Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(8)

Yeah. Bustillo’s that kind of guy. I can see it in his eyes. I’ve seen that fear before. I’ve felt that fear before. If I were a better man I’d just kill him. He knows that’s where this is headed. But I’m tired and I’m pissed off and I don’t much like him. So instead I feed that fear.

“I could carve you up, Manuel.” I trace the air with the knife like I’m filleting a steak. “Slice your skin from your bones with Mictlantecuhtli’s blade and put it on like I’m putting on a jacket. I could take you with me. Everything you are, everything you have would live on after a fashion. It’s maybe not immortality, but something of you will survive in me. Would you like that?”

Bustillo, eyes wide and body quaking from fear. I’ve cut him off from the pool, and his own power is next to nothing now. He’s used it all up. I’m still drawing power from the pool, pulling it down faster than it can fill back up. There’s nothing there for him.

“Or I can shoot you. Got a round in the chamber with your name on it. Well? I asked you a question, Manuel. What’ll it be? Do you want to live on? Or do you want to die?”

“Live,” he says. “I want to live.”

The fear has taken him and I bet if I told him to beg for it, he’d do exactly that. It’s not just that he’s afraid to die, though he’s sure as hell that. It’s that he’s run up against the limits of his own power and arrogance. That’s broken him more than anything else possibly could.

“Too bad,” I say and pull the trigger.





I pull my car, a ’73 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, out from where I’ve hidden it half a mile away from Bustillo’s compound. I got it off a whackjob necromancer who was kidnapping Voodoo Loa and stitching them into his soul. I took him down in a bar in Texas and took the Eldorado for my trouble.

I drive down the rocky hill from Bustillo’s compound toward Tepehuanes, the throaty rumble of the Cadillac’s V-8 echoing through the darkness. The Caddy’s been unintentionally mothballed for about a year and it feels it. Even with new pads and rotors the brakes aren’t great, the engine sounds like it needs another tune-up and the rag-top is so thin you can see light through it.

I had to abandon the car on a dock in San Pedro when I took it over to the land of the dead and didn’t have enough magic to bring it back. Kind of like if you do valet parking and you lose your stub.

I was being chased by a fire elemental at the time and had my ex-girlfriend and a burnt-out hobo of a mage in the car with me. It was kind of a stressful day.

The other side of the veil is pure entropy. Life drains away, magic leeches off into the fabric of the place. So by the time I got the car from the other side and off the dock the gas in the tank was as combustible as water, the metal was starting to pit, the rag top was falling apart and the tires were about ready to turn into dust.

The only thing holding it together was some residual magic left over from wards that were inscribed into it by the previous owner. At least those kept the inside of the thing in one piece. A little work and it was, well, not good as new, but better than it was.

Normally I don’t much care about cars. I need a ride, I steal one. But I’ve got a soft spot for the Eldorado. When everything else was going to shit the car worked even when it shouldn’t have. It’s built like a tank, steers like a goddamn cow, but it’s saved my life a couple of times.

I only had the Cadillac a short while before I lost it on the dead side, but having it back here feels right. It’s reliable, a trusted friend. I figure on this trip I can use all the friends I can get.

I pull off Bustillo’s dirt road and onto Highway 23 on the south side of town. In the distance I can see the burning warehouse casting a shifting red and yellow glow into the night sky. I pass a Pemex, the bright fluorescent lights of the gas station stark against the unlit highway and see the pickup trucks with Bustillo’s men, their faces blackened with soot. There are definitely fewer returning than left.

I had hoped to not see them at all when I walked out of Bustillo’s place. The Caddy stands out no matter where it is, but at midnight on a darkened road in Durango after their drug warehouse burned down? Just wait until they get back to their boss’s place. I want to be long gone before that happens.

I check a map I picked up in Puerto Pe?asco, when I realized I didn’t know where the fuck I was going, and find Mexico City. I do some quick math. It’s about a twelve-hour straight shot. Even with Adderall, which I’ve been popping like Tic Tacs for the last month, I won’t make it. I haven’t slept in three days. I need a shower. I need a place to hole up and figure out my next move. Zacatecas looks like a decent place for it. Hell, they even have a Walmart.

Zacatecas is only about three hours away. I can do that easily enough. I’m still buzzing on adrenaline from my fight with Bustillo and from the Adderall I took a few hours before.

When I started trading places with Mictlantecuhtli he appeared to me and laid it all out. He’s trapped in a tomb in Mictlan, resting, being alone with his thoughts. According to him he likes it that way. He doesn’t want to rise again. Told me that it was all Santa Muerte’s idea. Their kingdom, Mictlan, needs a king and a queen and, self-esteem and arrogance notwithstanding, I don’t fit the bill.

She wants to bring Mictlantecuhtli back and I’m the sacrificial lamb. The only way out, he tells me, is to kill her. Without her I become just some run of the mill, old and boring necromancer. Mictlantecuhtli’s obsidian blade is the way to do it.