“Fire he does just fine on his own,” I say, remembering a crowd of Sinaloa toughs getting torched in a hotel parking lot in Zacatecas. “But the trigger, yeah. Hard to hold a gun when you’re nothing but a ragged manifestation of wind and fire. I ran into her the other night. She was tying bundles of sticks together. I can’t see her being big on the arts and crafts, so I figure he needs someone with thumbs.”

“Sticks?”

“Yeah, I don’t get it either,” I say.

“What do we do about it?” Peter says.

“I’m tapped. I was hoping y’all might have some ideas.”

“Could you ask your . . .” Letitia starts and raises an eyebrow at me. Okay, so she hasn’t told them everything.

“I did. I got some information. After shit went down, Cortés had him trapped in a clay pot inscribed with binding spells and buried. Over time the spells faded and he cracked it like an egg.”

Chu and Peter don’t seem to like it. Even more loops to be left out of. Letitia’ll get grilled later, I’m sure. Not like it’s much of a secret, anymore.

“So, like a spirit bottle?” Chu says.

“If you mean like a spirit bottle in the same way a nuclear missile is like a bullet, sure. This is a god we’re talking about here, not some pissy little poltergeist.”

I’ve used spirit bottles before. They can be incredibly easy to make, depending on what kind of spirit you want to capture. I’ve got some drunkard ghost I trapped in a half-empty bottle of Stoli a few years back still banging around somewhere.

But this is so far out of the realm of what I can do; hell, what I even know how to do, I don’t see any way to make it work.

“Do you know anyone who can make a spirit bottle that powerful?” Peter asks.

“If I did, you think I’d be here talking to you people? How about you? My name’s mud in this town. You’re the fucking golden children in here.” Peter and Letitia shake their heads. Chu looks thoughtful. “You got something?”

“Actually, I think you might,” he says.

“How so?” People say shit like that, it usually means they know more than they’ve been letting on. I don’t like that.

“There’s a rumor, an old rumor, that your family had been collectors of a sort.” He looks uncomfortable, gauging each word carefully.

“Spit it out,” I say. “I’d like to get some sleep before dawn.”

“The rumor is that the Carter family has been collecting magical artifacts, reagents, spellbooks, what have you, for decades,” he says. “Nobody knows for sure because it’s always been denied and nobody’s been able to confirm because they don’t know where it would all be stored if it did exist.”