Graves' end Page 11

  Ant tried harder than the Archon of Night had against the lights, edging into the hot glare around the fence that the painted eyes provided. She cringed, but forced herself closer, and stopped when her thorax brushed up against solid wood.

  Uh-oh, Lia thought. She realized she was biting her lip only when the pain surprised her and she had to force her remote body to quit it.

  Ant stepped away from the fence and immediately began blinking her stalky, wavering eyes-clearly feeling the imaginal incandescence once again. Lia and Tom had a moment to hope before the Ant cautiously pressed herself back against the boards, in defiance of all their wishes.

  The demon had figured out that the warding eyes’ deflective power was cancelled when she touched the fenceboards and felt what was really in front of her: nothing but cleverly-painted wood. The first of the otherworlders had breached the outer defenses and it was creeping down the fence already, feeling for an opening. The Ant, at least, knew Lia was here.

  Shitballs, she thought, preparing to fire her awareness back down into her motionless body.

  Then she froze in mid-air, arrested by the sight of movement inside the gate.

  Oh, Hannah, no, she wailed without using her voice, upon realizing who it was she saw walking from the office shack and out toward her parked car. Han must’ve left her keys behind in the office. Again. It happened so often that it was a joke between them, and Lia castigated herself now for not remembering Hannah’s absentminded habit.

  She could still be all right, though, if she’d just get into her car and drive away. The barriers would still be in effect against all the other entities, since Ant hadn’t yet shared her strategic intelligence with them. The Tzitzimitl (singular for Tzitzimime, according to sources) might try to follow her, but since Hannah didn’t fit Lia’s description it would forget why it was doing so within seconds.

  She therefore willed Hannah to go on, to get out of here without delay, before the big Ant could find its way in through the gate to attack her.

  Han had her fingers wrapped around her Volvo’s door handle before she looked back longingly, first toward the corner of the Yard that Lia called home, and then over toward the still-open gate. Lia’s diaphanous firewall was the only ward covering the gap, and it alone wouldn’t stop something that really meant to step through. It was little more than a scrim of imaginal camouflage.

  Hannah trotted back past the gate and picked up the paper offering plate she’d left beside it earlier, meaning, Lia assumed, to provide the fascinating Crouchers with one last snack before calling it a day.

  She certainly could’ve picked a better moment to indulge her sense of wonder.

  Lia gritted her distant body’s teeth while she simultaneously tracked both her friend and the menacing Tzitzimitl outside the fence with her mind’s eye, uncertain of what to do. She might invite an attack if she intervened now, and if Hannah would hurry the hell up and drive out through the wards without doing anything else, there might not be a need for it.

  Hannah bisected an orange with her pocketknife and set the two halves down atop the paper plate, leaving them like a tip for the unseen guardians of the Yard’s front entrance, hoping they’d work extra hard at their jobs tonight because of it.

  She thought she saw something move when she stood up, in the deep shadows outside the Yard’s well-lit parking lot.

  “Tom?” she said uncertainly, stepping outside the gate. She peered down the street, looking for Lia’s cat, although a cat was not even close to the sight that confronted her when she turned around and looked up.

  Lia slammed back into her body as hard as she could, feeling hot blood surge up into her ears with an oceanic whoosh a second after jumping to her feet from a full lotus position. “Fuck!” she shouted. “Why didn’t she just leave?”

  Tom, back in catform, flattened his ears and offered no answers.

  “Han, getbackinside,” Lia shrieked, sprinting for the front of the Yard. She couldn’t see Hannah anymore, not now that she was back in her head and down on the ground, so she ran at full speed, unmindful of the many obstacles that might trip her up in the deepening darkness.

  She heard a scream before she was halfway there.

  “No!” she shouted again, feeling frantic with terror, her lungs burning as she and Tom raced toward Hannah’s last known position at the front gate. Lia muttered “Oh, Hannah, no, oh gods no…” under her breath as they went, without even being aware of it.

