were accustomed to dealing with.

  The explosion had killed him as surely as it had blasted the Oz.

  Pieces of that shattered now remained lodged in him like shrapnel, reminding him of when his world had changed. He almost felt like prey. The Beast recoiled in outrage.

  Through the smoke and fire, Max caught a familiar scent. Too soon, someone whispered.

  Closer to Max than he’d ever allow anyone to be. He turned; no one there. Shadows shot out from his feet toward the horizon, flickering with the flames leaping from the roof, a lone and wavering lance of darkness against the fading light. The last of the sunlight huddled against the horizon, as if protecting its brand of illumination.

  Words spoken, without accent, inside his head.

  At least Osiel had not laughed at him.

  A figure appeared out of the flames to greet the crowd gathering around the ruined villa. A sustained cheer went up. Bands resumed playing. Pieces of the wreckage, still burning, rose to the sky, raised by festival attendants. The figure merged with the head of a long line of people winding away from the villa, singing and dancing. They threaded their way through the tents and outbuildings, knocking over tables, spilling food and sweets, barely avoiding prematurely setting off the catafalque. Manny and even Carlos went off to join the line. By the time the last of the crowd had dispersed from the villa’s ruins, the line had become a great, flaming serpent winding through the countryside, devouring the night, raising its voice in triumph against the darkness.

  Max had not seen the face, but he’d recognized the tattoos and the prancing, bow-legged pattern of dance-steps. Max had not lost his target.

  Even with the scars of the broken moment marking him, Max felt like himself again, safe within the fortress of his skills and allegiances, the Beast his ally and comfort. With his place in the world secured, appetite took hold.

  Osiel would not be anyone’s prey, tonight.

  Still, there were others from which to choose.

  If he’d really wanted the German, Max was certain all he’d have to do is watch the great serpent, scaled with the faces of people, crawl past him. But his need for the German was obscure, remote. There had been questions, but they’d been lost in the fractured now. There was better prey to be found.

  Max followed in the wake of the Osiel’s serpent, stepping carefully between the turned-over pots of food and a few abandoned instruments. The explosion had transformed the festival’s mood. The random music and isolated dancing had faded away. The majority of the festival attendants followed Osiel into the countryside, leaving the grounds sparsely populated. The remainders, young and old, lay babbling, fucking, drinking. Moans and cries drifted through the night. The smell of smoke and blood and shit and piss overwhelmed the cooking odors and the scents of well-spiced food ready to eat. Fights erupted spontaneously between individuals and groups, collapsed just as quickly as the combatants became exhausted or lost interest. Others wandered like shell-shocked survivors of a battle. The children had stopped playing to hide.

  Max relaxed for the first time since he’d arrived. The landscape felt like the home he’d never known, a place he’d been born into and would return to rest when his days were done. It was a place where he could hunt without concern for the consequences of his appetites.

  The Beast flexed and stretched within him, confident of a feast.

  In one of the outbuildings, the oldest of the encampment’s women sat over babies in a makeshift nursery. They prayed to objects they held in their withered hands: carved stone, jeweled shapes, gemstone beaded strings wrapped around their wrists. A few of the babies mewled or complained, but none cried, as if they didn’t want to draw the serpent’s attention.

  Not his prey.

  An old man parted from a gathering of young and old repairing an altar —replacing statues and liquor bottles, relighting candles, repairing broken strings of beads, putting small baskets of odds and ends back up, dusting off fallen pictures—and tapped Max’s wrist insistently, croaking, “sangre, sangre.”

  The old man closed his eyes as Max grabbed him by the throat. Everyone in the group restoring the altar kept their heads down. No one offered a protest. The old man had already been given up for dead.

  No terror. Very little room left for pain. Not his prey.

