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 Seiemenn 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.