Cool Hand Read Free

out for the core of the pyramid, but they’d have needed rubble and supplies—stone, concrete, railroad ties. That meant trucks visiting. Dumps in the farmyard. Site vehicles going back and forth.
    I guessed that this far out on the plains, no one was around to notice the activity. But at a minimum, it had to have taken them three solid weeks to build this thing.
    Why do all this work? Just to indulge Matlal’s fetish for Nahuatl history?
    Including sacrificing children?
    My stomach twisted. I wanted to vomit. It was evil and insane, beyond even what the rest of Basilikos did. There was a cloud of malevolence clinging to the structure. Like the noonday desert sun on unprotected skin, it made me feel that my skin was getting drier—itching and stretching and burning.
    It’d only been a few minutes since we’d cleared the building, and everyone had followed us inside. I would have had trouble organizing my thoughts enough to give instructions over the comms set, but Elizabetta and the other kin just swept in and took over. Frightened, panicking children were being given sedatives, wrapped up in emergency blankets and carried back to the house. Minor injuries were being dealt with. Elizabetta stopped in front of me long enough to check me for wounds, and then passed on to help Bian in her grim struggle on the altar.
    The child had been sliced on her chest, but the priest—or whatever he called himself—hadn’t had time for the next cut.
    I left Bian and Elizabetta to it. There was nothing I could contribute and I was scared the blood was going to set off my wolf.
    David stood below, next to a huge drum made from an eighty-gallon rainwater butt. He looked as baffled as I was by the sight of the pyramid, but he gave me a nod. Everything had gone well outside.
    Tom and Paul came back in.
    “Ranch house is empty,” Tom said. “They were packed and ready to leave.”
    The way he said it gave it away. “Not the children, though,” I said.
    “No.” He wiped his hand against his shirt as if touching anything the Matlal had touched soiled him. “You okay?” he asked.
    I nodded, my mind skittering around again, trying to grasp it all.
    Killing the children before escaping made a sick kind of sense for the Matlal. They’d have planned to split up into smaller groups, each making its way south and trickling across the border back to the safety of Matlal’s domain in Mexico. Children might draw attention to them. And if they went across the desert, the children might not be able to keep up.
    But why this elaborate setup? What on earth was the purpose of this?
    I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this was somehow an imperfect copy, maybe of another temple.
    What had Luc Matlal been doing on his hidden estates down in Mexico? What had he found? When I first read the briefing notes on him, and had seen the Nahuatl political party affiliations, I’d dismissed that as opportunistic political maneuvering on his part. What if it was more?
    Whatever it was, I’d felt it first; from outside the barn I’d sensed the shape of evil in my mind. And even though that feeling was less now the Matlal were dead, it persisted, like the after-image of a bright light when you shut your eyes. That image wasn’t just a still shape; the surface swam with pale electric movement as if fluorescent snakes were climbing the tiers.
    I’d seen none of that when we’d come in, but reaching out a tentative hand to touch the steps, I somehow expected a shock.
    Nothing.
    My brain seemed slow from the smoke. I wondered if they’d put something mind-altering in those braziers.
    I used a discarded gold helmet to scoop up some moat water, and doused the flames. The smell of paraffin began to cover the odor of whatever had been in the braziers. I left the floating lamps; there didn’t seem to be anything in them.
    With the reduction in light, menacing shadows seemed to ooze out of the wooden walls and steal down them to pool at the bottom.
    I