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  Faint but luminous perspective lines bled out from Lia’s imagination and into the real world, stretching away toward all horizons. Their bright point of convergence was her third eye, her Ajna chakra, right in the center of her forehead. The lightlines undulated all around her, as if stirred by deep currents in the imaginal sea. Faint auras also faded in, one around Lia’s body, and another, brighter circle around her head.

  Hannah wouldn’t have been able to see these effects if she’d been looking on (although she would’ve readily sensed and respected Lia’s deep state of meditative focus). Still, seeing more than consensus reality allowed for was mostly a matter of experience, in Lia’s opinion. A skill, not a power. After Black Tom, it was the ritualistic nature of her work with the plant life at the Yard that had taught her the fundamental trick of looking at the world around her, moment by moment, and knowing it for the work of art that it was.

  She was never less than grateful for her unique perspective, even if it did set her apart from other people.

  Out beyond her and Tom, unseen by anyone else, an imposing ring of silent, jointly-imagined flames licked up toward the sky, from all around the Yard’s furthest boundaries.

  Lia wondered if her collection of improvised wards would do the job. She truly wasn’t sure. But she swore that if this all went wrong tonight, it wasn’t going to be because she hadn’t done every single thing she could think of to do in the name of defending her home.

  She let her thoughts uncouple from her brain and rise up, into the indigo twilight. She knew the sun was on the verge of setting, and that lights were starting to come on across the Valley floor. She could envision it easily, as though she were physically flying.

  Potter’s Yard blazed bright down below, with her imaginal effects visible across the worlds for one brief flash-right before it all went completely dark.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three identical points of light that might have been cold, distant stars appeared in the eternally gray sky that hung over the land of the dead and dropped down from it, like phosphorescent spiders descending on unseen webs. Smoky, wispy skeletons on the ground scattered like herds of cattle spooked by aircraft as the falling stars converged upon the mountainous step pyramid that was always visible on Mictlan’s horizon. The Temple of Mictlantecuhtli. The trio of swift sparks funneled themselves into the squat, square structure that topped the pyramid, shooting in under its doorway’s carved limestone lintel.

  Lyssa and Nyx were waiting inside. They were amongst the King’s elite creatures, conscripted from one of the all-but-forgotten pantheons he’d conquered in his campaigns. Each of them was intimidating to look upon, with curling tresses, full red lips, and a haughty expression on her exquisite, angular face. They were each clad in sleek, dark, twenty-first century business attire, and Nyx wore an enormous pair of black butterfly sunglasses over her eyes. Lyssa was sprawled across what now appeared to be a mahogany desk, even though it normally looked like a large stone altar.

  As soon as the three formless Tzitzimime arrived via the doorway from Mictlan it disappeared behind them, becoming a plate glass window-wall that offered up a kingly view of the Angels’ City. LA’s clumped-together business towers draped elongated shadows over traffic arteries that glinted and sparkled in a wash of warm, westering light. The panorama and the executive office were both illusions arranged for the group by their King: images he’d laid over the inner sanctum’s flickering torchlight and bloodsoaked stone as an example of the era he wished them to go out into and hunt. The door between his Chambers had been left aligned with the very moment in time they saw mirrored in the office’s big glass wall.

  Insects began to crawl from the illusory woodwork as soon as the realworld’s sun began to set. Then they boiled out, pouring from the walls and dropping from unseen cracks in the ceiling. The bugs lumped up around the floating points of light into three semi-feminine clouds that writhed and churned as they worked to solidify (although they wouldn’t be able to manage it until after the realworld’s night had fallen).

  Nyx took off her eyewear as soon as the sun’s upper arc dipped below the horizon, revealing eyes as black as the night she embodied. They were all pupil, devoid of either whites or irises. She looked over at the others. “It’s time,” she said.

  Lyssa sat up from the desk and nodded her assent; then she, Nyx, and the incomplete Bugwomen headed for the exit door, en masse.

