I had never driven a car before. I could barely reach the pedals, yet it seemed perfectly natural. An hour later, I returned to the old man’s home with my parents and the police, who dredged T’quan’s corpse from the sinkhole’s muddy bottom—along with the remains of no less than a dozen other children the old man had murdered over the years.

That was my first encounter with evil and the powers that we possess, Jacob, but it wouldn’t be my last.

I need to know more about evil. Where does it come from? How did it start?

That, my son, is a question your grandfather, Julius, pondered until his dying day. Is evil something genetically programmed into our species, or is it a learned behavior? Is it spiritual in nature, perhaps the Yin to the soul’s Yang. Or is it a disease that infects the mind? T’quan had a look in his eyes when he came after me, one that I’ll never forget. It was as if the old man’s soul had vacated the body and separated itself from the collective warmth of our species. Julius called the man a godless reptile, and for a long time I agreed with him, until the night I witnessed my own father straddling my mother’s body, suffocating her with a pillow.

Julius murdered Grandma?

He claimed it was euthanasia, but in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, it was murder. Looking back on it now, I realize just how much Julius loved my mother, how hard it was to do what he did. She was in so much pain from the cancer, she begged him for mercy, and he gave it to her. At the same time, I also realize how evil is created, because from that moment on, I hated Julius for what he had done, and I allowed my anger to fester, until it finally exploded backstage as I held my dead father in my arms and went after Pierre Borgia.

When you were in solitary for so long—how were you able to keep from … you know, from going insane?

For a while, I thought I had gone insane. Then, during my eighth month, I drifted into a semilucid state, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-body experience.

I don’t understand?

Nor did I at the time. It was my Hunahpu DNA. The gene was somehow programming my mind to take a visual reconnaissance into humanity’s past. My first journey deposited my consciousness on a Mediterranean shoreline, somewhere in the Middle East. From out of the sea strode a large humanoid male, his appearance bordering on the bizarre. His skin was as dark as cocoa, in sharp contrast to his long silky hair and beard, which were snow-white. His eyes were a deep azure-blue, set within an almost inhumanly elongated skull.

I would learn his name was Osiris.

But this was all just a dream?