Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(28)

Tabitha shrugs. “Mictlantecuhtli didn’t much care about him.”

“Isn’t Quetzalcoatl supposed to be here to usher the dead into Mictlan? I don’t see him.” And of course I don’t expect to. He wants this place to burn. If he were here, he’d do it himself. But I’m curious about why.

“At the main entrance down in Mitla, not here. And he hasn’t done it in about five hundred years. There was a disagreement. He sided with the Spanish.”

“Why? Domestic disputes between gods seem to be a thing around here.”

Interesting. Mictlantecuhtli told me about how a Spanish priest led an army of Conquistadores into Mictlan in the hopes that they could use it as a springboard to take the other lands of the Aztec gods. He said he lured them into a trap, cut them off from their weapon, but never said what that weapon was.

Was it Quetzalcoatl? It might explain how the Spanish did so well against the Aztec gods, if not the Aztecs themselves. But why side with the Spanish? Did he see the way the tide was turning?

I remember reading about a battle at Cholula, where the Aztecs had a small force and were hoping to use Quetzalcoatl’s power against the Spanish. They got their asses handed to them.

Did Quetzalcoatl forsake them? Or was he powerless to help? That’s the funny thing about gods. So much of their power is smoke and mirrors. Real world influence is sketchy at best. They’re much better with belief and magic than they are with cold, hard fact.

Trying to figure out the motives of gods gives me a headache so I shut down that line of thinking. I’ll figure it out. Or I won’t. He’s not really my problem. I have an agreement to keep with him. That’s all.

“Shit happens. Isn’t that true for everybody?” She stands up from her pile of skulls, stretches until her back pops. “Come on. It’s a long way off.”

“You said you know a shortcut?”

“Yeah. It’ll get us up into another mountain range near Teocoyocualloa.”

My head spins as she pronounces it. So many Nahuatl words give me a headache. “That’s the part of Mictlan where wild animals try to eat your heart?”

“Yeah. Don’t let them do that. Hope you’ve been keeping up with your cardio. Come on.” She leads me to the banks of the blood river. The thick, coppery stink of it is overwhelming.

“We are not swimming through that.”

Tabitha makes a face like she’s just bitten into a cockroach. “Ew. No.” She puts her hand out over the shore, palm down. Then jerks it up while making a fist.

The air fills with the scent of roses and smoke and I feel . . . something. It’s not magic like I normally know it, and it’s not the same energy that I feel when I call up Mictlantecuhtli’s power. I’ve never felt this with Santa Muerte, but it’s obviously her power Tabitha’s tapping into. The scent gives it away.

The bones at our feet shudder, leap into the air like they’re on strings. They clack together, strands of sinew wrapping themselves around connections, joints snapping into place like some nightmare museum exhibit. A few moments later the bones stop dancing.

“It’s a boat,” I say.

“You’re very perceptive. I can see why La Se?ora chose you.”

It’s less a boat and more a barge, like the trajineras that take tourists down the canals, only not as large or as colorful. A pole made up of linked together femurs wrapped in tendons leans up against its side.

“Help me get it into the canal,” she says. We push and it slides easily off the shore. Tabitha hops in and I follow, picking up the pole and pushing us off.

“Which way?” I say.

“Back the way we came.” The barge glides through the river of blood.

Tabitha sits on the gunwale staring silently out at the shore, frowning at the landscape. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. I try not to care, but I’m having trouble with that. I leave her alone and don’t say anything.

Occasionally I see something break the surface behind us, a fin or a piece of flotsam. I can’t tell. I don’t want to know what could possibly live in this.

“Think you can push the barge a little faster?” Tabitha says, eyeing a patch of bubbles in our wake.

“This boat isn’t the most stable thing to stand in. I’d really rather not fall in and have to swim through a river of blood, thanks.”

“No, you really don’t.” Tabitha puts her hand out and a few long bones disengage from the side of the boat and click into another barge pole. She dips the pole into the river and shoves.

“Should I be worried?”

“You ever hear of the Ahuizotl?”

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I say.

“It’s a sort of cat-dog with hands instead of paws and a prehensile tail that ends with another hand. About the size of a jaguar. It’s pretty unpleasant.”

“And that’s it behind us?”

“If we’re lucky.”

I don’t want to know what it might be if we’re not lucky. I put my back into pushing the boat faster, my eyes on the bubbles frothing behind us. Between the two of us we gain some distance and soon the bubbles disappear. Whatever’s been following has lost interest. I spend the rest of the time watching out for anything that might come leaping out of the blood at us.

We come ashore at a dock that juts out into the canal. Bleached white bone like everything else here except for the red stain from the blood lapping at its pilings. Further back is the Mictlan version of the streets we drove through to get here.