“Hey, you’re the one who told me to have The Talk. So we did and she didn’t believe me and then I showed her a spell and she lost her shit and then when she stopped yelling at me she told me to show her more so I was gonna introduce her to some of the mages here who aren’t raging assholes like you. This was supposed to be a goddamn mayoral fundraiser, not some vengeful god’s FUCKING STOMPING GROUND.”
“That was impressive. I don’t think you took a breath once. You done?”
“Yes,” she says, pumped with adrenaline. “I’m getting people the fuck out of here. If your god shows up, his pet’s not gonna be far behind.”
“If you’re lucky, a lot of people will have already left once they heard the noise in here.”
“I don’t think anybody heard anything,” she says. “I didn’t, and nobody was acting like they had, either. And believe me, if security had, they’d have been in here in nothing flat.”
“That’s just as well. Things are going to shit already. We don’t need a bunch of normals knowing about us.”
“Yeah, until the god shows up.”
“Then get them out of here before that happens.” She glares at me, but she’s through the door in a blink of an eye, and I can hear her using her cop voice to get people moving.
“Oh, Sweetums,” I say to the air, thinking the same very hard. I get nothing in response.
“If you call me that again I will fucking skin you alive.” Santa Muerte’s voice with Tabitha’s cadence in my head. This is going to get some getting used to.
“Hey, you’re the one who wanted me, so you might as well get used to it. A friend of mine suggested Honey Bunny earlier. How’s that strike you?”
“Like a hammer to the back of my head,” she says, with the sort of tone that says she’s wondering if she’s made a horrible mistake. “Is he there yet?”
The orderly sounds of people being evacuated are suddenly shattered as gunfire rips through the air. Pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons.
“I’d say the show’s about to start.” Clever fucker. Have Sastre sow some chaos out front, bet on me caring about any of them enough to be distracted. I can already feel people dying, ghosts coming into being. I’d love to help them, but I’ve got priorities.
There’s a tremendous tearing sound above me. It’s a two-story house. I don’t know what’s above this room, but I kinda doubt it matters anymore.
I hunker under the desk. There’s a sound like a tornado through a trailer park and the room fills with sunlight and debris. He’s pulled the whole second floor off. A spear of flame tears in from above, shoots out, threads its way through the ceiling. Takes me a second to realize it’s Quetzalcoatl’s tail. He yanks back, peeling off the second story floor like the lid of a sardine can. Pieces of plaster and wood rain down. The flaming wind god flaps his wings and starts to descend into the room.
“You think you can hide from me?” he screams, voice filled with a burning rage.
I poke my head out from under the desk. “Hide? Dude, you’re dropping a ceiling on my head. I don’t even have an umbrella.” I pull myself out completely, brush dust off my pants. It’s a futile gesture. The heat intensifies as soon as he sees the bottle.
He descends lower into the room and I get a good look at him. He looks awful. His flames aren’t as bright as I’ve seen them before. Barely any form left to him. He’s more a tattered blob of flame than a winged serpent.
“I knew I could count on a foolish human like you to find the bottle,” he says. “Now give it to me.”
“This bottle?” I say, putting my hand on the stopper. “The one with the Djinn in it? Yeah. Surprise! I figured out your plan. But then, you knew that already, because you saw it through Chu’s eyes. You know he was going to take it for himself?”
“Of course, he would have tried.”
“Hey, remember that spell that Mictlantecuhtli cast to seal the bottle? That was the fight where he handed you your ass. In case you forgot. Anyway, I got some help getting those seals pulled off. So what’s say I pop the cork and we celebrate together? I bet Darius would love to hang out, don’t you?”
“You wouldn’t dare.” He backs up a bit, his form tightening into something a little more recognizable.
“Let’s find out.” I put my hand on the stopper, really hoping this works like I think it does.
And Quetzalcoatl slams down on me with all the fury and power he can muster.
