The headlines are the kind of sensational bullshit you get from the era. INDIAN GRAVES YIELD SURPRISING FIND; ANCIENT SECRETS SHED LIGHT ON EARLY CALIFORNIA; CATALINA ISLAND EXCAVATION FINDS SPANISH TREASURE. No help there. And then I realize what I’ve just read and my brain seizes.

Spanish treasure, Catalina Island, an ornate spirit bottle.

Fuck me. People have been looking for this bottle for hundreds of years. This is the bottle that if opened would let loose an entity that wiped out almost all of the Aztec gods with Quetzalcoatl’s help, and under Cortés’s command. A bottle that only ended up here because it hitched a ride with Cabrillo in his travels along the coast, stopping at places like Catalina Island.

This is Darius’s bottle. And now everything starts to make sense.

Chapter 26

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. Cortés orders him to hit Mictlan with a bunch of soldiers, priests, Quetzalcoatl, and the Djinn, Darius, right? You know this bit. Everything goes to shit, Cabrillo escapes with Darius’s bottle, nobody’s happy.

Twenty-some odd years later, our boy Cabrillo has made his fortune in the slave trade, brutally oppressing the indigenous people, yada yada yada. You get the idea. Real charmer, this guy.

Anyway, around 1540 he goes on an expedition up and down the California coast, somehow missing San Francisco Bay, which people give him shit for to this day. He makes a pit stop at Santa Catalina Island, where he trips over a rock while stepping out of a boat. Shatters his shin. Can you say Vitamin C deficiency, kids? Wound goes septic, gangrene sets in, and about a week later he’s dead. Huzzah.

Now a question for the class, and think carefully. Where is Darius’s bottle?

Folks who know about it through legends, and then later after meeting the Djinn, dig all around the California coast looking for it. Eventually everybody settles on “somewhere in Los Angeles.” Even going so far as to use an excuse of hidden tunnels beneath Los Angeles filled with lizard people and gold to dig a pit near Downtown.

Stupid, I know. The lizard people are way further down.

Then in 1947, some archaeologists on Catalina dig up a bottle along with some Spanish crap and lots of busted up Chumash and Tongva artifacts. For god knows what reason, Robert Carter, Granddad, happens to be there and gets his hands on the bottle because it just about screams magic.

He locks it up. Then he figures out what it is and realizes that if anybody gets their hands on this thing, it’s game over. Because whoever has the bottle has control of Darius. And the last time that happened, an entire civilization crumbled.