I make a beeline toward Sastre, holstering the Browning and drawing my straight razor. One quick slice through the throat and it’s all over. They’ve gotten close enough, or run out of enough ammunition that they’ve moved on to hand-to-hand. Gabriela’s going to have that monster machete of hers, but I don’t know what Sastre’s got.

I make my move, running through them both to get behind Sastre. I’ll have to time it right, so that she’s not ducking a slice from Gabriela that I’ll take in the face. I get close behind her, ready to move back to the living side when everything lights up in the bright orange glow of a raging inferno.

A blast of power throws me back as the flames blind me. I skid across the floor, passing through barely visible industrial equipment that doesn’t exist on this side. My straight razor skitters in the opposite direction. After a moment my eyes clear and I freeze.

“Hello, Eric,” Quetzalcoatl says, an enormous winged serpent of flames hovering above his assassin. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Chapter 13

Q’s come a long way from the literal trash fire I met in Zacatecas. He had built his form out of random garbage strewn across a hotel parking lot, accreting his body out of discarded items. A throwaway god made of bike parts, soda cans, bits of string, all held together with burning hatred.

But now he is conflagration, devouring star, angry god of fire and blood. Before, it was just his eyes that glowed, but now it’s his whole body, fifteen feet tall, wings of fire beating lazily to keep him aloft.

“If I knew you’d be here I’d have brought you something,” I say. “Like a fire extinguisher.”

“You betrayed me, little necromancer. I could have had Mictlan and you cheated me out of it.”

“If by cheating you mean not murdering countless souls in an afterlife, okay. I’ll take that hit.”

On the living side I can see Gabriela and Sastre going at it. Strike, parry, spin, pirouette. If it weren’t so deadly and I wasn’t faced with incineration myself, it’d be beautiful to watch.

Gabriela’s holding her own, but I can see she’s slowing down, while Sastre isn’t. I need to get back and help her. Except I don’t know if Q will be able to follow me over.

I don’t have much power over here. I can’t tap the pool on the dead side and can only use whatever I’ve already got. It’s a lot, but I don’t know if he has the same limitation. On the living side I saw him torch twenty guys with a thought. Is he as strong here? I really don’t want to find out.