“Yes,” Cole said, “I suppose so. Formal introductions can wait. Listen to me. Mutex is raising the frog-monster, yes, but he’s prepared another spell as well. He’s going to cast a spell of psychic transposition.”
B and Rondeau looked at him blankly, and Ch’ang Hao looked at him with the disinterest of a snake watching the strange capering of mammals it wasn’t quite ready to eat. But Marla understood. “The Thing on the Doorstep trick.”
“What?” Rondeau said. “Who’s he going to switch brains with?”
“Tlaltecuhtli,” Marla said, coldness spreading inside her, making her feel like a sort of animate statue of herself. “Mutex isn’t just raising the god. He’s going to become the god. He’s going to take control of the god’s body, and leave the god’s mind in his human one.”
“And because he’s using the Cornerstone, he won’t go insane, and the switch will be permanent,” Cole said.
“Fuck,” Rondeau said. “We can’t have that.” He handed an aerosol can to B, and holding the other in his left hand, marched up to the wall of hummingbirds. He flicked on the lighter and depressed the button on the can, moving the flame into the spray. A modest gout of fire shot forth from the can, but the effect was dramatic—the birds touched by the flame fell, smoking and flapping, and while other birds moved in to fill the vacant positions, Rondeau kept sweeping the flame over them, and the fence grew thin. B stepped up at a different place on the fence and lit his own homemade flamethrower, turning his face away and wincing—sensibly, Marla thought, since there was a good chance that the flame would travel back up the spray and the can would explode in his hand.
“Rondeau, that’s perfect!” B was right—Rondeau was crucial here. Fire had killed the birds before, and it would kill them again. “But I can do better than white-trash flamethrowers.” Marla had just done this spell yesterday, so it was easier to do it now, with the mental patterns fresh in her memory. She sucked the remaining heat from the dead bodies inside the garden, but that wasn’t enough to do anything noticeable with—and then she thought to steal heat directly from the hummingbirds. They were small, but there were lots of them, so maybe there’d be enough heat.
Once she tapped into the hummingbirds, she gasped. It was like she’d tried to draw heat from a campfire and found a volcano instead—the birds contained astonishing amounts of energy, heat bound up in their ruby breasts. She felt her temperature rapidly rising into the danger zone, and she flung heat back at the birds.
Rondeau and B shouted and dove out of the way as the hummingbirds all burst simultaneously into flame, showering onto the ground in smoking ruin.
Marla nudged one of the hummingbirds with her foot. She looked around at her companions, and showed her teeth. This was it. This was the kind of shit she lived for, what she got out of bed in the morning hoping for and went to bed at night dreaming of. “Onward and inward,” she said. “And keep clear of the frogs, if you’re not a snake god like Ch’ang Hao or wearing a magical snake-belt like me.”
Since they’d already blown the element of surprise, Marla went straight up the path that led to Mutex. In seconds the Buddha was in sight, but it was no longer even remotely Buddha-like. It had grown to twice its former size and now towered nearly twenty feet high. Its features had softened and run, and it was no longer recognizably anything, just a squat, bulging bronze shape, vaguely froglike in its proportions. It did have a mouth, though, gaping big enough to swallow a bread box, with darkness inside. Mutex stood before it, surrounded by yellow frogs, his body streaked with blood. His back was arched, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of worship, his arms raised high. A flock of hummingbirds floated over the changing statue. They now carried the Cornerstone suspended from silver chains, just as they had on Strawberry Hill, but they hovered above the newborn frog god.
The smell of rotting vegetation was overwhelming.
Still running, Marla cried, “Mutex! This is for Lao Tsung!”
Mutex made no indication that he’d heard her, but he did sweep his arms down in a grand, maestrolike gesture.
When he did, the hovering hummingbirds flew off in a dozen different directions at once, severing the ties that held the Cornerstone. The stone—Marla’s one hope for survival, the reason she’d gotten mixed up in all this madness anyway, the ultimate goal of this entire ordeal—fell straight into the ur-Tlaltecuhtli’s vast, moaning mouth.