I sit in one of the leather chairs staring at the bottle on the table. I found a completely stocked bar and I’m on my second whiskey. Maybe if I drink enough this will all turn out to be a really bad dream.

I get why Gramps stuck the bottle here. Best place for it. I just wish he’d never found it in the first place. Then I wouldn’t be in this mess.

I think I’ve mostly got it figured out. I think some people knew my family had it and were hoping I’d go looking for it without figuring out what it was. Make Quetzalcoatl enough of a threat and I’d go looking for a spirit bottle to take him down with, and grab the most powerful one I could find.

Hell of a gamble to get the bottle. But what do they lose? Not much. If I grab the wrong one, as long as it’s not strong enough to trap Quetzalcoatl, they can do it again. “Well, that one didn’t work. Do you have another?”

But if I show up with the right bottle, all they have to do is take me down to get it. The hard part’s done. It’s out in the open. Easy after that, provided they know how to undo the spell that locked it up tight back in Mictlan.

Obviously Quetzalcoatl’s in on it. He knows what the bottle is, what it looks like, and how powerful he could be with Darius under his control. And Sastre, though I doubt Q would have told her everything. She’s hired help, or a true believer, but either way Q’s not stupid enough to let an unstable lunatic in on a secret that’s been buried five hundred years.

But why have her around at all? To do something he couldn’t. Sow enough chaos with the blame pointed at me that I lose my balance and can be steered in the right direction. She could have killed me pretty much any time she wanted to, or at least tried. But kill some mages, start some rumors, and now I’ve got everybody crawling up my ass. The obvious solution is to take her off the board. But she’s got Q’s protection, so he’s gotta go first.

But there’s somebody else. Has to be. How would Q have known my grandfather found it? I can’t see him or his pet assassin rooting through the stacks at the L.A. library looking through old newspaper articles.

But who? I’m pretty sure I’ve got it narrowed down to a couple. Now I just need to figure out what to do about it.

My phone rings in my pocket and I almost spill my whiskey. I answer it without looking at who it is. “Jesus fuck, who is this?”