She turned to find Victor walking silently up behind her. In the stark and bright illumination, she saw him more clearly than she ever had before, and it made her shudder inside. His skin had an unnatural green-gray pallor—as if she saw him in night vision. Like a sheet of wax paper, the skin of his face shone smooth, wrinkle-free, and barely hid the network of veins snaking every which way beneath the surface. His taut lips were the color of a two-day-old bruise and the teeth behind were gray and cracked like aged driftwood. His long, greasy black hair hung in strands, more like jellyfish tendrils than hair, and she could see his scalp in between them. He was, without a doubt, the most repugnant and grotesque human being she’d ever had the misfortune to gaze upon. And yet his eyes . . .

His eyes were beautiful.

Hypnotic.

Twin rings of fire, dancing around obsidian disks as black as the depths of space.

“What is this place?” she said, breaking eye contact and shaking herself from his trance.

The big operator who’d escorted her, who now stood at Victor’s side, chuckled at her question.

“Leave us,” Victor said with a sideways glance at the man, his voice a serpent’s hiss. The operator nodded and walked away without a word. “This is Dark Horizon’s Nashville staging facility.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looks like you’re preparing for war,” she said, sweeping her gaze across the cavernous space.

“It appears you don’t . . . ,” Victor said, curling his thin bloodless lips, “. . . know better. But then, aren’t we always at war, my dear?”

She kept her expression neutral, but the comment made her heart skip a beat. Rather than explain, he motioned for her to follow him. He led her past the row of armored assault vehicles, which she saw were parked in line with the loading bay doors, ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Beyond the APVs, she saw a strange-looking device, about the size of a refrigerator, sitting on a shipping pallet. Beside the odd machine sat a half-dozen shipping crates about the same size—additional devices? she wondered. Four support legs held the body of the contraption off the ground. On the underbelly, a satellite-looking dish pointed downward, and above it, exposed wires, stainless steel tubing, and heat-radiating fins protruded from all sorts of places. It reminded her of the death ray from the movie Megamind and she was about to joke as much when he read her thoughts.

“That’s exactly what it is,” he said, turning to her.

She chuckled uncomfortably, but when he didn’t react, she said, “You’re serious?”

He nodded. “It is a directed energy weapon that incinerates the target from the inside out. We call it the Wrath of God.”

“Who are you planning to use this on?” she asked, shaken to the core that such a thing existed.