“How long until we get there?” Ray asked.
“We’re stopping at a safe house for the night.” He pressed a green button on the phone and held it. Nothing happened. Banged it on his knee again. “It’s too risky to drive in the dark. Military roadblocks and gangsters all over the place. And we need you to get your new face on.”
Ray sighed. He hated the whole process of putting on the prostheses—a fake nose and a patch of what looked like scarred skin on his cheek—though he had to admit they were pretty effective, especially with his hair dyed oily black. He’d grown adept at using the adhesive to get them precisely in place, then touching up the edges with some thick cover-up. It hurt like hell when he had to rip them off, but the two pieces of fake flesh completely transformed him into someone else—Ray-not-Ray. A former Hollywood special effects makeup guy had been recruited by Jeremy in the late nineties, Mantu had explained. It was good enough, Jeremy said, to fool almost all biometric camera systems.
Mantu pressed the button and held the phone to his ear. “Hola, amigos.” He listened quietly, nodding. Looked at Ray, then nodded more. “Sí, sí. Hasta luego. Bueno.” Hung up the phone. “Good. The safe house is a go.” He reached into a bag and pulled out a mirror and a plastic container. “Here. Pretty yourself up.”
—
The safe house was a cattle farm carved out of the jungle at the end of a long, lonely road. Ray smelled it before he saw it, the scent of manure and mud and diesel. Ramón drove the van into a barn, and two vaqueros in broad-brimmed cowboy hats closed the door behind them.
“Welcome to the Hotel Cowshit,” Mantu said. He opened the van door. “Let’s go inside and eat before I decide to rope me one of those steers for dinner.”
Ray climbed out after him. The two cowboys were moving a stack of hay bales. Beneath the stacks, in the dirt, was a metal trapdoor surrounded by concrete.
Ray shook his head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Trust me. This place is like the Trump Towers compared to that trailer-trash hellhole in Blackwater.”
Mantu lifted the heavy door.
“Down the hatch, gringo,” Ramón said. He gave Ray a thumbs-up.
—
It wasn’t so bad—tiny but clean, airy, and well-lit. Ray had his bug bites tended, then they had a dinner of frijoles, rice, and fried plantains delivered from the kitchen in the farmhouse above. Mantu closed himself in a tiny room full of computers while Ray sat digging through the backpack that had been prepared for him. A new set of clothes, pre-stained and distressed, along with a pair of knockoff Nikes. A water bottle with a built-in purifier. A new locator watch, which he immediately fastened onto his wrist. A new passport—same fake name and address as before—with a photo matching his fake face. If he flipped open his passport the right way the photo would change, showing him without the makeup. The Brotherhood had plenty of magicians on its payroll, and the wallet was something stage magicians had developed for switching playing cards. Another chintzy prepaid flip phone. And finally a wallet full of cash, and a credit card tied to a flimsy shell account that could never be traced.
Mantu emerged a short while later. His mouth was drawn tight. “Okay. We’re good for tomorrow. You’ll finally get to see the place and meet the bosses. It’s gonna blow your mind, Ray. I’m talking a fortress full of genius scientists and crazy psychics and shamans. Like something out of a comic book. And the shit that goes on there…well, I still only half understand what those Brothers are up to.”
“I’m sure it’s fascinating. Did you ask about Ellen and William?”
“Yeah. Of course. They’re not one hundred percent certain yet, but it looks like Lily’s not involved. At least not her inner circle.”
“Who is it, then?”
“I don’t know. Jeremy thinks it was either a random kidnapping, or that Lily put out some kind of APB for the two of them and some jackass up and grabbed them. Or maybe they just missed you somehow.”
Ray grimaced. “I was on that goddamned Ferris wheel. Trapped in it. Maybe they just didn’t see me.” Of course there was another possibility, but it was one he didn’t want to think about and certainly didn’t want to speak aloud. How Lily, once again, may have taken away those he loved simply to torture him. As some kind of sick game. Or perhaps she knew that he would come after them, and, in doing so, deliver himself to her.
