Graves' end Page 16

  “Han, what’s happening?” she called out, through the diminishing screen of foliage that separated them. “Tom saw someth-”

  A sharp, hard gunshot hammered the air, leaving Lia’s ears ringing. Hannah clutched at her side and went down, driven to the ground by a bullet. She crashed out of sight into a massive billow of blue hydrangeas.

  “Hannah!” Lia screamed, like she’d never screamed any other word in her entire life.

  She brought her cherry branch up, but more gunfire tore apart a bromeliad that was hanging inches behind her head, and she shrieked as involuntary survival reflexes made her drop to the ground for cover.

  She peeked up over a fern frond and saw two men coming toward her. Saw the guns they held in their hands: black and menacing things that seemed out of place here amidst the Yard’s sea of living green. Faced with the weapons, the only thing Lia could do was scramble away, back into the dense camouflage provided by the enveloping plant life she knew so well.

  She was shaking by the time she reached the back of the Yard, her guts knotted up with adrenaline. The men with the guns were still pursuing. She could hear them crunching and rustling through the plants somewhere behind her. Directly in front of her was a woodpile, several feet high and seven or eight feet long. A small cluster of century-old walnut and pecan trees stood off to her right. Some of them extended a branch or two out over the Yard’s rear fence.

  Lia looked back over her shoulder, cringing against the shots she expected to erupt at any second. Gods and demons were all a part of her program, but guns upset her badly.

  For a moment, she almost didn’t know what to do.

  Black Tom left his catbody on the shack’s roof and let his awareness bloom large, out over the Yard, then scanned the property for Lia. He still tended to think of her as his Winter Flower, the first name he’d ever known her by, especially when he was scared for her. He’d called out to her on instinct when Lyssa and her crew first pulled up, but now he regretted the impulse. Steering his girl away from this situation would’ve been the smarter thing to do.

  If those men hurt his Lia, Black Tom was apt to lose his mind. At which point several distinct forms of hell were likely to break loose. Tom had never been the same man again after the last time he unleashed such a torrent of grief and rage upon others, after Dulce died… even if the others in question had deserved it.

  He was distracted, scattered, trying to keep track of more than a dozen people all at once, but the percussive sound of a gunshot caused him to draw all of his awareness straight down toward it.

  Hannah was the one who’d been shot, he saw instantly, as he watched the man he’d labeled Brickface deftly disarm the trigger-happy fool responsible for it. Mr. Brick’s technique looked like some fancy martial arts sort of thing, perhaps military training. The gunman hit the ground with a solid thud that was nowhere near satisfying enough for Tom.

  “What the hell, man?” the shooter said, looking up at Brickface, who’d thrown him down and taken his weapon before he so much as knew what was happening.

  “Do you know what ‘alive’ means, you goddamn idiot?” Brickface barked down at him. “It tends to be the exact fuckin’ opposite of bein’ fulla bulletholes!”

  “What’d we all bring guns for, then?” the shooter asked, getting to his feet and rubbing at the back of his head.

  “To point ’em,” Brickface yelled. “Not to fire ’em! They’re fuckin’ motivational tools, is all.”

  He dropped the clip out of the grip and cleared the chamber before giving the younger man his weapon back, shaking his head as he did so. “You just better pray that Lia chick’s not the one you hit,” he said. “For your sake.”

  Tom thought he had no idea how right he was about that, as Brickface tromped off in the direction Lia had fled. His Winter Flower was all right, Tom sensed, terrified but still unharmed… which was more than he could say for poor Hannah.

  She was fading. Lying in the dirt, surrounded by broken blue flowers, with both hands clamped to her injured side. Blood was soaking through her clothes. There was blood everywhere, it seemed like. Tom knew his girl would not have wanted him to leave Hannah’s side, so he moved in close enough to feel her pain as well as touch her thoughts, to see if there might be anything he could do.

  Hannah looked up, and Tom thought for an instant that she was somehow seeing him.

