A Blood of Killers Read online

  Certainly the German, cursing in a half-dozen languages as he brought up the rear, had already been separated from the herd. Obviously charged with the responsibility of confirming Max’s kill, Max was certain his employers knew he was hardly reliable and certainly replaceable. Manny, his bright blue paint leaving a trail the festival’s worst drunk could have followed to his sobriety, seemed to have fallen under the spell of an imaginary native. Max knew from experience it was a hard place from which to escape.

  Manny divided his attention between the denser pockets of forest, thick canopy blocking out the sun, along their path and the jaguar ahead. He used the obsidian knife rather than the Uzi to kill a snake that darted out at him from a shaded crevice he’d been about to put his hand in to balance himself. Max didn’t think he’d been concerned about exposing their position to anyone following them. Only Carlos kept to his training, staying on Max’s flank just far enough to avoid presenting a double target for a grenade, and maintaining a disciplined scan all around them for any signs of ambush. He’d make a fine witness—if he survived.

  The jaguar led them through crevices and ravines, along ridge-lines and into a cave system that made them crawl through a tunnel barely wide enough for Osiel. Their only light was the glowing aura surrounding her body. Passing through pools of water, they all paused to drink their fill.

  If Max had known the extent of the walk they were to take, he would have taken food and water from the festival. As it was, he was beginning to suspect the jaguar was some kind of trick, trained to lead them all astray so the Oz could escape the contract he’d arranged for his death.

  They emerged to find the jaguar waiting, breathing heavily and shaking, as if her entire being was rebelling against the use to which it was being put by a greater power. She took off only when the German appeared, crying, and protesting that he couldn’t go on.

  Max thought he heard the sound of an airplane, or a helicopter, but the Beast could find nothing above them except hawks. Carlos shook his head when Max asked if he’d heard anything. Manny nodded, but Max wasn’t certain if he’d understood the question. The German continued to babble. Max turned away before the Beast could make him tear out the madman’s throat. The German stiffened his back and set after Max.

  Max realized the German had no place else to go.

  The Beast was content to keep its prey close, though it continued to remind Max by the grinding of his teeth that it was long overdue for slaughter.

  “Where are we going?” Max asked the Oz as the sun sank behind the rocks ahead of them. There was still plenty of daylight left, but they’d passed the point where even Max could get back to the villa before nightfall.

  “Higher ground,” the Oz said. “Closer to the heavens. The better to fall farther, deeper, to where I must go.” He tried to sound cheerful, but his mouth hung open and the wrinkled flesh below his eyes sagged.

  “Like your followers.”

  “They went ahead in death to make my home ready.”

  “On the other side.”

  “In Mictlan. I love them dearly, as much as they love me.”

  “I thought your woman would do that for you,” Max said.

  The Oz grunted, smiled. “The one with the feathers? She just came to visit. She’s still mad over my being at this end of the world.”

  “She’ll get over it at the funeral.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Which was supposed to be today. You said, the Day of the Dead.”

  Osiel laughed, loud and from his belly. His brows crinkled with secrets trying to get out. “Tittle runs a little differently up here. Since the villa blew up, really. You feel it, don’t you?”

  Max felt himself to be on slippery ground. It was no use arguing with a mad man.

  “How much longer?” he finally asked.

  “Until we get to where I must be, or you get to kill me?”

  “Yes.”

  The Oz laughed. “Soon.”

  Max waited the time it took to take three steps before saying, “I could kill you now. You and everyone else here. My employers, your people, they’d all believe me if I told them I fulfilled the terms of your contract. They’d believe the rest died in these mountains, satisfying your terms, but that I survived.”

  “Not my people,” Osiel said. He tapped the end of his eye and said, without smiling, “One look into you and they’d know you were lying. The remaining terms and conditions of the contract with your employers would not be met. You’d lose favor.”

  “Do you think your people would live to tell anyone their version of the truth after I returned?”

  “Even you could not find and kill them all.”

