And then I’m hit with another wave of death as more explosions rip through the distance. I can feel the body count rising. In the days and weeks ahead, survivors will die from their wounds, infections, and toxic gases. Suffocate on a pocket of escaped cyanide gas, vomit themselves to death from arsenic, go slowly insane as mercury eats through their brains.

Every new explosion brings with it more hammering against my chest, like I’m getting slammed with a shovel. I’m not sure how far away I need to be to not feel it, but this is definitely way too close to ground zero.

“You all right?” Vivian says, coming out of the surgery and seeing me on the floor clutching my chest. “Shit, you’re having a coronary.”

I shake my head no and manage to hiss “I’m okay” before another wave of deaths washes through me. Not everyone leaves a ghost, even in a situation like this, but with so many dead, you’re going to get a lot. And I feel them tearing away from their souls, confused, hungry, scared. Hundreds and hundreds of them. L.A. will be infested by morning, not that anybody but me is gonna care, or even notice.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, my eyes never leaving Quetzalcoatl’s form burning above the flames. Then another explosion erupts, swallowing him up in its flames, the death toll landing one last sucker punch before I pass out on the floor.

Chapter 15

I wake up on a couch on the second floor of the warehouse, dirty yellow light streaming in through the blown-in windows. What little air conditioning has been running is shot, with no way to keep it all in, and the heat is even worse than before. My shirt sticks to my skin despite the dozen or so fans placed around the room, losing a war against the smoky air that has drifted inside.

I sit up, groggy, hungover, my mouth tasting like pennies, my body feeling like I’ve gone a few rounds with a pissed off skinhead. I wipe sweat from my face and forehead. It must be a hundred degrees in here.

I’ve never been near that many deaths before. That split-second moment between living and dead has always left a bad taste in my mouth, but this. Jesus. I try to estimate how many, piece apart the individual ones, but they’re all a nightmare blur of burning agony, crushed bone. And then there are the ghosts. I can feel a clot of them in the distance, an itch I can’t scratch, a noise I can’t shut out.