Fire Season (Eric Carter) by Stephen Blackmoore

Author:Stephen Blackmoore [Blackmoore, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2019-04-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

That stops her. “You’re lying,” she says. “I would know if he was near.”

“You sure about that? ’Cause I had a lovely chat with the guy last night. He’s got a minion lighting shit on fire. You hear about the Vernon disaster? That was them. If the lighter can do that to a whole chunk of the city, just think what it can do to you.”

In Mictlan she was terrified of Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire. It could burn the whole place down and she knew it. It might not have quite the same power here as it does in Mictlan, but she’s not from here. At least the Santa Muerte part of her isn’t.

“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.

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