Graves' end

  “Oh, no,” he admonished, shaking a finger in her triangular and out-of-focus face. “That would be the coward’s way out!”

  Mantis re-solidified against her will, her disintegration canceled.

  Esteban next swept Wasp to the ground when she snuck up behind him and pinned her face-down in the dirt with his second machete. He bound her with a bracelet as well, preventing her from coming apart with the same hex he’d used on Mantis, although he was now effectively tied between the two of them. Wasp’s twitching wings crackled and snapped like crumpled cellophane when she tried to rise and fly away.

  Lia could also hear Riley and his people in the distance, shouting to each other while they chased Nyx around the Yard. The sky above flashed blue every time they startled the frantic Archon with their lights. The ultraviolet bulbs inside them burned with the intensity of tiny suns and cast weird, dancing shadows all down the long rows of leafy trees.

  Dawn broke with full and instantaneous force and held onto the sky for almost half a minute when a number of the black-clad security specialists managed to surround Nyx, hemming her in from all sides with phony daylight until she arced out over the top of their circle and raced off into the darkness that resumed as soon as she could turn her featureless face away from their lamps.

  Closer by, Esteban’s two pinned specimens writhed and screamed in the stuttering flashes of inappropriate daytime, but they couldn’t escape him, not even under conditions that normally would’ve cancelled out their existence.

  He turned to face Lia as night spread out above and held its place. She assumed the Archon of Darkness must’ve pulled ahead of her pursuers. Nyx wasn’t easy to see in the shadows, but she’d need a minute to gather herself before she could vanish the way her missing sister-daughter had, and Lia didn’t think Riley’s people were going to give it to her. The thrashing bugwomen relaxed a little in the restored gloom, but Steb was still physically tied to them. He’d achieved a stalemate here, at best.

  “These things never die, brujachica,” he said to Lia. “Now they know you, they will never leave you be.”

  “I have been worried about that,” Lia confessed.

  “Yes,” Steb said, confirming that she should be worried. “But I do have one idea.”

  He bit at the empty air, catching something in his teeth. It was nothing more or less than reality itself, Lia knew: the actual fabric of being. It wrinkled where his incisors sank in. He pulled at it, tore at it, worried it open like a dog ripping into an unsecured sack of kibble. There was weird light beyond the flap he tore out of existence.

  “I’ve held a ticket to oblivion for a long time now,” Steb said to her, when he’d gotten the hole well started and widened to about half the size of his head. “What better occasion to make the trip? I’ll even have traveling companions this way. Incredible dancers!”

  “Steb, what are you talking about?”

  “The spaces between the worlds, mi brujachica,” Esteban explained. “Limbo. Oblivion. Nowheresville. Nobody comes back from there.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” Lia said. “Those bonds you made won’t be enough to pull them in with you. You’d be killed and it wouldn’t even help.”

  “No, you’re right,” Steb said, and yanked both his machetes loose from their moorings, unpinning the bugwomen. They both instantly impaled him, Wasp with her broken-off stinger and Mantis with one slim, barbed, raptorial forearm. He looked to Lia and gasped, “…but these links, I think, should do.”

  “Steb, no!” Lia howled, shocked to her core by the sight of him run all the way through in two different places. There was surprisingly little blood. “No, you can’t do this, please don’t do this!”

  But Steb only smiled. He could do this. He was perhaps the only human being alive capable of doing this, and she could tell that he meant to see it done. For her sake.

  “Te amo, brujachica,” he told her. “Remember me.”

  “Oh, Esteban…” Lia said, brushing his cheek with her fingertips before stepping back from him, out of harm’s way. “You know I always will.”

  Esteban de Rojo grinned and then, with a shout, the freelance witchman swung his twin machetes around in a wide X. They caught in the gap he’d torn from reality and sliced it open further, just long enough for the resulting rift to suck him and his dance partners into the white nowhere zone beyond the worlds, before it sealed itself back up.

  And then they were gone, all three of them.