Chapter 31
I jump out of the way, almost make it, but the force of Quetzalcoatl’s power clips me and slams me into a wall. I drop the bottle and brace for the end. When gods go a-smiting, well, it’s not a huge room is what I’m saying. All he’s got to do is a little shimmy and I’m a charcoal smear on the wall. But the fiery killing blow of an angry deity doesn’t land.
I twist around and see that it’s because Santa Muerte, eight feet tall, in a black dress, eye sockets glowing with an intense blue fire, has her hand around Quetzalcoatl’s neck.
“He is not yours,” she says, the power of her voice shaking the room. Quetzalcoatl whips his tail and wraps it around her waist. They both squeeze, but neither gives. There’s some exchange of power I can’t see and the two are thrown apart.
I’m sorely tempted to get out of their way and let them slug it out. But if I want to end this, that’s not an option. Muerte’s scythe is in her hand, slashing through the air and tearing fiery chunks from Quetzalcoatl’s form.
A great wind picks up inside the room and a mini twister of debris spins around him, slapping onto him, chunks of trash armor like when I saw him in Zacatecas. Muerte’s scythe tears through a piece only to have another take its place.
Quetzalcoatl’s attacks are feeble. Feints and dodges, as if his entire focus is on keeping his armor.
Waiting them out is looking more and more like a better idea than my original plan. Yeah, it’s a dick move, but even though she isn’t Santa Muerte, Mictecacihuatl, or even Tabitha, there’s a part of me that wants to see her fall. And there’s a part that really doesn’t.
Either way I need the bottle back. It’s rolled over near Quetzalcoatl, but close enough to me that I should be able to stay out of the line of fire long enough to grab it.
I duck-walk behind a chunk of fallen ceiling the size of a refrigerator, hoping Quetzalcoatl either doesn’t see me or can’t get a shot off at me. A little further and I’ll almost have it.
“You killed them all, you traitorous fuck,” Santa Muerte yells. Her voice switches in and out from the formal tones of Santa Muerte to the enraged screaming of Tabitha. It’s a weird up-and-down mixture that sounds oddly like a boy going through puberty.
“You all let our culture rot and twist away,” Quetzalcoatl screams back. “Creation was dead long before Cortés came to our land. Ours were a people steeped in blood, and we needed more, not less.”
“There were too many,” she yells back. “We saw what would happen if our people continued at the rate they were going. Droughts, starvation, disease. We could have saved them, but we needed you.”
“You all turned your back on me,” he hisses. “If I wasn’t going to get my due, I would take it on the backs of invaders from another land.”
“God, you are such an asshole,” she says.
Quetzalcoatl laughs as his junk armor loses more of itself to Santa Muerte’s scythe. “I am not the one corrupted,” he says. “I have not died and been reborn twisted with a human’s shape. She has desires and plans that you do not. How soon before you are too weak to keep her and her necromancer lover at bay? How long before they strip you of your powers?”
If this were a telenovela I’d go make some popcorn, but fascinating as it is to see these family dynamics play out, I have shit to do. I crawl within reach of the bottle, but just as I’m about to grab it, a gunshot rings out and a bullet embeds itself in the wall a couple inches above my hand. I
pull back quickly behind cover.
The Burning Girl has joined the party. Yippee. I steal a quick glance and see her holding herself upright against the doorframe. She’s covered in cuts, and blood that probably isn’t hers. Dark red blooms on her left thigh from a bullet hole. She’s breathing heavily and shaking. Every step through this place was hard won. I felt at least fifteen people die. She either let the others go or only wounded them.
I pull back as she takes another shot. It goes wide and thunks into the wall. A tremendous crash gets both our attention. Santa Muerte has torn away most of Quetzalcoatl’s debris armor and managed to get her scythe halfway through him. He shudders, the power holding him together fading fast.
I’d like to just have her kill him, but then I remember that gods don’t die like people die. Mictlantecuhtli was dead and he caused plenty of trouble. It might take centuries, but eventually this fucker’d be back and even more pissed off. I reach out again and snag the bottle.
