“Following through on an idea,” I say. I should trust her. She hasn’t done anything but help me. But she’s still working with Chu, and I don’t trust him. I’m not about to tell her a goddamn thing about the storage unit.

“Is this an idea that’s gonna fuck everything up?”

“Do you honestly think anything I do can make things worse?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Okay, fair point. I promise I will do my best to not fuck things up worse than they already are. Happy?”

“No, but it’ll have to do. Just be careful. Lives are on the line.”

“You realize it’d be easier for everybody if you just shot me, right?”

“I’ve thought about it. You gonna at least tell us what this idea of yours is?”

“No,” I say. I leave her at the door, where she watches until I’m down the street and can’t see her in the rearview anymore.

Chapter 23

I head down to Ventura Boulevard and park in an empty lot. It’s wishful thinking, but with all the crap my family’s collected over the years there has to be something in the ledger that’s a powerful enough spirit bottle it can hold Quetzalcoatl.

I scan through page after page, writing down every entry that looks promising on the back of a Taco Bell receipt I find in the car’s cup holder.

It takes almost an hour, but I’ve got it narrowed down to six possibles, none of which I’m crazy about. Two don’t just pull in a spirit, they pull in all the spirits around for a mile and a half. Even the ones that are still in people’s bodies. They’re probably strong enough to pull in Quetzalcoatl, but I don’t really want to be stuck in there with him.

The third one’s less a spirit bottle, more a magic vacuum cleaner. Literally. It’s an old Electrolux from the fifties that was used to rid a hotel of demons. Only problem is that the bags were enchanted, too, and they all got used up.

Number four is a clay vessel that was used in Iraq to trap an Ugallu, this nasty Persian storm demon. I’ve heard of them, but never seen one. It starts off looking promising, but a series of addendums shows that it’s not an Ugallu, it’s about fifty of them, and they’re still in there. To make things oh-so-much more interesting, sometime in the thirties it kind of went on walkabout and nobody’s clear what happened to it.

The fifth one looks like it might do the trick. It’s from the late sixties, a prototype built for the government. It’s about twice the size of a bottle of Jack Daniels, made of titanium, and uses an ensorcelled piece of plutonium as a power source.