Graves' end

  Caradura was on his way back up to the top again literally as soon as he landed, his bare feet beating a fast tattoo on the rough stone steps. It wouldn’t take him long to regain the pyramid’s summit.

  Ingrid’s bones turned to Graves. “Dexter,” she said, looking as though she’d had a sudden flash of inspiration. “It’s still November second out in the world. The dead can walk today if they have permission from the King. Maybe permission from the Prince will do. Call for help to drag him over the barrier!”

  It sounded like a decent plan.

  Graves looked out across Mictlan. He could see smokestreets and nebulous cities and possibly millions of tiny costumed skeletons in the far distance, if he tried. There were sure to be a lot of disgruntled dead out there. Plenty of possible allies.

  King Caradura was about a third of the way back up the stairs.

  “I think I can go you one better,” Graves said, looking away from Ingrid Catrina to wide-eyed Lia while he imagined them all, the forlorn dead of every era.

  He knew in a flash what he wanted to do.

  Graves leapt up, found a handhold between two mud bricks, and hauled himself onto the sanctum’s flat, square roof, onto the absolute top of Mictlantecuhtli’s pyramid. He bent down to help Lia up, too.

  He didn’t have to wrack his brain to know how she’d choose to handle this situation.

  So he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The shrill shriek cut across the plain like a sharp sonic knife. Skeletons going about their business on the vague smokestreets down below all turned toward the distant pyramid. Even King Caradura paused in his climb. He was more than halfway up the staircase.

  “Listen up,” Graves called, projecting his voice easily, as though it were somehow amplified. “Son of Hardface says it’s play day on the earth plane, so all of you-get those bony asses on the streets!”

  His penultimate order rolled across the realm of the dead like a peal of thunder, and the Prince’s directive was heard by one and all.

  The entire skeletal population of Mictlan, down on the ground and numbering so many billions strong, all paused and looked to one another. They were uncertain for an instant, but not one of them needed to be asked twice. The dead dropped whatever they were doing and stampeded across the plain, converging on their King’s pyramid from every side.

  All of them. Every one, without exception. After a moment an ocean of bones spilled over the hazy mountains that ringed the far horizon and flooded down their foothills-a multitude of tiny skeletons coming on the run, in numbers too great to comprehend.

  No similar offer of freedom had ever been extended before, not to everybody all at once, not even in the dustiest and most disused corners of any of their memories, and it woke a hunger in the dead for the pleasures of the living world that the realm of Mictlan could no longer contain.

  King Caradura, still stranded partway up his own pyramid, saw everyone who ever died pouring toward him across the vast, barren landscape at an unbelievable rate of speed, raising great billowing clouds of grayish dust that hung in the air behind them. The rumble of so many fleshless feet pounding the earth rose to a sustained roar.

  The King screamed and sprinted upward as the first wave of skeletons swarmed the pyramid’s base and stairs. He made it back to the summit within a matter of seconds, but while el Rey may have been supernaturally fast, he was nowhere near fast enough to outpace the motivated mass of his subjects. The wave of eager dead caught him and bore him up the last few steps, through the exterior door, and back into his own temple.

  Graves and Lia watched all of this in delighted astonishment, from the safety of the pyramid’s small, squared-off rooftop, both of them leaning over its edge to look down between their feet.

  Inside the sacrificial chamber, the flood of jubilant skeletons herded their King across his own inner sanctum. He clung to the altar by his fingernails until they yanked him from it, muscling him toward the far door in spite of his violent, clawing struggles and the snarled invectives he hurled at them.

  Ingrid Catrina watched it all as it happened, from a safe corner of the room.

  King Caradura turned into fleshless Mictlantecuhtli when the dead shoved him across the barrier and out into the first chamber, ahead of them. He had no chance to slow down before the crush of animated bones pushed him through the modern office suite’s main door-the one marked with the name of his favorite avatar and the blood of his human family.

  Then he was out in the corridor. Out in the realworld, beyond the Hole in the Sky, where he’d never been before.

  Which could only mean that Dexter’s extravagant, extemporaneous experiment had miraculously paid off.

