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  Papa Hurbon’s temple fell under the terrain of Beausoleil, a ville that had chosen to close ranks and reject any outlanders. Outsiders felt afraid, scared that their lands and their possessions would be taken. There were even stories that their children were being abducted for the rich ville dwellers, handed over to childless couples, or worse, roasted and eaten as delicacies. The people were scared, so they flocked to Papa Hurbon, whose fearsome charisma and powerful ways steeped in ancient ritual offered the promise of security and perhaps salvation.

  Nathalie was just one of the people who had joined Hurbon’s société in the past few months since he had reemerged after sacrificing both of his legs to his deranged goddess. When asked, Hurbon told her that the sacrifice had been worth it, and that it had granted him more power than any man had ever known before. She suspected that he was right.

  There was a room of the redoubt, beyond the vehicle garage whose floor was now hidden beneath an expanse of stagnant water where green clouds lurked and flies buzzed, that contained a thick-walled chamber within it. Inside the chamber, through a tiny pane of six-inch-thick glass, something incorporeal could be seen, swirling as if caught in a hurricane, its component parts unable to cling on to a form. The feeling of dread that emanated from the chamber was palpable. Nathalie had looked inside the chamber on several occasions, peering through the thick, reinforced glass of the rust-lined door. Within, she had seen a face, lit momentarily as if spied in a flash of lightning, then gone again as if it had never been.

  Papa Hurbon had told her that the face belonged to his precious Ezili, an ancient loa who had taken earthly form from the Annunaki goddess called Lilitu. He told her that she was his now, that she served him where he had once served her.

  Hurbon held surgery in his lodge, but he had turned the redoubt into the société’s temple, where the faithful came to bask in and add to his power. Hurbon took the responsibility easily, but then he had broad shoulders and a steady stream of young women who were only too eager to present themselves to the vodun priest.

  Nathalie moved down the concrete-walled corridor, gloomy in the insufficient illumination of the candles, and stepped into the side chamber where Hurbon kept his mixing equipment. Hurbon could get it, of course, but he preferred to send others to do his bidding now—he had spent so long just striving to survive on his own he basked in the luxury of having a congregation once more.

  Nathalie reached for the mortar and pestle, one of a dozen lined up by size along a dusty shelf that also contained aged items of jewelry and the skulls of a dozen different rodents and primates. The mortar was made from the curved bones of a monkey’s hand, the pestle the carved bone of a human finger.

  * * *

  ONCE NATHALIE HAD departed the room, Hurbon unsealed the bag of white dust and spread a little across his left hand. He sniffed it, taking in its aroma. It was redolent of obscure spices and incense, and the smell made Hurbon smile wider than before.

  “The smell o’ the dragon,” he muttered, before reaching into the bag for one of the larger shards of white. The shard was a little bigger than Hurbon’s thumbnail, and it looked porous, tiny indentations running all the way across its surface. Brushing the dust back into the open bag, Hurbon took the shard and tapped it against his teeth. It felt rock-hard, and even though he had used the lightest of pressure the feel of the tooth bit was such that it made Hurbon’s teeth sing, as though they might shatter. Then Hurbon placed the shard against his tongue and licked it, feeling its rough sides and sharp edges. He winced as the sharpest edge cut a tiny incision across his tongue, and he drew the fleck of tooth away with a start.

  “How the hell did they cut this thing?” Hurbon muttered. Neither man in the room answered him, nor were they supposed to—they just stared vacantly into the middle distance, not reacting to anything that occurred before them.

  Sucking on his tongue where it had been cut, Hurbon reached beneath the blanket that hid his missing limbs. He had a bag beneath there, an old leather pouch, its brown surface scuffed, frayed threads showing at its edges. The pouch was large enough for Hurbon to get both hands in, and it had a strap by which it could be carried, like a woman’s purse.