No gunshot this time. Another quick glance shows me that Sastre knows a bad bet when she sees one. She’s bailed. Gonna have to do something about that.
But first things first. I jump out from behind the wreckage and strip the glamour from the bottle. The nuclear spirit trap, plastered in warning stickers and radiation symbols, appears in its place. Santa Muerte pulls her scythe free and steps back.
I point THIS END TOWARD ENEMY and thumb the red button on the side. The top of the bottle snaps open and a loud klaxon goes off, filling the room with even more noise. A bright blue light fills the room, enveloping Quetzalcoatl. He claws at anything he can get hold of, wings of fire losing cohesion with every second. The light pulls at him, ripping him into scraps as it feeds him into the bottle. The bottle snaps closed and everything is silent.
I fall against the wall, slide to the floor. I’ll probably get cancer from that stunt. Who knows how much radiation I’ve been dosed with just by having it out of its box?
“You’re bleeding,” Tabitha says, crouching down to me. Gone is the terrifying 8-foot-tall skeleton who just ravaged a god.
“Yeah, I do that a lot.”
She frowns. “You know this isn’t over yet, right?”
“Yeah. There’s still a psychopath out there with the Zippo of Doom.” I hand her the bottle. “Here, go find a deep, dark hole to bury it in that it won’t get out of. I don’t ever want to see that motherfucker again.”
“You and I both,” she says. She leans forward and kisses my forehead. “Don’t die on me.”
“If I do, you’ll probably see me a lot sooner than we planned.”
“I’ll be in touch,” she says. “Good luck.” And then she and the bottle are gone.
My messenger bag is stuck under a piece of rubble and it takes me too long to pull it out. When I check inside, everything seems to be intact except for a Hand of Glory where all the fingers have snapped off. That’s why I always put those sorts of things into Zip-Loc bags. The last thing you want is having pieces of some elemental horror rattling through your luggage because you didn’t lock that shit down.
I don’t know what’s outside the study, but with everyone who was here the streets are going to be filling with emergency vehicles pretty quickly, so I have to move fast. I have my shield spell ready to go and the Browning in my hand. If there’s still security out there they might take exception to the gun, but I’ll deal with that when it happens.
I head out of the study and I’m shocked at the devastation. Overturned tables, shredded chairs, bodies everywhere lying in poses the living can never twist into. It looks like Sastre focused on security and any off-duty cops, but she mowed down anyone who got in her way. There are a lot of people missing, which I hope means they got out before this nightmare started.
I don’t see Letitia or Annie anywhere, but I can feel magic, a spell being maintained. I start looking under tables, moving bodies out of the way. I finally find Letitia under a thin bubble of a shield. I crouch down and look at the pile of rifle and pistol slugs flattened at its base.
Letitia is barely conscious, her entire focus on keeping the shield up. I touch the shield and it pops like a soap bubble. Her gun is up in an instant and the only thing that saves me is that I’m not standing up when she shoots.
“Whoa, hey, it’s me. Eric. You already stuck holes in me in high school, we don’t need a repeat performance.”
“What?” she says, snapping out of the trance she’d put herself into to maintain the spell as best she could. Her eyes go wide. “Annie.” She spins around and there’s her wife, unconscious and the reason’s obvious. She’s been gut shot.
“No, no, no,” she says. “I need, fuck . . . Goddammit. Eric, I—”
“Hey,” I say loudly, snapping her attention to me. “LAPD detective, remember. You have a civilian casualty. You know what to do in this sort of crisis.”
“She’s my—”
“She is a civilian casualty.”
“Right.” She takes a deep breath, does a basic triage. Checks Annie’s pulse, breathing, tags the wounds as best she can. “She needs a hospital. Fuck me.”
“Is there one nearby?”
“Every emergency room and bed is dealing with overflow from the Vernon fire. By the time she sees a doctor it’s going to be too late.”
“Hang on.” I pull out my phone and call Gabriela. When she answers, she immediately starts cursing me out in Spanish.
