Mickey Torke woke up in an extravagant hotel somewhere in Prague. The bed was luxurious and remarkably comfortable, and Mickey had a long, deep sleep.

  Fuck.

  This was bad. He wasn’t supposed to sleep at all. He didn’t need to, on account of the fact that he was a god, or whatever the hell you wanted to call him. It had been years since his last nap, and he’d planned on never sleeping again. Sleeping was one of his least favorite things to do. The only time he ever slept was to dream, and his dreams were never good. They were always the same:

  A baby is born surrounded by sludge. The sludge grabs hold of him, tears him apart, and reforms him into something grotesque and indescribable. He looks at you with black eyes. He hates you. He chases you and you’re too slow to get away. He grabs hold of you and you’re too weak to resist. He melts your skin and splinters your bones. The baby drains you slowly of your blood and takes satisfaction in making you suffer.

  Sometimes the dreams would trick him, lull him into a false sense of security. He’d be human again, homeless, hanging out under his old bridge of choice without a care in the world, sitting in his tent while a gentle rain pitter-pattered over his head, smoking and drinking to his heart’s content — and then the baby would come. No matter what, they always ended the same way, with a sludge-covered baby being torn apart and reformed into something hideous and powerful, and with Mickey being killed.

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  For a while, the symbolism seemed obvious — it was Gus, or “Emperor Augustus” as the smug asshole liked to call himself these days. He was a sludge slinging god (or whatever), who quite literally had his arms torn off, reformed himself into a half-sludge freak, and would never shut up about how he wanted Mickey dead.

  There were only two problems with this theory: Mickey was not afraid of Gus, and Gus wasn’t a baby.

  Why the fuck is it always a baby? Mickey would ask himself this question over and over for decades. The more he thought about it, the surer he was that Gus was not the villain in his dreams. And the surer he was that these weren’t just dreams — they were visions, and someone was making him see them. There was no way he would fall asleep unless someone made him fall asleep. But who?

  He rolled out of bed and rubbed his eyes. The room had a great view of the beautiful city, and Mickey took deep satisfaction in seeing miles of old European buildings and empty streets splattered with the red goo of his mutilated victims.

  Whoever was sending him these visions — Gus, Jesus, Satan, or some weird magic baby — he was going to break their fucking necks.