Either way I need the bottle back. It’s rolled over near Quetzalcoatl, but close enough to me that I should be able to stay out of the line of fire long enough to grab it.

I duck-walk behind a chunk of fallen ceiling the size of a refrigerator, hoping Quetzalcoatl either doesn’t see me or can’t get a shot off at me. A little further and I’ll almost have it.

“You killed them all, you traitorous fuck,” Santa Muerte yells. Her voice switches in and out from the formal tones of Santa Muerte to the enraged screaming of Tabitha. It’s a weird up-and-down mixture that sounds oddly like a boy going through puberty.

“You all let our culture rot and twist away,” Quetzalcoatl screams back. “Creation was dead long before Cortés came to our land. Ours were a people steeped in blood, and we needed more, not less.”

“There were too many,” she yells back. “We saw what would happen if our people continued at the rate they were going. Droughts, starvation, disease. We could have saved them, but we needed you.”

“You all turned your back on me,” he hisses. “If I wasn’t going to get my due, I would take it on the backs of invaders from another land.”

“God, you are such an asshole,” she says.

Quetzalcoatl laughs as his junk armor loses more of itself to Santa Muerte’s scythe. “I am not the one corrupted,” he says. “I have not died and been reborn twisted with a human’s shape. She has desires and plans that you do not. How soon before you are too weak to keep her and her necromancer lover at bay? How long before they strip you of your powers?”

If this were a telenovela I’d go make some popcorn, but fascinating as it is to see these family dynamics play out, I have shit to do. I crawl within reach of the bottle, but just as I’m about to grab it, a gunshot rings out and a bullet embeds itself in the wall a couple inches above my hand. I pull back quickly behind cover.

The Burning Girl has joined the party. Yippee. I steal a quick glance and see her holding herself upright against the doorframe. She’s covered in cuts, and blood that probably isn’t hers. Dark red blooms on her left thigh from a bullet hole. She’s breathing heavily and shaking. Every step through this place was hard won. I felt at least fifteen people die. She either let the others go or only wounded them.

I pull back as she takes another shot. It goes wide and thunks into the wall. A tremendous crash gets both our attention. Santa Muerte has torn away most of Quetzalcoatl’s debris armor and managed to get her scythe halfway through him. He shudders, the power holding him together fading fast.