  Max didn’t want to believe Osiel. The Beast heard the challenge and wanted it settled. Now. Max closed the distance between them with two steps, and only Carlos noticed the quick and sudden move.

  He trained his weapons on Manny and the German, backing his move.

  It would have been easy to end the ridiculous adventure now. But the Oz stood his ground, without a hint of fear over the possibilities of death or betrayal. Max thought the slight curl of his lips signaled contempt. Max was ready to end everything now, no matter the cost. Survival was not worth being held on a leash by prey that had lost its fear of him.

  But Max discovered something else in Osiel’s expression. The flicker of the alien. Not rage or hate or hunger, the things Max understood. Not quite compassion. Pity, perhaps. Or sympathy. An understanding of the cost Max was paying by holding his nature in check. A hint of respect in one predator for another.

  In Osiel’s gaze, Max found something to soothe him: submission. No regret, no yearning for escape, but an acceptance of fate, of death.

  More than acceptance. An expectation. A hope. A need for what Max and the Beast promised.

  Max took a step back, trying to catch each subtle shift in Osiel’s expression. He caught the truth in words the Oz had already thrown at him: a man fighting his own battle with death, trying to hold himself back from taking the leap he so desperately wanted to take because the time and the place was not right, because he would miss something he wanted.

  Because he wouldn’t go home.

  Mictlan.

  Words could not contain the truth bursting from Osiel’s flesh.

  Osiel’s eyes widened. He bared his teeth. His tattoos rippled and his face grew lines, deep and savage, from which another visage struggled to emerge. The smell of blood was thick in the air for an instant. The trees and mountains faded, the world became a place of mist.

  Max felt as if the instant of now that had been frozen since the villa’s destruction was about to start up again, only time would take another direction and carry him to places he could never imagine or survive.

  Osiel jerked a hand up, snapped his mouth shut. It was just enough of a reflection of the violence within Max to bring him back to himself and the world he knew.

  He stood facing the Oz, not sure what had just happened, feeling only that he’d narrowly escaped a trap he’d been warned not to set off.

  “Not yet,” Osiel said, with a wink. The fierceness of what the Oz had been, the shifting lines in his face and the blood-scent, were gone. They were back in the mountain wilderness. “Wouldn’t want us both to be lost.” He moved on, turning his back on Max.

  Max watched him go. Carlos lowered his guns. The Beast cowered, leaving Max naked and alone.

  They went deeper into the unknown.

  The jaguar, panting, stopped in the shade of an overhang to rest, dipping its head to drink from a pool. The rest of them watched. No one challenged the cat for water.

  The grinding silence of the forest closed in on Max, wore at his resolve. It seemed as if they were the last living things in the world.

  The Beast returned, as hungry as ever, and filled Max’s mind with the familiar images of killing and torture. Max embraced the Beast’s need, finding in them the comfort of familiarity. He didn’t want to think about Osiel’s strange w
ays.

  “We should have planned for this little expedition,” the German said. “I’m not special ops, I don’t do these kinds of field operations. People don’t just run into the —”

  Max exploded, had his hand around the German’s throat before he knew it. The man kicked and squirmed in his grasp, exciting the Beast.

  A morsel. That’s all it wanted. Osiel’s time was so near. He wasn’t running away. No one else could get to him. He was safely tucked away for future consumption. The German was here. Now. Max understood, though the Beast could not speak. Even dogs were tossed bones to gnaw on before getting meat.

  Manny came to them, focused on the German. He marked Max’s victim with blue paint—a spiral on the forehead. The Beast lost its appetite. Max let him go. Clutching his throat, the German scrambled away, but stayed within everyone’s line of sight. He lowered his head and, between coughs, sobbed.

  The jaguar licked her snout as she stared at Max.

  “Fasting is good for the soul,” Osiel said. He gave Max a quick look. “We all need cleansing.” When no one answered, he got up, slipped between the trees.

  Max listened, tracking him. The Beast quieted, stalking.

  For that moment, the Beast was not trying to tear through Max to reach what it wanted. They were joined in a single purpose. Max braced for a pursuit, for the kill.