  Ingrid Catrina stepped forward to help her fellow skeletons uproot Mictlantecuhtli’s round limestone altar and rumble it out the office door after him, like a massive grinding wheel. She stepped back and stood her ground on the spot where the altar had always been, in the center of the sacred chamber, at the very seat of Mictlan’s authority. The tidal flood of fleeing dead parted easily around her.

  “Goodbye, Mickey,” she murmured, and could hardly hear herself over the roar of celebratory noise. “We loved each other as best we could.”

  She watched the dead slam their King’s shrouded, skeletal form against the corridor’s far wall, then mash him there with his own rolling altar stone. He couldn’t come back to his realm while Ingrid was standing where the symbol of his purpose belonged. White plaster dust puffed out around his robed bones. Skeletons fought to roll the stone back as more and more of the unbreakable dead jostled out into the hall behind him, crowding the narrow space past its reasonable capacity within a matter of seconds. They hefted the altar up off the floor and used it like a battering ram, grinding Mictlantecuhtli deep into the drywall before the century-old masonry behind it simply shattered from the force and burst open in a shower of brick and plaster.

  Ingrid Catrina shaded her bare eyesockets against a wash of brilliant, realworld daylight as the dead leapt through the breach after their former ruler, pouring out of what the old people had always known as the Hole in the Sky.

  Mictlantecuhtli’s robe fluttered and snapped as he fell, screaming, and crunched against the cracked blacktop, thirteen stories below. His ancient altar landed on top of him and broke apart into several large pieces.

  Skeletons in clothing from every era rained down upon Mictlantecuhtli’s remains, smashing them first to gravel against the pavement, then to powder, and then finally to the dust to which all things are said to return. The durable skeletons themselves landed unharmed and pranced away, out into the streets, elated over the prospect of being free.

  Up on the roof of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, Graves and Lia continued staring down at the mass exodus taking place not three feet beneath the soles of their shoes.

  Fresh droves of skeletons kept coming, pounding up the pyramid’s steps and even climbing its stacked sides, pouring in from every corner of Mictlan’s plain like a blanketing swarm of locusts.

  There seemed to be no end to them, from one horizon to the next.

  Dexter Graves and Lia Flores looked up and grinned at each other like a pair of delighted children.

  The dead partied outside the Silent Tower and all over the rest of the city, badly disrupting the ‘real’ world of natural laws and social habits. They burrowed out of the ground and broke out of crypts, so hungry for the life they’d been denied that they were unable to wait in an orderly line at the door between worlds any longer.

  In cemeteries across town, bones boiled out of manicured plots. Mausoleum slots blew open and whirlwinds of ash danced around the memory gardens with unrestrained glee. So many of the dead sought to act on the permission they’d been granted that the inviolable veil between life and death might as well have come unraveled. Los Angeles was the event’s epicenter, but its results were going global, spreading more swiftly than the planet could turn.

  Los Muertos went nuts as soon as they were loose, too overwhelm
ed and overjoyed not to celebrate their liberation. The blue sky above was a miracle to them-even if the bright sun, which was currently facing a different hemisphere, was nowhere to be seen within it. They hardly noticed such a trifling detail as that after having endured the tedium of Mictlan’s never-ending gray for so long. Their raucous behavior freaked out the living (who were having a hard enough time dealing with the improbable daylight as it was). It looked as though a sepulchral spring break had been declared on the streets of LA. The dead were on holiday, and they meant to make the most of every second they had.

  On paved avenues that had once been dirt roads, ranchero skeletons riding pale horses fired their guns into a blameless blue sky. Tribal bones wearing tall fans of feathers performed wildly whirling ghost dances in intersections they remembered only as crossroads, while dead musicians carrying instruments of every stripe gathered together to make as much lively noise as they possibly could. Skeletons in the costumes they remembered best from life danced and twirled and laughed and sang, all of them intoxicated by their unexpected taste of vitality.

