Graves' end Page 17

  Graves shrugged. “Never know until you try,” he replied. Then he threw the empty guns aside and charged at her, bellowing at the top of lungs he no longer possessed.

  The thing called Lady Madness hauled off and backhanded his skull right off the top of his spine, almost without effort. The skull landed in the dirt many yards away. Graves saw the rest of his frantic skeleton caroming off the trees from his new, low-angle perspective, while Miss Madness turned back to Hannah.

  “LiaMiaZoeClioTia,” she said. “Where is they?”

  “Right behind you,” answered the woman in question.

  The Queen of Crazy spun around in time for Lia to ram the jagged, torn end of her cherry branch right through Lyssa’s broken visor. Lia ran her backwards with it, shouting, until the leatherclad demon tripped over Graves’ skull and went sprawling.

  As Lia savagely ground the splintered branch into Lady Madness’s open helmet, grunting with the effort of it, roots broke out through the back of the hard plastic braincase and slithered down into the earth. The demon drummed her heels and fists on the ground while the branch blossomed into a new sapling under Lia’s influence, pinning her helplessly to the dirt like some monstrous approximation of a scientific specimen.

  Both Graves’ skull and Hannah watched this happen with quiet shock. Neither of them would ever have guessed that such a thing could occur, much less that Lia might be the one to cause it.

  Her moment finally broke. Lia stumbled back from the fresh sapling and the madwoman whose head it was staked through, falling on her ass next to Graves’ disconnected headbone.

  She looked both stunned and depleted. Such intense acts of will took an immediate and visible toll on her.

  “That thing dead enough for you yet?” Graves’ skull asked. It happened to be facing the new tree, and had enjoyed an excellent view of the whole improbable event.

  “You can’t kill the moon,” Lia said, distracted. “But that might hold it till sunset. Maybe.”

  She picked up his skull when she got to her feet and shoved it against Graves’ ribs when the rest of him went running by. The skeleton grabbed its proffered top gratefully and crammed it back down onto its spine once again.

  Lia fell to her knees beside Hannah. Her black cat came running up to them, switching its fat tail back and forth. Graves hurried over and knelt down too, quickly assessing the lady’s injuries.

  “Awww, hey there, that’s not so bad, is it?” he said, squeezing Miss Hannah’s hand. “Not deep. Just grazed your side, is all. More of a mess than anything.”

  “Are you sure? Dexter?” Lia sounded wobbly. He hated hearing that terrible, sick fear in her voice. “There’s so much blood, I don’t know what to do, oh, Hannah, I’m so sorry…”

  “Pressure right now,” Graves said, ripping the lining out of his coat. “Stop that bleeding. Here. Hold this, nice and firm.” He balled up the fabric and put it into Lia’s hands, then guided them to Hannah’s wound and demonstrated an effective amount of force to apply.

  “Yes, okay, thank you Dexter,” Lia babbled, holding that wad of cloth against Hannah’s hip like all the world depended on it. “Are you sure she’s okay? She’ll be okay? You’ve done this sort of thing before?”

  “Back in the war, field surgeon woulda called you a sissy for wantin’ a band-aid on a scratch like that,” Graves said.

  “Some scratch,” Hannah gasped. “Feels like I’ve been chopped in two.”

  Graves looked to Lia. His manner was serious. “Maybe it’s time we got the hell outta here, whaddaya think?” he whispered. “There could be a whole stack of those guys out there in the trees.”

  Lia thought about it, frowning. “You’re right,” she agreed, after exchanging a quick glance with her black cat. “But we’ve gotta do it carefully.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lia’s car came barreling out of the Yard’s gravel parking lot, scattering the three henchmen who’d gathered at the gate after the earthquake. They must not’ve been watching carefully; they hadn’t seen anybody get into the Mazda. They hurried to pursue it in three of the four black cars they had remaining after the high-speed defections of the terrified pair who’d resigned without notice after encountering Lia. That put the score at three dead, two fled, and three more hopelessly distracted.

  A second after the cars all squealed away, Graves’ stolen fancyass number blew out of the lot and skidded around the corner. It headed west, unlike the Mazda, which had gone east, toward Burbank.

