Nathalie punched the button for a lower floor and waited as the elevator shuddered and dropped, its lights flickering and dimming as it sucked power from the redoubt’s ancient generator. The elevator worked when little else did, a necessity for the redoubt’s other occupant, who had lost both legs two years before.
A few seconds later the elevator came to a halt and its door drew back with a squeak on unoiled tracks.
Nathalie stepped out into a new corridor, one like any other in the redoubt, gray walled with a stripe of color to indicate level and area. Already she could hear the sounds of the generator that ran incessantly at the far end, not for lighting or heat but for that other purpose—to keep the dead thing from dying.
The corridor was lit by a single candle at the far end, held in the claws of a four-foot-high holder, its silver base emerging from the half inch of water that covered the floor here, just as it did in the motor pool.
Nathalie followed the corridor to its end, and as she approached the room there, she could smell the incense on the air, masking the other scents of damp and sweat and death.
This room was much smaller, barely able to contain the towering metal-walled tank that dominated its space. The sound of the generator was louder in here, too, a great thrumming that seemed to thump through the metal plates of the floor, pounding against the soles of Nathalie’s boots so that it seemed she was shaking, that her heart was racing.
The room was lit—almost reverently—by a dozen candles, each one as tall as a child’s arm and propped inside mismatched containers—jars and cups, here the jaws of a monkey’s skull as if it was smoking a lit cigar. There was no water in this room, though its floor was stained dark where water had seeped in before. A lone figure sat in the center of the room, facing the towering structure that dominated the space. He sat not in a chair but in a wheelchair, his back to Nathalie. This was Papa Hurbon, a corpulent figure with wide shoulders and richly dark skin. His head was shaved and shaped like a bullet, a bucket-wide jaw tapering upward to a point at the top of his skull. Earrings dotted his ears, twin lines of gold studs running up their shell-like curves, tiny figures suspended from the lobes themselves.
Clutching something small and ragged like an old woman’s knitting, Hurbon’s eyes were wide as he looked at the vast generator that was housed in the room. The unit towered over Nathalie, its curved metal sides buckled in places where something hard had struck them, a single porthole of six-inch armaglass located in the lone door that dominated its front. This was a cold-fusion generator, designed in the late twentieth century to create energy through nuclear fusion and used to power this underground redoubt when it had been in the possession of the US Army two hundred years ago. A spectral light ebbed from that single porthole, its luminescence a pale, irradiated blue.
“Nathalie,” Hurbon said without turning.
Nathalie bowed her head in deference to Hurbon, even though he had not turned to see. “My beacon, my guide,” she said, her voice shrill in the enclosed space.
She waited then, as Papa Hurbon, leader of the société, master of the djévo, practitioner of the dark voodun arts of the Bizango Priests, studied the ghostly miasma that swirled and flowed across the glass of the cold-fusion generator. There was a face there, the hint of an eye as hollow as the grave, a smile half formed from mist, strands of hair that swept across cheekbones that never fully formed as they were tossed by the ceaseless winds of the generator. Nathalie had never really understood what the thing in the generator was, only that Papa Hurbon regarded it with unmatched reverence.
“I have been t’inking,” Hurbon began without turning his gaze from the ghost in the window, “about what it is to be immortal. Is it a gift? Or is it a curse?”
Nathalie waited as Hurbon seemed to ponder his own philosophical question. She was not given to philosophy; rather, she was young and the blood still ran hot inside her, driving her to action, not to rumination.
“And so I have thought, back and forth, on this topic,” Hurbon continued after a long pause, “and I have concluded that the key to immortality lies here, in the conquering of death.” He opened his hands, bringing forth the little figure that he clutched there. The figure was a fith-fath, what the ignorant called a voodoo doll, and its twisted rag body depicted a woman’s figure with dark eyes and long, skeletal limbs. “But to conquer death, you see—that is a challenge that few can comprehend. Because to conquer it is to embrace it as my goddess, Ezili Coeur Noir, embraces it.”
He was talking about the figure in the generator, Nathalie knew, a by-product of the Annunaki wombship that had somehow been granted a second life, one fractured into separate bodies, broken away from the wheel of life and death and rebirth. Nathalie did not know the full story, had only pieced together hints of it from what her priest, Hurbon, had told her. When he was a younger man, Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared on the Earth amid the debris of a spaceship that had been destroyed outside of the atmosphere. But, driven mad by the damage that the accident had inflicted upon her body, she had come to the société’s temple in the Louisiana swamps and demanded blood sacrifice. That sacrifice had been wild and desperate and had involved dancing and fornication and, ultimately, the shedding of limbs in her name. Papa Hurbon had lost his legs to his goddess in those crazy days of debauchery, and in return she had brought him a brief taste of paradise as she set about eradicating all life on Earth. Her plan had failed when a group of self-designated protectors of humankind called Cerberus had intervened, petitioning Hurbon’s aid before forcing the broken aspects of Ezili’s body to combine in the heart of the fusion generator. Hurbon had helped, employing his arcane knowledge to draw the fractured aspects of Ezili’s body to one location. And, in so doing, he had gained a hold on Ezili Coeur Noir, weaving her spirit into his fith-fath and so momentarily controlling the uncontrollable. She was unstable even now, locked inside the generator, but at least she was where Hurbon could contain her.
“Death must be bypassed,” Hurbon continued, “and to do that we must first embrace it.”
“Do you...intend to kill yourself, Papa?” Nathalie asked, her tone wary.
Hurbon turned to her at last, a golden canine tooth in his top jaw glinting in the flickering candlelight, dark gaps in his lower jaw where other teeth were missing entirely. “That would be foolish, Nathalie child,” he said with that easy smile of indulgence. “Even if I gained immortality, using the dragon’s teeth, what would that be worth if I lost myself in the process? No, we have tested the teeth in Spain, in Italy, in the Congo—”
Nathalie inclined her head, stopping Hurbon in midspeech. “I am still awaiting the results of the Congo test,” she said.
“Where the locals see Heaven’s Light,” Hurbon muttered to himself, shaking his head sorrowfully. Then he looked up at Nathalie once more, piercing her with his dark-eyed stare. “To keep oneself...well, there are risks, as we have seen. Ereshkigal failed, the body never fully holding. Charun and Vanth failed, their portal collapsing.”
“And them with it,” Nathalie interjected.
“The risks of using the dragon’s teeth have been made clear,” Hurbon said, “and can be bypassed with a little patience. There is just one risk left. And to counter that I shall need someone from the société, someone loyal.”
“I know just the person,” Nathalie assured him, thinking of a desperate member of his parish whose loyalty was beyond question.
“Bring them,” Hurbon instructed, “and together we shall spring the trap that brings Cerberus down forever and grants us immortality and eternal reign over this beautiful mud ball we call Earth.”
Brigid Baptiste awoke with a start.
The sounds of the Cerberus redoubt filtered through the walls and door of her private apartment, faint but offering a reassuring background, reminding