“How are you feeling?” she says.
“You mean am I a garden gnome?” I feel fine. Which, come to think of it may not be a good sign. When I was first changing it was agony every time I tapped into the power. It left me shaking and weak afterward. Mictlantecuhtli told me that when it stopped hurting was the time to worry. I haven’t hurt in a long time from it, but opening the door was agony. The only difference now is that the feeling passed quickly.
“I think I’m okay,” I say. I pull my left sleeve up and see that I am so not okay.
Shoots of thin, green lines follow the veins into my hand. Dark green stone extends up my forearm and into my wrist. There’s a slight numbness where the stone is. Nothing too noticeable, just an absence of heat or cold.
And it’s spreading.
The green stone swallows up my flesh, spreading like a wildfire. Within seconds my left hand is engulfed in stone.
“Oh, Jesus, Eric,” Tabitha says. She looks me in the eyes and her own go wide in shock, horror plain on her face. She steps back.
“What? I’m not gone yet. Shit. It’s not just my hand, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
The vision in my left eye is suddenly tinged a light green. I tap at my face with one of my newly jade fingers and hear the cold tapping of stone on stone.
“Is it still spreading?”
“You can’t feel it?” she says.
“Not really. I mean it doesn’t hurt. Feels a little numb, but not everywhere.”
“It looks like it’s stopped. It’s covering the entire left side of your face, though.”
I wave my hand in front of my eyes and see it go green as it passes into my left field of view. “Kinda figured that part out, yeah. I’m still moving, so there’s that at least.”
Dammit. I hope I don’t tap Mictlantecuhtli’s power for anything else. This spreads anymore and I’m done. I draw the obsidian blade. Nothing like running out of time to keep you focused.
I’m so close and suddenly I’m not sure what to do. I think back to my conversation with Darius. From my meeting with him I know there’s something I’m forgetting. I almost have it, but that’s the magic. If I try to remember it I can feel it just out of reach.
I step into the tomb, a long, wide chamber that’s more a vault than anything you’d call a tomb. There are no decorations, just rough stone hollowed out hundreds of years ago. The soft light from the glowing crystals outside barely penetrates the gloom.
The floor is still littered with the bones of Conquistadores who’d died when they went up against Mictlantecuhtli. Discarded pieces of armor, broken weapons. Now that I know what really happened here I can see the pattern of chaos. It’s clear some of the men died fighting, swords still clutched in their hands. But the way so many of the skeletons are facing, and how close they are to the door tells me that most of them died running.
“You coming?” I say.
“I’ll hang back,” she says. “I’m not sure Mictlantecuhtli would be thrilled to see me.”
She’s probably right.
I shuffle through the piles of bones littering the floor. Tabitha stands in the doorway behind me. I stop when I reach an unusual pile. Long, blackened leg bones. Cracked and burnt skulls like twisted hyenas. Elongated snouts, long, curved fangs.
“Found the demons,” I say.
Before they ended up down here they’d been twisted into a thing called an ebony cage, a structure made of their still-living bones which continually released an elixir of liquid magic. It’s like the magic in the local pools, only in a drinkable form. Distilled and concentrated. Useful when you need some extra muscle in your spells but don’t have the ability to pull very much.
“You’re not screaming. That mean we’re safe?” Tabitha calls from the entrance.
Alex had the cage under his bar in Koreatown and was using the sorts of late night dramas bars are known for to feed emotional power into it and tapped the juice coming out to sell for a tidy profit.
After he died Vivian stuck the cage into storage where it broke, releasing dozens of these things. If they’d gotten out into the general population they’d have killed a lot of people and possessed their corpses, and L.A. would have been in the shit.
They almost killed me but I was able to open a passage into the tomb and toss them in. I figured Mictlantecuhtli would be pissed off at having his living room invaded by a bunch of unwanted guests.
Didn’t realize how pissed off.
“From them, yeah,” I say. But from Mictlantecuhtli? When I was here last he’d been an unmovable statue, inert and lifeless. That was mere hours before I sent the demons here. And just after I did is when I really started my transformation to jade.