“How so?”

“Last I saw him Q was a fifteen-foot-tall trash fire in the shape of a winged serpent. Not exactly in a position to hold a gun.”

“He’s got a friend,” she says. “You see the shooter?”

“No. Too far away. Didn’t get captured in the Echo.” Not that it probably would have, anyway. The shooter isn’t the one who died.

“You piss off the best people,” she says.

“What can I say? I’m a high achiever.”

—

About five hundred years ago, give or take, a Spanish dickhead by the name of Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca (a title he gets a little later), shows up on the Aztecs’ doorstep and proceeds to kick seven shades of shit out of them. It’s touch and go for a while. His attention’s split. He’s not the most popular guy with the Spanish government at the time. When they send troops after him he pretty much turns them into reinforcements.

That out of the way, he turns his attention to not only conquering the Aztecs, but their gods, too. Cortés puts a lieutenant, guy named Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in charge of the invasion of the Aztecs’ thirteen heavens. The ace up Cabrillo’s sleeve is an eight-thousand-year-old Djinn named Darius that Cortés loans him, and an alliance with the Aztecs’ own wind god, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, who’s turned traitor for fuck knows what reason. Gods fall like dominos; Tlaloc, Ixcuina, Citlalicue, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Xiuhtecuhtli, Ometeotl, and on and on.

Then they reach Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, where its two rulers, Mictlantecuhtli and his wife, Mictecacihuatl, set a trap. Cue Epic God Battle. Doesn’t end well for anybody. The Conquistadores die, Quetzalcoatl is seriously wounded, Darius is trapped in his bottle, Mictlantecuhtli is turned to jade and trapped in a hole deep below Mictlan.

The only survivor is Cabrillo, who limps back to the mortal world with Darius in his backpack. Quetzalcoatl does a runner to licks his wounds, and Mictecacihuatl tries to hold what’s left of Mictlan together. The thing with Mictecacihuatl is that she’s a survivor. Flexible, changes with the times. By the time I ran into her she’d restyled herself as a folk saint in Mexico by the name of Santa Muerte.

She’s got other names. La Flaca. La Señora de Las Sombras. Saint Death. She’s a saint for the outsiders, the narcos, the disconnected. She’s not evil. She’s not good. She is death and blood, lust and love, vengeance and redemption and all the visceral things that make us human. She’s messy as life, inevitable as death. She is the Saint of Last Resort.