“No, they were sent to stop whatever it was Agent Rodriguez and his sister were trying to see. The vision serpent shows you hidden layers of the world, things made invisible by magic.”

August didn’t ask any further questions.

“You were friends with Agent Rodriguez?” Deven asked after a moment.

August stared out the window and didn’t answer.

That was Deven’s one attempt at conversation, he decided. He leaned back and closed his own eyes, hoping to get some rest.

After several minutes of silence, August spoke. “You have knives in your pockets.”

“Yes.”

“What for? You’re a consultant.”

“Habit.” Deven wondered how much the Inter-Realm Refugees Office had told the agent. “If we’re dealing with Aztaw magic, there are going to be Aztaw lords.”

“So?”

“Aztaw lords and I don’t get along.” Understatement of the century, really, but it seemed to sate August’s curiosity and he let the subject drop.

The car eventually pulled up in front of the funeral home. Despite the central location in the city, the building had a lov-ely garden in the front, which Deven assumed was supposed to soothe grieving souls.

He didn’t understand why flowers were supposed to make death less painful, but he didn’t voice this thought out loud.

Inside, Agent August spoke quietly with the mortician, who then led them down to the morgue, where two corpses were laid out, covered in white sheets. Deven wondered why the dead needed sheets to cover them—were they cold?

Deven glanced at the mortician, unsure if he knew why they were there. Very few people were privy to the operations of the Irregular Affairs Division, let alone the presence of other realms and extra-human beings. It was one of the reasons Deven found himself a reluctant employee of NIAD—regardless of his feelings toward the agency, they alone had an inkling of his past experiences. He found himself drawn to those who knew the truth and now wondered how much information this guardian of the dead was privy to.

“Juan is with us,” August told Deven, as if reading his mind. “You can speak freely.” August cleared his throat, then pulled back the sheet covering Agent Rodriguez.

He had been a handsome man in life, Deven decided. His features were rugged and hard, but there was a softness to his expression, even after having died in fear. The back of his head was obliterated, caved in, collapsing the frontal lobe around the man’s right ear. His right eye bulged out from the pressure.

The rest of his body was white with death. Several scars marked his arms and chest, but these were old, healed and raised over time. His genitals were purple and nearly buried under his pubic hair. He had wide, thick feet and ugly toes.

But that wasn’t what he was looking for, Deven chastised himself. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to find.

When the sheet was removed from Carlos Rodriguez’s sister, Deven noticed August avoided glancing at Beatriz’s face as he examined her body.

“What’s that?” the agent asked, pointing to a red bruise just below her heart. Her skin had turned gray in death, but the bruise stood out, red and garish.

The bruise wasn’t large, about the size of a quarter, but it was perfectly circular, as if made with a cookie cutter. Deven checked the dead agent and saw he had the same marking.

“He has one too.”

August turned. He reached out and touched Carlos Rodriguez’s bruise, which was directly over his heart.

“I’ve seen a few bodies with these markings before,” the mortician told them. “I assumed ringworm, although the skin isn’t scaly like a fungus.”

“Does it always appear on the chest?” August asked.

The doctor shrugged. “They are always on the torso but not consistently in the same place. There are so few cases, I considered it an environmental anomaly, maybe some form of rash. It’s never shown any evidence of relating to the death of the individual.”

August stared hard at the marking on his partner’s chest. He pulled out his phone and took several photos of both Carlos’s and Beatriz’s markings.

“Know anything about this?” August asked. It took Deven several seconds to realize the question was addressed to him.

“No,” Deven said. “Never heard or seen of any circular bruises on bodies.” Deven tilted his head, considering. “Of course, there’s little known about the tzimimi so it could be related to their attack, although I don’t see how.”

“Tzimimi?” August asked.

“Malevolent female night spirits,” Deven said. “I’ve heard of them only in passing. The way they’ve been described fits with the creatures that attacked your partner. But they’re supposed to have been exiled from Aztaw thousands of years ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because I wasn’t sure they’re really tzimimi. I’m still not. They were exiled with the Lord of Hurricanes to the realm of light and there would have been no way for them to come back here. It doesn’t make any sense. No one has seen or heard from the Lord of Hurricanes or his minions in generations.”

August turned back to examine the bodies once more. He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out what looked like a pocket utility knife. Deven felt a moment of camaraderie.

But it was quickly apparent this was no normal army knife. It had strange attachments and Agent August frowned as he poked through the various options before picking out a screwdriver-shaped metal prong. He scraped this prong across the bruise on Agent Rodriguez’s chest, collecting a strip of skin.

“What’s that?” Deven asked.

“It’s for spectral analysis,” August said. “I can run a check on other-realm signatures when I get my equipment at the hotel.”

Deven wanted a closer look at the knife. He’d heard that many Irregulars agents used enchanted technology in place of magical powers but had seen little of it in person.

But by the time he drew near August had already closed the blade and pocketed the tool. He quickly replaced the sheet that covered Beatriz but paused as he did the same to his partner.

“See you on the other side,” August whispered. For a moment his eyes looked almost glassy. He drew the sheet over his dead partner’s body and strode out of the room, forcing Deven to rush to catch up.

***

Outside the morgue, the sun was setting and for that Deven felt grateful. It had been a stressful day and darkness always brought him comfort.

Of course, all darkness was relative. Here on earth, he could see perfectly well at any hour, because even without the sun, there were stars and moonlight and street lamps and a thousand other sources of ambient light.

During the decade that he’d spent in Aztaw, darkness had defined everything. The Aztaw themselves navigated perfectly well in the dark, but for the few humans who visited, only the glowing luminescence of Aztaw bones provided contrast on the jet-black backdrop of the flat, endless terrain of the Aztaw realm.

The utter lack of any starlight hampered human interaction with the underworld and had probably contributed to his father’s eventual madness.

Agent August sat next to him in the taxi’s backseat, silent once more. His body was completely still, eyes shadowed, and Deven would have thought him asleep if it hadn’t been for the chronic twitching of his jaw muscles as he ground his teeth.

“Have you been to Mexico City before?” Deven asked, not because he cared particularly, but because it was the question Agent Klakow had asked and therefore he assumed it to be a safe, normal conversation to have.

August nodded. “I vacationed here with Carlos and Bea a few times.” He rubbed the heel of his hand against his eye. “I’ll have to tell Teresa when I get home. God.”

“Teresa?” Deven asked.

“Carlos’s girlfriend.” August sighed loudly.

“She doesn’t know yet?”

“There hasn’t been time. I only heard of it this morning and came via the Fisherman’s Wharf–Mercado Sonora portal.” August ground his teeth and changed the subject. “Commander Carerra in San Francisco will want a report about your little trick with the mirror.”