Luis found all this very exciting. He had enthusiasm for myths, legends, bad omens, bad weather, supernatural happenings and inexplicable events. His passion for superstitions and doomsaying drove his other family members crazy. He didn’t often meet curious strangers with whom he could share his fantastic tales.

His deadpan expression turned bitter with a curl of his lip. “Save your sermon for some other sap. Nobody shares money—not even dead people. Why do you think they invented wills and trust funds?

A lone Japanese man stood on the sidewalk a short distance away. Sleek, self-possessed, dressed in gray. Emma’s lover. Moon’s prime suspect. The man who had once been Dr. Toshi Okada—maimed, supposedly dead, come back alive for revenge.

He attained the highest mastery of Korean martial arts—he could hurl himself through the air and crack cement blocks with his bare hands. In knife-fighting drills, he developed a thousand different reflexes to disarm and stab people. He learned to shoot all manner of firearms…Justin Moon had become the ideal South Korean soldier—with stony strength, quickness, and above all, endurance.

He didn’t wait for her to react. Their mutual desire was obvious. He started kissing her mouth first gently, then harder. He pushed her into the wall and started to slip her robe off. She was intoxicated by his touch. She reeled him in closer. They crashed into the bedroom.

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

The woman felt healed. This stranger understood her. He knew, on a personal level, everything she was going through. And he was asking her to stay alive. Because of him, her angry feelings melted away. She wanted to live again.

The whiskered goddess had two natures; as Sekhmet the lioness, she was a mighty queen of sun-fire and war, and a harbinger of raw spiritual powers. As Bast the cat, she was the gentle bringer of love and domestic joy.

No law. No order. No time or space. Danger was the desert’s breath, and the landscape changed with every wind.