“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“It’s finished.”

Cruz K. Flores leapt to his feet with the elegance of a pig.

“Really, Caglio? It’s really finished?”

“It is, sir,” replied the cool Italian.

“Then there’s no time to waste. Where to?”

“Follow me.”

Flores trailed Caglio out into a concrete staircase stretching steeply down into a maze of dim, bare corridors. A few twists and turns led them into a brightly lit room filled with lab equipment and bustling, quiet figures in white lab coats.

“Over here, sir.”

One of the lab techs, a mousy, pale-skinned man with extreme baldness, stepped up to Flores wearing a wide smile with only a hint of fear. “Sir, it is so good to see you here today, yes? Soon, you will be the greatest man in the wor-”

“Where is the fern?” Flores cut him off. “I am in no mood for flattery, man.”

The chemist’s shoulders sank and he meekly guided the fat drug-lord to a metal rack filled with all manner of test tubes and needles.

“According to our tests, the best way to take it is via intravenous injection, sir.”

“Wonderful. Now do it, eh?”

The lab tech nodded nervously and selected a syringe filled with a filmy cobalt liquid. He motioned to a bare mattress lying nearby.

“In all of our experiments with the drug, the subject enters a state of unconsciousness in approximately 2.4 seconds.” He coughed, eyes darting behind thin wire spectacles. “That number was calculated via the sample median of-”

“Shut up, lackey,” said Flores. “I do not have the whole day to listen to your babbling, you understand?.”

The scientist whimpered and scurried to the mattress. “If you would please lie down, it would make the process much more enjoyable in the future.”

Flores heaved his bulk onto the mattress and glared up at the man, his steely black eyes communicating a vague, predatory impatience more frightening than words.

The man squeaked something under his breath, knelt, and jabbed Flores in the arm.

Flores felt an uncommon tingling sensation. An ethereal blue light danced at the edge of his vision.

Strange, he thought.

And then everything went black.

***

“So… when did you get your driver’s license? I don’t really know how all that works in the US.” Hector laughed as he inspected Yogwo’s dinky Honda. Something about it- the smell, perhaps- reminded Hector of an ancient skeleton dragged from its grave by some foul necromancer. The car had been hidden under a tarp for who knew how long. It felt wrong to uncover it.

“Driver’s license?” asked Yogwo absently. He was trying to stuff Ike the stone-sleeper into a grocery bag. The snake wouldn’t stay in. “I don’t have a driver’s license, dude.”

Hector blinked. “Then how do you-” He stopped himself and thought for a second. I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess.

Goonda hobbled out of the Spirit-Healer’s little shack clutching a long, rectangular plastic case in both of his withered hands. It was as big as- maybe bigger- than the old Mayan, but that didn’t seem to stop him from gently setting it in the trunk of Yogwo’s car.

“What’s that?” Hector had never seen the case before.

“Bazooka,” replied Goonda sharply as he carefully situated the container. “And a couple of pistols for good measure.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Of course I am, you idiot. It’s Yogwo’s set of star globes.”

“His what?”

“They, like, guide us on our path, dude,” Yogwo explained. “They bring us the favor of Toohkla.”

“The favor of who?”

“Toohkla, dude. You know, he’s, like, the Divine Celestial Monarch. You know? ‘Cause Arch-Shaman Goonda and I are part of the Divine Celestial Monarchy. We’re Toohkla’s enemies.”

“Emissaries,” corrected the Arch-Shaman.

“Yeah, adversaries. That’s what I said, bro.”

“Do not ‘bro’ me, Yogwo. Remember your place.”

While the two cultists bantered, Hector looked around- at the mountains, the trees, and the rickety heap of rot that he had called home for the past few weeks.

He had nothing to bring with him except for the clothes on his back. By the time this was all over, he planned to have one more thing: a blue fern.

***

The drive to Mexico was long, cramped, sweaty, uncomfortable, and very boring. It alternated between three primary patterns: Goonda berating a meek and penitent Yogwo, Goonda discoursing at length upon the nature of Order and Chaos, and complete and utter silence. Hector kept to himself for the most part. What if Flores is gone? What if he’s not where we expect? It was a very real possibility. How much does he know? Is he expecting us? Did he somehow manage to get a stone-sleeper since the confrontation at Serpentemple? He evidently has some kind of contact who has secret knowledge… like Goonda. Another half-death, perhaps? Maybe another tzulik? Is Flores immortal yet? What if he’s injected his henchmen with the fern-drug too? That would spell trouble. What if Flores is a tzulik? No, he can’t be. What about me? What if I can’t use my powers? At least they had Goonda. He was their most important asset.

And what about Yogwo? What if he gets hurt? Or dies? Yogwo hadn’t spoken much about his role in the mission they were embarking upon, instead telling Hector to “relax, dude.” Hector was still holding onto the sinking hope that maybe, just maybe, the Spirit-Healer had a bazooka or a broadsword or a black belt in karate. Something. Anything.

