I lay her down in the backseat and we belt her in until we’re sure she’s as secure as she can be. Short of a major crash, she’s not going anywhere.

Letitia gets behind the wheel of the car. “You gonna tell me what that bundle of sticks is?”

“Later,” I say. “You don’t have time. They’re just really bad. I need to find that sicaria. She can still do a lot of damage. Like a lot a lot.”

“Okay. I’ll put out a BOLO. We’ve got her description. And I saw what she was wearing. And she’s wounded. No idea what she’s driving, but if she so much as runs a red light we’ll have her.”

She backs the car out of the tightly packed driveway, kicking on the lights and sirens as soon as she hits the street.

I pull out my phone and call Gabriela.

“What’d you do now?” she says.

“Tlepilli,” I say. She knows Nahuatl and she knows her Aztec lore. “I just found one and it’s linked to another one somewhere else.” I give her a second to catch up and make the connection.

“Fuck me,” she says. “I’ll have the warehouse and everywhere for the next few blocks looked over.”

“I’d make it fast. Quetzalcoatl’s taken care of, but his assassin’s on the loose and she still has the lighter.”

“On it.” She hangs up.

A tlepilli is an Aztec pine torch made from the Mexican ocote pine tree. Ocote sap burns really well. A tlepilli is just a bundle of sticks. You could have big ones, little ones, they’re still just tlepilli. People still use bundles like the one I found as fire starters.

Before the war with the Spanish, the god Xiuhtecuhtli was a fire god. Like the fire god. Every fifty years or so, the Aztecs would make a sacrifice to him by carving out a victim’s heart and setting a burning clump of pine sticks in the cavity. Which honestly just feels like insult to injury.

Anyway, Xiuhtecuhtli got taken out by Quetzalcoatl, who got hold of his power. When I met Q in Zacatecas he’d put the fires into something a little more portable, the Zippo lighter.

One of the things with tlepilli is that they’d be used to light others. Do it right and long enough and once you have one going, you never need to make a fire again. Just keep lighting new tlepilli.

In Vernon there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. If each is magically linked to another, half of them could be scattered across the city and the other half somewhere else, like a bunch of remote fuses.