“You have anger management issues,” says a voice behind me that I don’t recognize. I swing around, ready for another fight and freeze.
The man in front of me is tall, gaunt. Skin so tight I can see bones and organs pressing from the inside as if they’re struggling to break through. The flesh on his skull is almost superfluous, paper thin and shot through with veins of green. I can see the hinge of his jaw, teeth pressing against emaciated lips. The dozen eyeballs strung around his neck look crazily in all directions before finally focusing on me.
“Mictlantecuhtli.”
“Nice to finally meet you in the flesh, Eric,” he says. “Such as it is.”
“You’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” I say. Considering he was a rock at the time that’s not really surprising. As I become more like him he’s becoming more like me.
“You’re looking worse,” he says. “Might want to do something about that arm.”
“Huh? Oh, right.” My right forearm is a bloody mess with a short, deep gash in it. I can still move my hand and I have feeling in my fingers. The bleeding is bad, but it’s not going to kill me anytime soon.
I check my messenger bag for some bandages and come up with a roll of duct tape, instead. One of these days I’ll remember to stock a first aid kit in this thing. I wrap the tape tight around the wound. The pressure should stop the bleeding. And if it doesn’t, well, I’m probably not going to live much longer, anyway.
“I’m no expert,” Mictlantecuhtli says, “but I don’t think that’s hygienic.”
I’m so used to hearing and seeing him as Alex that it’s just as disconcerting as Santa Muerte appearing as a flesh and blood woman and not a pile of bones in a wedding dress. The voice is wrong, but he’s still as big a smart ass as the chunk of himself still in my head.
“Yeah, well. Needs must and all that,” I say. I might not have a first aid kit, but I think I saw some dental floss in the messenger bag. If I get some time I can always stitch it up with that later. Of course, that depends on what happens between now and later. “Thanks for the assist, by the way.”
“Just because I have a vested interest, doesn’t mean I’m getting in the way of a fight. Come on. We won’t have much time until they wake up. And then there’s going to be a lot of noise.”
“Even this guy?” I say nudging the warrior with the pulped skull with my foot.
“Even him. Might take a him a little while, though. And the guys you shot. And the others who you crushed with the street. Come on.” He steps to the edge of the building and raises his arms. Loose stones, dirt and sticks from the street down below rise up and interconnect, mashing themselves together until there’s a bridge of debris going from one building to the next. He walks across it to the other roof.
“Wish I’d known that trick,” I say, eyeing the structure and pushing my foot against it. It looks like it’s going to disintegrate in a stiff breeze, but it feels solid enough.
“You do know that trick,” he says. “It’d just be a real bad idea for you to try it. Just like it was a bad idea for you to use that trick with the street.”
“I didn’t do that. It just happened.”
“Sure. That’s up there with, ‘I just fell on it, doc’. It’s a miracle you didn’t turn into a statue right then and there. Now come on. I can’t hold this thing forever.” I hurry across and the moment I step onto the other roof the bridge collapses behind me.
“All right, now what?” Mictlantecuhtli does his trick again and we walk quickly to another roof. He’s visibly straining each time he does it.
“Now we get you into the palace so you can get my knife back. Then you go stab my ex-wife. Speaking of which, how come you didn’t when you had the chance? I was watching you when she showed up. You had a perfect shot.”
“With a dozen armed warriors surrounding me? Seriously?”
“Still think it was a missed opportunity.”
“Whatever. Probably should have stuck with the warriors. I was on my way there, already.”
“You were on your way to a cell,” he says. “She was going to lock you up and then find me. I’m too weak to fight her right now, since most of my power is sitting inside you. Then she sticks me in there with you so you can stab me. You finish turning into a rock, I get reborn into a meatbag. Nobody’s happy except her.”
“So what’s your plan?” I notice that though we’ve cut across several buildings and are taking a more indirect route, we’re getting steadily closer to the Bone Palace. “I take it we don’t just show up at the steps to the pyramid and walk on up.”
“My plan?” he says. “I don’t have a plan. What’s yours?”
He pulls together more debris, but this time it’s a ramp leading down to an alley. He’s visibly straining to keep it in one piece, and it disintegrates as soon as we’re on the ground.
“I figured I’d just show up at the steps to the pyramid and walk on up.”
“That explains so much. No, we’re not taking the stairs. Don’t be an idiot. Mictecacihuatl and I kept this area around the Palace clear of souls. Added privacy. There’s nobody in these buildings from here until we reach it. Just follow me and don’t do anything stupid like turn into a rock before we get there.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You could have had this sewn up months ago,” he says, anger in his eyes. “You could have gotten here in the blink of an eye. And if you didn’t want to, you could have come in through Mitla. So why didn’t you?”
“I needed a back door,” I say. “I needed to get as close as possible to Santa Muerte. I wasn’t going to rush in here and start stabbing people. What do you think would have happened if I’d just shown up at the front gate? I wouldn’t even be here by now.”
“Oooh, that’s a fib,” Alex says appearing next to me. “Go on. Tell him the truth. I know he’d love to hear it. You wanted to save your new girlfriend and kill everybody else. Go ahead and keep lying to yourself, but we both know that’s why.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say under my breath.