  Then he looked back (or rather he let his disembodied self experience three hundred and sixty degrees of visual awareness. There was no need to turn around when he wasn’t using physical eyes to see. Habit was always a considerable force when it came to perception, though).

  Sitting behind him and looking right through him, a few feet away from Hannah, were, well, things. Frogdogs, was the best description Han’s unstrung mind would offer. A sizable ring of them hunkered there, watching her, behaving like exemplary models of calm and patience. She had no idea what they were, or even if they were real, although Tom recognized them as the entire clan of Crouchers he and his Winter Flower had long ago petitioned to guard their front gate. The same ones that had trailed el Rey’s mercenaries into the Yard a few minutes ago.

  Hannah looked pale. Tom could feel that she was blacking out, possibly for good. The Crouchers all watched her in silence, with hungry expressions on their lumpy, curious faces. The man who’d shot her also stepped up to view his handywork, and Han turned her head, with an effort, to squint up at him.

  The gunman couldn’t see the Crouchers. Tom touched his mind and knew that it was so. All the guy saw, lying in the bushes, was a nice, mom-type lady whose clothes had gone a dark, wet red all down her left side. Tom sensed that he’d shot men before, several of them, but this, he did not feel good about.

  That’s much too little, much too late, cabron, Tom thought, feeling not the slightest glimmer of pity for the gunman, even though he knew from firsthand experience what was going to happen next.

  Hannah rolled her head away from her shooter in order to look back at her Crouchers, all of which squatted close to her eye level. She was seeing them, all right. They were fully visible to her. Her gunshot wound must have temporarily shocked her eyes open to the subtler aspects of being, Tom surmised. Such things were not unheard of.

  He looked back down and saw that the creatures had all turned around to consider the armed intruder who’d come to stand over Hannah.

  He also saw, with no surprise (before he winked away to drum up more assistance), that every last one of them was grinning.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Graves hooked his fingerbones through the unbendable metal screen that penned him into the car’s back seat while the two front gate guards looked at one another uneasily, then peered back in through the car’s windshield, doing precious little to conceal their stupefaction. You’d think they’d never seen a skeleton get manhandled by a crazy lady before. Their voices were faint, muffled by the heavy window glass, but Graves could hear them. He felt like a zoo animal in a goddamn cage.

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing in the back of that car?” the taller and darker-haired of the two men asked.

  “I dunno. What’re you seeing?” was the shorter, blond man’s evasive reply.

  “I don’t wanna say unless you’re seeing it too,” the first guard said. Something darted across the parking lot behind him and he whirled around, catching the movement in the corner of his eye. “You see that, then?” he demanded.

  “What? A cat?”

  Graves, too, had seen Lia’s cat, a large black tom, go bounding past the Yard’s main entrance.

  “No, it was a guy,” the blond man said. “I saw a guy, like a little old guy! Fast like a freak, though.”

  Darkhair nodded and motioned that they should go and check it out. Mr. Blond eased into the Yard, clicking off his gun’s safety, with his partner first covering and then following after him.

  A small, bearded man in sunglasses rapped on Graves’ window with the back of his hand as soon as the sentries were ou
t of sight.

  Graves, who’d been yanking on the metal dog screen, looked over and finally thought to pull that goddamn glove out of his mouth. “Hey, pal,” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard through the insulating glass. “Lemme outta here, whaddaya say? I’ll owe you the moon and the goddamn stars!”

  The little man, who wore a hat and carried a walking stick, opened the door and even held it for him, graciously. Graves jumped out and threw his arms around the liberating stranger, who accepted an embrace from a partially-dressed skeleton with wordless aplomb. “I love ya, man, I really do,” Graves said.

  Then he turned and strode into the Yard, just as the gate guards were returning to their post after a fruitless check of the parking lot’s perimeter.

  The dark-haired man saw him first. Wide-eyed with horror, he drew a gun with a silencer screwed onto the barrel and unloaded.