Mantu shrugged. “If we’re lucky one of them still has a transmitter. If not, we have other ways of finding them. They know the meditation.” Mantu had taught them all visualization and meditation techniques that were supposed to make them more visible to the Brotherhood’s remote viewer team. Ellen thought it was bullshit, but William liked that kind of thing.
“Well, I’m going to help find them. I can’t just sit on my ass while your psychics are swinging pendulums over maps.”
Mantu shook his head. “No way, Ray. You’ve been in danger for too long. My orders—orders right from the top, I should add—are to get you to Eleusis in one piece. You’re needed there.”
“Well, Ellen and William need me, too.” This was déjà vu of the worst sort. “You might recall that you guys told me the same thing once. That they were okay. That you wouldn’t let anything happen to them. When really they were tied up in some basement cell in Crawford’s fucking mansion.”
Mantu looked away. “Yeah. You have a point.”
“Damn right I have a point.”
“But listen—first things first. We’ll find them. We’ll get their signal. And then we’ll get them back to you. The Brothers don’t fuck around when it comes to our people. I promise you.”
He’d heard that before, too. “Look, I promised Ellen and William I would never let them fall into the hands of that bitch again. They’ve been dragged into this nightmare because of me. Out of their normal lives into this. Running and hiding all the time, scared that a stranger is going to step out of the shadows and fill us with bullets. Do you know what that does to a woman from a little town in West Virginia? What it does to a kid?”
Mantu shook his head. “I know. But Ray, we’ve been trying to get you to Eleusis since you left the States. Not just for your safety but for theirs. You kept refusing. You wanted to go it on your own. You kept swearing you’d be all right.”
Ray felt the blood rising in his face. “Don’t you dare make this my fault, Mantu.”
“I’m not—”
“Because I know I said I’d never hit you again, but if you—”
“Okay. Whoa. Take it easy.” He held up his hands. “How about we have a drink?” He pulled a bottle out of a rucksack. “Mezcal. I picked it up the last time I was in Chiapas.”
Ray stared. “Okay. Yeah. Fine. After last night, I could use about ten drinks.”
—
Despite his exhaustion, Ray couldn’t even think about sleep. Now he was half in the bag, too—he and Mantu had killed the mezcal and were midway through a bottle of local rum.
“So why do they want me at Eleusis? The one time I met him, Jeremy kept staring at me like I was some kind of rare butterfly. It gave me the creeps.”
Mantu topped off Ray’s glass. “Well, first off, they know she’s been after you from the get-go. It’s in our best interest that she doesn’t catch you, too—not just yours. The bitch will make you suffer and she’ll try to get every last bit of information out of you in the process. And you might not take it seriously, Ray, but this Brotherhood thing is deep with us. And you’re one of us.”
“Well, I’ll decide that. I never took any vows.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re one of us, so we took a vow to protect you.”
He was serious. Ray had often wondered if Mantu would throw himself in front of a loaded gun to save him. “But it’s more than that. It’s about the weird stuff, too. The ‘Great Work’ they’re doing, right? Why do they want me for that?”
Mantu swirled the shrinking ice cubes in his rum. “That’s complicated. You know me—I’m just a muscle man, for the mo
st part. I’m not in the ‘need to know’ on the spooky shit.”
“You have to have some idea. You trained in all that stuff.”
Mantu took a drink. Set down his glass. Nodded. “Yeah. I have a general idea. We all learn the basics—psychic self-defense, projection, and some magical theory. We joke that it’s psychic boot camp.” He rubbed his head. “But what they call the Great Work covers a lot of territory. Basically, it’s to keep the world in balance. To help humanity evolve.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that a hundred times. And it still sounds like new age bullshit. But whatever. What I don’t understand is why I’m so important.”
“You know how Crawford was trying to…communicate with those things—the entities. Behind the lights. Through the lights.”
