Hell's Maw

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_c1818a1e-e11e-5e2c-8f19-639098b6d448)

The room was too warm, too dark, and the dry smell of burning dust clung to it possessively.

The small space was made smaller by the drapes that had been hung from the walls and over the doors, patterned in the dark colors of blood and red wine intermingled with the purples and blacks and deepest blues of bruises on human flesh.

The room had no windows. It was located in an underground bunker, a single room in a facility that had once been called Redoubt Mike and had served the US military back in the twentieth century, two hundred years earlier. That name had been cast aside by history now, blown away on the nuclear wind that had reshaped the world and its people.

Where once there had been fluorescent lighting functioning on automated circuits, now there were candles, three dozen of them scattered across every cluttered surface and dotted across the floor like seeds broadcast from a farmer’s hand.

The room was cluttered by an odd selection of mismatched objects, feathers and bones, driftwood and skulls, jars of dried spices and plant roots vying for space along the walls, everything lit by the flicker of candle flames.

Everything here looks worn-out and tired, Nathalie thought as she pushed a hanging scarlet drape aside and strode through the doorway. She was a slim, dark-skinned woman in her twenties, six feet tall with long, bare legs that seemed to flow almost like liquid in the flickering light of the candles. She wore a calfskin jacket that jutted tightly across her breasts, leopard-print shorts and long, black boots that laced up at the back, the corset-like lacing running all the way up to the top of the boots where they sat just below her knees. The knife sheathed at her hip was as long as a man’s forearm and broadened along its length to become wider at its tip. Her hair was an afro of tight black ringlets, encircling her head like some shadowy halo. She wore dyed feathers hanging from her ears, and these seemed to twist and flutter as she entered the room, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. Her face was fixed in a solemn expression that gave nothing away, insouciant mouth unreadable.

A canvas bag hung from her shoulder on a thick strap, colored a dirty olive green but within which had been weaved threads of blue and yellow and silver. The silver threads glistened as they caught the light from the flickering flames.

Nathalie strode across the room toward the figure waiting in its center, admiring the ragged collection of junk with disdain. It was appropriate, she thought, the worn-out junk that cluttered this underground lair. Its tired and broken nature was in sympathy with the tired and broken nature of the man who presided over it, king of the flea pit, who sat in his chair at the midpoint of all the trash.

“Welcome to the djévo,” the man pronounced in a rich basso voice. “Enter freely.” His name was Papa Hurbon and his was a large frame with the richly dark skin of an octoroon. His corpulence was barely contained in the straining short-sleeved shirt he wore, and he had a bullet-shaped head that widened from his pointy crown to a bucket-like mouth. When he opened that wide maw, he showed a line of fat teeth, with two missing in the lower jaw and a golden replacement for his upper left canine. His head was shaved and beads of sweat glistened there. Both of his ears were pierced a dozen times or more, with a line of gold studs running from lobe to shell-like helix, golden hoops depending from the midpoints, and what seemed to be two petrified three-inch-long fetuses hanging from the lobes.

Hurbon sat in a wheelchair, a blanket cinched across his lower half where his waist met his legs, or more accurately, where his waist should have met his legs, for he had none. The blanket was black and patterned with skull designs that seemed to swirl like mist. Despite his disability, Papa Hurbon remained a charismatic figure, commanding all attention in the room.

Two other figures waited at the rear of the room, where a mirror had been hung, as tall and wide as the doorway on the opposing wall through which Nathalie had entered, and painted with an oily black sheen that peeked through the heavy drape that partially hid it. The figures were both tall, muscular men, so similar in fact that they might have been twins. They, too, had shaven heads, and they wore dark pants with no shoes or shirts, bare chests of defined muscles gleaming with sweat. The heat of the room was almost unbearable.

Two long strides brought Nathalie before Papa Hurbon, and she kneeled down in deference to him, casting her eyes downward. “Thank you for your ’ospitality,” she said in a soft voice that was barely a whisper.

Hurbon reached down and placed his hand against the side of Nathalie’s face, tilting it—not gently—up until she looked at him. “How wen’ your quest, sweet child?”

“It went well, my beacon,” Nathalie said, the timid hint of a hopeful smile crossing her wide lips. “I visited the site of the dragon’s death as instructed.”

Papa Hurbon nodded thoughtfully, his smile broad and bright in the shimmering flicker of the candles. “Good.”

Hurbon had heard of the dragon that had appeared on the banks of the Euphrates River in the territory known as Iraq some months ago. The dragon was not alive—instead it was a bone structure, as if the gigantic creature had died there and its carcass had been left to rot. Some had mistaken it for a city, such was its grand size, and this dragon city had played host to a fierce war between two would-be gods from the sky along with their respective armies of indoctrinated humans and fearsome lizard-like soldiers. Papa Hurbon did not know who the victors were, only that the battle had ceased almost as abruptly as it had started, and that the skeletal dragon had been abandoned and left to rot, forgotten by the gods who made it.

Papa Hurbon knew a lot about gods—he was a houngan, a vodun priest, and he followed the dark path of the Bizango. He had witnessed gods appear once before from the sky and he had heard tell that the dragon was their symbol, their home. When he had heard about the dragon city that had appeared in the Middle East, he had immediately dispatched his servant Nathalie to acquire a part of the leviathan for him. There was power in the parts of the body, power in desiccated and petrified things, and there was definitely power in the things that the gods had shaped.

“And what did you bring me, child?” Hurbon asked.

Nathalie shifted her weight just slightly until the bag she carried dropped before her, still hanging on its canvas strap. She unzipped it and pulled the mouth of the bag open. Papa Hurbon leaned closer to see what lay within under the flickering light of the candles. At first glance it looked like a drugs stash, for the bag contained layer upon layer of small plastic bags filled with white powder. Hurbon reached into the larger bag and drew out a bag, lifting it close to his face to examine its contents more closely. There were thicker flecks and chips scattered among the white powder, each of them the yellow-white of cream.

“Dragon’s teeth,” Nathalie explained as Hurbon studied the package, his brow furrowed.

“Dragon’s teeth?” Hurbon repeated, turning the bag to one side so that the powdery contents slid to one side of the larger flakes.

“I met certain people there,” Nathalie explained, “in the shadow o’ the dragon city. Merchants. They trade in exotic t’ings, parts o’ the dragon who died. You said you wanted the teeth, Papa.”

Hurbon nodded, the smile materializing once more on his face. “Bring me my mortar and pestle, girl,” he instructed. “The smallest ones, for the most delicate mixtures.”

Nodding once, Nathalie rose from the floor, her tall, lithe frame moving like liquid. Hurbon watched her depart from the room, peering up from under, still holding the bag full of dragon remains.