Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(43)

Doubt engulfs me. I try to fight against it, but it’s too strong. It pulls me down and every argument I have is washed away by self-loathing. Guilt and shame fill me up. She’s right. It is all my fault.

I can’t breathe, I can’t move. What the hell’s the point of even being here? I should just let everything play out and swap places with Mictlantecuhtli. Become a stone at the bottom of a hell I have no business being in. I deserve nothing better. I deserve so much worse.

Wait. That’s it. I made a smartass joke about the nine rivers being something to swim in. I was closer than I thought. These rivers aren’t for swimming.

They’re for drowning in.

Self-doubt, guilt, shame, regret. That’s what this place is for, that’s the challenge. That’s the trap. The dead come in here, confronted with their own failings and it eats them up. Like they’re eating me. The more I fight it, the more it sucks me in. Maybe there’s another way. Maybe I do the opposite.

“Yes,” I say, standing up from the blood soaked chair, my feet squelching in the gore soaked into the carpet. “I killed you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be alive. If it hadn’t been Santa Muerte it would have been something else. I chose not to run into a burning building to save our parents. I chose to kill Jean Boudreau and got this whole shitstorm started. I chose to leave and not come back. I pushed away Vivian. I shot Alex. I got suckered in by Tabitha. I’ve cut a swath of corpses through Mexico to get here. All of that’s true.”

Lucy pauses. I step in close. She stinks of rot and blood. Her eyes are filmed over and gray, green pus running from the corner of her mouth. Her hair falls out in clumps to drift lazily to the floor. I have to remind myself that this isn’t her. This isn’t the girl I grew up with, the woman she became who I never had a chance to meet.

“So fucking what?” I say, and for the first time ever I feel like I’m telling the truth about it. “I’ve been hanging onto this shit for years. I made choices in shitty situations. Do I regret what happened? Yes. Would I love to take it back? Absolutely. But I can’t. So if you’re trying to get me to wallow so you can feed off my guilt then you’re going home hungry. Because I am fucking done with that.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Fuck you. I don’t have to justify a goddamn thing to you.”

The room shudders around me, bends and distorts like it’s being run through a taffy machine. Lucy’s neck straightens, her bruises and cuts fading, her broken bones sliding back through the jagged tears in her limbs. Her skin fades from suppurating green to an ashen gray and finally back to normal.

“You have a chance to fix some things, Eric,” Lucy says. “Don’t waste it.”

She shatters like stained glass, the room going with her. Shards spray out in a shotgun blast of color and light blinding me. I cover my face with my hands as my vision goes white, my ears fill with a blast furnace roar. Pain wracks my body, a cold burn from the inside out that shoots through my limbs. It drives me to all fours and it takes everything I have just to stay conscious.

When the light and the sound clear I’m lying on a flat plain, the pain fading from my body. I roll over onto my back, catch my breath. The sky is the same, cold gray as when I stepped into the mists, but the mountains rising in the distance tell me I’ve come out the other side.

“That took less time than I expected.” Tabitha sits on a rock nearby, eating an apple. The landscape is less paved with bone here so much as scattered with it. Even the scrub brush and distant trees look more alive, less desiccated. Actual plants.

“Where the hell have you been?” I say. And where the hell did she get an apple?

I’m exhausted. And raw. Lucy’s image floats in my mind, neck snapped, bones shoved through skin. Her body a wreck of trauma and blood and rot. I want to throw up. I want to pass out.

But that’s not the thing that’s gnawing at me. I am done with feeling guilty. I am done with feeling responsible for shit I have no control over. I’ll take my lumps, I’ll admit to my role.

But I’m not responsible for everything, and giving up that belief feels like I’m giving up my memory of her.

Why haven’t I been back to Lucy’s house? Why haven’t I exorcized her ghost? Do I really think this isn’t all my fault? Or did I just bluff my way through the mists?

She said I had a chance to fix things. How the hell can I do that? How can I possibly fix anything? Goddamn, doubt’s a cold-hearted motherfucker.

“Close by,” Tabitha says, holding up her wrist to show the handcuff. “This thing wouldn’t let me get very far from you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Kind of by design. That’s why I got it for you. Figured I got this fancy wedding ring out of this arrangement, why not get you some jewelry, too? How’d you stay close and not end up on Bustillo’s radar?”

She couldn’t have blended in with the crowd. Now that I’ve met the dead in this place it’s obvious how much Tabitha and I stand out. There’s a solidity, a realness, to us that none of the souls have. For all their seeming physicality they still feel insubstantial in comparison.

“The Crystal Road,” she says. “That cave I ran into leads to a network of tunnels that run all through Mictlan. If you’d managed to keep up you wouldn’t have had to go through all that.” She takes another bite of her apple. “When’s the last time you ate?”