  Hurbon slipped the shard of dragon tooth into the pouch where it could reside beside other items that he found useful. Also in the leather pouch were a fith fath—what the ignorant nonbelievers called a voodoo doll—a chicken’s foot and a knotted material pouch of black-and-red powder. There were other bags within the larger bag that Nathalie had brought, and as houngan of the société, it was his prerogative to take a share of any spoils that came through the doors of the redoubt-turned-temple.

  His men would say nothing. They were there to guard him and he had removed from them the awkward inconvenience of independent thought.

  Hurbon looked up as he heard Nathalie pad back into the djévo room. In a loose sense, the room was mirrored, each decoration reflected in an ornament of similar size and shape on the other side of the room, a femur for a knife, a crystal ball for a skull and the black mirror in place of the door. It was important to keep the djévo in balance at all times, Hurbon knew, if one was to tap the powers beyond the barriè to the spirit world.

  However, it was not the voodoo deities—the loa—whom he planned to contact this day. No, Papa Hurbon planned to reach out for the other faces in the darkness, and the dragon’s teeth were the vital ingredient he required to do just that.

  “Are the teeth acceptable?” Nathalie asked as she handed Hurbon the mortar and pestle.

  Hurbon nodded. “They are genuine, we hope” was all he said. Then he took another package of bone dust from the open bag that Nathalie had brought and tipped a small portion of its contents into the mortar where it rested on his lap.

  “What is it you hope to achieve, Papa?” Nathalie asked as Papa Hurbon worked the powdery dust around in the bowl.

  “Child, there is a story which comes from the Greece of ancient times,” Hurbon explained as he mixed rat’s blood with the splinters of tooth, “which tells of the Spartoí, the children of Ares. The Spartoí were powerful soldiers grown from the sown teeth of a dragon, walking dead things that fought with a great warrior called Jason. You see, the Greeks understood the power of the dragon’s teeth in conjuring warriors into this world from beyond the grave.”

  “So your plan is to bring great warriors to life?” Nathalie questioned.

  “No, not warriors, my sweet cherry,” Hurbon said with a flash of his fiendish smile. “Gods. The Annunaki who came to Earth brought with them a whole new comprehension of technology, utilizing organic materials in the way so-called civilized man uses steel and silicon. In this sense, the Annunaki are closer to the old ways of the path, the voodoo ways—you see?”

  Nathalie nodded, awed.

  “Their ways and ours are so much alike,” Hurbon continued. “Each fleck of tooth contains a genetic story, each shard a history just waiting to be unleashed.”

  Hurbon pressed down hard with the pestle, and Nathalie heard something snap inside the tiny mortar bowl. “The trouble with the Annunaki is—they thought too small.

  “I will sow the seeds of the dragon across the globe,” Hurbon told the woman, “and unto each shall come a new understanding and a new reckoning. The children of the dragon shall walk the Earth once again, and when they are done, my child—when they are done, why, what a glorious day that shall be.”

  Hurbon stirred the bowl once more, mashing together the shards and the rat’s blood into a grisly paste.

  Chapter 1

  Seven months later, Zaragoza, Spain

  Located in northern Spain, the city of Zaragoza was alive with color. The large city housed half a million people, and its narrow streets and alleyways were brought to life with music and the sounds of the citizens. Parts of the city had been destroyed and rebuilt over the years, but the oldest landmarks, like the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar—a huge, palace-like cathedral dedicated to Christian faith—and the Aljafería Palace,
had somehow survived, repurposed, to revel in their second phoenix lives.

  Above those ancient towering spires, the sky was turning a rich shade of red as the sun set, painting everything with its pinkish glow and turning the Ebro, the river that bisected the city, into a shimmering orange line.

  Two figures were hurrying across the Puente de Piedra, a man and a woman. She seemed eager to cross the bridge of lions, while he was clearly more reluctant.