“Yes, I am a goat’s ass, have a tiny dick, should be butt fucked with a thousand bees . . . though, I have to say I hadn’t heard that one before.”
“My grandmother said it a lot. The fuck, Eric? Why didn’t you shoot her when you had the chance?”
“So not the time to get into this. Is Viv there? I’d call her but she usually ignores me. I have somebody who needs immediate help and can’t go anywhere else. And we don’t have much time.”
Her tone changes immediately. “One second.” Viv comes on the line.
“What’s going on?”
“Letitia’s wife has been gut shot and all the hospitals are going to be full up because of that fucking fire.”
“How far away are you?”
“Encino.”
“That’s at least an hour, probably more with traffic snarled this much. How’s she doing?”
“Badly.”
“Can you do that thing? Like you did with Gabriela?”
“Already planning to.”
“All right. That should give you enough time. Get her over here as soon as possible.”
“She’ll be there as quickly as she can. Tell Gabbie’s boys and girls not to shoot if a cop car shows up.”
“Got it. See you soon.” She hangs up.
I pull out a Sharpie and write an address onto Letitia’s hand. “You remember Vivian from high school?” She nods. “She’s a doctor now. Take her here. It’s a warehouse. Now I’m going to do something to Annie that will save her life. But she’s going to look dead. So don’t freak out. This’ll buy her the time she needs. Got it?”
“Do it.”
I pull the spell together and cast it at Annie, putting as much juice into it as I dare. I want her stable, but I don’t want a repeat of what happened to Gabriela. Her breathing slows, then stops. Blood stops pumping out of her. As far as anyone will be able to tell, she’s gone.
“Jesus. Did it—”
“Yes, it worked.” I help Letitia stand. She’s wobbly but not injured. I haul Annie up and Letitia and I head outside, Letitia with a heavy limp.
There are still cars in the driveway, including a blue Crown Vic that screams police. “That’s yours, right? Got sirens?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we might just save your wife, after all.”
Chapter 32
We head toward the car and my eye hangs on something sitting on the edge of the porch. “Hang on,” I sa
y, and gently lay Annie down. I pick up a small bundle of pine sticks held together by twine. The ends have been dipped in pitch. The last time I saw one of these, Sastre was making hundreds of them in a factory in Vernon. I finally realize what they are and my blood goes cold.
“What are you looking at?” Letitia says. “We have to go.”
“Tlepilli,” I say. There’s a spell on the bundle. Sympathetic magic. This thing is connected to another somewhere else.
“What?”
“Never mind.” I pick Annie back up and run her to the Crown Vic. “You need to get her out of here.”
I lay her down in the backseat and we belt her in until we’re sure she’s as secure as she can be. Short of a major crash, she’s not going anywhere.
Letitia gets behind the wheel of the car. “You gonna tell me what that bundle of sticks is?”
“Later,” I say. “You don’t have time. They’re just really bad. I need to find that sicaria. She can still do a lot of damage. Like a lot a lot.”
“Okay. I’ll put out a BOLO. We’ve got her description. And I saw what she was wearing. And she’s wounded. No idea what she’s driving, but if she so much as runs a red light we’ll have her.”
She backs the car out of the tightly packed driveway, kicking on the lights and sirens as soon as she hits the street.
I pull out my phone and call Gabriela.
“What’d you do now?” she says.
“Tlepilli,” I say. She knows Nahuatl and she knows her Aztec lore. “I just found one and it’s linked to another one somewhere else.” I give her a second to catch up and make the connection.
“Fuck me,” she says. “I’ll have the warehouse and everywhere for the next few blocks looked over.”
“I’d make it fast. Quetzalcoatl’s taken care of, but his assassin’s on the loose and she still has the lighter.”
“On it.” She hangs up.
A tlepilli is an Aztec pine torch made from the Mexican ocote pine tree. Ocote sap burns really well. A tlepilli is just a bundle of sticks. You could have big ones, little ones, they’re still just tlepilli. People still use bundles like the one I found as fire starters.
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