  Lia dropped to her knees, unable to breathe. This was too much to cope with. It was too real. Too irrevocable. Esteban was worse than dead, he was gone. Extinguished. She recalled, randomly, how he’d always brought her cut flowers when they’d been together, even though she lived in a world of flowers, because he somehow knew that contemplating their fleeting beauty as they faded moved her in an odd and personal way. He’d viewed her through a lens no one else ever had, understood feelings she’d never even tried to articulate, and now she’d never see him again. Not in this life or the next one, either. The weight of the sacrifice he’d made on her behalf was devastating.

  Lia felt sick and desolated, too gutted even to cry.

  Chapter Fifty

  Black Tom condensed himself down into the first chamber at the top of the Silent Tower. Winston Watt may have channeled himself across miles through the medium of earth, but he still had to climb a dozen flights of stairs before he’d reach the King’s Chambers, so non-corporeal Tom beat him to the top by a handy margin. He couldn’t tell where the Archon Lyssa had gotten to, either, even though he’d sensed this place as a destination in her mind as well, right before she winked out of existence.

  What really surprised him was finding Hannah up here, well ahead of anybody else. She was standing at the door between the rooms and staring through. Lia hadn’t sent her; Tom was certain he would’ve picked up on such a memory had it existed anywhere inside either of their heads. The only sign of Dexter Graves in evidence was a deflated mound of clothing and bones that lay on the floor at the lady’s feet.

  Did that mean Graves had gone over already? Made a deal with el Rey? Not yet, Tom thought, although Hannah seemed to believe they might be negotiating when he touched her mind.

  She wasn’t focused on Graves at the moment, however. She was instead remembering the Crouchers Lia had taught her how to feed. Recalling the shock of wonder that accompanied the experience.

  Tom could guess at what she was about to do next and he dreaded seeing the results, although he also knew that Hannah couldn’t really help herself. He understood the fascination she felt as she stood there at the boundary between the worlds. His Lia had always been possessed of that same sort of curious nature.

  Hannah put her hand through the doorway to the inner office. The air seemed to ripple around it, as if she’d touched a plane of glassy-still, vertically-suspended water. But her hand went through, and on the other side it looked to be just fine. The flesh stayed on her fingers. It was hard to say that anything unusual had happened at all.

  She put her face through next. Panic spiked Tom in the chest and he leapt toward her instinctually, even though he knew he’d have no chance of pulling her back if going over was her intention. He was no more substantial than a breeze.

  Hannah wasn’t yet that bold, however. She stayed right there on the threshold but opened her eyes, like a child dunking her head to look around underwater. She gasped in surprise at what she saw.

  Tom touched her thoughts and shared the vision with her. The second chamber was not an office anymore but rather the old inner sanctum of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, as Tom had known it back in its Hole in the Sky days. The carved altar stone crouched where the desk had been, and a rough doorway in the wall beyond it had replaced the illusion of panoramic windows. The impression of modernity the King liked to affect was gone: a projection visible from the first room only.

  Hannah pulled her head back across the threshold. She looked all right, as far as Tom could see. He could further tell,
from both her expression and her thoughts, that the fancy, well-lit office with the desk was once again what she saw on the doorway’s far side. One image replaced the other as soon as her eyes crossed the dividing line. It was like seeing two television channels switched back and forth.

  “Huh,” she said.

  Then she bent over and retrieved Graves’ lighter from his bone pile, digging it out from the inner pocket of his ratty, crumpled raincoat. She clutched it to her heart as she straightened up and faced the doorway. She took a single deliberate step inside, setting one foot onto the inner chamber’s stone floor and then planting the second right down beside it. Tom cringed, expecting to see her flesh slide away from her bones like so much loose sand, the way his friend Ramon’s had done so many years ago.

  Hannah’s skin didn’t do that, though, and after a few seconds she opened her eyes again. She seemed unchanged, to both her own and to Tom’s very great relief.

