“What’s wrong?” Tabitha says. She runs to me, trying to help but I wave her off. I lean against a crystal column, push myself forward.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“No you’re not. Tell me what’s happening.”
“Fuck, I don’t know. My tattoos are rebelling, or something.” Most of them are protection spells, shields to stop a bullet, misdirections to keep me hidden, spells to ward off magical attacks. They’re all kicking into overdrive. There’s a threat here and they’re doing everything they can to protect me. But I can’t tell what the attack is or where it’s coming from.
“Mictlantecuhtli,” Tabitha says. “He doesn’t want you in there. We should leave.”
“He can go fuck himself,” I say. “Besides, I thought you wanted him gone.”
“I do. He’s dangerous. But not if you’re going to end up dead before you get there.”
I’m not crazy about the idea myself, but if I’d seen a way out of it without this I’d have done it already. I force myself to straighten up. What are these spells trying to protect me from? Something about the tomb? Something on the door?
“You’re not feeling anything?” I say, gritting my teeth against the pain.
“No.”
“Lucky me. I always knew I was special. Come on.” I push myself onward, staggering with each step. It feels like walking through burning Jell-O. Tears fill my eyes and run down my cheeks and it isn’t until I wipe them away with the back of my hand that I realize it’s blood.
When I start bleeding from my eyeballs it’s time to admit I might be wrong. I’m about to turn back and get away before this kills me, but then we make another turn and there it is. Set against one wall of the cavern is a circular, stone slab a good ten feet across. The door to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb.
I stagger against it and the moment my hand touches its surface the pain stops. Whatever it was it’s gone, though I can still feel the ravens circling hungrily in their tattoo and Mictlantecuhtli’s dark power seeping into my bones.
“Oh, look. We’re here.”
“What gave you the first clue? How are you feeling?”
“Better. Recognized.” I tap the slab. “Like this thing knows me.” I pull my hand away, waiting for the pain to start again, but it doesn’t.
“That’s good?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s me that it’s seeing.”
The stone looks a lot like the Aztec Calendar Stone sitting in a museum in Mexico City, a massive, twenty-ton calendar made of basalt that shows the different eras of the Aztec civilization. But instead of being split representations of jaguars, wind, rain, and water to mark out the different eras, it’s covered in death iconography.
In the center is carved Mictlantecuhtli’s face. His real face, not the one of Alex I’ve been talking to. A skull with eyeballs bugging out of the sockets, a feathered headdress, a necklace of human eyes.
Surrounding his head are carvings of different locations in Mictlan. The mountains, the plains, the rivers, the mists. All the places where the dead travel to reach Chicunamictlan and claim their final reward. The work is stunning, cut with laser-like precision.
Behind that slab, inside his tomb, Mictlantecuhtli is waiting for me, encased in his own prison of jade. I wonder how the change is affecting him? As the stone takes me over, is his flesh becoming revealed? Skin hanging from bones, organs pushing out and visible against it? Is his skeletal face plumping out with muscle?
“What do you know about this?” I ask.
I can feel the power in my bones stretching out toward the door like a plant to the sunlight. I run my fingers across the stone, feeling for any kind of mechanism, a switch, something. Physically it’s just a big rock. Dead, inert. Magically, it’s lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. Even if I didn’t have Mictlantecuhtli’s power rolling through my veins I’d feel it.
“Only what I’ve picked up from Santa Muerte. Her memories are fuzzy about it. I don’t think she liked thinking about it much.”
“I don’t blame her. It can’t have been fun.” I wonder if I’d stayed connected to Mictlantecuhtli would I have picked up his memories instead of his annoying personality popping up in my dreams?
She touches the stone. “I’ve always wondered why she never tried to do anything about it.”
“What, like crack it open? That does seem kind of weird. What sorts of memories do you have from her, exactly?”
“Bits, mostly. Images, thoughts, knowledge. I’ve pieced together more than I’ve actually gotten from her. Like I said, there are gaps.”