  Maybe they’d finally reached Osiel’s killing ground.

  Wood snapped. Brush rustled.

  Osiel reappeared, sugar cane under one arm and apples in the crook of the other. He let the apples fall and, with Manny’s knife, split the sugar cane, distributed them like the skulls he’d given to children. Manny, Carlos and the German ate. Osiel stared into the thickets. Max watched Osiel.

  The jaguar remained fixed on Max.

  When cat moved on, the German ran to the pool to lap at water. The rest, even Osiel, took a turn and then pushed on after the cat before she disappeared. Max waited until everyone was done and gone before going for water. He stared at his reflection in the pool, finding in it the darkness in the eyeholes of Osiel’s mask.

  He found, as well, the twisted visage of the Beast reshaping the flesh of his face into a leering grimace that might have rivaled the expression of masks displayed during Osiel’s Day of the Dead festival, or the images on his catafalque.

  Max slapped the water and quickly caught up to his target.

  It was Manny who, in the night, as they followed the jaguar glowing as she had in the caves, came to Max and said, “Someone’s following us.”

  “Only one?” Max asked.

  Carlos came closer, listening intently with both concern and annoyance.

  The Beast understood a hunter denied prey, but Carlos’ vulnerability only sharpened the Beast’s hunger for him.

  “No.”

  “They’re not all enemies,” Osiel said, from ahead of them.

  “And watch yourself, please. Wander off now, and you’ll never be found.”

  “Let them come to us,” Max said. “This all has to end sometime.”

  They walked through the night following the cat as the mountains and the forest closed in around them, choking and tripping and scratching. Osiel was Max’s true guiding star. He didn’t need the jaguar. They might have crossed the borders of a hundred countries, walked for months in the starless night beneath the tree canopy, and Max would not have noticed. He’d slipped, though not without noticing, into the eternal moment, the ever-unfolding instant of the present. The Beast did not protest. Together, they let the current of their prey carry them, and the unearthly silence of the forest didn’t distract them, nor did the sounds of the others struggling to keep up.

  Somehow, the German didn’t get lost. He did stop complaining.

  Osiel said something to the jaguar and she paused by a dead tree. Flowers bloomed by her light from a vine choking the white wood. Osiel kneeled in the gloom just beyond the creature’s circle of light, put his face to a small, winding stream, and drank deeply.

  Owls hooted, as if in welcome.

  The German followed immediately, and just as quickly picked his head up and whispered, “tequila.” He put his face back into the gurgling water. Manny followed, drinking from cupped hands first. “Chocolate,” he said, and went back for more. Carlos didn’t say what he tasted, he just drank, fast and steady.

  Max wanted nothing to do with the water, but he was thirsty, and the Beast howled for a taste, adding another front of pressure in its assault on Max’s fragile self-discipline.

  Max gave in. Maybe it had caught something Max missed. Let it see what was in the water. Give it something, if it couldn’t have Osiel, the German, even Carlos and Manny.

  He didn’t want to think about what the Beast would feel like if it was disappointed with what it found.

  The blood surprised Max. He reared back, thinking one of the others had been killed and was bleeding into the stream. But the forest remained still, silent, except for the sounds of water and men drinking. The Oz had had his fill and was standing, looking to the jaguar, who paced back and forth as she watched the men, accompanied by a cloud of moths.

  He drank deeply. So did the Beast. And though what they took excavated a greater hunger and thirst in flesh and spirit, Max couldn’t stop himself, and neither could the Beast. In the eternal moment of Osiel’s company, they were at least trying to serve their appetites, even if death’s sustenance was denied.

  “We have enough to carry us over,” the Oz said, after awhile, and went to each of them, tapping shoulders with his fingertips. His touch was electric, a shock that broke the connection between need and the promise of satisfaction.

  Blood turned to water in Max’s mouth, and he spat it out and stood, bloated, sluggish, the Beast’s raw rage storming the walls of his purpose.