  The last three men covering the Yard’s other possible exits ran for the front gate after seeing the shiny new BMW shoot past them, but it was moving as fast as its expensive engineering allowed, and they were already too late to keep up with it.

  Lia’s battered gray Mazda zoomed east on Sheldon Street, turned right onto San Fernando, and shot down toward the Burbank Airport with three V-8 predators closing in behind it.

  The little car dodged around a lumbering lunch truck, pulled briefly ahead of the pursuit, and then skidded off the main drag, into an alley marked with a ‘NO OUTLET’ sign that was tucked in between an apartment complex and a liquor store, just past Ensign Street.

  Game over, the nearest pursuer thought. That should’ve been it.

  Which was exactly the impression Tom and Lia had planned to convey.

  The nearest of the large black cars followed the Mazda right down the alley’s narrow corridor. The other two stopped to block the alley’s mouth. Lia’s little sedan skidded all the way around at the far end of the passage and stopped there, rocking on its springs.

  There was nobody in it, either behind the wheel or in the passenger seats.

  Some distance back, the approaching black car also squealed to a smoking stop. Its driver frowned, realizing that the little gray car up ahead really was empty. His eyes weren’t playing tricks.

  “What the…?” he muttered, as Black Tom (who was invisible to the norms but grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless) threw Lia’s car into gear and stomped the accelerator. The tires screamed against the pavement.

  Hardface’s man saw the empty Mazda coming at him at an already dangerous and still-increasing rate of speed. He threw his own car into reverse and mashed a blue plastic recycling bin against the side of the alley in his haste to back the fuck up.

  The black car slammed ass-first into the blockade comprised of Hardface’s other two vehicles, both of which failed to get out of the way in time. A second later Lia’s car crashed with considerable force into the trapped sedan’s front end, driving it back hard. Both cars’ radiators blew simultaneous jets of steam.

  The three shaken henchmen got out of their respective vehicles and peered with disbelief into the unoccupied wreck that had taken them out of commission.

  This would not be easy to explain.

  Black Tom lingered on for a moment, perfectly invisible, enjoying their looks of astonishment and dread before pulling his awareness back down to the Yard.

  He found the only three of Hardface’s henchmen remaining on-site easily enough (without bothering to reclaim the catbody he’d stowed under a bush before driving off in Lia’s car). They were sidling up and trying to come to terms with the sight of Lady Lyssa, who’d somehow been spiked through her helmeted head with a living, rooted tree. Tom gave his girl high marks for style.

  “Now how in the hell does that happen?” one of the men in the cheap suits asked rhetorically, eyeing the new sapling.

  They all shouted and scattered when the presumed corpse at its base answered. “Which girl was the witchgirl was something we should’ve learned much sooner, is how this happens,” Lyssa said. “Hello? Wolves?”

  There was, by then, nobody but invisible Tom around to hear, but still she asked:

  “Will one of you please find an axe?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Graves drove his stolen car westbound down Branford, with the women socked away in its small back seat. Hannah was stretched out as much as possible, with her head resting in
Lia’s lap. Lia kept steady pressure on the wound that grooved Hannah’s hip, exactly as Graves had demonstrated for her.

  He looked again in the rearview mirror. “I don’t see ’em,” he reported. “I don’t see anything. I think we’re in the clear, ladies.”

  Lia nodded, squeezing Hannah’s hand. Her eyes were shut painfully tight. In the mirror she looked withdrawn and lost. Graves glanced over his shoulder at her in concern.

  “Say,” he said, exchanging a look with Hannah, who seemed to share his worry. “Just outta curiosity, d’you know what that thing was back there? That broad with the bad reception?”

  Lia had to drag herself out of her daze to think and answer. Those dark circles were starting to look tattooed under her eyes.

  “That was Lyssa, I think,” she said. “The Archon of Madness and Moonlight. Like a goddess, very ancient. Greek originally. Too crazy to be scared of my tricks the way the others were. Too irrational already.”