The hair on Ray’s neck rose. He hated thinking about what had happened in that stone circle under the stars. The mention of it made him want to cover his ears and start yammering to drown Mantu out.
“Well, going all the way back to the old teachings—and I’m talking way, way back—there’s a whole mess of them. Different kinds of beings. Not all nasty, either, like what came through in Blackwater. In fact, some of them like to help us. They want us to grow. To help us evolve in spite of ourselves.”
“Good monsters? Nice, friendly aliens or whatever the fuck they are?”
Mantu laughed. “There’s another word for them. You go to church when you were a kid?”
“Yeah. I hated it.”
“The church school I went to had a painting of two little kids, a boy and a girl, walking along this little road. Little white kids, of course. But there was this dude walking behind them. I used to stare at that picture all the time. He was wearing a white robe, and he had—”
“Wings.”
Mantu smiled.
“You’re telling me Jeremy and the Brothers at this Eleusis are talking to angels? Are you shitting me?”
“That’s one name for them. But there are lots of others. Shedim is another. Nephilim is even older. Djinn if you’re Arab. Lots of names for the same things.”
Ray stared. Then he held out his glass. “Fuck that shit. Let’s finish that bottle.”
Mantu laughed. “Bottoms up.”
—
“Welcome to my home.”
Ellen and William had been escorted through the doors of an enormous colonial estate house enclosed within a twenty-foot-tall fence topped with razor wire. Guards stationed along the perimeter ringed the opulent building. It was an armed compound, not a home.
The man welcoming them wore an open-collared shirt beneath a designer suit. His exposed chest was covered in short black hair. He was tall, more mestizo than Indian, and slender, with large, vibrant eyes.
“My name is El Varón.” His accent was unusual, his English nearly perfect.
“What’s that mean?” Ellen asked.
“The gentleman, I think,” William said.
El Varón smiled. “A smart young man. Muy inteligente.”
“Some gentleman,” Ellen scoffed, pulling her arm out of the grip of the smelly, rough guard escorting her.
“I’m sorry for the unpleasantness in getting you here, but you can be assured that while you are my guests your safety and comfort are my primary concerns.”
Unpleasantness was putting it lightly. They’d been tied up and gagged and locked in the back of a pitch-black trailer. The duct tape hadn’t been taken off their mouths until they’d been loaded onto the private plane. Even then, they’d been told to stay quiet, and Ellen had felt the greedy, lascivious eyes of the guards ogling her the entire ride. The windows of the plane had been covered so they couldn’t tell where they were or where they were going. Not that she would have been able to tell anyway.
“Well, Mr. El Varón, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel so welcome.” She moved protectively in front of William. Not that it mattered. Three of their escorts held military rifles and were standing a few feet away. But she felt like she had to assert herself. She wasn’t going to act weak in front of these men, not while William was watching her.
El Varón shook his head. “You have my apologies, Señora. And my promise to do the utmost to make it up to you and your fine son. It’s an unfortunate fact that my business requires some primitive tactics at times.”
William stepped in front of his mother. “Let us go,” he said. Ellen grabbed him by the shoulders, but he shook off her grasp. “Just let us go.”
El Varón bent to look William in the eyes. “Little man, I brought you here for a good reason. Not to hurt you. I bought you here to keep you safe.”
“Safe from what?” Ellen asked. “What’s safe about getting kidnapped, tied up, and—”
El Varón wagged a finger. Several of his thin fingers had thick gold rings. “Someone has been looking for you for a long time. And for a…man you were said to be traveling with. But he is of no concern to me now. You are here, and that is what matters. And she—this awful woman—would do very bad things to you if she found you. So I brought you to my home, where you will be safe and comfortable.”
Ellen’s fists clenched. Lily. She’d half-expected Lily to be the one behind the compound door. But now here was this well-dressed man claiming to be their protector. And how had his goons not found Ray? Maybe they had missed him when he’d gotten into a separate cage on the Ferris wheel. How quickly a small decision like that could change everything. “We can take care of ourselves,” she said. “We don’t need you. Let us go. We were doing fine on our own.”