  As they crossed into the outer office, passing through the barrier between the worlds of life and death, they changed. Everything that passed through there did, in one way or another. The two chambers were something like an air-lock between realities, one room in either realm.

  Nyx became a flattened, two-dimensional outline of herself that filled up with stars and swirling galaxies when she stepped through the portal, while Lyssa changed into a similar silhouette containing only mad static and twitchy silver flickerings. The unfinished bugwomen finally came together into their distinct, hard-shelled, long-limbed avatars: a Wasp, a Mantis, and an Ant.

  Nyx threw open the door to the wider world-the door that read ‘Miguel Caradura’ on the outside-and the surreal quintet strode down the hall, toward the elevators, looking like danger and glamour personified.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lia, done meditating upon the now-active and empowered symbols she’d set up to defend her home, opened her eyes. It was just after sunset at Potter’s Yard. The sky was a pool of blue ink above, flecked with a first dusting of tiny silver stars. The trees were black silhouettes set against a backdrop of luminous twilight. Lia’s expression remained blissfully serene and untroubled for one instant, until she remembered something, and frowned.

  “Hannah,” she said to herself, then leapt to her feet and hurried off toward the front of the Yard.

  Tom followed, after resuming control and stretching the muscles of his waiting catbody.

  Hannah picked up a paper plate with a piece of withered fruit on it that was lying on the ground inside the Yard’s front gate. She dumped the old fruit into a green plastic trash bin, then set the plate back down and fanned a newly-sliced apple out onto it. Lia had left her in charge of this one final task.

  Within seconds, the apple wedges withered, browned, and visibly began to mold. Hannah watched the accelerated process of decay in total mystification.

  “What makes that happen?” she asked, looking up when she realized Lia had emerged from the foliage behind her, with her tomcat close at her heels.

  “Crouchers,” Lia told her. “Doorway demons. You buy their loyalty with snacks. That’s why I had you do this.”

  “So there’s something there… eating it?” Hannah said, eyeing the sliced fruit uneasily.

  Lia shrugged. “The part that counts, yeah.” Then, before Hannah could pose a follow-up question, she said: “Listen, Han, you’ve gotta get out of here, okay?”

  “What, now?” Hannah asked, looking bewildered. “But I thought-”

  “We’ve done everything I know how to do,” Lia told her. “But I’ve got no way of knowing if it’s gonna be enough.”

  She knew it scared Hannah to see the worry in her eyes, but she also knew Han really believed what she said when she spoke so nakedly.

  “I couldn’t live if something happened to you,” she said, her voice tightening up as she forced one of her worst fears into words. “And I might not be able to keep my guard up properly if I’ve got too much on my mind.”

  Hannah stared at her for a long moment, unsure of what to do. Unsure of everything, it looked like. “Okay. I understand,” she said at last, although she clearly didn’t.

  Lia wanted to hug her, but she could be awkward in her expression of feeling (having been socialized under some fairly unusual circumstances), and the appropriate moment for it passed her by.

  It was plain enough that Hannah’s experience of meeting Dexter Graves had called her basic picture of reality into question, sparking an agonizing reappraisal of her entire belief system. Lia
felt her searching for words to express herself. She did understand what Hannah was going through, from personal experience, and so she chose to let her friend talk through it, for a minute, despite the approaching darkness.

  “Lia?” Hannah ventured in a troubled tone. “This’s all been, I don’t know… so different from the things I’ve seen you do before.”

  Lia smiled. “Like getting plants to grow and reading people’s tea leaves?”

  “Yeah. I guess,” Hannah said. “And those sorts of things are impressive enough, believe me, but this, this has been… I don’t even know. On another level.”

  “C’mon,” Lia said. She helped Hannah up and guided her toward her car, which was parked on the far side of the gravel lot.

  “Where’d you even learn these things?” Hannah asked.

  Lia shrugged, glancing down at her black cat. She’d never figured out how to explain her teacher, or the relationship they had. It was something else she’d never found the right moment or the right words for.

