Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(54)

Weirdly, the raven tattoo on my chest is getting in on the action, too. It’s been feeling off for months now, as if the change in me is changing the ravens. They might be magic, but they’re still just ink. Even when the spell triggers and releases them, they’re just phantoms. A last ditch weapon when the shit hits the fan. There’s no thought in them, certainly no will. But I still can’t shake the feeling that they’re waking up.

We head around a bend and all my tattoos get in on it. The ones to ward me against being detected by Mictlantecuhtli are beginning to itch and burn, even where my skin has turned to jade. The burning spreads. Each tattoo lighting up on my skin like they were drawn in fire. Searing pain engulfs my body and it takes everything I’ve got to keep from falling to my knees. As it is I bend over double, gritting my teeth through it.

“What’s wrong?” Tabitha says. She runs to me, trying to help but I wave her off. I lean against a crystal column, push myself forward.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“No you’re not. Tell me what’s happening.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. My tattoos are rebelling, or something.” Most of them are protection spells, shields to stop a bullet, misdirections to keep me hidden, spells to ward off magical attacks. They’re all kicking into overdrive. There’s a threat here and they’re doing everything they can to protect me. But I can’t tell what the attack is or where it’s coming from.

“Mictlantecuhtli,” Tabitha says. “He doesn’t want you in there. We should leave.”

“He can go fuck himself,” I say. “Besides, I thought you wanted him gone.”

“I do. He’s dangerous. But not if you’re going to end up dead before you get there.”

I’m not crazy about the idea myself, but if I’d seen a way out of it without this I’d have done it already. I force myself to straighten up. What are these spells trying to protect me from? Something about the tomb? Something on the door?

“You’re not feeling anything?” I say, gritting my teeth against the pain.

“No.”

“Lucky me. I always knew I was special. Come on.” I push myself onward, staggering with each step. It feels like walking through burning Jell-O. Tears fill my eyes and run down my cheeks and it isn’t until I wipe them away with the back of my hand that I realize it’s blood.

When I start bleeding from my eyeballs it’s time to admit I might be wrong. I’m about to turn back and get away before this kills me, but then we make another turn and there it is. Set against one wall of the cavern is a circular, stone slab a good ten feet across. The door to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb.

I stagger against it and the moment my hand touches its surface the pain stops. Whatever it was it’s gone, though I can still feel the ravens circling hungrily in their tattoo and Mictlantecuhtli’s dark power seeping into my bones.

“Oh, look. We’re here.”

“What gave you the first clue? How are you feeling?”

“Better. Recognized.” I tap the slab. “Like this thing knows me.” I pull my hand away, waiting for the pain to start again, but it doesn’t.

“That’s good?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s me that it’s seeing.”

The stone looks a lot like the Aztec Calendar Stone sitting in a museum in Mexico City, a massive, twenty-ton calendar made of basalt that shows the different eras of the Aztec civilization. But instead of being split representations of jaguars, wind, rain, and water to mark out the different eras, it’s covered in death iconography.

In the center is carved Mictlantecuhtli’s face. His real face, not the one of Alex I’ve been talking to. A skull with eyeballs bugging out of the sockets, a feathered headdress, a necklace of human eyes.

Surrounding his head are carvings of different locations in Mictlan. The mountains, the plains, the rivers, the mists. All the places where the dead travel to reach Chicunamictlan and claim their final reward. The work is stunning, cut with laser-like precision.

Behind that slab, inside his tomb, Mictlantecuhtli is waiting for me, encased in his own prison of jade. I wonder how the change is affecting him? As the stone takes me over, is his flesh becoming revealed? Skin hanging from bones, organs pushing out and visible against it? Is his skeletal face plumping out with muscle?

“What do you know about this?” I ask.

I can feel the power in my bones stretching out toward the door like a plant to the sunlight. I run my fingers across the stone, feeling for any kind of mechanism, a switch, something. Physically it’s just a big rock. Dead, inert. Magically, it’s lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. Even if I didn’t have Mictlantecuhtli’s power rolling through my veins I’d feel it.

“Only what I’ve picked up from Santa Muerte. Her memories are fuzzy about it. I don’t think she liked thinking about it much.”

“I don’t blame her. It can’t have been fun.” I wonder if I’d stayed connected to Mictlantecuhtli would I have picked up his memories instead of his annoying personality popping up in my dreams?

She touches the stone. “I’ve always wondered why she never tried to do anything about it.”

“What, like crack it open? That does seem kind of weird. What sorts of memories do you have from her, exactly?”