  She grabbed hold of a fat cherry branch and ripped it loose when she passed by, trusting that the assaulted plant would be willing to forgive her under the circumstances. She and Tom emerged into the parking lot and she swung the wrist-thick branch around, wielding it in a way that suggested she meant to do something pretty impressive with it.

  But she pulled up short instead, before the intention she meant to symbolize with the weapon could click in.

  Hannah stood framed in the open gate on the far side of the parking lot, frozen in terror in front of the Ant.

  “Liiaaaaaaahh,” the six-foot-tall upright female insect hissed, waving her razor-edged mandibles in Hannah’s face. “Where?”

  Hannah held her hands up, backing away from the first embodied demon she’d ever had the misfortune to see and triggering its aggressive inclinations. The thing looked strong enough to pull a human being apart without making any particular effort. Lia was about to shout a warning, to try and distract the creature, when the Ant paused of her own volition, staring down at Hannah’s chest and cocking her head in a quizzical manner. It was an expression that might’ve looked cute on a puppy, but not on a murderous, monstrous insect.

  Tom touched Lia’s mind and urged her to stay perfectly still. The thing hadn’t seen her yet.

  “Han…nah?” the ant demon said. She tried out the name again, saying it backwards this time: “Han-nah.”

  Lia sucked in a quick breath. She understood what was happening when she saw the Ant’s eyes tick back and forth across the alphabet beads that made up Hannah’s necklace. Little square plastic ones that spelled out her name. Hannah wore the old thing almost every day.

  Ant’s exoskeleton pebbled and turned to individual bugs while she stood there ogling the beads, forgetting to concentrate on holding her body together. Hannah shuddered over this new development, gasped, and turned to flee.

  The demon’s forelimb re-solidified in the flash it took to shoot out and snag Hannah’s wrist. The disproportionately-strong insect jerked her around like she was nothing but a ragdoll. Ant caught sight of the alphabet beads again and lapsed back into her trance before she could bite, although she didn’t let go of Hannah’s arm. Lia could tell the tall Tzitzimitl was fighting hard to shrug off the palindrome-induced cognitive dissonance the necklace beads caused her and retain her physical form.

  Lia also understood that Hannah was stuck. Hopelessly stuck, because Ant would snap back to herself at the instant those beads were out of her sight. Hannah seemed to understand at least some of this when she looked over toward Lia with wide and horrified eyes. “Little help? Please?” she said in a tiny voice, as if afraid to disturb the distorted, shimmering Ant in even the slightest of ways.

  Lia set her broken-off branch aside and approached her friend with a bomb-squad degree of caution, sizing up the situation. “It’s gonna be okay, Han,” she reassured, and thought she sounded at least mostly convincing. “It’s all right. Just don’t move until I say. But then be ready to do it fast.”

  She edged in carefully, meaning to untie Hannah’s necklace at the nape of her neck and remove it without taking it out of the Ant’s eye-line.

  “I’m sorry, L-”

  “Stop, right there, just shut up,” Lia said harshly. Then she whispered, “The instant you say my name we both die, so be very, very careful when you speak. Okay?”

  “O- okay.”

  Lia undid the necklace and lifted it off Hannah’s chest, leading Ant away with it as though the string of beads were a carrot on a stick. She h
ung the necklace on a nail just outside the gate. It was still holding Ant’s attention, but only barely. The creature almost seemed to understand that its quarry was within reach, and yet it couldn’t quite force itself to ignore the series of lettered beads that spelled out the same word in either direction.

  “Get inside,” Lia said.

  Hannah complied, springing over the property line like a schoolgirl skipping rope. Lia jumped back alongside her and threw the gate shut, shoving the wheeled length of fencing down its uneven track with all her might.

  Ant shook off her paralysis and lunged, but she was a moment too late. The corrugated sheetmetal gate rattled shut, nearly cutting off two of her six limbs. She yanked them back with an ugly, high-pitched shriek.

  A sequence of red spraypainted numbers rolled in front of her eyes along with the closing gate:

  3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937…

  …and Ant jerked like she was having a seizure.