“What?” Mictlantecuhtli says.
“Nothing. Go on, please. You were berating me for not doing things the way you would.”
He gives me the kind of glare you can only get from a death god. “If you hadn’t wrapped yourself in spells to keep me out I could have helped you,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “You still don’t trust me.”
“Look, I’ve got a chunk of you still with me, so believe me I’ve been getting plenty of commentary.”
“That’s because I’m tired of only having you to talk to,” Alex says. “It’s really frustrating that you won’t let me out to talk to him. You’ve got lots of charms to keep him out, but nothing to shut me up. If you’d open things up a little—”
“Let’s just go and get this over with,” I say, cutting them both off before they can say anything else. I follow close behind Mictecacihuatl through the twisting alleys toward the Bone Palace.
Something is bugging me about what Alex just said and it takes a little while before I figure it out. With the spells in my ink, Santa Muerte couldn’t see me. But Mictlantecuhtli can. Why?
“That’s a really good question,” Alex says.
“Will you just shut up?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Mictlantecuhtli says, annoyance in his voice.
“Not you. The other you.”
“Oh. You’re talking to him?” Mictlantecuhtli looks around me trying to see the sliver of himself in the air.
“It’s really more at him.”
“Ah. So exactly how you talk to me, then. Nice to see some things never change. You sound annoyed.”
“You don’t say?”
Are the spells in my ink just not working? Or is it because of this unwanted connection I have with him? There’s part of him still inside me, so even if he can’t get into my head, it doesn’t mean I can hide from him. Dammit. I thought I’d fixed that.
We make a turn
and straight ahead of us is the palace. It’s immense. Hundreds of feet wide, thousands high. We come to the side of it and I don’t see how we can possibly get in.
We get in close to the limestone bricks and Mictlantecuhtli peers at them, looking for something. “All right,” he says, brightening. “Now we’re talkin’.”
There’s a section of wall that looks just a little darker than the surrounding brickwork. Mictlantecuhtli presses his hand against it and it disappears. As it does I can feel the pull of his power inside me wanting to get out, rejoin him. It doesn’t hurt so much as it’s just uncomfortable.
“Secret passages in Mictlan? Who the hell are you hiding from that you need secret passages?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Other gods, my wife, the occasional fling gone bad.”
“There was one time when we had to hide from all three,” Alex says.
The passage is wide and made of bone white bricks. A soft glow emanates from the walls illuminating our path. Behind us the gap in the wall seals back up as if it had never been there, cutting off the noise from the city as if somebody had thrown a switch. The only sound is my own breathing.
“I feel like I’m skulking through some medieval castle,” I say. Between this and the Crystal Road it’s a wonder I’m not claustrophobic by now.
“Yes, it’s all very Macbeth.”
“How—”
“I was in your head for months,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “I even know what Star Wars is.”
A cracking sound like calving ice echoes through the passage. “Do I want to know what that was?” I say.
“That was you,” he says. He nods toward my right arm. I pull up my sleeve. The green stone inches its way toward my hand. In here where there’s no ambient noise the sound of the jade crawling down my right arm might as well be a gunshot.
“That stunt you pulled out on the street has cut your time even further. You don’t have much left,” Mictlantecuhtli says, as if it’s something I don’t already know. “Pretty soon it’ll be too late.”
“I told you I didn’t— Ya know, never mind. Let’s just keep moving.”
There’s only one way to go: up. So up we go. We walk through the passage, footsteps echoing back to us. We make some sharp turns, but mostly it just curves a little with a gentle upward slope. I really hope that the weird time and distance thing where everything felt further than it was that I experienced outside the city is working here, too. Otherwise, if we need to get to the top of this thing we’ll be at it for days.
After what feels like an hour the hallway dead ends in a blank wall. Mictlantecuhtli stares at it for a long time.
“Problem?”
“I haven’t been here in five hundred years,” he says. “Cut me some slack. Oh, there we go.” He presses a portion of the wall that looks like everything else in here and the wall fades away like smoke. The doorway opens onto a wide room with lit pine torches and tzompantli lining the walls, the impaled skulls grinning at us.
“How high up are we?”
“Couple floors,” he says.
“That long for a couple of floors?”
“From the top.”
“Oh,” it hadn’t felt like we’d gone that far in that amount of time. “Would she have brought Tabitha here?”
“Her avatar? Possibly. Why?” We walk through the room into an adjoining hallway. Everything looks pretty much the same as everything else. How the hell does he know where we’re going?
I tell him about the handcuff, about blocking the connection between Tabitha and Santa Muerte. How Tabitha refused to take it off. And that last bit is something I don’t even know what to do with.
“She didn’t seem happy when they left,” I say.
“I don’t doubt it,” he says. “Avatars aren’t meant to be individuals. They’re extensions of gods. They’re our eyes and ears outside. Most gods can’t actually leave their domains. Mictecacihuatl and I can’t. We can project our consciousness, but physically move among mortals? We need an avatar for that.”
Something about that twigs something in my memory but I can’t place it. It’s just out of reach, and the harder I grasp at it the further away it gets. I let it go. If it’s what I think it is it’ll come to me when I need it.
