If I hadn’t pulled the knife out of Santa Muerte and plunged it into Tabitha in a split-second decision to try to reverse things, would it just be Santa Muerte wearing Tabitha’s skin? Shit, how do I even know it isn’t? Try to fix shit and all I do is make it worse.

Okay, yeah, not entirely true. Mictlantecuhtli is gone. Nothing left of him but a pile of ground-up jade blown away in the wind. Still feels like an epic fail.

I should just let Quetzalcoatl burn everything down. Shit, I should have burned Mictlan down for him when I had the chance. I should track his ass down and just ask him. Dude, the fuck do you want? Burn L.A.? Set fire to Santa Muerte? You want your pet assassin to put a bullet in my head?

Great. Let’s fucking do this. I am goddamn tired of this. I’m just tired in general. I’ve got mages hunting me down, a pissed off god whose agenda I can’t figure out, and a cartel sicaria intent on making everything a pain in my ass.

When the phone rings I’m not in the best of moods and instead of looking to see who it is first, I stab the answer button and yell, “What?” into the microphone.

“Mister Carter,” David Chu says. “I’m sorry, did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Is there a good time these days?”

“I’m an optimist,” he says. “I was wondering if you could come by the house later. I’m releasing that file to the community and I wanted to give you a copy. You might be able to see something in it that we don’t.”

“Come again? I thought this was all Super-Secret Squirrel shit.”

“It was intended to be, but under the circumstances, I think it would be better to get the information out than have you draw out the assassin. I spoke with Letitia and I understand there are larger forces at play. She told me about Quetzalcoatl, Santa Muerte, all of that. Had I known sooner I would have done this already. I’m not your enemy, Eric. I’m doing what I think is best for the city, and for our community. I handled it poorly. I’m sorry.”

“Uh, sure. Okay.” I want to be pissed off, but he sounds sincere. It’s also his job to sound sincere, so I probably can’t trust it. I’m more disappointed in Letitia than anything else. But I knew she was going to say something to him.

“There’s another reason I want to get the file out there exonerating you,” Chu says.

“Oh? You find something embarrassing about yourself in there that you need to get ahead of?” Silence.