The crate groans as the nails bend, and in a few minutes I’ve got the entire top up, exposing smaller boxes with their own dates. June 13th is near the top, underneath a box containing a cut-glass doorknob that the ledger tells me opens doors that aren’t there into places you don’t want to go.

The mirror is brass with mother-of-pearl covering the top and bottom. It opens with a click and the inside is just as innocuous as the outside. The makeup’s gone, but the mirror is nice and shiny.

I concentrate on the remains of the Cadillac. I don’t expect it will work. This place is massively shielded. I can’t even feel the local pool of power.

The second I finish that thought, though, the pieces of the Cadillac sitting in a police impound yard appear in the glass. The mirror tugs in my hand, pulling itself to the right. If it can punch through this place’s wards, it might work to punch through Quetzalcoatl’s.

I try test runs on Gabriela, Letitia, and Chu; I get nothing. I think about Letitia’s house, and there it is, with Letitia and her wife arguing on the doorstep.

Okay, things only, not people. I concentrate on Quetzalcoatl’s lighter. The mirror tugs toward the southeast. In the glass I see Sastre in a dark, industrial-looking space, the lighter on a worktable in front of her. She’s wearing a tank top, hair pulled back, sweat on her brow. She’s tightly wrapping bunches of sticks into bundles the size and shape of ice cream cones and placing each one carefully onto an enormous stack of them on the table. The floor is piled high with twigs, a heap of thin leather straps next to them.

She’s in a factory to the southeast tying piles of sticks together. Not what I was expecting, but it gives me a place to start. I check my phone to call Gabriela, but of course there’s no signal. This place is locked up tight. I flip through more of the ledger looking for descriptions of other items in the room.

December 3rd, 1893—Monocle (1): Gives wearer ability to discern provenance of any wine.

January 11th, 1921—Walking Stick (1-15): Creates multiple versions of itself in various colors and styles until the user picks one, locking in that style until placed in a corner for half an hour, after which it resets to its original appearance.

6/12/62—Moonstone Amulet (1): Protection against charging minotaur. NOTE: Does not appear to protect from any other attack by a minotaur.

So much of this is useless junk. Sure, it’s magic, but it’s still trash. What’s the use of an amulet that only protects against a charging minotaur, but not against, say, being punched by one? How many people died before they figured that out?