  The blood was a lie. Rage shot through him. His hands seemed to close over Osiel’s throat.

  But Osiel’s murder was also an illusion. The Oz was walking back to the jaguar, oblivious to Max’s fantasy.

  Max knew he’d been drinking water. He was still in the world. It was the Beast that had been fooled, lost in its appetites, blind to the moment. As always.

  The gulf between Max and his demon had never been wider. In that space, with the Beast’s rage and hunger entwined with illusion, Max’s will held. Even the Beast understood its instincts could not be trusted. The dream walk through night, through festival and forest, in the company of fire serpents and glowing jaguars, remained a more vivid truth than the world of killers and contracts and dusty Mexican villages. That dream’s reality contained the Beast behind walls it could not break. And in Osiel’s insubstantial world where time stood still and blood flowed through but not into the Beast, hunger was an eternal torment beyond satisfaction.

  Max wasn’t sure how much longer he and the Beast could survive the mission’s strange parameters. He was grateful he’d been pulled away before he’d fallen for the lie of blood-filled streams. Manny and Carlos, equally dazed, quickly shook off the webs in which they’d been snared, Manny with a forced laugh and Carlos with a quick spit into the water. Only the German needed to be pulled away, and only the German walked on unsteadily, drunk on illusion.

  They resumed their journey with the Beast nestled in its walls and in Max, refusing to stir, even for the promise of finally attaining the prey leading them.

  Even when nightmares tainted the dream through which they walked.

  Max tensed at the first hint of motion, high up in the trees. Leaves whispered, though no breeze blew through them. Stars vanished for fleeting moments, eclipsed by darting darkness.

  Bats, Max thought, though he couldn’t spot their black bodies. The Beast remained quiet, sullen.

  Without telltale downdraft or the smell of engine exhaust, the appearance of a noise-suppressed helicopter seemed unlikely. Besides, that level of tech was out of reach for local drug lords, and Max saw no reason for his employers to send one as backup in his operation.

  A night
drop seemed more likely, but the crashing of drug bundles or even men through the canopy was missing.

  Another mystery to grate his nerves. The Beast fed on the misery of his frustration, though the meal was sparse.

  Something flashed across his path.

  Staring.

  Black, like a patch of night fallen from between the stars. A face. Skeletal. A body. A woman’s body.

  A whirlwind of darkness caught him in its vortex. Women, dressed in rags, bones flashing between clumps of dried meat and torn cloth, their heads reduced to bare skulls, danced around him, arms outstretched, reaching for Max.

  Chattering. Clicking. The rattle of bones on bones.

  Their clawed hands raked his back and shoulders as they tried to drag him off.

  Illusion. Even the Beast believed what was happening was only an illusion.

  But the pain was real, and so was his blood.

  Max slowed, considered fighting back. But Manny, Carlos and Osiel weren’t reacting to the apparitions flitting about. He didn’t want to wind up like the German, still reeling as he brought up the rear.

  Cihuateteo, the Oz said, inside Max. The ghosts of women who died in childbirth.

  “What?” Max asked, the word carrying in the night like a birdcall. You might remember a few.

  Carlos turned, tapped his chest and shook his head. Max waved him off. Manny looked to one side, as if following the word’s flight through the trees.

  But don’t worry. Your time with them hasn’t come, yet.

  More lies, Max told himself. Everything about this assignment was a lie. Including the voice in his head.

  He rode that certainty until the skull faces faded from his sight, until the clutching and grabbing stopped and the trees fell silent. He checked the scratches on his arms and shoulders and told himself he’d drifted into a thorn bush.

  The Beast shifted, dug itself deeper into Max, content that it had been proven right. Max focused on his guiding star. Night comforted him, along with the promise of Osiel’s death.

  The morning sun shocked Max. He’d gotten used to the darkness surrounding the jaguar’s glow. It had felt like home, or Osiel’s Mictlan. Dawn felt like an intrusion, destroying the dream of intimacy between killer and victim that had carried Max and the Beast through the night’s never-ending moment between breaths.