“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 suppose 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.