  “The earth,” she said, in partial answer to Hannah’s question. “Books, certain plants…” She hesitated, then told her friend the simple truth: “Black Tom’s taught me more than anyone.”

  Hannah’s eyes widened, as eyes do when the people behind them are told something crazy. “You mean your cat?” she said, making no attempt to disguise her knee-jerk incredulity… until she saw how it abraded Lia’s feelings. Then she paused, as they reached her Volvo, and looked down at the animal in question. He blinked back up at her with his bright green eyes.

  “He’s not really a cat, you know,” Lia said, trying not to sound defensive. “I mean, yeah, of course that’s a cat, but a cat’s not all that’s in there. If you know what I mean.”

  “I… I did not know that, no,” Hannah said. After a beat she admitted, very softly: “Nothing looks like it did to me this morning.”

  Lia did hug her then, feeling for her but also feeling the pinch. “Hannah, honey, I know,” she said, into the older woman’s ear. “But we’ll have to talk about it tomorrow.”

  Hannah pulled back and offered an awkward smile. “I kind of want to stay and see how some of these things work,” she said, sweeping a hand around in general reference to the nonsensical projects they’d labored over all afternoon.

  “But you won’t want to be here if they don’t,” was Lia’s terse reply.

  Hannah understood that this was probably so, and nodded reluctantly. Lia herded her into the old Volvo and closed the door behind her. Hannah’s driver’s side window was already down.

  “Go home,” Lia told her through it. “And call me when you get there, but don’t call me by my name when you do. Okay? That’s important.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go on, then,” Lia said. “Get out of here.” She slapped the top of the car like a cowpoke motivating a sluggish steer and then hurried off, back into the darkening Yard and onto other last-minute errands.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lia sat down again, crosslegged, cat in her lap, back in the cozy bower where she liked to do her psychic exercises. It was fully dark by now, just after nightfall. She set a notebook computer she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car next to herself on the bare earth. It was on, but closed and quiet, waiting for her in standby mode. She closed her eyes, controlled her breath, and within moments she was able to send herself out, leaving her own body in a sort of standby mode, as Black Tom had long ago taught her to do.

  ‘Sending out’ was Tom’s term (or at least one he’d surrounded with an aura of approval back when she first thought of it, the same way he once had with his own name). The ever-informative internet had the technique labeled in various places as scrying, astral projection, remote viewing or skywalking, but they were all names for a more or less identical concept. Lia wasn’t as skilled a sender as her Tom, who’d been practicing the art for well more than a century, long outlasting his original body in the process, but Lia didn’t need to be a master in order to help him watch over the Yard’s new fortifications.

  She rose up-at least the invisible, non-physical part of her did-nearly to the tops of the Yard’s tallest trees. Tom left his catbody and rose up with her. There was nothing of him to see, nothing of either of them, and yet they each felt the other hovering close by as they chanced a look around.

  Potter’s Yard was situated in a semi-industrialized area in the northernmost part of North Hollywood, right before it became Sun Valley on the maps, so there were few homes nearby and little traffic to be seen on a weeknight. Not too many people around. The area managed to feel surprisingly isolated and almost rural, despite being set right in the heart of one of LA’s largest suburbs.

  Both Lia and Tom were careful not to rise too high or to extend their awareness beyond the psychic barriers they’d erected earlier in the day-barriers that rippled when the evening’s first otherworlders arrived in the neighborhood like day-late trick-or-treaters, causing Lia’s distant body to break out in gooseflesh and dashing her last faint hopes that the Tzitzimime wouldn’t manage to find their way back here at all.

  A striking set of Mictlan’s minions stepped into the nearest lighted intersection, a few dozen feet from the Yard’s front gate. They seemed almost to coalesce out of the shadows themselves. There were two new creatures in the lead, Lia noted. Not Tzitzimime, although, like the bugwomen, these were also doing their best to appear human. With a heavy emphasis on ‘their best.’ In practice, the only disguises the new additions to the crew seemed able to manage were woman-shaped outlines: one of them ink-black and flecked with stars, like the night sky, while the other crackled with a sort of mad static that jumped and flickered in an unhealthy-looking way.

