It was dead, and hanging upside down. Next to it was the dried foetus of a llama, its eyeball poached and screaming in the skinless carcase. Jess spat the taste of the rough nylon hood from her mouth. The hood now lay crumpled on the dirty floor; it had been whipped away by a lustrously dark, luridly tattooed man, with a necklace of shark’s teeth and an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt. The man was barefoot and muttering and smoking a spliff of dark jungle tobacco, and tightening the bonds that strapped Jess to the chair on which she had been forced to sit. She knew immediately where she had been taken: because they hadn’t gone far, and the environs were distinctive. Evidently, she had been dragged into the witches’ market, a corner of the town market where shamans and curanderos and brujas came from many miles around, to trade potions and spells and malevolent juju. Ironically, the Mercado de las Brujas was where she had been headed.
