Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(69)

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say under my breath.

“What?” Mictlantecuhtli says.

“Nothing. Go on, please. You were berating me for not doing things the way you would.”

He gives me the kind of glare you can only get from a death god. “If you hadn’t wrapped yourself in spells to keep me out I could have helped you,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “You still don’t trust me.”

“Look, I’ve got a chunk of you still with me, so believe me I’ve been getting plenty of commentary.”

“That’s because I’m tired of only having you to talk to,” Alex says. “It’s really frustrating that you won’t let me out to talk to him. You’ve got lots of charms to keep him out, but nothing to shut me up. If you’d open things up a little—”

“Let’s just go and get this over with,” I say, cutting them both off before they can say anything else. I follow close behind Mictecacihuatl through the twisting alleys toward the Bone Palace.

Something is bugging me about what Alex just said and it takes a little while before I figure it out. With the spells in my ink, Santa Muerte couldn’t see me. But Mictlantecuhtli can. Why?

“That’s a really good question,” Alex says.

“Will you just shut up?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Mictlantecuhtli says, annoyance in his voice.

“Not you. The other you.”

“Oh. You’re talking to him?” Mictlantecuhtli looks around me trying to see the sliver of himself in the air.

“It’s really more at him.”

“Ah. So exactly how you talk to me, then. Nice to see some things never change. You sound annoyed.”

“You don’t say?”

Are the spells in my ink just not working? Or is it because of this unwanted connection I have with him? There’s part of him still inside me, so even if he can’t get into my head, it doesn’t mean I can hide from him. Dammit. I thought I’d fixed that.

We make a turn and straight ahead of us is the palace. It’s immense. Hundreds of feet wide, thousands high. We come to the side of it and I don’t see how we can possibly get in.

We get in close to the limestone bricks and Mictlantecuhtli peers at them, looking for something. “All right,” he says, brightening. “Now we’re talkin’.”

There’s a section of wall that looks just a little darker than the surrounding brickwork. Mictlantecuhtli presses his hand against it and it disappears. As it does I can feel the pull of his power inside me wanting to get out, rejoin him. It doesn’t hurt so much as it’s just uncomfortable.

“Secret passages in Mictlan? Who the hell are you hiding from that you need secret passages?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Other gods, my wife, the occasional fling gone bad.”

“There was one time when we had to hide from all three,” Alex says.

The passage is wide and made of bone white bricks. A soft glow emanates from the walls illuminating our path. Behind us the gap in the wall seals back up as if it had never been there, cutting off the noise from the city as if somebody had thrown a switch. The only sound is my own breathing.

“I feel like I’m skulking through some medieval castle,” I say. Between this and the Crystal Road it’s a wonder I’m not claustrophobic by now.

“Yes, it’s all very Macbeth.”

“How—”

“I was in your head for months,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “I even know what Star Wars is.”

A cracking sound like calving ice echoes through the passage. “Do I want to know what that was?” I say.

“That was you,” he says. He nods toward my right arm. I pull up my sleeve. The green stone inches its way toward my hand. In here where there’s no ambient noise the sound of the jade crawling down my right arm might as well be a gunshot.

“That stunt you pulled out on the street has cut your time even further. You don’t have much left,” Mictlantecuhtli says, as if it’s something I don’t already know. “Pretty soon it’ll be too late.”

“I told you I didn’t— Ya know, never mind. Let’s just keep moving.”

There’s only one way to go: up. So up we go. We walk through the passage, footsteps echoing back to us. We make some sharp turns, but mostly it just curves a little with a gentle upward slope. I really hope that the weird time and distance thing where everything felt further than it was that I experienced outside the city is working here, too. Otherwise, if we need to get to the top of this thing we’ll be at it for days.

After what feels like an hour the hallway dead ends in a blank wall. Mictlantecuhtli stares at it for a long time.

“Problem?”

“I haven’t been here in five hundred years,” he says. “Cut me some slack. Oh, there we go.” He presses a portion of the wall that looks like everything else in here and the wall fades away like smoke. The doorway opens onto a wide room with lit pine torches and tzompantli lining the walls, the impaled skulls grinning at us.

“How high up are we?”

“Couple floors,” he says.

“That long for a couple of floors?”

“From the top.”

“Oh,” it hadn’t felt like we’d gone that far in that amount of time. “Would she have brought Tabitha here?”