“Why, I bet you’d go up like gasoline-soaked cardboard. I’m betting if one of you goes, you both do. What would happen to Mictlan then? Neither one of you would be there to protect it. Quetzalcoatl could stroll right in and burn the whole place down.”

Santa Muerte shudders, her body shrinking, twisting, half her and half Tabitha straight down the middle. Tabitha’s skin melds bloodlessly into the bone. She pushes aside the wedding veil with a skeletal hand and I can see anger in Tabitha’s eye. But more importantly I can see fear.

“He’s here for you,” she says, her voice a resonant harmony between Santa Muerte’s and Tabitha’s. “What do I have to worry about?”

“Yeah, he’s here for me. So why hasn’t he killed me, yet? Instead he’s murdering other mages and pinning the killings on me. That sound like him? There’s something else going on. It can’t just be me he’s after. Maybe he’s hoping I can lead him to you, too.”

“I know this pitch,” she says. “You want something, Eric. Tell me what it is.”

“You sure you don’t want me to be all cryptic and subtextual and shit?”

“Just fucking tell me.”

“I need to know what he wants, and to do that I need to understand him. And you’re the only one left standing who I can ask. What the hell was his beef with you and the rest of his family? He turned on all of you and helped the Spanish wipe your people out. Why did he do it?”

“Because he’s an asshole,” she says, her voice more Tabitha than Santa Muerte.

“No,” I say. “I’m an asshole. What he did is so far outside the realm of asshole I don’t even know what to call it.”

“He betrayed us all for more power,” she says, her voice shifting back toward Santa Muerte’s. “He wanted to rule over everything, he wanted to be the only god. He thought to use Cortés to get that power for himself. But he was outwitted by the Spaniard after they tried to take Mictlan. Wounded and weak, he was trapped in a vessel and buried beneath the temple of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. I would send what few worshippers I had left to see him every twenty years, to spit on his writhing spirit and ensure that he was still trapped.”

“And then he got out,” I say. “How?”

“The vessel was weak like the Spaniard who trapped him. The magic guarding it cracked over time. With the spells failing, he was able to free himself.”

How does she know this? She couldn’t leave Mictlan. Then it comes to me. “Your followers who were staking him out. They were there when he broke free.”