Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(23)

But it’s not like I’m the only one around. Or necessarily the most powerful. We don’t exactly work together. I only know of a handful, though I’ve heard rumors there are more of us around than I’ve met. Why would Santa Muerte need to wait five hundred years?

“What about you?” I say. “She just happened to come by some girl dying in a ditch by the side of the road and thought, ‘Yeah, she’ll do’?”

Tabitha gives me a smirk. “She’s been waiting for me for a very long time, too.”

It takes me a second to realize what she means. “You are fucking kidding me.” She wasn’t waiting for one necromancer. She was waiting for two. “Fucking prove it.”

“In the last five minutes we’ve passed twelve Wanderers, three Haunts and at least two Echoes. I’ve always called them Playbacks, but I like Echo better.”

I think back. She’s right. “Playbacks, huh? Okay. How’d the last one we pass die?” This isn’t something you can guess at. She could have made up the numbers and I could have miscounted. But no matter how similarly people die, we all go out in our own way.

“Shot in her car waiting at a light. I only caught a glimpse of the car around her, but I’d say, late 1940s? Her hair was up in a bun. She was smoking a cigarette.”

“I didn’t see the cigarette. And you’re saying you didn’t get that ability from Santa Muerte?”

“You disconnected me from her, remember? This is all me, baby.”

“And I disconnected myself from her and Mictlantecuhtli, too, but I can still use his power. I still have the abilities being married to her got me.”

“Believe it or not, Eric. I don’t really care. I know what I am. I don’t need to prove it to you. And I know why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Interesting. So Santa Muerte needed two necromancers at the same time. One for her and one for Mictlantecuhtli? Did Tabitha get the same treatment I did? Did she get lured into it the same way?

When I’d seen her last, Tabitha, or maybe it was Santa Muerte talking through her, I don’t really know, told me that she’d been killed and brought back by Santa Muerte putting a piece of her essence into her. Was that true, or just a convenient lie? And if it was true, and Tabitha knows it . . .

“Santa Muerte didn’t murder you, did she?” I ask.

“Oh, she killed me,” she says. “Forced my car off the side of the freeway, just like I told you.”

“All right, but that’s not what I asked. You knew it was coming. You agreed to it.”

She looks defiant. I’ve hit a nerve. This is important to her. “Yes,” she says.

“And she didn’t kill me because . . . ?”

“She didn’t have to kill you. Just marry you. And despite what some people might think, they’re not the same thing. For me to be closer to her, linked more directly as her avatar, I had to connect with her more fully.”

“Which meant you dying,” I say. “So you signed up for this. Did you know what was going to happen?”

“Of course I did. She talked to me about it. Explained the whole thing. She needed an avatar. She asked me to be it. I chose this, Eric. Just like you did.”

“I didn’t—”

“Nobody put a shotgun to your head and made you do it.”

She’s got me there, though I’d argue I was manipulated and didn’t know what I was signing up for. I don’t, though. What’s the point?

She did it for a cause. People who care. My parents were like that. Always wanting to do the right thing. Been running into that a lot, lately. I can never quite figure out why. It’s like some puzzle box I can’t get open. I mean, I understand why people care about things, about making the world better. I’m just not sure why I don’t.

“I just don’t get it is all,” I say.

“Figure it out. Or don’t. I don’t owe you an explanation, Eric. I have a thing to do. A thing I believe in. And I’m sorry you got roped into this the way you did. I really think if you’d known beforehand that it was all of Mictlan at stake, you’d have signed on all on your own.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t. And I’m not gonna be a part of it.”

She laughs. “It’s too late for that, lover,” she says. “Too late by a long shot.”

I drum my fingers on the steering wheel in annoyance, silence stretching between us. Finally I say, “So are you going to show me a way into Mictlan or what?”

“Go to Mitla, south of here. It’s—”

“The entrance to Mictlan,” I say. “Yeah, I know. It’s the fucking front door. I need something a little more discreet.”

Mitla is a site in Oaxaca that dates back to the Zapotecs almost three thousand years ago until it fell to the Aztecs in the late 1400s. Not quite a city, not quite a palace, not quite a temple. When Cortés showed up it was the seat of their religious power where their highest priests lived and worked. He compared it to the Vatican, compared their high priest to the Pope.

And it holds the entrance to Mictlan.

Most people can’t see it, of course. Otherwise tourists and old archaeologists would be falling into the goddamn thing all the time. Instead of pyramids like in Chichén Itzá, it’s all low, flat buildings. Closer to the ground. Fitting for a hole to the underworld.