With Goonda droning on, Yogwo occasionally interjecting with a bad joke or ill-timed comment, and Hector worrying himself silly, the trip to the Sierra Madres crawled by. Nine hours passed. It was late in the evening when the battered little car pulled up at a roadside motel. The Flecha Motel was a long, thin concrete structure hunched against a mountainside. It was cement gray, with the occasional smattering of pale yellow paint that hadn’t flaked off yet. There were fourteen rooms in total at the Flecha. None were occupied, and judging from the thick dust carpeting the furniture and the cockroach breeding operation going on in the floorboards, they looked as if they hadn’t been for a century or two.

Yogwo wasn’t exactly rich, but the owner of the motel wasn’t either. After a bit of bargaining on Goonda’s part, this fact created a nice equilibrium in which the owner got enough money to live off of for the next month or two, and the three customers got three separate rooms.

The next day began with more driving. Yogwo swerved his way through the mountains of northern Mexico. Hector spent his time peering out his dirty window, guiding the Spirit-Healer down road after winding road. They were headed for the drug-dealer stronghold. It was the logical choice for Flores, after the police raid. Unless he had another mansion somewhere that the authorities hadn’t yet discovered. Which is entirely possible, Hector thought.

Finally, they turned a corner onto an overgrown gravel road stretching far into the wilderness. The road was thick with dust.

“There’s one more turn before we can access the road up the mountain,” Hector told Yogwo. “Pull over here. We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Goonda grunted. “What if no one’s there?” He was in good shape- for a two-thousand year-old- but his age showed when compared with the much, much younger Hector and Yogwo. “Maybe I should stay with the car.”

Hector glanced at Yogwo, and Yogwo nodded. “Sounds good, du- ahem, Arch-shaman. We’ll be back in, like… uh, um, however long it takes us to get back.”

“What eloquence,” muttered Goonda as the two younger men stepped out of the car. “If anyone tries to shoot me I’ll dissolve his shoes.”

“Shoes? What-” Hector asked.

“Get going,” Goonda snapped. “You don’t have all day, do you?”

Twenty minutes later, Hector Domini stood a quarter of the way up a mountain, studying a shaded dirt track stretching up through sparse patches of pine and oak. At the mountain’s peak, he could just make out a speck of white concrete surrounded by more trees.

The compound.

“We’re not taking the path.” He turned to Yogwo. “It’s probably watched. I don’t know if Flores is expecting us, but even if he isn’t, I’d rather not risk being spotted by a guard.”

“Don’t worry, bro,” replied Yogwo. “I’m, like, a master of stealth. I’ve lived in the woods all of my life.” He smiled and wiggled his fingers creepily for absolutely no reason.

“I sure hope so.” Hector strode, somewhat reluctantly, into the pine forest on one side of the road. It was going to be a long climb.

***

Miguel Torres was tired.

Really tired.

He had already spent an entire night and part of the morning sitting in a metal chair, staring at flickering security camera monitors and trying not to fall asleep. He hadn’t seen a single thing of note in ten hours. Except for those two mule deer. And the mountain lion. That thing was creepy.

But there had been no Hector Domini. And he was the only thing that they were watching out for. He was the only thing that mattered.

After complaining to Marcus Angel, Flores’ bodyguard, that he never wanted to see another security monitor again, he had been sent- without even a lunch break- to sit in yet another metal chair, this time in the dry, semi-cool air of the Mexican mountains. He was in the tiny guardhouse that kept watch over the road up to the compound. Besides the chair, there was a metal table, a metal cabinet, and a black-and-white security monitor. He hadn’t looked at it since sitting down.

A shotgun lay across his lap, and Miguel savored the feel of the mountain air on his skin as it explored the room through an open window. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He was… so… tired…

A noise outside jerked him out of half-sleep and into full alertness. Had that been a footstep? It was hard to tell. He should have been paying more attention.

Cursing himself under his breath, Miguel picked up the shotgun and shuffled out the door of the guardhouse, headed down the mountain road. Eyes peeled, he scanned the dirt track and the surrounding woods. There was no one. Not that he could see.Better check a little farther.He stumbled down the steep mountainside, trying to peer around the next corner.

There was no one. It must have been the wind.

Torres turned around. Back to the metal chair and the flickering monitor that he wouldn’t look at.

He screamed, stumbled backwards, and tripped on his own feet. The shotgun clattered onto the dirt.

There was a man, right in front of him, clutching a large stick.

The man was terrifying. Long, tangled, filthy black hair dangled down his shirtless back. Wide, pallid eyes stared at him with an unreadable expression. He looked like the dictionary definition of “madman.”

A second man stepped out of the woods on Miguel’s right. He carried a long, thin switch in one hand and a dangerously large rock in the other.

It was Hector Domini.

Miguel spewed a dictionary’s worth of Spanish expletives and lunged for his shotgun. The stick in the first man’s hand came down, hard, and crashed into Miguel’s head at the same instant as a bare heel crushed his hand.

Pain seared the edges of Torres’ vision. The last thing he saw was the long-haired man pulling out a flip-phone and dialing someone.

“We’re in.”

“Stay wild, moon child,” said the long-haired man.

And then he brought his cudgel-like stick down on Torres’ head one more time.

Reality dissolved into blackness.