  “Come on, Grant-san,” the young woman urged, tugging at the man’s hand, “I have no desire to be late.” Her name was Shizuka and she was the leader of the Tigers of Heaven, the ruling group of New Edo in the Western Isles of the Pacific. A formidable warrior, Shizuka was a petite woman of Asian extraction, with golden skin and dark eyes with a pleasing upward slant, lips like cherry blossoms and fine dark hair.

  Shizuka wore an elegant evening dress in midnight blue. The dress sat high across her neck, leaving her arms bare and reaching to midway down her legs, cinched tightly across her hips and legs to accentuate her figure. The figure beneath was slim and athletic, taut muscles moving in slick motion as she trotted across the bridge on three-inch heels.

  The man beside her could not be more at odds with Shizuka’s lithe and petite frame. In his midthirties, Grant was a hulking figure of a man, six-foot-four inches tall, all corded muscle without an ounce of fat. His skin was a rich mahogany, his head shaved, and he sported a gunslinger’s mustache. He wore a well-cut suit with blazer jacket in a shimmering gray-silk weave. Beneath the jacket he wore a wine-dark shirt and a black bow tie that, despite his best efforts not to, he could not help adjusting as they hurried across the bridge that crossed the River Ebro. Grant was an ex-Magistrate, an enforcer of baronial law, from the US settlement of Cobaltville. In recent years he had traded that role for a position with the Cerberus organization, a group dedicated to the safety of humankind, defending it from alien threats and other terrors that had been caused by extraterrestrial intervention or as fallout from the alien barons’ schemes to rule the world.

  “Why should we hurry, Shizuka?” Grant asked. His voice was a rumble like distant thunder, but there was a tenderness there that spoke of his feelings for his breathtakingly beautiful companion. “This is our chance to relax. So slow down, enjoy the sights. A place this beautiful needs time to be admired.”

  Grant had been with Shizuka for several years, though they had seemed to have little time to relax and enjoy one another’s company in all the time that they had been together. This visit here to Zaragoza was Grant’s attempt to change that, a moment’s quiet in the ongoing battle against alien incursion.

  Shizuka had to admit that it was hard to argue with her lover’s point. She slowed down, admiring the view from the bridge as they approached the west bank. The city of Zaragoza had suffered a little at the hands of the nuclear devastation that had racked the Western hemisphere, but much of the city had survived, and what had not had been sympathetically rebuilt over the two centuries since that awful nuclear exchange. There was a palpable sense of age to the place, that tranquil beauty that only old buildings—and old stone—exhibited. The Puente de Piedra was an ancient stone bridge that crossed the Ebro in the center of the city. Two decorative bronze lions had been placed atop pillars at either end of the bridge—four in all—guarding the crossing and the travelers who used it. Making the crossing to the west side, one could see the towering, ornate turrets of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar to the right, a beautiful palace that looked something like an upturned table with its exquisite carved legs thrust up into the sky. To the left stood the rich redbrick building that housed artifacts from the Roman era, and towering behind this was the ornate spire of La Seo Cathedral, its white brickwork recolored in a luminous strawberry red as the sun set behind it. Trees lined the wide avenue that ran alongside the riverbank, obscuring the towering gray-brown structures of ornate design that looked out across the water. Wheeled wags hurried to and fro, transporting locals and visitors to destinations amid the city’s bustling nightlife.

  “You continue to surprise me, Grant-san,” Shizuka said as she took in the magnificent view.

  “This is why we came here,” Grant said, indicating the panorama that stretched out all around them. “The clean air, the sunlight on the water—I like to believe it’s all been put here just for us.”

  “Oh, Grant,” Shizuka whispered, turning back to him and gazing longingly into his eyes. “I forget how you can make me melt within.”

  For a moment Grant looked regretful. “Easy to forget,” he admitted. “I don’t make enough time for ‘us’ sometimes…”

  Before he could say anything further, Shizuka placed her index finger against Grant’s lips. “Because you are too busy saving people’s lives, my brave hero,” she reminded him, “and there can be no shame in taking that choice. A weaker man than you would turn his back on his obligations.”

