Max kneeled beside the god's former host and smoothly broke his neck. The Beast blew through Max like a sandstorm: blinding, stinging, hot. Max tore off the man's arms and legs, using a jagged length of metal to saw tendons and sinew. He broke bones, separated joints, drew out the man's blood-slick heart and felt its spasms die out in his palm. The Beast, ravenous, made him eat it. When he was finished, he sank his fingers into the man's bowels, drew out his entrails, threw them into the fire drum. He yanked organs out until the torso was an empty cavity, then severed the head and threw all the remains into the fire. The fire brightened, sending up thick smoke redolent with the stench of charring meat. And in that smoke, Max imagined the soul of the man sold by the god Legba into Pale Fox's mad service rising to freedom, testing the direction of the cross-breezes, and finally escaping on a cold wind into the black night. Free to fly to the spirit world the soul had been shaped to expect after death.
Without a god rooted in its soul-form, fleeing death as it had done when Chiao drowned its host in rising river water.
As the Beast vented its rage and triumph, Max watched the twins still using the god's host, killing the mortal flesh with their love. Neither god nor man had yet assumed control. And without the god's will, the mortal flesh would not survive the twins' attention for much longer. Max understood what it took to survive the twins. He knew how the brain and muscle and organs were reacting in the riptide of sensation. Sanity and physical stamina were being drawn farther out beyond the boundaries imposed by the physical world. Each affirmation of life, every sliver of pain and pleasure, was sending the man's body closer to death.
Max waited for the moment when Pale Fox realized he had lost the soul of the one who believed in him. Without that soul, Max was certain Pale Fox would not find his way back to the spirit world of his creation, and so lose the path to his own followers. Without followers, Pale Fox's hunger for the twins would have no means of satisfying itself. Kueur and Alioune would be safe. The plan had fallen into place instinctively, in an instant, as soon as he had seen what the twins had done to Pale Fox's first host. Chiao's words echoed in his mind. Her form danced at the edges of his vision.
Only the slightest touch of doubt chilled Max as he basked in the Beast's exultation.
A seizure suddenly racked the man's body. His limbs flailed, and his hands and head smashed repeatedly against the floor. Then his muscles locked, stood out under his skin, fully flexed. Veins popped up. His hair stood up on end. The animal form receded. A choked cry escaped his wide-open mouth.
Alioune released him, pulled away. Kueur quickly untangled herself from his rock-hard limbs and embraced her sister. As they collapsed to the ground in each other's arms, Pale Fox's host surrendered to an orgasm. A pale geyser exploded from his raw, red organ. Human seed splashed on concrete and metal and bloody, torn skin. Max imagined the fragments of fonio seed unraveling, the snakeskin codex scrambling into hissing, static clouds. The waste saddened him, and made him feel small and insignificant.
The twins convulsed, looked to Max with surprise in their faces, then closed their eyes and balled their fists. Their skin rippled.
Of course, a part of their souls believed in Pale Fox. In them, he might find safe haven.
Max started toward them, but Kueur held out her hand without opening her eyes. The twins breathed steadily, deeply. The skin rippling subsided.
Chiao, Max thought. Prayed. The part of them that was not Pale Fox would give them strength to fight off the god. The tattered remains of second skin hanging from Max's body twitched with life. A darkness entered his mind. Spiked tentacles of hunger searched for his soul.
"You've seen, you believe," said Pale Fox. The Beast leapt at the alien entity intruding on its territory. Through the tenuous bonds the god was trying to forge with his mind, Max saw the soul of the second host disappearing into a nimbus of light. Still rooted to that soul, Pale Fox's spirit stretched between the light and Max. "Let me in," Pale Fox pleaded. "He's taking me with him. I fought too hard for his body. I'm caught in his soul. I need help to free myself. Just let me root in you until this mortal's soul leaves. Then I'll release you. I promise. Swear. Please, this soul believes in nothing. He drags me to oblivion. Spare me. Spare the father of your lovers. Can you live with them, knowing you killed their creator?"
