CHAPTER SIX

THE SMALL cavity under the clump grew dark as dusk settled over the mountain jungle. Relentless chopper blades passed back and forth, low over the trees. Twice he heard men arguing over how to proceed. Twice they had skirted the pond, cursing.

For the past twenty minutes the air had remained quiet. Shannon had decided that he had to get over the cliff to the river beyond, and he knew where he could climb it along a narrow crack. But another image had taken up residence in his mind. It was the old shaman, eyes black and piercing, a black jaguar’s fur draped over his head, tapping a crooked cane. He was mumbling in low gutturals—reciting the old legend of how man had been formed from the blood of a wounded spirit as it fled skyward, mortally wounded.

“From blood to blood,” the old man’s voice croaked. “Man was born to kill. It is why the spirit of death is the strongest. Sula.”

A chill ran along Shannon’s spine. You were right, Sula, he whispered.

Then go.

Shannon blinked in the darkness. Go?

To the grave.

His fingers trembled and he wasn’t sure if it came from the cold or from this thought whispering through his mind. The grave was strictly forbidden. It could mean death. Or it could mean power, to the next witch doctor. None of his friends had ever dared venture within a thousand meters of the cave where the tribe had buried, not only Sula, but a whole line of witch doctors before him.

Shannon swallowed. But what if he could take that power and avenge his parents’ deaths? Another voice whispered through his mind. Tanya’s. And it was telling him not to be a fool.

But Tanya was dead, wasn’t she? Everybody was dead. He began to cry again, desperate and shaking in the cold water.

He made the decision on impulse, as much out of fear and destitution as anything else. He would go to the cave.

Shannon sucked a lungful of air, submerged into the cold water, and swam for the bank. The perimeter was clear when he surfaced and stood on the grass. He ran toward the black cliffs, pushed by a numbing determination now—a singular desire to dive into the Sula’s power. For comfort or for revenge or just for his own sanity, he wasn’t sure, but he ran faster as he neared the old cave.

Large fruit bats beat their huge wings in near silence overhead. Insects screeched. The looming black rock cast a foreboding shadow, even in the dark, hiding the moon.

He broke out into the clearing, thirty yards before the cave, and stopped. A human skull hung over the entrance—Sula’s first victim. They had retold the story at his burial amid cries that wailed through the jungle like forlorn trumpets. The skull belonged to a woman who had wandered too far from her own tribe. Sula said she had come to cast a spell on their village and he’d taken a rock to the back of her head. He’d been fourteen.