“Maybe gaps about him?”
“Some, yeah. I know she loved him intensely. They were married for thousands of years.”
“Really? She seemed kind of bitter about it.”
Tabitha frowns. “It’s hard to tell with her, sometimes. They didn’t always get along? How did you put it? It’s fucked up, like Sid and Nancy fucked up?”
“Cemetery love. I’ve had a few of those relationships.”
“You still do.”
“Like I need reminding.”
I tap at the stone some more. The magic in it traces along the carvings, stronger in some spots, weaker in others.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any dynamite in that messenger bag, would you?” Tabitha says.
“Yeah. Just not sure I should use it.”
“Wait, seriously? You have dynamite?”
“Better, actually.” I dig through the bag, pushing past Zip-loc bags of grave dust, a vial of Four Thieves Vinegar to ward off disease, a chicken foot amulet for protection against demons and a severed thumb I got off an Icelandic Seiðmenn that I can’t remember what the hell it’s for.
“Here we go.” I pull out a small green marble the diameter of a quarter. “I got this from a Bruja in L.A.”
Tabitha’s face turns sour. “Oh. Her.”
Tabitha met the Bruja, Gabriela Cortez, when we went in to Tabitha’s bar to find a shapeshifting Russian mobster. The mobster killed Tabitha, though if he hadn’t there was a good chance Gabriela would have.
“You saw her for like two minutes,” I say. “How much do you even remember from that night, anyway? You were dead for most of it.” At least I thought she was. I also thought she was normal at the time.
“The night’s fuzzy. I was less me than I was Santa Muerte at the time. I just know more about the Bruja through Santa Muerte’s memories than you do, obviously.”
“Yeah, I think I’m siding with the Bruja on this one,” I say. “She didn’t turn out to be Santa Muerte’s avatar.” She did try to kill me, though. Which, to be honest, is not that rare an occurrence. “Before we do this, I have to take some precautions. If those demons are still in there that’s gonna be a whole lot of trouble.”
I dig a depression into the dirt road about twenty feet in front of the tomb with the heel of my shoe. Another minute of rummaging through my messenger bag and I find a half-empty bottle of Stoli. It’s an impromptu spirit bottle, a ghost trap. Some poor schmuck died in Darius’s bar and left a ghost he couldn’t get rid of. I did the old Djinn a favor and trapped the ghost.
I’ve been meaning to let it go, banish it to wherever it needs to be, but I keep forgetting. It hasn’t exactly been high on my to do list. The volume of the bottle isn’t important. When it comes to spirits you can fit a surprising number of them into a really small space. Demons, too.
I set the bottle into the depression and tilt it so it doesn’t wobble and the opening faces the entrance to the tomb. I draw a circle around it in the dirt with my foot, unscrew the cap and set it aside. Finally, I pour salt into the circle, and add a couple of drops of blood from my thumb.
I can’t see the ghost inside, but I can feel him. Small, insignificant, scared. I kinda feel sorry for him. I don’t even know his name. Probably feels like an eternity in there. Trapped with nothing to do but bang around against the glass like a fish in a tiny aquarium. Suck it up, pal. Things are tough all over.
Normally I wouldn’t have to go through this much trouble. But I need to set it for bigger game than just a ghost, and using my own magic to bait and set the trap might just be a really bad idea. This way I only have to tap a little bit and this small ritual does the rest.
“One makeshift spirit bottle half-filled with the finest Russian spirits a gulag chain gang ever had the misfortune to drink.”
She bends down to look at the bottle. “If it works, it’ll suck in all the demons?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Then we won’t have anything to worry about again ever. But don’t worry. It’ll work just fine.”
The trap set, I turn my attention back to the door. There’s a space in the carving of Mictlantecuhtli’s mouth. It’s not large, but it’s deep. Deep enough for me to shove the marble into it and seat it firmly. The marble’s keyed to me, so it won’t just go off if I drop it.
