Lucy pauses. I step in close. She stinks of rot and blood. Her eyes are filmed over and gray, green pus running from the corner of her mouth. Her hair falls out in clumps to drift lazily to the floor. I have to remind myself that this isn’t her. This isn’t the girl I grew up with, the woman she became who I never had a chance to meet.
“So fucking what?” I say, and for the first time ever I feel like I’m telling the truth about it. “I’ve been hanging onto this shit for years. I made choices in shitty situations. Do I regret what happened? Yes. Would I love to take it back? Absolutely. But I can’t. So if you’re trying to get me to wallow so you can feed off my guilt then you’re going home hungry. Because I am fucking done with that.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Fuck you. I don’t have to justify a goddamn thing to you.”
The room shudders around me, bends and distorts like it’s being run through a taffy machine. Lucy’s neck straightens, her bruises and cuts fading, her broken bones sliding back through the jagged tears in her limbs. Her skin fades from suppurating green to an ashen gray and finally back to normal.
“You have a chance to fix some things, Eric,” Lucy says. “Don’t waste it.”
She shatters like stained glass, the room going with her. Shards spray out in a shotgun blast of color and light blinding me. I cover my face with my hands as my vision goes white, my ears fill with a blast furnace roar. Pain wracks my body, a cold burn from the inside out that shoots through my limbs. It drives me to all fours and it takes everything I have just to stay conscious.
When the light and the sound clear I’m lying on a flat plain, the pain fading from my body. I roll over onto my back, catch my breath. The sky is the same, cold gray as when I stepped into the mists, but the mountains rising in the distance tell me I’ve come out the other side.
“That took less time than I expected.” Tabitha sits on a rock nearby, eating an apple. The landscape is less paved with bone here so much as scattered with it. Even the scrub brush and distant trees look more alive, less desiccated. Actual plants.
“Where the hell have you been?” I say. And where the hell did she get an apple?
I’m exhausted. And raw. Lucy’s image floats in my mind, neck snapped, bones shoved through skin. Her body a wreck of trauma and blood and rot. I want to throw up. I want to pass out.
But that’s not the thing that’s gnawing at me. I am done with feeling guilty. I am done with feeling responsible for shit I have no control over. I’ll take my lumps, I’ll admit to my role.
But I’m not responsible for everything, and giving up that belief feels like I’m giving up my memory of her.
Why haven’t I been back to Lucy’s house? Why haven’t I exorcized her ghost? Do I really think this isn’t all my fault? Or did I just bluff my way through the mists?
She said I had a chance to fix things. How the hell can I do that? How can I possibly fix anything? Goddamn, doubt’s a cold-hearted motherfucker.
“Close by,” Tabitha says, holding up her wrist to show the handcuff. “This thing wouldn’t let me get very far from you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Kind of by design. That’s why I got it for you. Figured I got this fancy wedding ring out of this arrangement, why not get you some jewelry, too? How’d you stay close and not end up on Bustillo’s radar?”
She couldn’t have blended in with the crowd. Now that I’ve met the dead in this place it’s obvious how much Tabitha and I stand out. There’s a solidity, a realness, to us that none of the souls have. For all their seeming physicality they still feel insubstantial in comparison.
“The Crystal Road,” she says. “That cave I ran into leads to a network of tunnels that run all through Mictlan. If you’d managed to keep up you wouldn’t have had to go through all that.” She takes another bite of her apple. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“Tepito,” I said. “I had a couple bowls of migas.”
“Want some of this?”
“I don’t have much of an appetite, thanks.” I don’t want to eat, and I’m sure as hell not accepting food from her here. Persephone and Hades come to mind. But I need to do something. Exhaustion is yanking at me and there’s no way in hell I’m going to take a nap in this place.
I root around my messenger bag until I find the bottle of Adderall. I don’t really relish the idea of dry swallowing these things, but the only thing I’ve got in here is a flask with some whiskey in it that I haven’t opened since before I lost the Cadillac in San Pedro.
Ah, what the hell. I haven’t had anything to drink since that Coke in Tepito. I toss back a couple of the pills and take a swig from the flask. The whiskey burns on its way down.
“Do that a lot?” Tabitha says, concern on her face.
“The fuck do you care?”
“I—You’re right. Forget I said anything. Now that you’re adequately fortified you want to get going?”