Her feet felt leaden, like they were cast in concrete. She looked over her shoulder, back at the helicopter where the young missionary still wept, his hunched shoulders bobbing with each breath. Flush with emotion, she surprised herself by saying a short prayer—one of the very few she’d said in a while—making sure to add a petition for Dagan at the end. Then with a heavy heart, she retrieved the digital camera from the zipper pocket of her fleece and began the solemn task of documenting the mysterious violence that had been dealt upon these poor, innocent people.

The machinations of men and war are clever and cruel, she thought as she zoomed in on one of the piles of ash, but this is a power no mortal should have the authority to wield.

CHAPTER
FOUR

MORENA PERUVIAN KITCHEN RESTAURANT

PLAZA DE ARMAS

CUZCO, PERU

2011 HOURS LOCAL

Jed forced his mind away from the horrors of what he’d seen on the mountain and tried, instead, to think through the images more technically. Tactically, even. The sights were terrible enough—charred buildings; piles of ash presumably once men, women, and children; the anguish and fear in the faces of the survivors—but when you added the smell of burnt flesh and sulfur, well, it was hard not to invoke Old Testament images of God’s wrath as the young missionary had rambled incessantly about. For Jed, passages of fire and brimstone from the book of Revelation had also come to mind. Because what earthly power could possibly mete out such destruction?

Which is precisely the question the Dark Ones would want people to ask after an attack like this. They want to make people believe in a vengeful God, a God of judgment and retribution, a God who doesn’t care . . . or better yet, a God who doesn’t exist at all.

The very fact these thoughts and doubts came to him was the evidence he needed that this was the work of Victor and the Dark Ones. It was right out of their playbook—violence and horror, not for its own sake, not to conquer territory or change geopolitics, but to shake faith and wrestle people away from a loving God.

The trip up the mountain had been sobering and had left Jed and his team with more questions than answers. They’d gathered no proof that the Dark Ones were behind the attack, and yet it felt like the only plausible explanation. The Q’ero were not a threat to any state actor. They were not terrorists or extremists bent on undermining the Peruvian government or any government for that matter. It simply made no sense for these people to be targeted.

Unless this was just a test and there is more yet to come.