The following day, a storm threatened the basin. Not with rain — Luna County hadn’t seen real rainfall in six months — but with wind. Endless, churning wind that carried dust and whispers and a low moan that seemed to echo off nothing and everything at once.

I was in my office, staring at the evidence board, when Sandy buzzed in.

“There’s someone here to see you,” she said, her voice tight. “Says he knows about the murders.”

“Name?”

“He won’t give one.”

I sighed and opened the door.

The man standing there looked half-starved. Tall, with a leathery face like sun-cracked leather. His coat was three sizes too big and smelled like rust and oil. But his eyes — his eyes were wrong.

Too dark. Too still. Like water that never moved.

“Detective Mac Cole,” I said.

He didn’t shake my hand. Didn’t blink. He just said:

“You saw him. Didn’t you?”

I paused. “Who?”

The man leaned forward, and I noticed something strange — his tongue was mottled, almost gray, like something left too long in the dark.

“The one who walks behind the spiral. The caller. The old voice. You saw him in the arroyo.”

I didn’t answer.

He nodded anyway. “They always do. He waits. He watches. He shows himself to those who are marked.”

“You got a name?”

“They called me Lukács. Long time ago. Before I cut the voice out.”

He opened his mouth wide — too wide — and I saw the scars. Deep ones, crisscrossed under the tongue, cut into the meat.

My stomach turned.

“I saw him too,” Lukács said. “In Romania. In the Argeș hills. Same patterns. Same smells. They buried them under salt and bone. But they never stayed buried.”

I felt cold all over. “What are you talking about?”

He sat without being asked. “It’s not one killer. Not one man. It’s a liturgy, like you said. A rite passed through the centuries. It moves from place to place — always the same symbols, the same effigies. It lives on belief. On sacrifice.”

I stared at him. “So what are we dealing with?”

He leaned forward. “A god.”

The word hit the air like a dropped knife.

He continued. “Not a god like you know. Older. It doesn’t want prayers. It wants patterns. Shapes. Flesh. It teaches the chosen how to speak its name without sound. How to make the spiral sing.”

I tried to keep my voice level. “And who’s doing this now?”

He smiled — a strange, cracked thing. “You’ll know them soon. You’re being invited.”

Before I could ask another question, he stood and walked out. I didn’t stop him.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I went over everything again — Ashton, Sister Ellen, the bone spiral, the pointing arms, the turquoise eyes. Now Lukács.

And the figure in the arroyo.

I pulled out a map and started marking the locations. Henderson’s land. The mission route. The arroyo.

A triangle.

And in the center — an old place. Forgotten. I checked the topo lines.

An abandoned Spanish monastery. No roads led to it. Just dust trails.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I packed my bag and left.

By the time I reached the site, the wind had turned violent. Dust hissed against my windshield. The ruin rose like a skeleton out of the scrubland — broken stone walls, shattered stained glass, a bell tower open to the sky like a wound.

Inside, it was worse.

Someone had returned here. Recently.

There were candles. Melted into piles. Scratched words in dead languages. Symbols carved into every wall — spirals, teeth, the all-seeing eye. At the altar: a small sculpture. Bone. Blood. Something inhuman fused with something that once was.

I turned to leave.

And I saw her.

Sister Ellen.

Standing in the doorway. Alive.

But wrong.

Her eyes glowed faintly, unnaturally, and her skin looked stretched — like something had worn her body like a coat and hadn’t bothered to zip it all the way up.

She opened her mouth — and the voice that came out was not hers.

“You heard the first verse, Mac Cole.”

My body froze.

“The liturgy begins with the witness. You are the second.”

Then she screamed — a sound that didn’t stop. That couldn’t stop. It went on and on, rising, echoing, folding in on itself like a sound made of many mouths.

I ran.

The scream followed me into the night.

And when I looked back…

She wasn’t there.

Just the wind.

And the glint of animal eyes watching from the hills.