Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(72)

“Kinda dicked yourself there, didn’t ya?” Alex says, appearing in front of me. I walk through him, ignoring him. He appears a few steps higher, an annoyed look on his face.

“I could have saved you all that trouble,” he says. “Now look at you. You’re—” He cuts off as I walk through him again. “Oh, come on.”

Funny, I’ve never really ignored him. Even when he was actually Mictlantecuhtli and not this seed of his personality in my mind. I kinda like it.

“Will you just stop for a second and fucking listen to me?” I give him my answer by walking through him again. I hear an exasperated sigh behind me. He doesn’t reappear again.

Dim, gray light shines through a doorway ahead of me. I can hear raised voices. Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli. They don’t sound happy. I suppose that’s to be expected. From what they’ve both told me they can’t stand each other.

I stop a few feet from the entrance, something else from Darius’s message leaking into my mind. Not memories, not even words or concepts, really. Just this strange feeling that I’ve said something wrong. I listen, straining to hear. There’s a background noise of wind whistling through the doorway making it hard to catch what they’re saying. I give up after a few minutes and keep going, pausing only for a moment at the doorway before stepping out onto the roof of the Bone Palace.

The sky has opened up. Rain comes down in sheets, the wind buffeting me, tearing at my clothes. A heavy, stone altar, red from all the blood, sits in the middle of the roof, a prone form lying on top of it, soaked through from the rain.

Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli stand on the other side of it, arguing loudly, though over what I can’t tell. Santa Muerte holds the obsidian blade in an overhand grip. A shitty way to hold a knife if the person you want to cut can see you coming. It’s a stabbing grip.

Fuck. I run to the altar, neither god paying attention to me. They’re too caught up in whatever they’re fighting about. It’s Tabitha on the altar, unconscious but still breathing. The cuff is still around her wrist. She’s wearing a simple, red robe open to expose her sternum. It couldn’t be more obvious what’s happening if she had a big, red X painted on her chest.

She’s held to the altar at her upper arms and calves by thick, metal straps. I pull at them, but they don’t budge. I’ve got nothing to pry them open with, either, not that I think anything would work. At that thought Mictlantecuhtli’s power perks up. It could do it. It could cleave through these straps like they’re paper.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mictlantecuhtli says. They’ve stopped their bickering and they’re both looking at me. “But it’s a bad idea. You do that and you’re not coming back from it.”

He’s right. It would be the end of me. I have two fingers left, and even those are starting to feel a little numb. I’m surprised just thinking about the power doesn’t tip me over the edge.

Mictlantecuhtli looks more human than he did downstairs. Long, black hair falls over his shoulders. His face is more fleshed out, but not enough to hide the skull beneath. His cheekbones are a little too sharp, his lips a little too thin.

“Why don’t you just stab him?” I yell. The wind has picked up and I’m having trouble hearing myself over it. “You’ve got the knife. You’ll get what you want. You’ll get what you want for me. He dies, I go back to normal, and we rule here together. That is what you want, isn’t it? You’ve told me that plenty of times.”

Before she can say anything I turn to Mictlantecuhtli. “Or you? Are you saying you’re so weak you can’t get the blade away from her? You can’t wrestle it away? Hell, you don’t even have to do that. Just get her wrist bent the right way and shove. Inertia does the rest. What are you two waiting for?”

“You,” Santa Muerte says. “We’re waiting for you.”

“We can’t kill each other,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “Isn’t that obvious? Otherwise don’t you think we’d have done that a long time ago?”

“You need to choose, Eric,” Santa Muerte says. “This is as much your destiny as it is ours. You need to be the one to choose which god dies.”

“Am I executioner?” I say. I nod toward the blood red altar where who knows how many hearts have been torn from ecstatic breasts. “Or priest?”

“You can call it whatever you like,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “But the fact remains that you need to kill one of us.”

“How about both of you?” I say. “I like that plan better.”

Mictlantecuhtli looks at Santa Muerte and sneers. “I told you,” he says.

“Told you what?” I say.

“He believes that if I gave you the knife that you would try to kill us both,” Santa Muerte says. “He thinks that I chose my consort, his replacement, poorly.”

“She doesn’t realize just how pissed off you are,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “But I’ve seen it up close and personal.”

“So I am reconsidering,” Santa Muerte says. “As I am reconsidering my avatar. I will kill her and sever my connection. And then I will decide if I’m going to kill you or simply let Mictlantecuhtli’s fate be yours.”

“For the record,” Mictlantecuhtli says, “I am not a big fan of this plan.”