  Bone chips flew from Graves’ cranium and bullets cracked a few of his ribs, but he incurred no damage that would stop him. He walked right up and twisted the gun out of the shooter’s grip, wrenching the man’s shoulder to drive him to his knees in the same motion. Graves genuflected behind him and shoved his head back viciously, snapping the henchman’s neck over his fleshless femur like a dry twig.

  Done. Graves claimed the man’s gun and dumped his slack body aside.

  He turned on the second guy, who backed away, dropping his weapon and holding up his hands. “Hey, come on, man, we weren’t gonna hurt nobody,” he said. “We had orders not to-”

  The silenced weapon made an anticlimactic sound-sort of a ‘bzzew’-when Graves dropped the sniveling fuck with a perfect shot through his thigh. The man groaned rather than screamed, his face turning purple as veins stood out in the sides of his neck. His eyes rolled back to the whites.

  Graves walked up and loomed over the writhing mercenary, training the automatic down at him. “The minute you point guns at my friends is the minute I stop givin’ a shit about your perspective,” he said, although he doubted he was really being heard. “You punched your own ticket, far as I’m concerned.”

  The skeletal PI gritted his teeth in grim satisfaction as he drilled the blond man between the eyes with his own partner’s silenced pistol. It made that distinct bzzew! sound again, a little bit louder this time as the baffles inside the suppressor began breaking down under the stress of so many recent firings. It was nowhere near as wrath-of-God satisfying as an unmuffled report from a hand-cannon of this caliber might’ve been, but blood sprayed across the gravel just the same.

  Graves spun on his calcaneus bone and headed off into the Yard, hellbent on saving Lia.

  Her cat, that old tom, watched him lope away from high up in a pepper tree. Graves caught a flash of bright green eye when he strode past.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Lia, crouched behind cover, listened as the three gunmen who were chasing her crept up on the large woodpile at the very back of the Yard. She trusted that Tom was watching over Hannah for her, since she couldn’t see him anywhere.

  “Eddie?” one of the men said, only to be shushed by their obvious leader.

  “Uh… Miss?” the one called Eddie began, raising his voice to address her, apparently, even though Lia knew they couldn’t have seen her yet. They weren’t looking in the right direction.

  The guys he was with both eyeballed Eddie like he sounded asinine, and he shrugged in exasperation. He had sounded asinine, trying to open a dialog under these circumstances, and Lia could tell from his irritated expression that if they had a better opening line to audition, he was more than ready to hear it.

  “Listen,” square-faced Eddie continued, speaking up to make himself heard. “We got sent out here by a guy called Mickey Hardface. Maybe you heard that name and maybe not, I dunno, but all he wants to do is talk, okay? Now I apologize for the hostile behavior of the mental defectives I got workin’ under me, and I promise you there is not gonna be any more gunfire. Those are Hardface’s specific orders: nobody gets hurt today.”

  “Except you,” Lia said, stepping out from behind the copse of trees that stood beside the men and batting the one called Eddie across the back of his head with her weighty, knot-studded, cherry branch cudgel.

  He pitched forward, losing his gun along with his balance. The other two clowns both pointed their weapons and staggered back at the very same time, dancing out of each other’s line of fire.

  Lia stepped in to seize Eddie by the throat with both hands before he could regain his feet. She screamed down into his face as she squeezed, with tears of near-psychotic rage streaming down her cheeks, and vines sheathed in rough gray bark twined down her arms to lend an ancient strength to their daughter’s efforts.

  Edwin Dane’s face reddened and his eyes bulged grotesquely. Capillaries burst in the whites and bloomed there like tiny red roses. His truest name and certain of his foul memories bloomed similarly into Lia’s mind.