  “Especially when there’s a hottie waiting at home for him,” Grant said, a broad smile appearing across his face as he admired his lover. But the smile faltered when he saw Shizuka’s flawless brow furrow in uncertainty. “All right, all right,” Grant said, holding his hands up as if in surrender, “so maybe I shouldn’t have called you a hottie. You’re a capable, vibrant woman who…who knows what she wants and…and…”

  “Go on,” Shizuka encouraged, an air of challenge in her voice.

  “And…intelligent, beautiful and wise,” Grant finished, an uncertain note of hope in his tone.

  Shizuka crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “Hai. Quite true,” she agreed. “However, that was not what caused me to question your statement, Grant-san, because I am a hottie. Rather, when have you ever known this hottie to stay at home waiting for her man?”

  Grant looked suitably chastised. “You have a point.”

  Shizuka raised Grant’s left arm then and twirled beneath it until she was wrapped in his grip, ready to walk beside him across the bridge. “We both have busy lives, Grant-san,” she reminded him. “You with Cerberus, me with my obligations to the Tigers of Heaven. There is no shame in our choices, nor in shouldering the responsibilities we have both been tasked to endure. However, today is not about that. This night, this week—it is all for us, with no buzzing Commtacts or pleading advisers.”

  “I never had an adviser,” Grant stated as they strode arm in arm across the vast stone bridge.

  “And I have never had a Commtact,” Shizuka replied, whip-fast.

  The Commtact to which Shizuka referred was a remarkable tool that Grant and his fellow Cerberus operatives relied upon for global communications. It was a small radio device that was embedded beneath the skin of all Cerberus field personnel, including Grant. The subdermal devices were top-of-the-line units, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus rebels.

  Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtacts could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the user’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. This facility had the additional perk of being able to pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user, which meant that it was unnecessary to speak aloud to utilize the transmission function.

  Broadcasts from the unit were patched through the Keyhole communications satellite, or Comsat, and then relayed to the Cerberus redoubt headquarters in Montana. Thanks to the nature of the vibration system used by the Commtact, if a user went completely deaf they would still, in theory, be able to hear, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

  “Anyway, you promised me a romantic evening of dinner and dancing,” Shizuka reminded Grant.

  “The evening’s barely begun,” Grant told her, pulling the modern-day samurai a little closer as they walked past the l
ion-topped columns at the end of the bridge.

  The pair had arrived just a few hours before, booking into a grand, family-run hotel after traveling via interphaser. Based on an alien design, the interphaser could tap quantum pathways and move people through space to specific locations instantaneously. The technology was limited by certain esoteric factors, the full gamut of which had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful, hidden lines called parallax points that stretched across the globe and beyond. This network followed old ley lines and formed a powerful technology so far beyond ancient human comprehension as to appear magical. Though fixed, the interphaser’s destination points were often located in temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious significance. These sites had frequently emerged around the interphaser’s use, ancient man sensing the incredible power that was being tapped for such instantaneous travel. Cerberus personnel’s access to an operational interphaser had taken many months of trial and error to achieve.

  This time, the quantum jump had brought Grant and Shizuka close to an ancient church, more ruin than building now, located in the middle of a dusty, overgrown graveyard on the east bank, their arrival unseen. From there, the couple had made their way to the luxurious rooms in which they would be staying. The rooms were typically Spanish, painted in light colors to reflect the heat and sparsely decorated to leave them uncluttered. The bed featured a brass frame shined to look like gold in the fierce sunlight that blasted through the open window of the balcony, and a complimentary bottle of wine had been left cooling in an ice bucket for their arrival. At reception, Grant had deftly navigated the questions about how their trip had been and when they had arrived; the interphaser was a method of travel exclusive to the Cerberus organization and not something he wanted to advertise.