Hell's Maw. James Axler

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