  Max threw the man back to his companions, started to walk past the altar, stopped suddenly. He picked up a broken piece of bottle and cut one of his fingers, then let blood drip on to one of the statues—actually a plastic doll, slim and impossibly proportioned for a woman, dressed in a sequined red gown, her blond hair braided with black threads ending in skull beads, her tiny, beatific face finely etched with the lines of a skull mask. His blood found tears in the gown, fell into wounds that had been cut and painted on her body, arms, and legs.

  A couple of the teenagers and a middle-aged woman with thick, calloused fingers cried out, startled, afraid. The group turned its attention to Max. Relaxed as a whole when they all realized he hadn’t come for them. Some nodded their heads, others mumbled chants. They seemed grateful.

  Max felt oddly fulfilled, having sacrificed a part of himself to the festival, though he didn’t understand why he’d done it.

  He moved on, already forgetting the act. There was better prey to find.

  Lovers on the catafalque tempted him with promise, but he found the displays of sensual passion and of simple, violent fucking before the array of gaudy visions repellent. Demons, animals and humans staring out from cloth and the boards took life from torches and camp fire light. The heat reflecting from the catafalque pricked Max’s flesh. Frantic flames waved like tentacles, eager to consume. In the deeper corners, in the catafalque’s hollow heart, shadows trembled like muscles held taut, waiting to be released.

  His prey. But Max was not in the mood to share his hunting ground with other predators, even if they were only illusions.

  Max wandered through a cluster of trailers and RV’s, huddled together like sheep in a corner of a madhouse corral. From the other side of aluminum walls came the sounds of panting, weeping, laughter. Dull victims. He could already see their eyes opening wide in shock as he burst in on them, hear their feeble cries of protest, feel the puny strikes of their d
efense. Even the Beast was restless with the offerings, hungry, but with the taste for something more extreme.

  Osiel had sharpened their palate.

  A silent but dimly lit RV drew Max’s attention, and he looked through a crack in the curtains at a window. Someone was transmitting video through a satellite uplink. When Max checked the roof, he found a folding transmission antenna. He considered the operation proof Osiel’s passing was as important as he’d been told.

  Max ranged to the darkest corners, to the shadows spilling out from tents and the outbuildings, to see who, or what, lay hidden in the shadows. He challenged the shapes he’d seen before, even if his daring drove the Beast deeper inside.

  The air chilled his lungs. Whispers invited him to places he couldn’t reach. He caught a glimpse of a woman’s face, skin flapping from her cheeks and forehead, tears of blood staining the bone beneath. Before he could meet her gaze, she was gone.

  She’d seemed familiar, but would have had to hear her scream to know who she was.

  Mostly, he found dust.

  And then, just as he thought his hunger would force him to lose control and allow the Beast to have its way with Osiel’s torch parade, he discovered the Oz’s sisters crowded into a candle-lit storehouse no bigger than a tool shed with half its roof missing.

  He glanced to the side and found the hut, limned by the villa’s fire, where he’d earlier met Osiel. He’d arrived at the place he’d instinctively tracked the women to when he saw them leave the meeting. The Beast purred, telling itself it had known all along where they were going.

  The sisters greeted him eagerly, rebozos flying from their shoulders and robes falling to the ground as they rose to welcome him as one creature made of many arms and breasts and legs. He dove into their fleshy mass, tearing at cloth as easily as flesh, not caring who heard or might come to investigate. As if anyone would bother.

  He’d found his prey.

  They didn’t cry out when the Beast rose in Max, when his teeth bit too hard, too deep, when his hands closed too tight. They offered themselves to him eagerly, fending one another off for the chance of accepting his next assault. His hand fell on a sharp edge—a knife, like stone. Obsidian. He moved them to the next circle of his intimacy, cutting, carving, letting blood flow, mopping up pools with the fallen shawls so he could see his work clearly. Still, they were quiet, writhing not with agony but in ecstasy. The Beast worked harder to inspire the echoes of its rage, but all it could earn was a muffled moan, a dry chattering of bone at the back of a throat.