Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(77)

An hour later, I leave my sleeping bus companion and step off the bus on Washington Boulevard in Venice Beach. It’s bright, the sun shining through a crystal blue sky. The Santa Ana winds have blown all the crap in the air out over the ocean and a ring of shining, white clouds surrounds Los Angeles.

I don’t know what happened after the explosion. Everything’s a blank. I woke up alone in the middle of the desert, my clothes torn and stained with blood. The jade was gone, though it wasn’t until I found a town on the edge of the Arizona/Mexico border where I could find a mirror that I discovered my eyes were back to normal.

But I still had the wedding ring. It used to change from jade to gold with tiny Calaveras carved into it, but now it’s just the gold. It comes off my finger, which it didn’t before, but I don’t understand why I still have it at all. I’m not sure what it means.

I take a short walk from the bus stop and turn in toward the canals. The canals are a holdover from when some guy named Abbott Kinney tried to turn the beach into a tourist trap and make it look like Venice, Italy. Hence the name. It didn’t work out so well, but the canals and the tourists are still there.

The canals are quiet, the sounds of traffic on nearby Venice Boulevard muted. It’s around noon on a December Tuesday and most people are at work. The Venice canals are a strange neighborhood. Houses on narrow plots with little boats tied up in the canals right outside. It’s hidden away, and hard to find if you don’t already know it’s there.

It’s an upscale neighborhood, and a disturbing number of the residents have gone all Martha Stewart on their Christmas decorations. The decorations feel out of place. The demographic’s a little too old, a little too gentrified, but it’s candy cane fucking central all along the canals.

I pass a handful of ghosts on my way over. After seeing what some people’s idea of the afterlife looks like, seeing the usual Wanderers and Haunts is a comfort. I understand them. They make sense to me.

But Mictlan? That there’s some twisted shit. Tabitha said that the people shaped the place. I wonder if the other afterlives are as fucked up. The fact that human beings can even come up with a concept like Hell speaks volumes about us.

It took me over a month to get out of Mexico. Five days finding a town, three weeks recuperating in a shitty little hotel where all I did was sleep, eat tacos and drink tequila. I needed to recuperate, sort through everything that happened, figure out what to do next.

The obsidian blade and Quetzalcoatl’s lighter are gone. Destroyed? I don’t know. I don’t even know if Mictlan is still in one piece, or if either Tabitha or Santa Muerte survived. I saw Mictlantecuhtli’s shattered remains, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. If I’ve learned anything it’s that I know fuck-all about gods.

Once I’d gotten enough sleep and drank enough tequila I caught a train down to Mexico City and found the Cadillac parked in Xochimilco. It hadn’t been touched. The wards carved and painted into its frame saw to that. Anybody who tried to break in, damage it, or even leave a ticket, would have had themselves a very bad day. Waking nightmares, shitting themselves, temporary paralysis. Nothing life threatening, just really, really unpleasant.

I took a drive along the river’s edge to see Isla de las Mu?ecas. The entire place was burned to the ground. The fires had spread about a quarter mile in either direction, blackening the shore and turning the trees to ash. Nothing stood. More importantly, the souls of all those dead children had moved on to wherever it was they needed to move onto.

I hope it’s better than being trapped inside a doll.

Lucy’s house in Venice is a boxy, two-story affair of stucco and glass with large windows looking out onto the canal and a balcony high enough to see a sliver of the nearby Pacific Ocean. It must have cost a fortune when she bought it, and is certainly worth a much bigger fortune now. Lucy didn’t lack for money. When both your parents are mages, money isn’t a problem. She was left a hell of a trust fund when our parents died.

When I was here last a window facing the alley had been boarded up. Her murderer had jumped through it and proceeded to turn her into hamburger. It’s repaired now, and through it I can see that the rest of the room has been painted over, carpet torn up and replaced. Walls cleaned of any trace of a murder.

Too bad cleaning crews can’t clean a place of ghosts.

After I got the Caddy back I drove into Tepito. To look at Santa Muerte’s shrines you’d think nothing had changed. And really, has anything changed? Whether Santa Muerte is alive or dead is irrelevant to her followers. It’s not like they ever talked to her outside of dreams, anyway.

The storefront that Tabitha worked out of had already been repurposed into a place selling cheap clothes, crappy luggage and bootleg electronics. There was no sign of Tabitha, not even a feeling of her. As far as this place was concerned she might as well have never existed.

The drive up from Mexico City was easier than the drive down. I knew where I was going this time, not bouncing around from town to town looking for traces of Tabitha, beating up Narcotraficantes, looking for a door into Mictlan. Even crossing the border into San Diego was easy. It helped that I used Sharpie magic to make the border guys think I was an FBI agent.

Sometimes magic is pretty cool.

I can feel Lucy’s Echo still lingering in the house waiting to come out and replay her death. I know it’s not really her. There’s no consciousness there. This is just the imprint left behind from her passing. Nothing but a constant howling pain. Her ghost is defined by nothing more than her final moments alive.