  Many of the living (who were still horribly confused, but starting to get over that first, debilitating shock that always accompanies an experience of the impossible) began recognizing ancestors. Joyous reunions broke out everywhere, in yards and in stores and on streetcorners, as the liberated dead sought out children, grandchildren, or descendents too far down the timeline for anyone to reckon. Even expired pets, cats and dogs by the skeletal score, hurried home to check up on the friends they’d loved so well in life but had to leave behind.

  For one moment, unique in all of time (like every other moment, of course), the living and the dead celebrated together, and all of them believed wholeheartedly, if only for a little while, in the glorious future of their kind.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  After what felt like well more than an hour Lia and Dexter hopped down from the roof of Mictlantecuhtli’s temple and crowd-surfed back into the world. Lia had to coach Dex on how to do it, as he’d missed out on the era in which the practice was born by a number of decades.

  Celebrating skeletons obligingly bore them across the two rooms of the office suite, then on down the stairs and out through the lobby’s double doors, finally depositing them right on the cadaver-crowded street in front of the Silent Tower.

  Hannah Catrina and Riley’s well-dressed bones were dancing a sprightly jitterbug together, and they both waved a cheerful hello.

  “You like what I did here, dollface?” Dexter asked, grinning his biggest lopsided grin when he turned to face Lia. “It’s the Day of the Dead. I uncorked the otherworld for you!”

  “I love it, Dexter, I really do,” Lia said, and cast her wondering eyes around at the cheekbone-to-jowl crowds packed into the narrow street before them. When she looked up at Dexter again, his silly smile only widened. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen!”

  She touched his thoughts and was humbled to know that Dex had pulled this incredible trick because he believed she would’ve done the exact same thing, had the power been hers to use.

  His eyes told her the same, and his lips confirmed it when he seized her and dipped her in a deep, triumphant kiss.

  Skeletons all around whooped and applauded, whistled and cheered, many of them reminded powerfully of a famous old photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse that had once, for so many, symbolically sealed the end of their world’s great war.

  Dexter straightened up and set Lia back on her feet, ending their breathless moment. The crowds all around fell silent, and they both looked up to see Ingrid Catrina, the new Queen of Mictlan, smiling down upon them.

  Ingrid’s bleached skeleton wore a regal costume now: a long-skirted suit and a broad-brimmed hat pinned over her lustrous, dark red hair. To Lia she seemed to embody everything that was dignified, elegant, timeless and wise, like the Elizabeth of the Otherworld. The dusts of this world swirled about her before settling down onto her bones in a flawless facsimile of flesh. After a few moments her face looked as smooth and radiant as it had in life, and her occluded eyes cleared to a blue as bright as sapphires. She was one of los Muertos now, as well as their Queen, and on their day she could walk the worlds beside them, on her own recognizance. Unlike her imaginal predecessor, this was a Death who had lived.

  “Ingrid,” Dexter said, taking off his hat in the presence of royalty. “Or should I say your majesty?”

  “Ingrid’s fine,” the new Queen offered. “Or mom. If you like. Not ma, though, please. That’s a sound a sheep would make.”

  “But…” Dexter started, then hesitated. Lia looked up and saw that his eyes were full of need and a brand of pain she understood all too well, being an orphan herself. She also knew that the world’s mythologies were rife with tales of semi-divine parentage, and of progeny hidden away by human mothers until such children could come of age to claim their birthrights from otherworldly fathers. The pattern was a classic one, reiterated time and time again.

  “Is it really true, what you told me about being my… you know, my mother?” he whispered. “How can it be? I mean, look at us. I’m older than you are.”

  “Dexter…” Ingrid explained gently. “I had you in 1915, back when I’m originally from. I left you in the realworld to keep you safe from Mickey, but then I jumped to 1950 to meet you. To see what sort of a man you’d become. I jumped to now to find Lia after Mickey tracked me down again and wouldn’t let me go till I promised I’d deliver you. I’ve taken trips all over time. Any point in human memory is accessible from Mictlan.”

  She brushed his face with fingertips of dust-sheathed bone.

  “I’m sorry I was never a parent to you,” she said. “I had no idea how to be. I was never very good at normal life. Maybe now… I can be of a different sort of use.”

