Shannon stared into the cave and fought a sudden panic crashing around his ears. He took an involuntary step back, swallowing.

“Sula,” he whispered. “Sula.”

A cold breeze rustled the leaves over his head, sending a chill deep into his bones. The cave looked like a dark throat. Like the cliff was actually a face and the hanging skull was its one eye, and the cave was its yawning mouth. The natives said that the cave reached an endless abyss of black space where the spirits had first lived. Hell itself.

An image flashed in Shannon’s mind, and he blinked. It was Mother, screaming past the window of the house. Begging him to run for his life.

Shannon swallowed and walked for the cave. Tears filled his vision and he marched on. He felt as though he were walking over a cliff.

“Kill me.” He ground the words out past clenched teeth.

And then he was stumbling forward, his head thumping with blood.

“Kill me!” he screamed. He ran for the hole, gripped by a maniacal frenzy. He scooped up a handful of rocks and hurled them into the cave.

“Kill me! Kill me!”

Shannon stopped, legs spread. He was in the face of the cave, five feet from the mound of dirt that covered Sula. The shaman’s crooked cane stuck up at the grave’s head, like a dagger. A bleached jaguar’s skull hung on the cane—fangs white, eyeholes black.

Shannon’s muscles began to twitch with horror. It was the kind that starts deep in the marrow and spreads out to the bones and burns the flesh from the inside. He knew then that coming here had been a mistake. He was going to die.

Cold wind blew past his face, lifting his long hair. A low moan pushed it through the opening, out into the silent jungle. His legs quaked and he dropped to his knees, breathing heavy now.

“Sula . . .”

Touch the grave.

He began to sob.

Touch the cane.

Shannon spread his arms wide and lifted his face to the cave’s rock ceiling. His body heaved with torturous sobs that rang through the chamber.

The cane, you spineless worm! Touch the cane!

With a final cry that sounded more like a long groan, Shannon threw himself at the grave. He scrambled over the mound and dove for the cane. His hands seized the crooked pole and he fell flat, facedown, his torso hitching in soft sobs.

The power came like an electric current, silent but unmerciful.

A wave of raw energy ripped down his back, contracting it with rapid pulses that seized his lungs and bent his spine backward like a bow. His head and his feet jerked a foot off the ground, straining to reach back and complete an impossible arc. For a full five seconds, his body convulsed, threatening to snap his back in two. He could not breathe; he could not utter a single sound; he could only drown in the power that swallowed him.