Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. I wasn’t sure if he was still around. So many of the old gods are gone or so faded they might as well be. And he isn’t looking so great. A dying god made of rags and tatters. A burning Doritos bag flutters off one of its wings.
Quetzalcoatl’s eyes flash. It lunges at me with its mouth wide, showing teeth made of screws and nails, and lets loose an unholy shriek. The sound pummels at me, almost pushing me to my knees. But I stand my ground. This is all show, trying to get the upper hand. Assert its authority.
“I am the Snake,” Quetzalcoatl says. “The Feathered Serpent and the Crow. I am the Wind that scours the desert.”
I don’t have a lot of experience with gods. I’ve worked with the Voodoo Loa, Baron Samedi, Maman Brigitte, Baron Cimetiere. But my arrangement with them has always been business. With Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli, it’s been a more . . . turbulent relationship.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about dealing with them, it’s that you never back down.
“You’re also the Duck and the Spider Monkey,” I say, naming off some of Quetzalcoatl’s lesser known forms. “So pardon me if I’m not exactly shaking over here.”
Truth be told I am. The other Aztec gods are as close to in-laws as I’ve got, so I’ve made a point of knowing who they are and what they do. I don’t know how many of them still exist, how many of those are still intact enough to remember who they are. All I have are tales, textbooks, websites. The reality of the supernatural is always a little different from the stories.
Quetzalcoatl is one of the heavies, and I’ve been wondering if the demands of the Wind up north came from him. The stories say he stole the bones of the dead from Mictlan and created the fifth version of humans, us. Creation myths are weird. What’s truth and what’s “truth” tend to blur. The important thing for gods isn’t what happened, but what people believe.
Gods thrive on that. Demons, too, though they’ll all kill you just as dead whether you believe in them or not. But without belief they’ll wither away and die. They feed on it.
Not a lot of people these days believe the old stories, but there are enough to keep a lot of the big gods around. Certainly enough to give Quetzalcoatl the power to kill more than two dozen men with a hurricane of fire.
Hell, I know I believe.
“You want me to burn down Mictlan,” I say. “Any particular reason why?”
“My business is my own,” Quetzalcoatl says. “You merely must carry out my will.”
I don’t mind the idea of burning Mictlan. I’m going to kill its king and queen, after all. Setting it alight just sounds like being thorough. But I would like to know why. What is it that’s got him in such a snit? Jealousy? Pissed off because Santa Muerte has managed to change with the times?
I laugh at him. “Is that how you see it? No. We made a deal. I’ll keep the deal. End of story. None of this ‘carry out my will’ shit, though. I’m not your fucking minion. You don’t want to tell me why, fine. Least you can do is tell me how. Because if you were thinking to leave that up to me to figure out, man are you gonna be disappointed.”
“To think Mictecacihuatl picked you as a consort,” he says. He licks lips made of shredded grass and palm fronds with a tongue made of tinfoil. “And you cannot do such a simple thing.”
“I’m only human.”
“Indeed. Then I will give you a talisman that even your feeble mind can grasp.” Quetzalcoatl vibrates, going so fast he begins to blur. He shatters in a silent explosion, pieces of trash flying only to freeze in place a few inches out. A flash of brass drops to the ground, bounces to my feet. A sound of sucking air and Quetzalcoatl snaps back into his garbage god form.
A dented and tarnished brass Zippo lighter with a mosaic of chipped turquoise on one side lies at my feet. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands. It’s old, scratched, the brass worn. The mosaic has the hint of a shape, a chaotic mess of different shades of turquoise, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it is. It’s seen a lifetime of use and more.
I flick the Zippo open, thumb the wheel. A spark and a flame. Yep, it’s a lighter.
“Unless you’re expecting Mictlan to be a lot more flammable than I think it is, you’re gonna need to do better than this.”
“The fires of Xiuhtecuhtli,” Quetzalcoatl says. “God of the flame, the light in the darkness. Fire against the cold, and a feast in famine. He is hope where there is none. He has faded over time until that is all that is left of him. An errant spark, a flicker of his former self. Take him to Mictlan, burn it down with his divine flames.”
“And this’ll work?”