“Might want to stand back,” I say. We both get behind a column of quartz about ten feet away. I’ve been pretty close to these things when they went off, but I don’t want to take a chance that the blast won’t kill us, too. Maybe I’m paranoid, but these things can leave a hell of a mess. I prime and trigger it with a thought.
A tremendous flash fills the cavern as the marble explodes. When the blast fades Tabitha starts to look around the edge of the column and I pull her back. I learned the hard way that the show’s not over yet.
A sound of rising wind punches through the air with a sonic boom that rattles my teeth. Dirt, dust, anything that isn’t nailed down in this section of the road gets pulled in like a black hole to end with a muffled pop. I can feel the force tugging at my clothes, shifting the quartz column we’ve sheltered behind.
The wind and noise die down. I give it another minute and venture a peek around the column at the stone slab.
“Well, shit.” Nothing. Not even a scratch.
The fifteen feet or so of ground in front of the door is polished clean. All the dust and dirt and crap got sucked into the blast. The only thing left is the spirit bottle and the circle of blooded salt. The spell binding it will keep it in place against anything short of a hurricane.
“There’s got to be another way to open it,” Tabitha says. “Maybe together we can push it aside?”
I’m out of ideas. If Gabriela’s exploding marble trick can’t put a dent in it, I don’t see what else I’ve got that might. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I need to get in there and this is the only way in. I clearly can’t blow it up. I can’t roll a twenty-ton stone slab out of the way on my own. Even with you helping I don’t see it happening. There’s only one way to do this. It’s locked. I’ve got the key.”
“Let me try,” she says. “Our powers are similar. Even the ones we’ve inherited. Maybe it will open for me.”
“Be my guest.”
She steps up to the slab, hand hovering just over its surface and stops. “What happens after you kill him?” she says.
“You know what happens.”
She nods. “I’m going to have to stop you.”
“Thanks for the reminder, Señora.”
“Goddammit, Eric,” she says. “I’m not Santa Muerte, all right?” She taps the side of her head. “I have a piece of her inside me, that’s all. I have my own thoughts and my own feelings. I believe she’s right and she’s doing what she needs to. I’m not her goddamn puppet.”
“Careful there, Pinocchio, your nose is growing.”
“Oh, fuck you.” Tabitha reaches up to the slab, fingers resting lightly on the stone. She closes her eyes and a soft radiance grows from inside her to an intense white light. I can see her bones, organs. It’s like she’s burning from the inside out. She takes her fingers from the stone, then slams them hard against it, unleashing all that built up energy into one massive strike.
Two things happen. The first is that Tabitha gets blown back into the road, hitting the dirt and skidding a good five feet before coming to a stop. The second is that the door doesn’t open.
Tabitha stands, shaking dirt out of her hair. Aside from some burn marks on her clothes she looks fine. She brushes more dirt from her clothes.
“It didn’t work at all, did it?” she says.
“Not even a little.”
“You’re sure you don’t have some magical crowbar in that bag?”
“I wish.”
“Shit. Just be careful, then,” she says. “Please?”
“If I were the careful sort we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Stay behind the bottle. Once this thing opens up those demons are gonna pour out like a burst pipe. And, uh, if any of them get past it, might want to duck.”
“What do you mean if any of them get past it?”
Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb isn’t going to open up to anything less than Mictlantecuhtli’s power. I had really hoped I could have avoided this.
There’s a good chance that this is going to tip me over the edge, turn me into a permanent place for pigeons to shit on. That was the whole point of taking the long way through Mictlan instead of just using his power to pop inside the tomb. But I don’t see any way around it.
I go back to the door, tracing the carvings with my fingers. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to open it. No handholds, no keyhole. After a moment of looking and not finding anything I press my hands against the design of Mictlantecuhtli in the center of the slab and his energy takes notice.
“Eric,” Tabitha says, “I asked you a question.”
“It’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
“Hundreds?”
“Okay, a couple. But they worked. Mostly.”
“Eric.”