  “Yeah, that lunar chick was a lunatic, all right,” Graves agreed lightly. “Bugs in the brainpan, you ask me. Strong, though. Geez.”

  He rolled his neck, cracking vertebrae all up the line. He was pleased to have drawn Lia back out of herself, even if it was only to a tiny degree. At least he knew the trauma of recent events hadn’t left her unreachable.

  “So,” he said. “The sooner we get that wound hosed out, the less chance of infection there’s gonna be. Maybe you got some kinda destination in mind, dollface?”

  “Head south,” Lia told him. “Over Coldwater Canyon. I know people who’ll help us, up in the hills.”

  Graves nodded and made a left when they reached Coldwater, after another two blocks. When he looked over, the short man with the hat and the sunglasses who’d let him out of Hardface’s car was sitting in his passenger seat. He grinned at Graves and doffed his hat without saying a word, like he thought he was Harpo Marx or something.

  “Oh,” Graves said in greeting, his capacity for surprise having been much diminished by the events of the last two days. “Hey. So you’re one of Lia’s sort of things too, huh? Guess I mighta known.”

  “Who’re you talking to up there, Dexter?” Hannah asked, as he wove the fancyass car through mid-day traffic denser than any he’d ever seen. Everyone in the world had a car of their own by now, it looked like, including kids too young to enlist in the service, and all of them were on the roads all of the goddamn time.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ingrid watched as Winston the bony butler finished knotting Miguel Caradura’s fine silk tie, then stepped back from the King. ‘Caradura’ turned to admire himself in a full-length mirror that appeared upon the gray plain in perfectly-timed anticipation of his desire for it.

  The King had materialized another elegant, modern-day suit, Italian cut, which he now wore with his golden Aztec armbands over the sleeves and his owl-feather headdress perched upon his brow. The necklace of eyeballs was, as ever, his signature statement. If the vitreous humor that dribbled from the holes they were strung through stained his new clothes, well, then that was just as it had to be.

  He turned away from the mirror. “Do you like my suit, my love?” he asked.

  Ingrid looked him up and down, from where she sat reclining on her chaise. The step pyramid stood tall against the gray horizon far behind him, like a jagged Mount Fuji. “I do,” she answered, truthfully enough. “You always did know how to wear your clothes, Mickey.”

  El Rey grinned. Ingrid figured it probably wasn’t the moment to point out that his taste in accessories did detract somewhat from his outfit’s overall effect.

  Nyx, who was still kneeling on the bare ground, stirred and looked pained. She remained dressed in her simple linen and wore her hair in a fat, dark braid, as was her prerogative on this side of reality.

  “Mic- Mictlantecuhtli?” she said.

  “Yes, Nyx?”

  “My sister-daughter… will not be returning, Mictlantecuhtli.”

  Mickey blinked calmly, several times. “And why might that be, Nyx?”

  “The witchgirl grew a tree down through her head and rooted her to the earth,” the anxious Archon explained. “She… she is quite uncomfortable, Mictlantecuhtli.”

  “I always wonder what really happened when they come out with surrealist shit like that,” Ingrid said.

  Mickey frowned, and Ingrid instantly regretted having spoken her mind. “Do you say their descriptions are not accurate?” the King queried. “They do not illustrate the events of the actualworld?”

  “They tend to be… colorful, let’s say,” Ingrid said. “That’s all.”

  “Foreigners,” the King spat, sneering down at his kneebound concubine. “I wasted my efforts when I conquered your sphere, Nyx. But you were weak and it was easy, so I figured ‘what the hell?’”

  “I apologize, Mictlantecuhtli,” Nyx said, without raising her eyes. Ingrid actually felt a little bit bad for her. “I will free my sister-daughter at dusk, if it pleases you.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mickey said dismissively. “Now leave me. It will please me more not to look upon you for a while.”

  “Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” Nyx said, and vanished.

  The King turned to Ingrid. “Did I use that right?” he asked. “A ‘while?’ The vocabulary of time remains academic for me.”

  “It was perfect, Mickey,” Ingrid said. “Spot on.”

  “Like an incarnation would say it? An actualperson, not a nonbody pretending?”

