Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(42)

I know she’s not really here. It’s not her soul. She’s not in Mictlan. Why would she be? Santa Muerte might have killed her, but unless she was a follower she should have gone somewhere else, though where I have no idea.

That’s one of the biggest problems with necromancy. I know how ghosts are made, I can talk to them, influence them, control them, even. I know there are afterlives, but before I met Santa Muerte I’d never actually seen one up close or figured out how to get to one. I mean, besides the obvious way, of course.

Mages are surprisingly agnostic. Yes, we know there are gods, we deal with them all the time. We just think they’re largely irrelevant and mostly assholes. In case you hadn’t figured it out, yet, we’re pretty fucking arrogant.

Gods have limits, boundaries, rules. We exploit those, twist them to our own ends. Or don’t and end up a smear on the floor if we’re lucky.

So where did Lucy end up? The most popular guess, and that’s all we’ve got, guesses, is that we go to what we’re most drawn to. Gods don’t choose it. We do.

Christian? Go to Heaven. Norse Pagan? Valhalla. Hate yourself and everything you’ve ever done and have a vague idea that there’s probably a God, but you’re really not sure and if there is boy howdy are you ever fucked? One of a thousand random Hells, probably.

Point is, when you die you’ll go somewhere. Even if it’s only to be recycled into the universe.

So Lucy’s out there, somewhere. But she’s not here.

I sit down in an easy chair opposite her. I wonder what would happen if I stabbed her with Mictlantecuhtli’s blade. Would it kill the thing that’s impersonating her? Or is she just an illusion being fed to me the way Vivian was and it wouldn’t do anything?

I’ll do it if this thing starts to piss me off, but otherwise I might as well see how things play out. I slide the knife back into the sheath in my coat pocket.

“So what’s the point of this exercise?” I say. “I mean in a cosmological sense? There’s got to be a reason for putting people through this crap. Did all the Aztec gods get together and say, ‘Hey, let’s fuck with our believers and make them relive their individual horrors’? Or did they just do that whole carving out human hearts thing?”

“It’s a challenge, Eric. That’s the point. This is Izmictlan Apochcalolca, the mists that blind, the place of nine rivers. The final stop before reaching your destination. By the time they get here, most have had their devotion tested by the crushing mountains of Tepectli Monamictlan, their sins carved away by the obsidian mountains of Iztepetl, their fears flayed from their souls by the scouring blade winds of Izteecayan. There’s only one thing left.”

“I figured with the river metaphor it had something to do with swimming.”

“Why’d you kill me, Eric?”

“I didn’t—”

The room flickers, blood blooms on the carpet, streaks across the walls. Lucy’s head lies on her shoulder, cocked at an insane angle, bones poking out her arms. Her fingers are ground down stubs of blood and meat, her face purple and swollen.

“Yes, you did. You murdered me as much as the man who burst through the window to beat me to death,” she says, her voice thick around a slurry of blood and ground up teeth. “As much as Santa Muerte used his hands to break my bones. Everything you did brought this down on me. Letting our parents die, killing Boudreau, running away like a whipped dog and staying away like a coward. And even if you hadn’t done those things, I’d still be dead because of you. Because of what you are. You’d have brought Santa Muerte or some other freak to my doorstep just to get at you.”

I can’t speak. I want to. I want to argue with her, but I know she’s right. It’s all true. Every word.

“You always thought you were the freak of the family because of all the death that surrounds you. You were wrong. It was me. It was always me. I was the family embarrassment. I was the shame you all needed to hide.”

She shifts her weight and her head lolls over to the other shoulder on a neck so broken it’s just a bag of shattered bones.

“I was that thing you all hated, Eric. I was normal.” She spits the word out, blood dripping from her devastated jaw.

“I never felt that way,” I say. “I loved you.” Only I did feel that way. I’m ashamed of it and horrified by it, but I did. She was a thing that shouldn’t have happened. A normal in a family full of mages. She was a target for anything that wanted to get to us.

One time as a kid I even thought it would have been better if she’d never been born.

“You say you loved me. And that’s why you killed me, Eric. You were always going to kill me. Just like you killed Alex. Just like you’ve killed all the other good things in your life. That’s what you do. You kill the things you love.”

“I did not kill you,” I say, trying to put a conviction into my voice that I don’t feel. “I tried to save you.”

“Hell of a way to save someone,” she says. She peels herself slowly off the couch, congealed blood sticking her to the seat. Her body jerks around like a badly controlled marionette and steps toward me.

“You’re guilty. We both know it. If you weren’t, why won’t you go back into my house? Why won’t you exorcize my ghost? You’re just letting me replay my death over and over and over again. Because you’re too cruel and too cowardly to make it stop.”