My attention pulls toward the energy flowing out through my center, spreading down my arms, into my hands. There’s an even greater hunger to it now. A need in it. Pain tears through me as the power rips through my fingers and into the stone.
My knees buckle, but my hands stay locked to the slab. The carvings glow with a sudden green flame that spreads across their surface, running through the channels between the designs.
The power won’t let me go. It rips through me like high voltage through a penny. My legs give out and I collapse to the floor, my hands still stuck to the slab, smoke rising from them. Tabitha runs forward and yanks me back, drags me behind the bottle. I’m too weak to stand, so I let her. A deep rumble wells up from the slab. Slowly, with a sound of stone grinding on stone, it rolls to the side.
I can feel her crafting a spell, that same not-quite Santa Muerte magic I felt at the blood river filling my nostrils with the smell of smoke and roses. I’m not sure if she’s doing it or if it’s the piece of Santa Muerte in her soul reacting. The spell is sloppy, instinctual, less a spell and more an outburst of power.
Mictlantecuhtli’s power responds to it before I can tamp it down. I can feel it intertwining with her own, the spell amplifying. I try to pull it back, but I’ve lost any illusion of control I ever had over it.
I can’t tell where I end and she begins. The power inside knots together, pulls tight against the other and for a split second we’re so deeply entwined. We’re just the energy, just the spell. The will of Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli merging together.
The spell tears loose from us with a sound like a cannon. A wave of blue fire rips itself out of our bodies and fills the chamber in front of us. My vision goes white, blinding me, and all I can hear is a high-pitched whine.
Tabitha and I collapse in a heap on the ground, neither of us able to do more than wheeze. Either it destroyed the demons in the chamber, or the spirit bottle got them. Or it did nothing and they’re already coming for us but we’re too blind and deaf to know.
I’m really hoping it’s not that one.
“Did it work?” Tabitha says after what feels like forever. I must have blacked out at some point because I don’t remember my vision and hearing coming back.
We’re not dead so I su
ppose something worked. “I’m not sure I even know what that was.”
The spell wasn’t one I’ve ever felt before. It didn’t even feel like magic, not the way I know it. It was nothing but distilled rage. The phrase “wrath of god” pops into my mind and I realize that that’s exactly what it was. The fury of the old gods channeled through their avatars.
I slowly drag my way to the bottle. Besides a very pissed off ghost and some tainted vodka there’s nothing in it. I sniff at the air. Something’s not right. When demons die there’s a smell. Like rot and asphalt. Once you smell it you never forget it. It can last a few days.
But I’m not smelling it. So unless the spell we just unleashed destroyed every trace of them down to the stink, and hell, maybe it did, I should be able to smell dead demons.
“I don’t think the demons were in there,” I say. I slowly manage to stand, my balance shaky. I steady myself against one of the quartz columns. I look at my hands. Though they feel burnt, and there’s smoke coming up from them, the pain is fading fast and they don’t look damaged. No blisters, no burns. They’re not even red.
“Where would they be? Could they have gotten out?”
Light from the crystals around us fills this end of the tomb, fading off into darkness the further in it goes.
“I don’t see how,” I say. “Not unless somebody opened the door and let them out.” That’s not something I want to think about. Bad enough they almost got loose in the living world, I can’t imagine what kind of mayhem they might get up to over here.
“How are you feeling?” she says.
“You mean am I a garden gnome?” I feel fine. Which, come to think of it may not be a good sign. When I was first changing it was agony every time I tapped into the power. It left me shaking and weak afterward. Mictlantecuhtli told me that when it stopped hurting was the time to worry. I haven’t hurt in a long time from it, but opening the door was agony. The only difference now is that the feeling passed quickly.
“I think I’m okay,” I say. I pull my left sleeve up and see that I am so not okay.
Shoots of thin, green lines follow the veins into my hand. Dark green stone extends up my forearm and into my wrist. There’s a slight numbness where the stone is. Nothing too noticeable, just an absence of heat or cold.
Hungry Ghosts Page 17