  Her bugbody burst apart and the white light at her core rocketed down the line of numbers (which started at Hannah’s eye-level and went around and around and around the fence, all the way down to the sidewalks), scorching the digits onto the wood planks as it went. Ant’s inner light whizzed around the Yard’s perimeter multiple times in less than a second, chasing the Pi line like a firework flower, and then it winked out in a flash.

  She was gone, just like that. Pursuing Pi into eternity.

  Inside the fence, night’s stillness resumed. Crickets picked up their interrupted songs. Woodsmoke rose lazily from the outer side of the fenceboards, and Lia thought it smelled bizarrely nice.

  She turned to Hannah. “You okay?” she asked. She figured her face was waxy pale, bloodless, and her wide, frightened eyes felt like they took up half of it.

  Hannah nodded vigorously, assuring her that she was indeed unharmed, to the best of her knowledge.

  “Okay, good,” Lia said. “That’s good. Yeah.”

  Now that the crisis had passed and they were both provisionally safe, she turned away from Hannah and went over to the cherry branch she’d dropped in the parking lot gravel, where she sat down beside it and burst into a wrenching squall of post-traumatic sobs.

  Being in danger herself was one thing, in Lia’s mind, and bad enough, but seeing that danger threaten someone she loved was entirely another.

  Hannah all but slid into home in her rush to throw her arms around her friend. Tom ran up too, offering his feline brand of comfort. Lia let Hannah squeeze her fiercely for a moment, soaking in the concern and affection, then pulled herself together and drew away, feeling self-conscious.

  She swiped at her nose and looked up at Hannah from beneath the fringe of her thick, black bangs. “I really hope you and Skeletor didn’t finish off that bottle of wine,” she said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Graves’ ghost tapped its way around the circumference of his invisible prison with vaporous knuckles that felt solid enough against the symbolized glass, looking for a weak spot in the force-field and growing increasingly frustrated with each rotation. He didn’t know how long he’d been down here, interred within Lia’s underground bunker. It seemed like hours had passed already. He could’ve used a cigarette or a drink, and he would’ve settled for something to read. No dice, though. He began to curse as he tapped, under his breath at first, but then with more volume.

  Tap tap tap. “Dammit.” Tap tap tap. “Dammit.” Tap tap tap. “Dammit.” Tap tap tap. “Dammit!”

  As Graves grew angry, the bound-up lighter Lia’d stowed away on her bookshelf grew hot. The twine began to smoke, and the smoke swirled inside the inverted water glass.

  Graves noticed this. He paused, getting an idea, and then strategically went nuts, bellowing at the top of his lungs and hammering on the psychic boundary Lia’d trapped him under, getting just as mad about his confinement as he possibly goddamn could.

  The twine flamed and went up in a flash. Smoke filled the interior of the glass. The red-hot lighter pulsed deep within the gray miasma, glowing like a ruby beacon in a fog. Graves’ bones stood back up inside his stolen coat as his ghost evaporated. The transition from spirit to solid happened instantaneously, requiring no further effort on his part.

  “Now that’s more like it,” his restored-to-animation skeleton said aloud.

  Graves peeled off his tangled raincoat and tossed it aside. He stretched, groaning, and his spine crackled all the way up. The lighter’s glow faded away in the dense cloud of smog still lingering under the glass.

  “All righty, then,” Graves said. “If nobody minds, I think I’ll just be on my-”

  Clink. His fractured forehead tapped against Lia’s barrier when he tried to walk away.

  “Oh,” he finished. “Ow.”

  He rubbed the exit crater above his eye as he looked over at the smoke-filled glass up on the shelf. The twine was long gone, burnt away, but the intention symbolized by the glass itself apparently remained in effect.

  “Dammit,” Graves said, like he was picking up a refrain.

  He sat his bones down on the floor in the same posture his ghost had assumed while ruminating and drummed his fingers on his kneecap. An air exchanger of some kind went on with a soft whoosh.

