Sighing, she pushed away from the wall, somewhat irked by the blood that was slowly drying to a sticky crust on her bare arms. Walking over to one of the recessed cabinets, she quickly tapped in the security code, opened the door and pulled out a set of keys.

Then she padded over to the sleek, shiny little speed demon with an engine bigger than the interior, and slipped inside the leathered comfort, cranking up the engine in a satisfying howl of horses and filling the garage with the stink of smoking tires as she backed out of the open garage.

Shoving the car into gear, she executed a precise one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed toward the barred gate of the compound, baring her teeth at the frightened looks the heavily armed guards were throwing her way.

Trying to hold his face together, Geraldo ran out into the yard, followed closely behind by the now recovered and screaming housekeeper who was waving a blood-stained towel in her hand and running as quickly as her thick legs could carry her.

“Open the gates!” the drug lord screamed at his guards, well knowing that Kael would simply ram them down if given half a chance. “Then someone follow her! Don’t let lose her or I’ll have your heads! Do you understand me?!?”

Something, either the sight of their gore-covered boss screaming obscenities at them, or the sight of a shiny black demon-car bearing down on them, made the guards’ decisions for them and one ran to open the gate while the other jumped into the Range Rover parked by the guard-shack just outside the fence.

Kael shot out through the ever widening gap in the fence, more than a bit disappointed that she didn’t get the chance to ram the damn gate down, even more so with the fact that in her hurry she’d managed to miss the little pissant who was cranking the damn thing open while looking at her through white eyes half the size of dinner plates.

She jarred the wheel sharply to the left and the car took the turn on two wheels, shooting onto the street and missing a broadside collision with an oncoming bread truck by the width of a hair. The bread truck then did what Kael wished she could have done, taking out both gate and guard in one fell swoop of screeching brakes, squealing metal, and screaming human. The Range Rover finished the job, plowing headlong into the bread truck and smashing the guard flat against the gate post.

The screams mercifully stopped.

Cackling in triumph, Kael downshifted and sped out toward the milling city, a gore-coated specter whose sanity, what there was of it, cowered in a corner of her dark and empty soul.

*******

Forty five minutes later, she found herself on the very outskirts of Medellin, driving along a twisting road she’d never been on before, having no idea how she’d gotten there, and gripping the twisted remains of a blood-sodden business card tightly in one hand.

Too puzzled over her apparent blackout to be frightened, she pulled off to the side of the empty road and looked down at the card again, trying to decipher the fine script through the coating of damp blood obscuring it.

Ianna Velasquez de la Cruz

Seer

The address was a bit harder to read, but by placing it within the map she carried inside her head, Kael figured she was pretty close to the ‘seer’s’ home, even though she honestly couldn’t remember having made the conscious decision to drive out that way.

“Alright, witch,” she whispered. “Time to find out what’s going on here.”

She eased the car back onto the street, the sound of her tires crunching over gravel the only thing that could be heard this far out into the country. A short while later, a white, adobe-style house loomed over the cresting hill, sitting on land that was almost entirely barren; a definite rarity for an area where jungle was a fact of life. A smaller building, also white, sat off to one side, its doors and windows tightly shuttered against the strong sunlight. Unlike the house, which seemed, from the road at least, more open and airy, the lone outbuilding had a vaguely menacing air around it, as if, by its closed-tight look, it promised dark secrets hidden within.

As Kael drove closer, she noted that there wasn’t a number on, or near, the house, but since there weren’t any other habitable buildings anywhere else along the road for as far as the eye could see, the dwelling must have been the right one.

Pulling up into the semi-circular driveway, she turned off the ignition and sat in the car for a moment, listening to the tick of the slowly cooling engine and thinking. On her wild drive to nowhere, her anger leaked out of her slowly, leaving her empty once more. She was well aware how deep of a pit of depression she was in.

She was empty.

Completely and without purpose.

Emptier even than when she had first set foot in Colombia, the only reason for her existence being to live until the next fix could end the screaming pain of her shattered legs.

She didn’t even have that pain to spark her anymore.

Instead, she felt …numb.

