“David, what the hell are you doing?” Letitia says, voice calm, pitched low. Her stance and movements designed to de-escalate. I don’t think that’s going to work in this situation.

“And you,” he says. “God, you’re an idiot. You don’t get it at all.”

“What don’t I get, David?” she says.

“You were just one more piece of bait,” I say. “We knew each other. He figured since my sister was murdered, the idea that your wife could be killed because of something I had done would make me want to help you.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “This whole thing’s been a scam to get hold of this bottle, hasn’t it? Stop me if I start to go off track. You found out about it through, what, newspapers? Old stories you wanted to figure out were true or not? You heard about Darius, and Cabrillo, and you run into the story of my grandfather finding something on Catalina. How long ago did you make that connection?”

“Ten years ago,” he says. “Give or take.”

“And then you heard the rumors about my family owning some kind of vault, right? Time goes on and you hear all those weird stories about me and Mictlan, and something about Quetzalcoatl and Darius.”

“You make it sound easy,” he says. “Getting hold of Quetzalcoatl was a pain in the ass, but once I did, everything fell into place. Have him and his pet assassin fuck with you, turn the mage community against you for all those murders. Show you those pictures so you know what you’re up against. I just had to spoon-feed the bullshit to you and you ate it right up. Man, when Werther’s family put that bounty on your head? That was just frosting on the cake.”

“You wanted to push me hard enough that I’d go looking for a powerful spirit bottle, hoping I’d run into this one. You were pretty sure I had it. And that nothing else would have been anywhere near as powerful. How come?”

“Because everyone knows about that vault. It’s an open secret. Everybody knows the Carters hoarded shit, even if they don’t know where they put it. My grandmother helped put the thing together. Fucking bitch wouldn’t tell me where it was before she died. But now it doesn’t matter. Because once I take that bottle off your corpse, not a goddamn thing’s gonna stop me.”

“Then we can’t let that happen, can we?” Attila Werther steps out of nowhere. One second he isn’t, and the next he is. Chu slams against the far wall, Letitia’s Glock hanging in mid-air where he had been standing a moment ago.

“I believe this is yours,” Werther says, floating the gun over to Letitia, who plucks it out of the air.

“We square?” I say.