Ash Return of the Beast

CHAPTER 44



The Next Day…

New Mexico

It was still a sweltering 90 degrees when Ravenwood landed in Albuquerque just after 6 p.m. She rented a car and headed straight for Sky City, an ancient sun-parched pueblo complex situated some 360 feet atop a steep-walled mesa in the middle of nowhere about 30 miles outside of Albuquerque. The small population consisted mostly of the Acoma people. Among them was her childhood friend, Tocho.

Sky City, although rustic and relatively primitive, did have what every good Native American tourist trap needs to survive: a nice hotel and a modern casino. Tocho, now in his late forties, with shoulder-length graying black hair and a deeply crevassed face, worked as a bartender at the casino. But Ravenwood hadn’t come all this way just for a drink. At least not that kind of a drink. Tocho had another skill when it came to mixing up liquid spirits. He’d spent a few years living in the jungles of Central America as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice under the tutelage of a Mesoamerican shaman named Tlacatecolotl, the ‘Owl Man’. That’s where Tocho learned the art of making the powerful psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca, the spirit vine.

Ravenwood and Tocho had not seen each other since she’d left New Mexico decades ago but they had kept in touch through letters and, more recently, by email. In her latest email she’d told him that she needed his help and that it would involve the spirit vine. She didn’t tell him why. She knew if he knew what she wanted to do he would tell her to forget it. He’d tell her it was too dangerous. He’d be right. She knew that. But she also knew something even more dangerous may be at stake. She needed to know for sure because, if she was right, she was the only one who could prevent the hell that was about to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.