Max closed his mind against Pale Fox's influence. The Beast stormed along the borders of Max's self, cutting loose every hold Pale Fox tried to take. Savaging the spirit with cruel ghost spikes and sharp ghost teeth.
"I'll find another way to bring Yasigui back," Pale Fox said, his voice diminishing as the link between them died. "I won't ever attack them again. . . please. . . help me. . ." His words turned to frantic barking.
Pale Fox's form stretched to an infinite length between one world and the next. Max caught a last glimpse of Pale Fox's stolen fonio seed. Smaller now, and shrinking as it went with the god into the unknown, it still had the power to move Max. The knotted snake vanished into the light, and the last grip Pale Fox had on Max came loose. The god dwindled like a train barreling into mist-veiled mountains.
As the light began to fade and Max's hold on reality returned, a sound rose up in Max's mind like an echo traveling from a valley on the other side of existence. The Beast's cry of victory nearly overwhelmed the echo, which Max thought first was a grumbling bark, and then a word in some foreign tongue. At last, with the breeze picking at the torn suit of skin and chilling his blood-soaked flesh, Max understood he had heard the god call out, in a voice filled with hope and surprise: "Yasigui?"
~*~
"You look like hell," said Kueur, washing herself with warm water melted from ice held over the fire drum's glowing embers.
Max scraped his skin with a sharp-edged piece of metal he had cleansed with water and fire, flicking away the last of the gore still clinging to him. "I'm getting too old for this," he said. The Beast rumbled in protest but returned to its sated, drowsy state, curled in a dark corner of his mind and dreaming ghost dreams of torn bodies and the taste of blood.
Alioune sifted through a pile of clothes salvaged from those discarded by everyone over the course of the night's battles. "You always say that," she said. She found Pale Fox's original jeans, burned and torn, and put them on.
"At least lately," he added, turning to his own pile of clothes he had brought up from downstairs.
"Maybe now you'll listen when we talk about our past," said Kueur with a rueful smile that faded quickly. She donned the jeans Max had used as part of the harness he used to bring up his living sacrifice to the god. "Do you think he's dead?" she asked, holding up two ragged sweatshirts and looking from one to the other.
"The gray one doesn't have blood on it," Max said.
When Kueur looked to him, he nodded his head. "He's gone. I don't think he'll be back." After another pause, he asked, "Will you miss him?"
Kueur laughed. Alioune answered in a serious voice, ”We didn't know him long enough to miss him. If we had, we still would not miss him."
Suppressing her amusement, Kueur added, "But it is good to meet one's father."
They finished dressing and hurried to the car, all three crowding into the front. With the heater running high, they drove through an ice-locked world with the wind whistling at the windows, and left Bayonne for the lights and life across the river.
"You met our mother," Alioune said as they went through the tunnel. She was sitting in Kueur's lap, staring at the tile wall streaming past. Limbs entangled, bodies pressed against one another, the twins looked like a pair of lion cubs exhausted from their play of chasing future prey.
"Tell us about her?" asked Kueur.
Max did, recalling every detail and impression as he took them to a safe house in Chinatown, where they changed into clean clothes and drove out in a Lincoln. On the final ride back to their loft, Max stopped at a red light, frowned, turned to them. He spoke the question that had been haunting him, prepared to flinch at the answer.
"Did you really want to keep the children?"
Alioune met his gaze. Kueur, now sitting in her sister's lap, closed her eyes. Neither of them answered for several moments. The light turned green and Max accelerated, thinking he had escaped their response.
"Perhaps," said Kueur, her eyes still closed, as if envisioning another life. "After going through all the pain of conceiving and delivering them, it might've been interesting to keep them, raise them. Who knows what pleasures there are in giving our children what we never had?"