  Behind her, back in the realworld, shred-faced Winston Watt burst into the outer office, banging the bloodstained door off the wall. His black sweatshirt and jeans looked beige with embedded dirt.

  Hannah whirled around at the percussive sound of his entrance.

  Watt saw Graves’ cigarette lighter in her hand. He pulled a gun from inside his soil-caked sweatshirt and marched right into Mictlan without undergoing any more metamorphosis when he stepped through the portal than Hannah had a moment before. Tom was indistinct enough to go undetected by both of them.

  Hannah put her hands up, clutching the lighter in the left one, when the desiccated gunman shoved his weapon into her face.

  “I thought only a bonafide dirtwitch or whatever he called it is supposed to be able to walk through that door,” she said to him, shying back as far as she could without letting her ass come into contact with the grisly altar.

  Winston ripped off the remainder of his Xavier mask, sunglasses and all, revealing the bare and eyeless skull beneath it. “Here’s my dirty little secret,” he said over Hannah’s involuntary shriek. “Now what, pray tell, is yours?”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Daylight flashed again in the sky above Potter’s Yard, as bright and sudden as thunderless lightning. It disappeared as quick, leaving Ingrid’s night vision obscured by brilliant, overlapping afterimages. She’d gone with Lia’s friend, the one called Riley, to see if there was any help she might offer, or anything else she might be able to do. There wasn’t, really, but she was too fascinated by Riley’s technological solution to the Archon problem not to see how his approach panned out.

  She saw Nyx duck into an outlying shed and slam the door, pursued by a team of those identically-dressed guardsmen. It seemed that Mickey wasn’t the only individual in town who maintained a small army of mercenaries, and these people behaved like they’d even been trained, in sharp contrast to the motley assortment of lowlifes her King had sent her out here with. Ingrid knelt down some yards back from Riley’s men and closed her eyes, latching onto the perceptions of the ancient entity inside the shack. She caught an impression of the guards’ lights illuminating the windows before Nyx dropped down to the floor.

  Outside, Ingrid opened her physical eyes to watch the guards ring the shed, three men to a side as well as one at every corner. The combined glare of their electric sun-lights made the boxy little structure at the center of their circle stand out with hallucinatory clarity. She could feel Nyx cowering under a table, in there.

  Riley stepped up next to Ingrid and put his hands on his hips, assessing the situation.

  Inside the room, on the floor by her head, Nyx noticed a strip of electrical power outlets, as well as something attached to it. Ingrid felt the attentional snag, closed her lids, and turned her mind’s eye toward the object of the Archon’s focus. It turned out to be a complex, boxy device plugged into the power strip, one that Ingrid guessed to be a timer of some sort, based mostly on the fact that it had a numbered dial on its face. Nyx, she sensed, had no idea what the mechanism was called, although she understood that it was counting down, and that something would happen when it finished.

  The timer clicked over to the next hour, and more dazzling sun lamps came on above to nurture a prolific crop of fat, red tomatoes.

  Nyx yowled in the lamps’ glare like a boiled cat and Ingrid pulled away from her, back into her own headspace.

  Opening her eyes, she found that it was now daytime outside the shed. It just was, despite being nearly eight o’clock in the evening, according to reason. A beautiful mid-morning blue hung over all of Los Angeles (and maybe over all of everywhere, as far as Ingrid knew, since Lady Night was currently unable to fulfill any of her duties).

  She got up from her knees and brushed them off. She didn’t want to think about how ragged she must’ve looked in the harsh light of day. Riley nodded, appearing rather pleased with himself when he grinned at her. “I think that’ll do,” he said.

  Ingrid had to shade her eyes to look at him. She was apt to freckle now, because of his tricks, and yet she couldn’t help but smile back.

  The men in the black suits began propping their burning lights up around the shed, and she and Riley started back toward the last place they’d seen Lia. Nyx went on wailing, unharmed but unhappy about being trapped in the light of an artificial day.

