“When I was an old, scary hag people came to me. I was like Don Corleone. Now that I’m the upstart little shit who fooled everyone it’s the other way around. Nobody talks to me. Everybody from La Eme to the fucking Armenians are testing me, not to mention the other mages who think they can take on a little girl.” She laughs. It’s a bitter, tired sound. “Thing is, they’re not wrong. I’m hemorrhaging resources faster than I can replace them.”

“That bad?”

“Enh, I’ve been here before. I’ll win this fight again. Enough about me. Quetzalcoatl’s helper—how do we find them?”

“I wouldn’t trust any divination spells. If Q’s fucking around with the victims’ families, it’s not a stretch to think he’d do the same with you or me. I could ask some of the Wanderers in the victims’ neighborhoods if they saw anything. But if everybody thinks I did this, those might not be the smartest places to be seen.”

That little shit hit me with poison today and almost killed me. He’s good, but there’s better and smarter out there. Who knows what the hell I might run into next time?

“How about Darius?” I say. I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

The Djinn has doors all over the city that lead to his own little pocket universe. He can’t get out, but it doesn’t mean others can’t get in.

He saved my ass in Mictlan by sending me some conveniently well-timed information. He wanted Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli out of the picture as much as I did. He could have told me sooner, or at least given me some breadcrumbs to follow. But he didn’t. He wanted me to go to Mictlan. Whether revenge for getting him locked in his bottle, or something else, I don’t know. Whatever it was, he wanted me there.

“Already tried,” Gabriela says. “He won’t even let me through the door.”

“That happen often?” I thought she and Darius were besties. I’ve been formally banned from his place.

“A few times,” she says. “But only when he’s pissed off at me. It passes in a day or two, but the timing is a little interesting.”

“You think he knows what’s happening and he’s gone to ground?”

“I think he knows more than he lets on, at least,” she says. “If shit’s going down that has him looking to weather out the storm, it’s gonna suck for everybody else.”

Could Quetzalcoatl hurt him? Who knows. An eight-thousand-year-old Djinn versus a broken-down god? But why would he try? They fought on the same side against the Aztecs, not that that proves anything. Darius probably didn’t have any choice in the matter.

“Well, shit,” I say.