Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(17)

I pass small towns separated by miles of nothing. Truck stops, gas stations, bars. The terrain becomes more mountainous as I get closer to Mexico City, the population denser, the world more modern.

The magic changes, too. The taste and feel of the magic shifts based on location and people. New York doesn’t taste like New Orleans. St. Paul doesn’t taste like Miami.

My entire time here, the magic has tasted old, like dirt and clay and ashes. It’s peasant magic, mostly, spells that come from the earth, magic tinged with the wrappings of faith, either for the Catholic god or some of the older ones. The magic in rural America has a similar feel, if not as wild.

And not nearly so full of death. I’ve occasionally seen a few shrines to Santa Muerte on the road and in those areas the magic tastes off. Not bad, evil, or anything stupid like that. Those aren’t things that apply to magic. That’s like calling water evil.

No, it feels resigned, stoic. Like it’s given up. Magic takes on the characteristics of the lives around it. So much violence, so much corruption, I’m not surprised. And when I pass those areas I feel a surge of power. Death is death, and whether I like it or not, that’s what my magic’s tuned to.

That’s never bothered me before. It’s just something I accepted. But lately, especially here where the body count is in the tens of thousands, where there’s this much suffering, I’m not sure how I feel about it.

As I get closer to Mexico City the magic starts to feel more modern, colder. Steel girders and old world marble. Electricity and blood. As the seat of the Aztec empire before the Spanish came along there’s a lot of blood. It wants it. Demands it. The murder rate doesn’t compare to places like Acapulco or Ciudad Juárez, but it’s got a deeper history of it. Murder here has its roots in ritual and the city feeds on it.

Pulling in to Mexico City proper and the magic competes with itself. It wants to be ancient and modern at the same time. A constant back and forth struggle as the people embrace the future and cling to the past.

Everything about Mexico City has that same sense of old and new. Cobblestone streets and modern day traffic, glass-skinned skyscrapers and five-hundred-year-old cathedrals. The whole city is built over the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the seat of Aztec power before the Spanish came, while just to the north lies Teotihuacan, a city pre-dating the Aztecs by a thousand years. No one knows who built it. No one knows where they went.

It’s a strange city, even by my standards. Hell, a strange country. It’s easy to be swept up in this idea that it’s nothing but a murder party 24/7. But it’s not. There are people pushing back. People living their lives. When all you see is the fucked up parts of a place, you start to think that maybe that’s all there is. But most people aren’t really that bad.

All that goes out the window, of course, as soon as I start crossing the city toward Tepito. I sit in gridlock for more than three hours trying to go less than twenty miles. Makes Fridays on the 405 back in Los Angeles look like an empty four lane highway. This is not a city built for cars. Or people with anger management issues.

I finally manage to park the Cadillac a few blocks from Tepito proper. Almost the entire barrio is taken up by a massive open-air market and trying to get the car in there is an exercise in futility.

I dig through the messenger bag past bullets, cans of spray paint, locks of hair from convicted murderers, grave dust and ground up bone, salt for barring doorways and drawing circles, extra Sharpies and “Hi My Name Is” stickers. You know, the usual.

For about a year all this stuff was stuck in the Caddy’s trunk where I couldn’t get it. Restocking took forever and there are some things that I just couldn’t find. One of a kind items, reagents that would take me a couple of years to get more of. I’m lucky the trunk is warded as well as it is, or most of it would be useless by now.

The dead side sucks, sure, but if you do it right it’s a great place to stash your stuff.

After a minute I find what I’m looking for. A pair of handcuff bracelets with the chain connecting them removed. I check the cuffs. One of them has a large M engraved on the side, the other an S. It won’t do to mix them up.

I bought the cuffs about eight years ago off a dominatrix who works sex magic in Brooklyn. Goes by the name of Mistress Morgana. Has the phrase “a touch of the exotic” on her cards for her normal clientele. Real name’s Eunice. She’s a peach.

I put the cuff marked M around my left wrist and close it. I can feel a small pop of magic as the spells in the cuff activate. I slip the other into a pocket.

I’ve modified these heavily over the last six months from their original purpose as a bondage toy. Each cuff has spells engraved into the surface. I blurred out a bunch of them and added new ones with a Dremel.

I just hope they work.

I secure the Benelli in the trunk, check to make sure the Browning’s loaded, and sling the messenger bag over my shoulder. I’m jittery and worn out, adrenaline replacing the Adderall.

I cross a couple of boulevards, dodge traffic and then I’m in Tepito. Here the streets are clogged with people shopping at makeshift stalls covered in blue and yellow tarps, folks selling their wares on blankets in the street. It’s a massive twenty-five block swap meet of vibrant color and noise, thick smells of food and sweat, gasoline and rancid garbage.

Clothing, bootleg DVDs, computers, luggage, TVs, boomboxes, guns, drugs, second-hand odds and ends, people. If you’re looking for it, chances are somebody in Tepito has it.