  “Yeah, you’ll make that otherworld a better place, I just know you will,” Dexter said. His voice went hoarse with emotion when Lia unobtrusively took and squeezed his hand. He held on gratefully. “Get out there and liberate those mythologies,” he suggested.

  “That already has been done,” pronounced the Queen. Her gaze was growing distant, her focus already turning inward, toward the otherworld’s eternal mysteries.

  “Well all right,” Dex said, beaming. He pushed his hat back on his head and looked around, at the dead who still crowded the streets, milling about and chatting. “What about the rest of the mess I made?”

  Queen Ingrid shrugged. “The dead will return when their day is done,” she said. “And the living will recall this only as a dream. The realworld defends its boundaries too well to let this be remembered. Nyx, I believe, remains your prisoner?”

  “Back at the Yard, yeah,” Lia said.

  “Free her as it pleases you,” the Queen instructed. “Until then… let the dead enjoy their day.”

  Queen Ingrid Catrina, the new Reina de los Muertos, bowed to her son and to Lia before she turned back to her building, the Silent Tower, the thin facade worn by her ancient temple in that patch of the actual currently known as Hollywood. The torrent of still-exiting skeletons parted before their new sovereign to let her enter the building, all of them kneeling and bowing their heads when she passed. No longer out of fear, as would’ve been the case with the previous monarch, but rather as an expression of adoration, admiration, and genuine gratitude.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Ingrid told her son, waggling fingers over her shoulder without turning back. The dust-flesh fell away from her bones as she did so.

  “In all the old familiar places,” Dexter replied, in a murmur only Lia was close enough to hear.

  Together they turned away as the Queen returned to her realm and its faraway concerns, only to be confronted by Mictlantecuhtli’s dead manservant Winston, who stuck his rusty gun into Lia’s face. She cringed back against Dexter, who moved to shield her with his body.

  “Black Tom Delgado,” skeletal Winston rasped. “It’s not fair that he should get away with what he did
to me. The degradations I’ve endured. The centuries of humiliation. If all I can do to hurt him is kill what he loves, then that’s what I’ll bloody well do!”

  Lia and Dex both flinched when the small gun burst apart, taking most of Winston’s mummified hand along with it. His finger bones went careening off in every direction. One stray knuckle bounced harmlessly off Dexter’s chest. They heard the shot whole seconds later, and were slow to realize that it hadn’t come from Winston’s gun.

  Neither of them was hit.

  Lia looked up to see a distant sniper atop a tall neighboring building taking aim in their direction through a riflescope. She shouted and jumped when a team of six black-clad Navy SEALs burst from concealment behind parked cars and tackled Winston the would-be assassin to the blacktop, before she or Dexter had any idea what was happening.

  Dex drew Lia close while one masked and helmeted member of the SEAL team trussed Winston up with plastic zip-strip restraints and the other five covered him with drawn sidearms. She couldn’t have been more astounded when a gray Seahawk helicopter diced the air above, rising from a helipad atop the sniper’s building and whirring to a three-wheeled landing in the empty lot across the street from the King’s tower. (Make that the Queen’s tower, she corrected herself.) Skeletons ducked and parted to make room for the incoming aircraft. The gunship had a United States Navy insignia on its side, barely visible through the haze of brown dust its rotors kicked up.

  It was the same symbol that graced the front of Dexter’s lighter.

  Two very old men (one dressed in a heavily decorated Naval uniform) and a skeletal version of Tomas Delgado stepped out of the flying eggbeater, ducking under its roaring blades.

  “Black Tom!” Lia cried, feeling limp with relief upon seeing him again, when she hadn’t been at all sure she would.

  “Hey, that looks to be my old pal Charlie Lurp with ’em,” Dexter said. “And… holy hell, I think that’s-can that really be Davey Normoyle? Admiral Davey? Still in the Navy!” Dex crowed, sounding more than amazed. He and Lia ran up to meet the new arrivals. Dexter embraced the shriveled Admiral and pumped old Charlie’s gnarled hand. Lia hugged Black Tom’s bones.