Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(29)

When we get out onto the dock Tabitha gestures at the boat with her hand and it rapidly deconstructs itself and sinks beneath the blood.

We walk through the bone streets, past buildings that would make H.R. Giger cream his jeans. Our feet crunch through shards of skulls like gravel. The heat is more oppressive here than out on the boat. Sweat spreads black soot from the island fire streaking down my face, soaking my shirt. Great. I get this far and I’m going to die of dehydration. I pull off my coat, roll up my sleeves. I catch Tabitha looking at my arms when I do it, no doubt wondering how much more of me has been invaded by jade.

“Shouldn’t there be, I dunno, more Dead here?” I say. “Seems kind of empty.” We haven’t seen anyone since we came through the portal. Even when I drove through the part of Mictlan that extended up to L.A. there were souls around. Not many, but enough that I noticed them. Here there are just empty buildings, silent streets.

“Trust me, that’s a good thing. There are some things we don’t want to run into out here. I told you Mictlan is broken. Just because Santa Muerte rules doesn’t mean she has complete control over it.”

“What, like the locals do? They’re dead.” I try to keep the tone light, but after the Ahuizotl in the river I know this is serious. Besides the challenges I’ve read about, I don’t know what else is here. And if Mictlan is in as bad a shape as she says it is, there’s no telling what kind of nastiness is running around.

I don’t know how much of my magic I can tap into. I can feel a trickle of power in the area, but it’s faint and tastes sour, like spoiled milk. I’m not sure what will happen if I tap it and I don’t trust Tabitha to tell me the truth.

Plus there’s the problem that if I only have my own power to use that won’t last long if I have to do anything big. It’ll come back, but slowly. And if I pull too much and end up inadvertently grabbing Mictlantecuhtli’s power things will go south in a hurry.

“Most of the dead who came in after everything went to shit are Aztecs killed in the war with the Spanish,” she says. “Lately, it’s been devotees of Santa Muerte. But with Mictlantecuhtli out of the picture they can’t reach the end of their journey. So they wander, waiting for things to get better.”

“They don’t sound so bad.”

“Dead warriors?” she says. “The Narcotraficantes, or even the police who follow La Se?ora? Some of them are here, too. We do not want to run into them.”

“And you said I wouldn’t need the shotgun.”

“Shotgun’s gonna do sweet fuck-all, Eric. They’re already dead. You’re not.”

We come out past the buildings, through the narrow, winding streets and onto a wide road heading toward the pyramids in the distance. Bone trees grow thick on either side.

I feel a weird rumbling through my feet. Does Mictlan have earthquakes? No. It doesn’t feel like that. Too steady, too low. I can see a thin cloud of dust further down the road. “Anything else we need to worry about?”

“Too many to list. This is why Santa Muerte needs you. Look at this place. Before the Fall this was filled with souls on their journey to their final rest in Chicunamictlan. It was a rough existence for them, being judged by your gods is never easy, but it was more like the world outside than this. There were plants, water. Servitors of the dead to help the souls on their journey. Now look at it. Discarded scraps of flesh and bone. The rivers are blood for fuck sake.” She bends down and picks up a fragment of a skull and tosses it into the distance.

Does she really care? It’s not like Tabitha is old enough to have seen it. How much of this conversation is Tabitha and how much is the piece of Santa Muerte grafted to her soul? Is there any difference?

“And having a king in place would solve this?”

“This place needs two rulers,” she says. “Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli had their own duties in taking care of this place. They can’t do each other’s job.”

That dust storm is really starting to kick up. Tabitha hasn’t noticed it, yet, and I’m not sure if it’s something to worry about. I nod toward it. “Should we try to find cover or something?” Not that there’s any I can see besides the trees. And though there are a lot of them, their threadbare trunks won’t offer much protection. Maybe we can dig a hole in the road and cover ourselves with bones.

Tabitha squints at the cloud. “Shit.”

The dust is spreading in a wide column on the horizon. Instead of the whistle of wind there’s a rumble that sounds like car engines. It takes me a second to realize that that’s because it is the sound of car engines.

“What the hell is that?”

Tabitha starts running toward them. “The narcos I was talking about. Probably some of the Aztecs they’ve roped into joining up with them.”

I break into a run and follow her. Oddly, we’re running toward the column of dust.

Of all the things I was expecting about Mictlan, this is so not one of them.





“They’re in cars? Where the fuck did they get cars?”

“How the hell should I know? I told you things have gone to shit around here.”

She cuts sharply to the left through a break in the trees, kicking up pieces of skull that clattered behind her. Not far off I can see a low hill. At first I think it’s just another bone pile, a wrinkle in the landscape, but there’s a hole in it that becomes apparent the closer I get to it.