Hell's Maw. James Axler

guided her across the room. “Come, I may need you to help me speak with them,” she explained.

      Bewildered by the almost-surreal scene around her, the receptionist plodded alongside Shizuka on her flat-soled pumps.

      “Do any of you speak English?” Shizuka asked, addressing the band.

      One of the guitarists nodded, as did the singer, while two of the others made “so-so” gestures with a shrug.

      “You must have been here when all this was occurring,” Shizuka said. “What did you see?”

      “See?” the singer repeated. “It’s…confused. We play as people arrive. They laugh, some dance. Then…”

      “Then?” Shizuka urged.

      “It’s…atropelladamente,” the singer said.

      Shizuka looked from the singer to the other band members, some of whom were nodding. “I don’t understand,” she said.

      The singer began rattling off something in fast-paced Spanish, her garbled words exhibiting the rat-a-tat rhythm of an old machine gun’s fire. “Un tobogán en espiral de altura sinuoso alrededor de una torre en una feria,” she said. “Una feria…fairground.”

      Shizuka looked to the receptionist for help. “Fairground?” she prompted.

      “Mónica says it was like seeing a twisting slide,” the receptionist translated thoughtfully. “Like the slide at the funfair.”

      “The helter-skelter.” Shizuka realized after a moment.

      “Si!” the singer agreed with a snap of her fingers. “But here, in my head. Inside.”

      The woman’s bandmates seemed to agree, one of them translating for the drummer, whose grasp of English was very limited. Several of the men tapped their foreheads as if to show her. It was the point where many religions placed the third eye, Shizuka noticed.

      At that moment, the authorities arrived, and the atmosphere in the room changed subtly. Shizuka felt it straightaway, the way that everyone suddenly became a suspect.

      Two officers strode through the room, eyeing the sprawl of corpses and wounded scattered across the lavish surroundings. They were a man and a woman, both dressed smart-casual in charcoal-gray suits. The man was in his thirties, six feet tall with striking features and wavy dark hair slicked back from his forehead, a trace of stubble darkening his chin. He wore his jacket open, the pressed white collar of his shirt tightly clasped to his neck, a striped tie swaying before his broad chest. The woman was of a similar age, several inches shorter than the man, and her suit was looser, its baggy lines masking her taut, athletic figure. She wore a white T-shirt beneath the blazer, the bulge of a blaster almost hidden where it was holstered beneath her left arm. She had dark hair cascading past her shoulders in gentle waves and she wore a concerned expression that sat well on the sharp planes of her face, enhancing her flawless olive complexion.

      The woman asked something in Spanish, addressing the room in general. The blonde receptionist answered, indicating Shizuka, and the two officers strode across the room toward her, while everyone else seemed to subtly rear back to give them room.

      Shizuka looked mystified as the dark-haired woman babbled something in Spanish, then the hotel receptionist said something and the woman repeated her question in flawless, slightly accented English, “You found the people here? Like this?”

      Shizuka nodded. “I did.”

      “I’m Pretor Cáscara,” the woman explained, flashing her a badge, “and, my partner, Pretor Corcel. Are you able to answer some questions for me?”

      Shizuka nodded again. “Of course.” Then Shizuka explained who she was and that she had been visiting the hotel with her partner when they had, by chance, made their grisly discovery.

      “And when was this, Senora Shizuka?” the man asked, speaking for the first time. He had a refined accent, as if he had learned English from the upper-class British of a bygone age.

      “Ten minutes,” Shizuka guessed. “Less maybe. I don’t… It was very unexpected.”

      The woman touched Shizuka’s bare arm gently. “We understand, you must have had quite the shock.”

      Shizuka took a slow, deliberate breath, gazing past the two officers to focus on the fallen bodies strewn about the room. She had seen worse than this, many times in fact—such was the cost of a life of adventure. But there was something poignant and hopeless about finding these people hanging here like this without warning or explanation. It sickened her, and for the first time since she and Grant had arrived, Shizuka had the chance to stop and realize that.

      Pretor Cáscara raised her dark eyebrows, peering at Shizuka as she saw her tremor slightly. “Do you need to sit down?”

      “Yes,” Shizuka blurted, so sudden that the word caught her unawares. Even as she said it, Shizuka wavered in place as if she might fall. Shock, she realized at a disconnect, as if she was thinking about someone other than herself.

      The woman called Cáscara took Shizuka by the arm and led her from the room, asking one of the hotel staff in Spanish to bring a glass of water as she escorted Shizuka into the hotel lobby.

      * * *

      PRETOR JUAN CORCEL was left alone with the doctor as the relevant authorities arrived to remove the bodies and take the survivors away to a nearby hospital. The hotel staff had departed the crime scene, waiting nearby. As he surveyed the room, pacing in a small circle on his Italian-made loafers, the doctor asked him a question.

      “I bet you have never seen anything like this, eh, Pretor?” the doctor said in Spanish while several of the living where taken away on stretchers.

      Corcel shook his head. “Sadly, that is not the case.”

      The doctor looked surprised. “You mean this has happened before?”

      Pretor Corcel looked back at him with haunted eyes, saying nothing. “How many are alive?” he asked finally, gazing at the stretchers. Some of the sheets had been pulled over the heads to hide the faces.

      “Seven,” the doctor said.

      “Yes,” Pretor Corcel agreed distractedly, pacing across the room. He had seen this before; in fact this was only the latest in a spate of something that one might have called serial killings. But the details were vague, uncertain. He and his partner, Cáscara, urgently needed a break on this, before things became any worse. There had been sightings, two black men appearing close to the scenes sometimes, vague recollections of a woman, but that was all circumstantial, hearsay, like trying to grab ahold of something from a child’s drawing. There had been tiny slivers of evidence—another Pretor had been killed using a razor-sharp disc that had been pushed into his belly somehow, shredding his gut apart; bloodred feathers scattered at two of the scenes. But it all felt disconnected, with no clear picture emerging.

      Corcel huffed, shaking his head. Who would do this, and why?

      It was then that Juan Corcel, Pretor of the Zaragoza Justice Department with a twelve-year unblemished record of service, had what he considered at that moment to be the greatest lucky break of his career. The twin doors leading out of the ballroom crashed open and one of the black men from the eyewitness reports came hurrying through, breathless from killing. He held one of the throwing disc-like weapons in one hand, a bloody feather protruding from his jacket pocket.

      In a flash, Corcel pulled his blaster—a compact Devorador de Pecados—from its hidden underarm holster and targeted the man in its sights, even as he stepped into the room. “¡Congelar!” he shouted.

      * * *

      GRANT HAD DASHED back to the hotel as quickly as he was able, concerned at leaving Shizuka alone amid the nightmare scene. He wished he had some way to remain in touch with her in those moments as he sprinted through the back alleys of this strange city, wished she had a Commtact like the Cerberus personnel. But she wasn’t