“Not yet,” Jenny said. She gave him a wicked smile and pressed a hand to the top of his head, pushing him down along her body. He kissed her breasts, then her stomach. Jenny spread her knees wide as she pushed his face between her legs.
His tongue entered her, and her hips jerked immediately, and she cried out. He licked her and sucked at her, his hands on her breasts, her nipples between his fingers. Her body writhed in pleasure at the touch of his tongue and lips.
Jenny cried out again, and again, her scream of pleasure echoing back from the high stone walls of the Sierra Madre.
“Now!” Jenny shouted, and he climbed on top of her. Her hands slid all over his back as she pulled him down on her. She couldn't touch him enough—each touch only made her crave him more.
She felt him enter her, and her fingernails slashed across the flesh of his back. He filled her up in a way that was both painful and unspeakably satisfying. She bit hard at his neck and cheek, drawing blood while he slid into her again and again.
When she screamed again, she though the mountains would shatter around her. For an instant, her entire body felt like fire.
“Netjenkhet!” she cried, and she felt the tidal wave of his orgasm inside her.
He collapsed on her, and they panted and sweated and bled.
“I love you,” Jenny said.
“What do you remember?”
“Everything.” She caressed his face. She was the ancient thing, the nameless being who only play-acted at being poor little Jenny Morton from Nowhere, South Carolina. She had played any number of roles, but she wasn't playing anymore. She was awake and aware, yet still in the flesh. It was a powerful feeling.
She stood and walked out into the humid night air.
“I knew you would remember,” Alexander said. He stood beside her, one hand on her lower back, while she looked down the long, steep stairs to the ruins below. The sound of rattlesnakes still pulsed in her ears.
She had once been regarded as a goddess in this city, or one very similar to it, and blood sacrifices had been made to appease her.
Jenny looked up at the sky. She could see the great serpent there, coiled in its spiral, each one of its massive scales an entire glowing galaxy.
Eons ago, in a time before numbers, long before the universe was stable enough for time to be measured, their kind had existed in the formless void, the endless chaos. They had fed on a raw psychic energy, the most basic fabric of the cosmos. They developed strategies for stealing this energy from each other, strategies that would, eons later, translate into the powers they expressed when born in the flesh.
Among this chaos, the great serpent began to grow. It did not simply steal energies, but devoured the beings themselves, swallowing and incorporating them into the structure of its body. The more it grew, the more it could devour, and it soon grew massive and powerful, though this also meant it moved more and more slowly.
They did not know whether the great serpent was an invader from elsewhere, or one of their own kind, grown to titanic proportions by devouring so many of the others. As the serpent ate and grew, it left more and more open and empty space in the cosmos. The remaining beings learned to fear and hide from the great serpent so that it would not devour them.
In time, those original beings who still remained hid themselves away from the serpent, in the remaining pockets of primordial chaos too small and distant to interest the slow and titanic being. Each scale on its back was a galaxy. Its form repeated throughout its colossal body, from the serpentine shapes of the galaxies to the DNA coils that constructed plants and animals around themselves. Every living thing was its offspring, its parentage reflected in that coiled serpent at the core of every cell.
While the serpent became a highly structured universe, their kind, the remaining inhabitants of the original chaos, lived as forgotten outcasts on the fringes of the cosmos. After an immeasurable span of time, they learned to insinuate themselves like parasites into the great serpent's flesh, and to take the forms of living things. Deep down, their intention was to destroy the great serpent. By defeating their ancient enemy, they could feed on its corpse and restore the old chaos in which they had thrived.
Those humans whose minds could tap into the great serpent's dreaming superconscious were known as shamans, prophets and madmen. They had called the great serpent by a hundred thousand names: Ngalyod, Sheshanaag, Nüwa, Tiamat, Ophion, Amduat, Ouroboros.
Finally, many of the humans had stripped away ceremony and symbolism and simply called it God.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was ungodly. I'm telling you it was evil, it was the devil. That man got crushed by that tractor, shoulda died, and the Barrett kid just touches him and reshapes him til he's fixed again. And the Morton girl threatens everyone with her, her witchcraft, that's what got the town thinking about witchcraft—