Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(56)

The wind and noise die down. I give it another minute and venture a peek around the column at the stone slab.

“Well, shit.” Nothing. Not even a scratch.

The fifteen feet or so of ground in front of the door is polished clean. All the dust and dirt and crap got sucked into the blast. The only thing left is the spirit bottle and the circle of blooded salt. The spell binding it will keep it in place against anything short of a hurricane.

“There’s got to be another way to open it,” Tabitha says. “Maybe together we can push it aside?”

I’m out of ideas. If Gabriela’s exploding marble trick can’t put a dent in it, I don’t see what else I’ve got that might. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I need to get in there and this is the only way in. I clearly can’t blow it up. I can’t roll a twenty-ton stone slab out of the way on my own. Even with you helping I don’t see it happening. There’s only one way to do this. It’s locked. I’ve got the key.”

“Let me try,” she says. “Our powers are similar. Even the ones we’ve inherited. Maybe it will open for me.”

“Be my guest.”

She steps up to the slab, hand hovering just over its surface and stops. “What happens after you kill him?” she says.

“You know what happens.”

She nods. “I’m going to have to stop you.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Se?ora.”

“Goddammit, Eric,” she says. “I’m not Santa Muerte, all right?” She taps the side of her head. “I have a piece of her inside me, that’s all. I have my own thoughts and my own feelings. I believe she’s right and she’s doing what she needs to. I’m not her goddamn puppet.”

“Careful there, Pinocchio, your nose is growing.”

“Oh, fuck you.” Tabitha reaches up to the slab, fingers resting lightly on the stone. She closes her eyes and a soft radiance grows from inside her to an intense white light. I can see her bones, organs. It’s like she’s burning from the inside out. She takes her fingers from the stone, then slams them hard against it, unleashing all that built up energy into one massive strike.

Two things happen. The first is that Tabitha gets blown back into the road, hitting the dirt and skidding a good five feet before coming to a stop. The second is that the door doesn’t open.

Tabitha stands, shaking dirt out of her hair. Aside from some burn marks on her clothes she looks fine. She brushes more dirt from her clothes.

“It didn’t work at all, did it?” she says.

“Not even a little.”

“You’re sure you don’t have some magical crowbar in that bag?”

“I wish.”

“Shit. Just be careful, then,” she says. “Please?”

“If I were the careful sort we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Stay behind the bottle. Once this thing opens up those demons are gonna pour out like a burst pipe. And, uh, if any of them get past it, might want to duck.”

“What do you mean if any of them get past it?”

Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb isn’t going to open up to anything less than Mictlantecuhtli’s power. I had really hoped I could have avoided this.

There’s a good chance that this is going to tip me over the edge, turn me into a permanent place for pigeons to shit on. That was the whole point of taking the long way through Mictlan instead of just using his power to pop inside the tomb. But I don’t see any way around it.

I go back to the door, tracing the carvings with my fingers. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to open it. No handholds, no keyhole. After a moment of looking and not finding anything I press my hands against the design of Mictlantecuhtli in the center of the slab and his energy takes notice.

“Eric,” Tabitha says, “I asked you a question.”

“It’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ve done this hundreds of times.”

“Hundreds?”

“Okay, a couple. But they worked. Mostly.”

“Eric.”

My attention pulls toward the energy flowing out through my center, spreading down my arms, into my hands. There’s an even greater hunger to it now. A need in it. Pain tears through me as the power rips through my fingers and into the stone.

My knees buckle, but my hands stay locked to the slab. The carvings glow with a sudden green flame that spreads across their surface, running through the channels between the designs.

The power won’t let me go. It rips through me like high voltage through a penny. My legs give out and I collapse to the floor, my hands still stuck to the slab, smoke rising from them. Tabitha runs forward and yanks me back, drags me behind the bottle. I’m too weak to stand, so I let her. A deep rumble wells up from the slab. Slowly, with a sound of stone grinding on stone, it rolls to the side.

I can feel her crafting a spell, that same not-quite Santa Muerte magic I felt at the blood river filling my nostrils with the smell of smoke and roses. I’m not sure if she’s doing it or if it’s the piece of Santa Muerte in her soul reacting. The spell is sloppy, instinctual, less a spell and more an outburst of power.

Mictlantecuhtli’s power responds to it before I can tamp it down. I can feel it intertwining with her own, the spell amplifying. I try to pull it back, but I’ve lost any illusion of control I ever had over it.