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“I choose her.”
Mandenauer peered down his nose. “You do not get to choose.”
“She can be cured,” Matt insisted. “You said so yourself.”
The old man stared straight ahead. “Sometimes those we cure run mad. There have been days where I wonder if it would not be better to put them out of their misery like the rabid dogs I often tell witnesses that they are.”
“No,” Matt said. “Just … no.”
The old man shrugged, not an agreement but probably the best Matt was going to get from him.
“If the Nahual can’t be killed, then what’s your plan?”
“As I told you on the phone, we will simply confine the creature again.”
“And as I told you, everyone alive when the deed was done is dead, and no one bothered to leave an instruction booklet. We’re screwed.”
“Not any longer. I spoke with the man who confined him.”
“Are you high?” Matt asked. “The guy’s dust.”
“So was the Nahual once.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
“Raised the dead.”
Matt laughed. Mandenauer did not.
“I—uh—how?”
“Voodoo can be very useful in my line of work.”
“You practice voodoo?”
“My boy, I’d dance the hoochie-coochie on the Empire State Building if it got me what I wanted.”
“How in hell did you learn voodoo?”
“I have a priestess on staff.”
Matt stifled a repeated urge to laugh.
“Okay,” he allowed. He’d really like to know more, but … Matt peered ahead. Their destination loomed a few hundred yards away. “What did the shaman tell you?”
“Words have power,” Mandenauer said. “What occurs in a being’s life is what makes them who they are.”
Matt thought about the wall that had told the Nahual’s story, or at least what the Ute who had created it had known of the story, and understood why those glyphs were there.
“He also said sacrifice was needed to…” Mandenauer’s thin lips pursed. “Set the spell.”
“What kind of sacrifice?”
“Blood.”
That figured.
“What do we do?”
