“Fine. Well, you can’t kill him,” she says. “He’s a wind god, so Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire isn’t going to touch him. If anything it makes him more powerful. And you don’t have the obsidian blade, anymore.”

“Awesome. Okay. Fire bad, killing’s out.”

“I think you have to trap him,” she says. “Like what Cortés did to him before.”

“Inside a clay jar inscribed with a bunch of old Spanish spells that I don’t know how to cast?”

“Bit of a longshot,” she says. “I don’t know what to tell you, Eric. I think you’re right. When Quetzalcoatl exacts vengeance, he doesn’t fuck around. If he was really trying to kill you, he’d have just done it. There is more going on here. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what.”

Does this even have anything to do with me? Am I a distraction? Bait? Just a loose end to tie up? I was hoping to get some idea what he might be up to by coming here. Instead . . .

“I shouldn’t have come,” I say. Tabitha’s dead, or maybe not dead, and Santa Muerte’s—worse? Better? How would you know if someone snuck into your house and replaced everything you owned with an exact replica?

After spending time with her in Mictlan my feelings about Tabitha got confused. I went from wanting to kill her to wanting to save her and . . . maybe something more. Now I don’t even know what the hell I’m feeling. Numb, mostly. I expected this meeting to be weird and awkward, but not this weird and awkward.

“I’m glad that you did,” Tabitha says. She puts her hand gently on my arm. I jerk it back like I’ve just seen a scorpion sitting on it.

“Sorry,” I say. “How much of you is in there? And you know what I mean, so please, just give me a real answer.”

“All of me,” she says. “All of Santa Muerte.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“You still don’t get it,” she says. “Nobody’s in charge. I’m me. Just me.”

“I get it,” I say. “I just don’t want to.” She’s been Frankensteined together with personalities and powers intact. Thinking of her as Tabitha is like thinking of a heart transplant patient by the original owner’s name. Which reminds me. “I still don’t know what to call you.”

“I have to think about that,” she says. “In the meantime, use my old names.”

“Don’t suppose you’d like to take on Quetzalcoatl for me?”