I’d like to just have her kill him, but then I remember that gods don’t die like people die. Mictlantecuhtli was dead and he caused plenty of trouble. It might take centuries, but eventually this fucker’d be back and even more pissed off. I reach out again and snag the bottle.

No gunshot this time. Another quick glance shows me that Sastre knows a bad bet when she sees one. She’s bailed. Gonna have to do something about that.

But first things first. I jump out from behind the wreckage and strip the glamour from the bottle. The nuclear spirit trap, plastered in warning stickers and radiation symbols, appears in its place. Santa Muerte pulls her scythe free and steps back.

I point THIS END TOWARD ENEMY and thumb the red button on the side. The top of the bottle snaps open and a loud klaxon goes off, filling the room with even more noise. A bright blue light fills the room, enveloping Quetzalcoatl. He claws at anything he can get hold of, wings of fire losing cohesion with every second. The light pulls at him, ripping him into scraps as it feeds him into the bottle. The bottle snaps closed and everything is silent.

I fall against the wall, slide to the floor. I’ll probably get cancer from that stunt. Who knows how much radiation I’ve been dosed with just by having it out of its box?

“You’re bleeding,” Tabitha says, crouching down to me. Gone is the terrifying 8-foot-tall skeleton who just ravaged a god.

“Yeah, I do that a lot.”

She frowns. “You know this isn’t over yet, right?”

“Yeah. There’s still a psychopath out there with the Zippo of Doom.” I hand her the bottle. “Here, go find a deep, dark hole to bury it in that it won’t get out of. I don’t ever want to see that motherfucker again.”

“You and I both,” she says. She leans forward and kisses my forehead. “Don’t die on me.”

“If I do, you’ll probably see me a lot sooner than we planned.”

“I’ll be in touch,” she says. “Good luck.” And then she and the bottle are gone.

My messenger bag is stuck under a piece of rubble and it takes me too long to pull it out. When I check inside, everything seems to be intact except for a Hand of Glory where all the fingers have snapped off. That’s why I always put those sorts of things into Zip-Loc bags. The last thing you want is having pieces of some elemental horror rattling through your luggage because you didn’t lock that shit down.