  “Exactly like.”

  “It wasn’t ‘colorful?’”

  “Mickey…” Ingrid had to make an effort not to get frustrated with him. “It was just right. Do I have to drop to my knees in admiration before you believe me?”

  She illustrated by doing so, at a distance from his pelvis that was far more suggestive than it was respectful. She looked up the silk-suited front of him, batting her lashes and making her blue eyes as large and innocent as she possibly could. “Does this make you happy?”

  “Stand up, Ingrid Redstone,” the King said, sounding stern and not at all amused. “Those games ended between us when you elected not to become my Queen.”

  “Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” Ingrid said, in perfect imitation of Nyx and Lyssa’s fawning subservience.

  “Stop it.” Mickey shook his head, looking disgusted. “Foreign women,” he mused aloud. “I should never have strayed beyond the ministrations of my Tzitzimime.”

  “Sure, if you like handjobs,” Ingrid said, getting to her feet and brushing off her knees. “Plenty of extra limbs. I’d steer clear of those mandibles though, if I were you.”

  “Do not forget your place, Ingrid Redstone,” the King murmured. “Do not insult my sphere or those native to it. You are a foreigner in this land as well.”

  “As if I could ever forget it,” Ingrid said.

  That seemed to give Mickey an idea. He paced, thinking aloud. “And yet you are a native of the actual,” he said. “One not hampered by the necessary ignorance that blinds my living soldiers…”

  “What’s your point?” Ingrid asked, leading him a little, but not too much. She had to play this very carefully now. He would never send her on this errand if he had any inkling that she wanted to go.

  “You could get them,” the King said. “Find them, bring them. You could do this, my love.”

  “Do I look like a bounty hunter to you?” Ingrid sat back against her cushions and spread her white arms out across the back of the red velvet sofa. “Don’t act desperate, Mickey. It’s unattractive.”

  “You may command my mercenaries,” he told her. “I’ve got all the human beings you can use.”

  “I don’t know, though…” Ingrid said, feigning a frown and hoping she wasn’t hamming it up too much. Not that a nuanced performance wouldn’t be lost on Mickey Hardface anyway. “It’s kind of a tall order. What can I do that all of your bugbabes and moonmaidens couldn’t?”

  “Walk the actual with some understanding of its habits and its ways, apparently
,” was Caradura’s considered thought on the matter. “You will do this, Ingrid Redstone,” he decreed. “You will do this, or you will become my Queen, regardless of your wishes in this matter, and we’ll try this all again!”

  Before Ingrid could respond, Mickey snapped his fingers.

  She woke up on the floor outside his office within the Silent Tower. In the very place where Dexter Graves had died, in fact. Died by her hand… sort of. She had managed to bind a tiny spark of him to the lighter he’d dropped, the last object he’d touched, right before he passed on into darkness.

  She sat up, looked around, and smoothed her hair. The hall was a lightless ruin once again, with no red carpet rolled out for her now.

  “My gods, that took long enough,” she muttered. She looked back at the closed door with Miguel Caradura’s name stenciled on it, and allowed herself a slight, sly smile.

  Ahh, Mickey, she thought to herself. Still handsome, ruthless, and stupid. Just the way I like you.

  She got up and hurried off, down the decaying hallway, headed toward the stairs.

  When Ingrid stepped out onto the street, she found thirteen new gangsters already waiting for her, with six new black cars at their disposal. These guys were younger, rougher, more tattooed and less experienced than the last bunch had been. They mostly wore hooded sweatshirts and dark jeans-a distinct step down from the ugly suits the previous, more competent-looking minions had worn.

  They all fell silent upon seeing Ingrid. ‘Rapt’ seemed like the appropriate word. She figured her gown was probably decades out of style (her clothes often were), but it was low-cut and form-fitting, and she didn’t think the men were staring because it looked anachronistic. Her curves and her vibrant red hair never failed to make an impression.

  The gang’s defacto leader, a mean-looking, baldheaded bastard in sunglasses, stepped forward. “You ‘Lady Redstone,’ then, lady?” he asked.

  “I am,” Ingrid said.