Max swallowed his answer and kept his silence. By the time they reached the loft, the edge to his fear had been dulled by the claw-edged purr of the twin's presence. He no longer felt compelled by restless anxiety to go back out to the dead drop and pick up the rest of his money for the night's earlier work. A peaceful exhaustion had settled over him, blanketing even the Beast in a layer of sleep's deadening sand. The money could wait until tomorrow. He headed for the bedroom, his love for the twins casting the idea of children in an alien but not entirely discomforting light.
Kueur grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the Box. Alioune held the door open. Waves passed through crimson veils lining the walls.
"I'm getting too—" Max began, then stopped himself. He allowed himself to be pulled into the Box. "It's time to change the decor in here," he said sheepishly, thinking of a serpent motif, with a very specific pattern for the skin of his tail-eating snakes.
"Some things never change," Kueur said, wriggling out of her pants.
"And some things do," said Alioune, closing the door.
Max roused himself from a chant-induced and dream-laced slumber. The Australian oknirabata, a white cloud of beard masking his weathered face, paused in his ministrations. He looked up from Max's bloated stomach, his lips still pursed from his attempt at sucking out the malevolent Djanba spirit he claimed had come to reside in Max's belly. The other shamans, healers, and wise folk scattered throughout the loft glanced at Max lying naked on the prayer rug draped over the sofa.
Max tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea and dizziness forced him back. Nothing had changed. The mysterious ailment plaguing him for the past two days had not yet been exorcised. He was as helpless as when he had first been struck down at the airport while assassinating a diplomatic courier attempting to take stolen computer chips out of the country.
The Beast whimpered, its spirit writhing in the storm of sorceries washing through Max like a cleansing flood. He soothed the ghost of his murderous impulse, reassuring the Beast that it was not the object of the magical assault. The Beast, having already been slain once by Max, snarled with distrust and squeezed itself into a dark pit of rage in Max's soul like a poisonous snail withdrawing into its shell.
The men and women scattered throughout the loft turned back to their own work. The oknirabata lowered his head and smacked his lips, preparing to use his power once again, but Max shifted and waved him away. With lowered gaze the holy man stuck two fingers up Max's anus and pulled out the magic mabanba stone he had implanted earlier. Then he walked away, bare feet slapping against the wood and tapping the mabanba stone against his bare chest, shoulders hunched in his worn, dark, two-piece suit.
Kueur hurried from the kitchen carrying a cup of tea fragrant with ginger, deliberately bumping into Dex, the New Age crystal guru in European-cut sport casuals drawing out his finest stones from their leather pouches and laying them on the floor. Max scowled at the fool who had taken great pains to introduce himself when he arrived. He knew most of the healers in the room, but their names were indistinct shadows in his mind. He needed their skills and powers, not their familiarity or fawning attention.
Kueur's twin, Alioune, watched her sister's flirtation from behind the dining counter with her arms crossed over her chest, shoulders hunched, the exotic beauty of her Asian-African features distorted by a frown.
"Tonton," Kueur said, the music of her voice soured by quavering, "how was your rest?" She cradled Max's head in her lap and helped him take a few sips before putting the cup down on the long, low, glass coffee table.
"More of the same," he answered curtly. He opened his mouth to say more, shamed by his harsh tone. They deserved better than his helplessness and short-tempered moodiness.
His mouth stayed open, but nothing came out. He wanted to tell Kueur about dreams limned by healing fires, shadowed by blood desires. He needed to talk to the twins about images haunting his dreams: fanged monsters lurking in caves; cherubic infants steadily devouring his limbs, sex, torso, and finally his face; the sensation of worms tunneling through his body, devouring organs and tissue, caressing his bones with their soft, plump rings. They had to hear of the endless pursuit through sewers by wailing creatures that moved like a horde of slick-haired rats but, when they finally trapped him against a drainage grating overlooking the sea, looked up at him with innocent eyes set into round and smooth-skinned faces.
Max closed his mouth, then his eyes. Dreams spun a cocoon of paralyzing fear around his mind. Reality dipped and tilted as if uprooted, and the strength Max had always counted on to face the dangerous and the strange drained from his body. Words broke apart, spilling memory, thought, and emotion. He could say nothing.