Anger and hatred seemed the only things capable of filling her enough to erase the swaddled-cotton feelings she experienced each and every day since Lao Ma’s death. Utter rage was the only thing that got her out of the bed in the mornings.

She knew she was falling. Knew it in the marrow of her bones. So she tried. Oh yes, she tried. Tried again to be that vessel for purity that Lao Ma had so wished for her. Tried to picture in her mind that one perfect moment when anything seemed possible.

And failed. Miserably.

Well, if darkness was what it took to get her living again, she could handle that. Relish it, even. It seemed all she was destined for anyway.

Why not have fun with it?

And she had the feeling that this ‘seer’ could be very fun, indeed.

Feeling a little better about life in general, Kael pushed open the door and slipped her long frame out of the cramped car, raising to her full height gracefully, stretching out her muscles as she did so, and frowning, once again, at the caked blood liberally coating her flesh. “Motherfucker bleeds like the stuck pig he is,” she muttered, scratching flakes of blood off her arm.

The closing of her car door seemed deliberately timed to coincide with the opening of another. Dressed in dark jeans and a bright green shirt, her hair hanging loose and blowing in the slight breeze, a smile firmly affixed to her beautiful face, Ianna seemed the very picture of peace and clean living.

That and a good, healthy dose of primal, blatant sensuality thrown in for good measure.

“Welcome,” Ianna purred, leaning against the doorjamb in an exact imitation of Kael’s casually seductive pose when they had first met. “I knew we’d see one another again.”

“Yeah. You’re a real fortune teller, alright.”

Ianna’s smile broadened. “It pays the bills. Won’t you come inside?”

Instead of answering, Kael brushed past the standing figure and walked down the dimly lit hallway toward what she sensed was a large open room, lured on by the sight of candlelight as it flickered off one wall in the near distance.

The hallway opened out and Kael stepped into the room, then stopped, stunned at the sight before her.

The room was filled with candles. Seemingly hundreds of them littered every flat surface within, their flames dancing merrily and casting eerie shadows on walls and objects stuffed into the largish space. Taking up most of the remaining space were garishly dressed and painted life-sized plaster representations of what Kael, a Catholic girl back when religion actually meant something to her—as in when she was five and her parents, both long dead, forced her into a Church kicking and screaming—recognized to be saints. She looked, over her shoulder, at Ianna, who had followed her into the room. A perfectly arched eyebrow raised over one impossibly blue eye in question.

“As I said, it pays the bills,” Ianna said unapologetically. “The locals like a bang for their buck and I, of course, am happy to provide it for them. I am, after all, a Santeria priestess.” Her smile was mocking.

The connection clicked home. “Santeria. Saints.”

Ianna grinned. “Beauty and brains. An intoxicating package.”

“Yeah. Whatever.” Kael looked around. “You really believe in all this mumbo-jumbo? I took you more for a woman of …substance.”

The other woman laughed, somehow a harsh and grating sound, like two sandstone blocks rubbing against one another. “The spirit world has more substance than you could ever imagine. This is just my parlor. My pretty trappings, if you will. There are other, much more glorious things to be seen here. For those with the courage to look.” Her glance was a challenging one.

Kael snorted. “Like your ‘friends’ in the Villa family?”

“Ahh, you heard about them, did you?”

“Enough.”

“One of my proudest achievements.”

“If you consider that an achievement, I don’t think I’d like to see any of your failures.”

Ianna tilted her head coyly. “That’s just because you don’t know the whole story. It was a wonderful success.”

“Ya don’t say.”

“Oh, but I do. I most definitely do. You see, if they had only listened to me, did what I told them to do, they’d have been alive right now.”

“I was under the impression that listening to you was what got them murdered in their beds.”

Ianna laughed again. “Who do you think set that up in the first place?”

Kael bit back a smirk, cocking her eyebrow at the other woman.

“I’d be happy to share the whole tale with you, but first, why don’t why don’t we slip you into something a little more …comfortable.”

The raven eyebrow rose higher.

“Fetching as the blood-stained look is on you, my dear, I don’t want to have to spend the rest of the day washing it out of the furniture. We’re about the same size. I’m sure I have something to compliment that marvelous body of yours.”