The car fishtails again, whipping me around just as the flame burns through the line, severing it. Momentum shoots me across the ground, and I skip over the skull landscape like a rock across a pond. Where my skin hasn’t turned to jade it’s getting the mother of all road rashes.
I hit one of the trees hard, fight back the dizziness and pain. I pull myself up onto my knees, hope to Christ I haven’t broken any bones. Blood seeps into my eyes, the skin on the back of my left hand is shredded. I grasp for the shotgun over my shoulder, but it’s gone. I look around wildly for it as the cars circle me, closing in like sharks. I might not be able to kill them with it, but I bet I can make their day suck.
I find it about five feet away from me and leap for it, but one of the cars peels off from the pack toward me to cut me off. I try to move out of the way but I’m too slow and maybe even a little concussed.
It veers off at the last moment, missing me by inches and knocking over a tree. For a brief second I think maybe I’ll get out of this okay. But then somebody in the passenger seat reaches out and swings a massive bone club at me and clocks me over the head. The blow throws me backward hard into the ground and everything goes dark.
When my friend Alex, whom I’d known since he was a kid using magic to run penny-ante scams on normals, had his soul consumed and replaced by the same man who’d killed my parents, I put a bullet in his brain.
I told myself he was already gone. That this wasn’t my friend. This was some monster using his face. I didn’t believe it.
When I saw him again months later I thought I was going insane. He couldn’t be a ghost. Ghosts are remnants of souls, leftovers, images. His had been eaten. No soul, no ghost.
It turned out that it was Mictlantecuhtli choosing his face to get to me, his dark power running through my veins. I kicked him out, blocked him from my thoughts, from contacting me, from even knowing where I was. I pushed until I couldn’t hear him anymore, and then I locked him out with more spells inked into my skin.
I didn’t push hard enough.
“You look like hell,” Alex says from the driver’s seat of my Cadillac. It’s night in Mictlan. I can smell the dry, desiccated air, feel the strange heat, the smell of flesh and ash and bone blasted by searing winds.
There is no moon in Mictlan and so the only light is from the Caddy’s headlights casting strange shadows along the bone-paved road to who knows where. This has happened before, me being in the car with him like this. Not quite a dream, not quite reality.
Of course, it’s not Alex. And it shouldn’t even be Mictlantecuhtli.
“I kicked you out,” I say. “And barred the door. Why are you here?”
“What, no hello? No, hey buddy, how ya doin’? I’m hurt. Come on, man. It’s been months.”
“It’s the power I have from you, isn’t it? And being here in Mictlan. That triggered something.”
“And they said you were stupid,” he says.
“Why are you here?”
“Why are any of us here, really?”
I don’t bother answering him.
“No sense of humor,” he says after the silence becomes uncomfortably long. “I’m here because you’re here. I’m not Mictlantecuhtli. I’m your idea of a piece of him stapled onto your own soul. It’s all very meta.”
“I didn’t think it was possible, but you’re just as big a pain in my ass as Mictlantecuhtli. So I’m talking to myself? Awesome.” Mictlantecuhtli was always like this with me, so I guess it makes sense that this piece of him has the same personality.
“Sort of? Not really? Think of me as fake Mictlantecuhtli. Mictlantecuhtli Lite. I’m just the piece left over in your head. Stuck in here with your self-loathing and shitty self-confidence. All the death god with fewer calories. Fake me, real you. After a while we’ll just be us. Make sense?”
I rub my temple where I got hit. My head is starting to hurt and I’m not sure if it’s this conversation or the bone I took to my skull. I’m assuming I’m unconscious and this is all going on in my head, so feeling pain is probably a sign I’ll be waking up soon.
“Not really. Is this the same thing as what Tabitha has with Santa Muerte?” I’m still having trouble figuring out what Tabitha really is. Is she Santa Muerte? Is she Tabitha? If what he says is happening to me is also happening to her, then the answer is yes.
Tabitha told me that she and Santa Muerte had merged but she has her own opinions, her own thoughts. She was connected to Santa Muerte, had her voice in her head, until I cut it off with the handcuff.
I knew Tabitha had a chunk of Santa Muerte in her soul, and I wasn’t entirely sure she had any of her own. Santa Muerte killed her to make her avatar, after all.
He frowns. “Pretty much, yeah. I’m a little sketchy on the details. I don’t know everything real me knows. A lot, but not all of it. I’ve got holes. But if you’re asking if she’s her own woman? Yes.”