“You were on your way to a cell,” he says. “She was going to lock you up and then find me. I’m too weak to fight her right now, since most of my power is sitting inside you. Then she sticks me in there with you so you can stab me. You finish turning into a rock, I get reborn into a meatbag. Nobody’s happy except her.”
“So what’s your plan?” I notice that though we’ve cut across several buildings and are taking a more indirect route, we’re getting steadily closer to the Bone Palace. “I take it we don’t just show up at the steps to the pyramid and walk on up.”
“My plan?” he says. “I don’t have a plan. What’s yours?”
He pulls together more debris, but this time it’s a ramp leading down to an alley. He’s visibly straining to keep it in one piece, and it disintegrates as soon as we’re on the ground.
“I figured I’d just show up at the steps to the pyramid and walk on up.”
“That explains so much. No, we’re not taking the stairs. Don’t be an idiot. Mictecacihuatl and I kept this area around the Palace clear of souls. Added privacy. There’s nobody in these buildings from here until we reach it. Just follow me and don’t do anything stupid like turn into a rock before we get there.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You could have had this sewn up months ago,” he says, anger in his eyes. “You could have gotten here in the blink of an eye. And if you didn’t want to, you could have come in through Mitla. So why didn’t you?”
“I needed a back door,” I say. “I needed to get as close as possible to Santa Muerte. I wasn’t going to rush in here and start stabbing people. What do you think would have happened if I’d just shown up at the front gate? I wouldn’t even be here by now.”
“Oooh, that’s a fib,” Alex says appearing next to me. “Go on. Tell him the truth. I know he’d love to hear it. You wanted to save your new girlfriend and kill everybody else. Go ahead and keep lying to yourself, but we both know that’s why.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say under my breath.
“What?” Mictlantecuhtli says.
“Nothing. Go on, please. You were berating me for not doing things the way you would.”
He gives me the kind of glare you can only get from a death god. “If you hadn’t wrapped yourself in spells to keep me out I could have helped you,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “You still don’t trust me.”
“Look, I’ve got a chunk of you still with me, so believe me I’ve been getting plenty of commentary.”
“That’s because I’m tired of only having you to talk to,” Alex says. “It’s really frustrating that you won’t let me out to talk to him. You’ve got lots of charms to keep him out, but nothing to shut me up. If you’d open things up a little—”
“Let’s just go and get this over with,” I say, cutting them both off before they can say anything else. I follow close behind Mictecacihuatl through the twisting alleys toward the Bone Palace.
Something is bugging me about what Alex just said and it takes a little while before I figure it out. With the spells in my ink, Santa Muerte couldn’t see me. But Mictlantecuhtli can. Why?
“That’s a really good question,” Alex says.
“Will you just shut up?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Mictlantecuhtli says, annoyance in his voice.
“Not you. The other you.”
“Oh. You’re talking to him?” Mictlantecuhtli looks around me trying to see the sliver of himself in the air.
“It’s really more at him.”
“Ah. So exactly how you talk to me, then. Nice to see some things never change. You sound annoyed.”
“You don’t say?”
Are the spells in my ink just not working? Or is it because of this unwanted connection I have with him? There’s part of him still inside me, so even if he can’t get into my head, it doesn’t mean I can hide from him. Dammit. I thought I’d fixed that.
We make a turn and straight ahead of us is the palace. It’s immense. Hundreds of feet wide, thousands high. We come to the side of it and I don’t see how we can possibly get in.
We get in close to the limestone bricks and Mictlantecuhtli peers at them, looking for something. “All right,” he says, brightening. “Now we’re talkin’.”
There’s a section of wall that looks just a little darker than the surrounding brickwork. Mictlantecuhtli presses his hand against it and it disappears. As it does I can feel the pull of his power inside me wanting to get out, rejoin him. It doesn’t hurt so much as it’s just uncomfortable.
“Secret passages in Mictlan? Who the hell are you hiding from that you need secret passages?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Other gods, my wife, the occasional fling gone bad.”
“There was one time when we had to hide from all three,” Alex says.
The passage is wide and made of bone white bricks. A soft glow emanates from the walls illuminating our path. Behind us the gap in the wall seals back up as if it had never been there, cutting off the noise from the city as if somebody had thrown a switch. The only sound is my own breathing.
“I feel like I’m skulking through some medieval castle,” I say. Between this and the Crystal Road it’s a wonder I’m not claustrophobic by now.
“Yes, it’s all very Macbeth.”
“How—”