“So what do you do when an avatar stops being just an extension?”
“Simple. Get rid of it. Find another one.”
“Get rid of how?” I say, knowing I won’t like the answer.
“Kill it. How else?”
That is so not going to happen.
“Where would she be keeping her? You mentioned cells before. Would she be locked up? On this floor? Or another one?”
“How the hell would I know what she’s doing with it?” he says. “The cells are in the basement, but I doubt she’d put it there. If her avatar is broken, and it sounds like it is, the sooner she gets rid of it the better.”
“So she’s got her with her. Okay. I can work with that.” I find Santa Muerte, I find Tabitha, I find the knife. I kill everybody who gets in my way.
“Hey. Stay focused,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “You don’t have time for this bullshit. That means I don’t have time, either. We find Mictecacihuatl, get the blade, and you finish the job.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “You’re acting like I give a flying fuck about you. You want this to end well? Then you fucking help me find her.”
“We are in this together, you little shit,” he says. “So when I say—” He stops when footsteps round a corner. We both turn to look.
Warriors in jaguar skins. At least twenty pour into the other end of the hall with macuahuitls and spears and sneers showing too many teeth.
I think one of them is the guy whose head I pulped on the roof. It’s partly his look but really more that he’s the first one who screams and rushes us.
“Run,” Mictlantecuhtli says, and bolts down the hall.
“Run?” I yell as I catch up to him. “You’re Mictlantecuhtli. You’re the king of Mictlan. Aren’t they supposed to listen to you?”
“I’m not exactly at my most imposing at the moment.” All of the halls and rooms look the same. Bare floors, pine torches, tzompantli on fucking everything. You’d think after a few hundred years they’d come up with something a little more interesting than skulls. “I’ll draw them off. You find Mictecacihuatl and get that knife back.”
He shoves me and I stumble through a doorway, catching myself on the edge before I can fall over. I press myself up against the wall. The warriors sandals slap on the hard stone as they pass by.
At least one of them has stayed behind. I can hear him in the other room. He’s trying to move slowly but his sandals are scuffing the stone floor. I’m sure he can hear me just fine. Between the two of us I’m the only one breathing.
I don’t want to use the Browning. The noise will just bring everybody running. I don’t have the knife anymore, but now that I know I can at least inconvenience these guys for a little while I dig around in my messenger bag until I find my straight razor, unfolding it and holding the blade in a pinch grip. Useful things, straight razors. Good for getting a little blood for rituals. Even better for getting a lot of blood in a fight.
I take a deep breath, loud enough he has to be able to hear it, then hold it and duck down low, pivoting into the doorway. He’s taken the bait and his macuahuitl swings high above my head, leaving him wide open. I step forward, coming up and blocking his backswing. I run the razor through his throat. The wound’s largely bloodless, but it must hurt because he drops his weapon and grabs at his open throat.
I follow it up with a left hook that knocks him back a little, but he’s not going down. He rushes me, hitting me hard and knocking me to the floor. The wound in his throat is a deep gash that keeps tearing the more he moves his head. Pretty soon he’ll be able to pass a baseball through it. It isn’t slowing him down much.
Because why would it? The ones I took out on the roof I either put holes in their heads or crushed their sku
lls into oblivion. He’s already dead. The hell does he need a throat for?
I block his swing with my left arm and his hand cracks on the stone. It’s the swing you don’t see that always gets you. His left hook hits the flesh and bone part of my face and I go down.
He bends down to grab me for some more beating, the back of his throat visible through the gash in it. But I manage to grab hold of the discarded macuahuitl and swing it up. The blades bite into his neck, ripping through muscle and tendon, sticking on bone. I yank it down and the blades tear free, shredding their way through until his head is hanging on by scraps of flesh and stringy meat.
He looks at me, more annoyed than anything else, and falls motionless to the floor.
I’m wheezing from the fight and the slash on my arm is oozing blood out from under the duct tape. Mictlantecuhtli must have gotten them far enough away that I can’t hear the other warriors. He’ll be a good distraction. He knows this place.
And I’m not completely buying that those warriors wouldn’t listen to him if he turned around and told them to stop. Either I’ve got more confidence in his abilities than he does, or he’s lying to me. Guess which one my money’s on.
Okay, so he’s lying. The question is why? Something’s tugging at the back of my brain, trying to get out, but it’s not quite there. The memory from my conversation with Darius? Fuck, this is maddening. I know why he did it, but so far my tattoos have kept the piece of Mictlantecuhtli in my head from getting out.
I think. But how do I know for sure? He can see me where Santa Muerte can’t. There’s no way I can be certain that the piece of Mictlantecuhtli in my head isn’t talking to him.
I know I’m being played. I’ve known for a long time. I know they don’t just want me to kill the other. I just don’t know why or what the endgame is here. I’ve been so focused on just getting here and staying alive during the journey, I haven’t had a chance to give much thought to what I’m going to do now.
Sure, stab them. But I need to get close enough. I need to be fast enough. And let’s not forget, I kinda need the blade. All of which is pointing me in one direction. Up. So how do I get up there?
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