Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(52)

“L.A.’s not the only place with necromancers. We’re rare, but we’re not that rare.”

“Rare enough for their purposes.”

“All right, what’s the third thing? I’m not going to be asleep forever. I need to know everything.”

“Son, we’re in a dream. We got all the time in the world. But that third thing? It’s maybe the most important one of them all and the one you’ll have to fight through to do. And that is that you’re really gonna hate it.”

“I think anything that gets me out of this situation is a win. Hit me.”

He tells me.

He’s right. I hate it.

___

I startle awake, my head pounding and my mouth tasting like a rat just took a shit in it. The alcohol in Darius’ bar might not have been real, but it still gave me a hangover.

The dream is still vivid and fresh in my mind with one massive exception. The entire conversation we had after he told me I was going to hate his suggestion. It’s just a blank.

Now I only hope that when it’s time for it to come back to me that it does. I pull myself up from the ground, stretch my back and hear it pop.

Tabitha sits cross-legged against a crystal eating another one of her not-apples. She sips something from a clay cup the color of a blood orange.

“Morning, Sunshine,” she says. “Good nap?” She tosses another one of her not-apples at me. I’m slow and groggy but manage to catch it, anyway.

“It was informative,” I say. And maddening. I keep poking at the hole in my memory. I get that it’s for my own good. At least I think it’s for my own good. “Don’t suppose that’s coffee you got in that cup.”

“Water,” Tabitha says. “I can’t do coffee. Chocolate, though, if you like it bitter.”

I turn the not-apple in my hands. “What is this?”

“White sapote. The Aztecs cultivated them.”

“You picked this trick up from Santa Muerte.”

“Came with the package.” She puts her hand out, palm down toward me. There’s a snap in the air and a red cup identical to hers appears in front of me. I take a sip of the water, and like the fruit I ate last night, it’s gone before I realize it. “If you let yourself try you could do the same thing.”

“Summon food of the Ancient Aztecs?”

“Other things. Like the boat I made to cross the blood canals.”

“Useful trick, but I think I’m a little far gone for that to be a good idea. Don’t suppose you could call up some tequila.”

“Sorry, no. I can do pulque, though if you’d like.”

“Oh, Jesus, no.”

“Bad experience?”

“You have no idea. Okay, so I’m trying to get an address out of this guy in Chihuahua and he doesn’t seem the type who’s gonna break if I beat on him. So he says he’ll tell me what I need to know if I drink some pulque with him.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah. So I say, sure, let’s do this. How bad could it be, right? He brings out this pitcher, pours this milky white gunk that looks like jizz shot out of a hippo and stinks like three-day-old fish.”

“You still drank it?”

“And threw it all up right then and there.”

Tabitha’s laughing. “Did he tell you what you wanted, anyway?”

“No, I had to put his head through a wall.”

“Of course you did.”

We’re both laughing now. Tension draining away. And then I think about where we are and what’s going on, and the laughter dies and it all gets weird again.

“I want to ask you something,” I say after a minute, “but I don’t know who I’m talking to.”

“We’ve been over this. I’m me. Part of me is Santa Muerte. Part of me is left over from when Tabitha died.”

“I get that. But here’s what I don’t get. When I saw you last in Hollywood, you were different. More, I don’t know, more Santa Muerte? She spoke through you and at the time she was you.”

She rubs at her wrist just above where the handcuff sits. “But then you showed up and slapped this thing on me.”

“The magic in that should have disconnected you from Santa Muerte and it’s got a compulsion that forces you to not get too far away from me. But that’s it. You’re not fighting me all that much on killing her. You haven’t beaten me over the head with a stick and tried to take the obsidian blade from me. You haven’t let me get eaten by the Ahuizotl, or tossed me out of the boat into the blood river.”

“I’m not hearing a question,” she says.

“Are you your own person? Or are you still Santa Muerte’s mouthpiece?”

“I’ve always been my own person,” she says.

“Look me in the eye and say that and maybe I’ll believe you. What are you, Tabitha?”

She taps the fingers of one hand against her knee. Doesn’t answer me. I don’t say anything, just let the silence grow more and more awkward.

“I’ve had her voice in my head for years,” she says. “Knowledge, memories. Not everything. There are gaps. Maddening gaps. I know I have my own opinions. I’ve argued with her. I argued with her about your sister, about you. When I would become her it was like I was filling up with power and knowledge and everything made sense. And even when that went away and I was less than that, I knew I was a part of something bigger, something important. And I wanted to always get back to that, stay connected to it.”