  These two were more than demons. They were Archons, Lia guessed-ancient embodiments of fundamental concepts, and who knew how old or how powerful they might be?

  She dropped back into herself and flipped open her computer.

  Tom gave her a sense that entities such as these Archons were free to pretend to be anything they liked (such as human women) on the other side of the door between worlds, but over here they were compelled to appear more or less as they actually were. They could never completely conceal their fundamental natures out here in the realworld. Lia scanned a webpage or three with that in mind, until she felt reasonably sure she’d pinned down the one who looked like she’d been airbrushed with stars as the goddess of darkness and night. Nyx, the Greeks had called her. The staticy one she was less sure of, although she felt no less threatened by her. The pair might’ve been able to project those womanly forms, but it seemed they couldn’t finish them off with crucial details like hair, clothing, or facial features. Or maybe they were simply too far removed from humanity and its concerns to know how to draw up more than simple representational sketches.

  Lia sent herself out again. Carefully, not wanting to be picked out by otherworldly eyes, which could be exceptionally keen under certain circumstances. She rejoined her disembodied Tom, who’d never stopped monitoring the situation from above, and he let her feel that nothing much had changed, as of yet.

  She watched as Ant, Mantis and Wasp, the original Tzitzimime, hardened into their three distinct avatars out of an amorphous swarm of gnats.

  Lia felt ill with anticipation as the five otherworlders paused to look around. From her projected perspective, she saw her own defenses more clearly than they did. The ring of ghostly flames around the property shimmered, although it would be opaque like a one-way mirror from the other side, and a challenge even to perceive. The eyes she’d painted all down the fence appeared to be blazing like halogen lights. The two flat, feminoid shapes-the Archons-exchanged a look, and Lia felt her earthbound body’s heart speed up in terror when they chose to head in the Yard’s direction, despite the wards intended to shunt their attention aside. The three Tzitzimime trailed after their new leaders, and Lia readied herself to drop back into her head and make a dash for her bomb-shelter home (skeletal prisoner notwithstanding), shoul
d such a drastic retreat prove necessary.

  The team of otherworlders spread out as they approached the simple spraypainted eyes that they experienced as blinding floodlamps. The Tzitzimime spread out literally, separating into many thousands of tiny flying and crawling creatures, in order to cover the widest area possible.

  It was then that Lia realized her barrier was working after all.

  The otherworlders looked confused, and were clearly not able to penetrate her concentric rings of influence well enough to find the gate. For them, the painted eyes and the glitchy Solitaire game running on the office computer conspired to create the impression of a raging party going on inside the fence. The soft music pouring from Lia’s cheap boombox sounded like a live and amplified band. The demons had come here expecting to find a lone girl in a deserted grove, so this trick alone might convince them to retreat, shaking their misshapen heads in frustration.

  The bugs couldn’t even feel the subtle deflective hexwork that rendered the Yard’s green canopy of treetops totally opaque to them when they flew over. They couldn’t sense Lia or Tom at all.

  Everything was working beautifully.

  Lia’s body grinned, even though it was down on the ground and mostly detached from her spirit.

  Around the back of the property, Nyx (the black outline comprising the goddess of night), tried to peer into the lights along the fence. She shied away, however, shielding her featureless face with a hand made out of stars and nothingness, which pleased both Lia and Black Tom to see. Bright light was obviously not Miss Nyx’s thing.

  The Archon looked away, down darker streets, bewildered.

  Around the front, near the northeastern corner of the Yard, some of the insects swarming in the street pulled together and solidified into the same giant, bipedal, red Ant-woman that had chased Lia the night before, which she took as a probable sign that the creature was trying to think. The bug-based entities couldn’t concentrate without assuming a humanoid form. Intellect just wasn’t an insectile trait.