  The other two henchmen looked on in abject, uncomprehending terror as green life effloresced all around Lia Flores, sprouting and flourishing at a time-lapse pace. A camellia tree-Lia’s namesake plant as well as her earliest vegetal teacher-shot up from the bare dirt behind her to a height of well over ten feet within a matter of seconds, and its flexible new limbs helped her throttle Eddie Dane until the small bones in his neck crackled and popped like twisted bubblewrap. The sound of it was audible even over the soul-deep scream that blanked out Lia’s conscious mind and empowered her intentions. The earth beneath her feet shook with rage to hear its child’s cry, although Lia herself barely felt it.

  All she could think about was Hannah.

  Shoots and tendrils grew up through Eddie Dane, piercing and impaling him, rooting him to the ground. His skin roughened into crusty bark, while his limbs shrank and gnarled up into brittle, leafless branches. By the time Lia ran out of breath all that was left of him was a twisted stump that looked a vague bit like a contorted, struggling man.

  It was like he’d never even been.

  Lia ended her scream and staggered drunkenly when she let go of the stump and stepped aside, panting for air. She fixed the other two men with her raw, red gaze.

  They fled, both of them, without another moment of hesitation. One of them actually dropped his gun in his haste to get away. Lia grabbed up her cherry branch and followed after them, flashing murder from her eyes.

  Tom looked down from his cat’s perch in the pepper tree to see three of the men who’d gone around to guard the Yard’s periphery returning to the front gate, wondering over the weird noises they heard emanating from the central depths of the property. He could tell they were feeling keyed-up after the brief jolt of an earthquake that had set off car alarms and caused a few dogs to bark, somewhere down the block.

  At least they assumed it was an earthquake. Tom, however, figured his Winter Flower must have drawn up a walloping bolt of chthonic force and discharged it at somebody. He knew a psychic shockwave when he felt one.

  As the three uncertain joes from outside the fence stood gaping over the two bullet-riddled corpses of their confederates that now lay in the parking lot, a pair of thugs Lia’d routed on her own came racing across the gravel and out the front gate in what Tom could only describe as an undignified panic. Each man hopped into a black car all by himself, and they both peeled away, in opposite directions.

  Tom could not have felt any more proud of his girl.

  The youngest of the three remaining gate-guards looked over at the other two. “Should we go in there?” he asked.

  His nominal elders considered the question and all of its ramifications. “I think we oughta wait,” one of them ventured. “Cover the exits like we were told.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna wait too,” the last man concurred.

  Satisfied they weren’t going anywhere, Tom leapt down the tree trunk in two long hops and hurried into the greenery to find his friends.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Graves came across Miss Hannah first. The lady was ju
st then sitting up (possibly having been roused by the swift seismic kick the earth had delivered moments ago), fighting for consciousness and wincing at the obvious pain in her side that rewarded her efforts. She was banged up badly but far from finished off, he was glad to see.

  Hannah looked over at a man-shaped bundle of twigs and leaves and rotted crap that was lying in the dirt beside her and she cocked her head, as if it meant something to her but she couldn’t quite remember what. The pile looked like nothing so much as the husk of a mummy, desiccated beyond all recognition-although there was a gun lying next to it. And a pair of shoes at one end. Graves didn’t know what in the hell that thing might’ve been before something sucked it dry, nor did he much care to speculate, not at the moment.

  There were significant sights Hannah had yet to see.

  Graves, standing a few yards away, watched as she slowly looked up further, only to find the imperious, helmeted figure of Lady Madness looming over her, with her head cocked at a curious angle.

  The figure’s visor exploded, showing the static behind it. Hannah flinched, and shards of tinted plastic rained down all around her.

  Lady Staticface turned to see the bones of Dexter Graves pointing two silenced handguns at her, from behind. They spat quiet fire as he squeezed off every round in the magazines.

  Hannah threw her hands over her head as multiple bullets perforated the Archon’s black suit, traveling on an upward trajectory. Graves had been sure to shoot from the hip, to keep her safe. The spots of bright gray static that showed through Lyssa’s leathers made her look like she was dressed up in costume as her absent sister-mom.

  “Gin plus tonic, super plus sonic, you plus moronic, if you think that’s gonna help you, Dexter Graves,” she said.