  When they came out of the trees, Lia was kneeling in the dirt where the young man called Esteban had been fighting with Mickey’s Tzitzimime. Weird tracks proliferated, scattered across the dirt in no discernible pattern. Ingrid didn’t see any other trace of the bugwomen, but then there was no sign of Lia’s friend, either, and her heart sank. She didn’t know the particulars, but she got a sense of what must’ve happened, all the same. She hoped it hadn’t been terrible for Lia to watch, but she could tell just by looking that the hope was in vain.

  “Lia…” she said, very softly, coming up behind the smaller woman and hesitating for a moment before placing a hand on her shoulder. “We’re both alive. They can’t have switched yet. There’s still time. Maybe we can close that door to Mictlan, if we hurry.”

  Lia looked up. Her eyes were black and cold.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go do that.”

  A column of three police cars blasted down Lankershim Boulevard, their lights flashing and their sirens wailing. Lia sat in the front passenger seat of the lead car. Riley and Ingrid were in the back. Lia was all too aware that theirs were not the only flashing emergency lights out here on the roads. Accidents, awe, and the evidence of panic were everywhere to be seen, right outside her window. Madness and wonder wandered freely through the streets while people stared up into a blue mid-day sky that should’ve been as black as midnight, according to their watches or the clocks on their cellphones.

  “They must all think it’s Jesus coming home to roost or Superman turning the planet backwards or, well, shit, I don’t know what they must think,” Riley said, staring out through his own window as they turned onto Ventura from Lankershim, heading into the Cahuenga Pass. It was a rare thing to see either his vocabulary or his imagination desert him, Lia knew.

  Panicked crowds were pouring down the hill from Universal Studios, making the intersection all but impassable. Their police car eased past a mad-eyed, bearded man wearing a sandwichboard too-tightly packed with apocalyptic text for any of it to be legible. He harangued anyone whose eye he could catch about the pressing need to repent, and Lia looked away from him. They’d driven past a surprising number of individuals who seemed to share his attitude already. Lia wondered when they’d had the time to hand-print all those ‘The End Is Nigh’ signs. She hated to think that people had them pre-made and socked away in garage rafters or under their beds, in case an unscheduled end of the world should ever catch them unawares.

  Lia ignored the hysteria as best she could. She figured people’s existing beliefs would help them reassemble their conceptions of reality later on-assuming that things eventually did return to normal. There were no guarantees on that score, she reminded hers
elf. This was unprecedented territory.

  Their cruiser sped up again once they entered the Cahuenga Pass itself. From here they’d reach their destination within minutes, and Lia already knew she meant to send the police escort away as soon as they arrived-using Esteban’s brand of influential tricks, if necessary. The Blackdogs were needed out on these streets more than anybody, and, after what had happened to Ben Leonard, Lia didn’t want any more of their blood on her hands.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Black Tom stood by in the waiting room, helplessly watching Winston Watt’s old bones threaten Hannah inside the second of the King’s Chambers. Tom knew he couldn’t cross the barrier the way they both had and retain his will, as he was technically dead already and therefore a subject of el Rey’s (even if he’d been absent without leave for the last hundred years). He’d be rendered helpless by Mictlantecuhtli’s influence as soon as he stepped across the threshold, and he’d be no good to anybody, then.

  “But I hardly know anything about these things!” Hannah protested, staring down the barrel of Winston’s gun. Tom had no idea what would happen to her if she got shot while standing in the realm of the dead. “I didn’t even know things like you could be, outside of movies,” she insisted.

  “The dead like me can walk the earth this time of year, with permission from our King,” Winston informed her. “But a living thing like you has no business being here. You couldn’t be, unless you know something more than you’re letting on, my dear.”

  “I really swear I don’t,” Hannah said.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Winston replied. “All I want is for Black Tom Delgado to take over my position in Mictlan. Do you think your Lia will trade him for you?”

  “I… I have no idea,” Hannah said. Tom didn’t either. He was glad that Winston couldn’t see him.