chapter X
Banes, Cuba, present day
A COOL LIGHT BREEZE wafted across the dirt road, bringing with it the smell of salt water and wet grass. Kreios stood still, waiting. It was just past two in the morning and the moon hung full and fat, casting its shimmering light on the sea, long shadows over the landscape.
Beyond the single lane dirt road, a cemetery was stamped into the earth, bordered by a stone wall in disrepair. From the shaggy grass fed by ancient corpses jutted sun-bleached marble crosses, stone angels with broken wings outspread over raised tombs, mausoleums, overgrown paupers’ markers. A huge Ceiba tree, its roots climbing like smooth gray buttresses to the massive trunk, stood in the midst of the graves. Its leaves were like six-fingered hands drooping low, shading the dead from the moonlight.
A scuffling noise.
Kreios turned eyes and ears to the lone tree, watching, waiting.
A man stole in amongst the graves in the darkness past a large Spanish stone cross. He looked around him suspiciously as he moved toward a mausoleum, a house for the dead.
Kreios prayed the information he had gained from the dying lips of his last kill was solid; that he would find what he sought and that this foolish idiot would lead him directly to it beneath the graveyard.
Kreios ran swiftly to within a few yards of the man, crouching behind a white stone plinth, moving without sound.
The man heaved his weight against a massive bronze placard on the side of the tomb. Silently it sunk in and back, swinging in to one side, revealing a secret passageway. The man ducked inside and began to turn around and close the heavy door.
Kreios leaped to the entrance so fast that the man didn’t have time to react. Kreios withdrew his fist from the man’s smashed face, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and roughly pulled him outside, dashing his brains against the foot of a statue of Gabriel.
He was dead.
Kreios quickly regarded the statue’s likeness. “Not bad,” he whispered under his breath. “…though Gabe is not that feminine.” He drew his sword and ducked inside the doorway. Rough-hewn timber steps led down into the wormy darkness.
He felt at once the drain of energy that sounded the general alarm, making his presence known to the demons and men below.
Kreios prayed there was no escape route and charged down the stairs.
Ripping and tearing filled his ears as he descended: the Brotherhood were splitting, separating into demons and men. No two-for-one deal tonight.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned to the right, meeting a female directly. He blithely lifted an elbow, knocked her to the ground and then severed her head from her body.
“Kreios!” Something called out his name.
Kreios did not care for conversation, however. He hacked his way deeper into the torch-lit underground chamber, dodging fists and sword thrusts and stepping over freshly made corpses. Black stench hung chokingly in the air as demon after demon expired, leaving behind heavy wet ash.
Kreios gritted his teeth through it, suddenly taking a blindside strike across the jaw from a clawed hand. He recovered quickly, vengeance fueling angelic adrenaline, sword held vertically to one side with two hands, point up.
A thin and wiry creature stood before him sneering. “You have no idea what you have started! This is just the begi—”
Kreios’s blade stabbed quickly up through the soft tissue of the thing’s throat, piercing deep into its rotted brain.
“Shut it,” Kreios said.
The eyes rolled dead in their sockets, arms twitching as Kreios withdrew his blade and pushed the body aside.
“Who is next!”