“I got an idea,” Gabriela says. “But you’re really not gonna like it.”

“No,” I say, wondering when we were going to get around to this. “Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’ve already considered it, and I’m not going down that road.”

“She’s the only one left who actually knows him besides Darius. Probably knows him better than Darius.”

Goddammit. I know she’s right. I’ve known for months. But I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. Thinking about her. And it’s not for her lack of trying to get hold of me, either.

I pull a couple of cards out of my pocket, slightly larger than standard playing cards, and hand them to Gabriela. The images are used in a bingo-like game called Lotería. Each card has a title, an image, and a little nonsense rhyme associated with it. If you’ve got a divinatory bent, you can use them like tarot cards.

The first is El Corazón, showing a picture of an anatomically correct heart with an arrow through it sitting in the middle of a very familiar looking ring with tiny calaveras carved into its surface. Compared to the one on my ring finger the detail’s not as good, but close enough.

The other is La Muerte, depicting a half-skeletal, half-flesh woman. Though the image is stylized, I know exactly who it’s supposed to be.

“These first showed up a week or so after I got back from Mictlan. I was getting two, three cards a day for a while. Then they stopped. They started back up last month. This is the fifth pair I’ve gotten in the last two weeks.”

“You sure they’re from her?”

“Who else would they be from? I just don’t know what they mean.”

“At least she’s still in one piece. That’s something, right?”

“No. The plan was to cut her goddamn head off and mount it on a wall.” Things didn’t go as planned. I’m not sure how much of Santa Muerte is still Santa Muerte and how much is her human avatar, Tabitha Cheung. Tabitha played me like a goddamn piano to get me into Mictlan under her boss’s orders.

My goal had been to kill Mictlantecuhtli and hopefully stop the progression of the jade taking over my body, and then Santa Muerte for killing my sister, though I wasn’t picky on the order.

Only it turned out to be a con job and Tabitha and I were the marks. Santa Muerte as her alter-ego Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli wanted me close enough and mad enough that I’d stab at least one of them in the heart with a god-made obsidian knife.