El Varón shook his head, frowning. He spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. “You don’t seem to understand, Señora. If I let you go, she will take you. You do not know how close she was to doing that before I found you.” He stared into her eyes. His gaze was cold and sharp. “I am saving your life and the life of your boy by bringing you here. You will come to understand that. And to see that I am your friend.”
“Why should we believe that?” Ellen asked.
El Varón laughed. “You say in English, the proof is in the pudding, sí? Well, I said you are my guests and you will be treated as my guests. Mi casa es su casa, and that is the truth. You will learn that I am a gentleman with only your very best interests in my heart.”
Ellen looked at William. The boy wasn’t convinced. And neither was she. But what if what El Varón was saying was true? Could being captured by this man be worse than capture by Lily? For almost two years she had haunted them. Even in their brief times of happiness, she lay coiled and hidden like a snake, coloring those rare carefree moments with her presence. It seemed they had little choice but to play along with this man. At least until they could find a way to escape.
“You must be tired. And hungry. Come this way. I will show you around and take you to your rooms, and Juanita will make you some lovely chicken.”
William looked at his mother. Ellen sighed and nodded.
El Varón led them down a long hall.
—
The house was enormous. El Varón, with his two guards, led them past what looked like a rock star’s party room, replete with an enormous TV, video game consoles, exercise equipment, a billiards table, and a KISS pinball machine. “You can play anything you like,” he said to William, who refused to acknowledge him even as his eyes widened. Then they passed a cavernous dining room with a massive mahogany table and at least two dozen chairs around it. A door led into a bright kitchen full of tiny indigenous women swarming around the stove and sinks. The place was enormous and modern, though the decor was a weird mix of folk Guatemalan art and chintz from the eighties. Ellen’s single aunt who lived in Pittsburgh had similar taste—bad abstract hotel room paintings and white leather furniture. The aunt had been more inclined to African masks and tribal statues, while El Varón—or, more likely his designer—went for vibrant, eye-popping Guatemalan fabrics and patterns.
El Varón stopped in front of a sliding glass door. “The pool,” he said, smiling. “And my animales. I have much lov
e for them. The beasts of the earth have always been my most trusted friends—they are true to themselves and their nature. They do not lie.” It was dark out, so Ellen couldn’t see anything. William leaned into the glass and squinted, then turned and shrugged to his mother.
“My office is down the hall. And rooms for my employees. Nothing that would interest you. But I know you’ve had a long trip and you must be tired. Let me show you to your room.”
—
Their bedroom was just inside the front door and up a staircase. El Varón stopped in front of the first door along a darkened hall. “As long as you are my guests, your door will remain unlocked. You may roam freely around the areas I have showed you, as you wish.”
“That’s awfully nice of you,” Ellen said, trying to contain her sarcasm. She pointed to the guards lingering in the shadows. “Will these goons follow us everywhere we go?”
El Varón smiled. “They are here to protect everyone in this house. Including you.”
“Well, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel so safe around them.” She pointed at one of their guns. “Where I come from, you’re not supposed to carry weapons around in your house. Especially guns like that.”
“Señora, those guns may save your life. And your son’s life. But I will ask them to put them away if it makes you feel better.” He opened the door and gestured into the room. “Go ahead. Take some time to rest. I will have some clothes brought for you—very nice clothes, very stylish. Take a bath, if you like. And dinner will be delivered soon. Do you like chicken?”
Only William answered. “It’s okay.”
“Very well. Juanita is an excellent cook. She’s been with me for almost twenty years.” He smiled. His teeth were ridiculously white, like something out of a dentist’s brochure. “Rest now. We can talk after you eat. Luis and Ricardo will wait out in the hall—just let them know if you need anything. Do you speak Spanish?”
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