  A lone dust mote drifted down from an air vent, floating right past Graves’ nosehole. He followed its drift with his finger until the bone clicked against Lia’s magic field… even as the mote sailed lazily on toward whatever corner it would finally fetch up in.

  “Hmmm.”

  It was only then that he noticed the coat he’d tossed aside was lying on the floor, well outside his established circle.

  Graves thought about this. Thought hard. He looked up at the glass on the shelf, wondering if he might be able to knock it off.

  It would take a little experimentation to find out.

  He took off his hat and moved it toward the barrier. The felt brim crumpled against empty air at exactly the point he expected, the crown bunching up into his bony hand.

  He pulled it back, then tossed it gently, like a kid flying an overturned pie tin. It sailed easily outside the barrier this time around, now that he wasn’t in contact with it.

  “Well all right,” Graves said. If he threw hard enough, he might have a chance at hitting Lia’s voodoo waterglass. He bent to retrieve the hat, but his forehead and hands clinked against the magic boundary once again.

  The hat, he understood in dismay, was out of reach, and he had nothing else to throw.

  He sagged against the unseen barrier in defeat. “Coulda planned that out better, couldn’t I?” he muttered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  An hour after dark, Lia and Hannah sat sipping pinot noir under the stars, surrounded by the Yard’s dense, potted wilderness while they lounged around on last season’s unsold garden chairs. They had citronella candles burning for light (and irony, considering the bugwomen they were trying to repel). The music was turned down to a whisper, though prowling imaginals would, thanks to Lia’s efforts, still perceive a full-volume blare. Tom was curled up nearby, catnapping.

  Lia had her laptop open with a number of IM windows displayed on the screen. A collection of internet pervs addressed her variously as Cammie, Chloe, Zoe, Lisa, and Mia. She paid them little mind, typing just enough to keep them going. Which wasn’t much, as the men on the other sides of the message windows needed just a touch of believably female participation to fill in the gaps in their fantasies.

  All Lia needed out of them was to be called by the wrong name.

  She had the branch she’d torn down earlier propped up next to her chair. She was still prepared for the worst, but she felt far more relaxed now that she knew Hannah, at least, would be safe here until morning.

  The rest of the otherworlders must have known the Ant was gone, but they couldn’t know if she’d been destroyed, captured, or if she’d run off of her own accord. The deflective eyes and other wards had neatly concealed the Tzitzimitl’s demise, and they were
still preventing the rest of the entities from seeing anything that happened within the fence’s perimeter. The party the otherworlders thought was going on inside the compound still seemed loud and lively.

  Lia could imagine the remaining Tzitzimime stalking the streets and scratching their freakish heads, although she didn’t send herself back out to observe them. Better to lay low, at this point. And besides, she knew Black Tom was out there keeping watch around the edges of things, even if his catbody seemed to be asleep beside her.

  Hannah leaned back in her chair and looked up at the bright splash of stars overhead. “So, where are we supposed to sleep tonight?” she asked. And then, after a pause, “Are we supposed to sleep tonight?”

  Lia looked over. She was feeling better by now, over the shock of Hannah’s close call, soothed by the wine and the quiet. She decided she liked having Han out here for company. Lia tended to protect the Yard like a secret, and therefore rarely entertained. Hannah may have owned the place on paper, but after dark, the territory still belonged to Lia and her Tom. This change of pace was nice, though. Cozy and convivial, in an eye-of-the-hurricane sort of way.

  “I was thinking right here, campout-style, if you want,” she said in belated response to Hannah’s query about the sleeping arrangements. “I’ve got sleeping bags, I’ve just gotta go down below to get them.”

  “Is it… you know, safe? To go to sleep?”

  “Sure,” Lia said. “Everything’s holding. And I can keep an eye on things from my dreams.”

  “Can you really?” Hannah seemed charmed by the idea.

  Lia nodded, sipping her wine and smiling. She liked the odd combination of candle-and-computerlight. It seemed both warm and ice-cold at the same time.