Graves' end Page 23

  “How do you know?” Hannah asked, having never seen Black Tom out of his catbody before. She’d parked their car at a scenic overlook, though none of them had eyes for the view. “How did you know?”

  “Normally I see him, or at least I feel him,” Lia said. “He’s always with me, in one way or another. And now he’s not.”

  “Always?” Hannah said, thinking about it. “Always always? Does he look like a cat?”

  “No, he mostly looks like a man,” Lia said. “Like he looked when he was alive. He was an operator too, years and years ago. His patron was Mictlantecuhtli. That’s how I know about the Tzitzimime and all that stuff, from him. But he skipped out on the deal they made when he died and escaped into another body. A cat’s body. My cat’s like his tenth or twelfth ride. So if Ingrid’s aligned with Mictlantecuhtli, and it’s pretty clear by now she is, then Tom’s in real danger.”

  “What’s a Mictlantecuhtli?” Dex asked. “Like an imported beer or something?”

  “He’s the Aztec personification of Death, Dexter,” Lia said shortly. “The King of the Realm of the Dead. You’ve heard him called Miguel Caradura or Mickey Hardface, I guess.”

  “Hey,” Hannah said, as a weird thought occurred to her. “Does that mean the Aztecs had the right religion, then? Lia?”

  “It means everything that can be dreamed or imagined lives a life in the otherworld,” Lia said.

  Dexter looked thoughtful. “Ingrid told me Hardface was just a mobster,” he recalled. “Or at least implied it. She was pretty vague, but I chalked that up to her being scared for her life. She said she got mixed up with Caradura, said he was crazy and threatenin’ to kidnap her off to Mexico or someplace and force her to marry him, if she wouldn’t tell him where to find a baby of his she’d given up to get adopted.” He paused, touching the ragged exit hole above his eye socket. “Then she went and shot me through the head when I was trying to rescue her from that.”

  “Hannah, give me the keys,” Lia said.

  Hannah did so without hesitation. Lia went to the car that was parked some yards behind them. Dexter followed after her.

  “Lia, we are not goin’ out there. Not without a plan,” he said.

  Lia opened the driver’s side door, but stopped and stared at him over the top of the stolen BMW before she got in. A soft tone chimed to remind her the door was ajar. She looked to Hannah, too, who was visibly frightened.

  “You’re right,” Lia said, coming to a decision, although it still fell pretty far short of anything that might be called a plan. She’d hoped to have more time up at Esteban’s extravagant estate to formulate one, but it hadn’t been in the cards, and all she could do now was trust in her instincts. “It is too dangerous for us all to go out there. That’s why I’m going, and you’re staying here.”

  “Lia, no!” Dex shouted.

  She ducked into the car, shut her door, and hit the locks. Dexter saw the plastic nub drop down into the passenger-side doorframe, but he scrabbled at the handle anyway, scratching up the paint with his calcified fingertips.

  Lia downed the electric window just enough to be heard when she spoke. “I have to go, Dexter,” she explained. “I owe it to Black Tom. You guys walk down to the park on Coldwater and wait for me there, or call a cab and go to Hannah’s house. I’ll find you when this is finished.”

  “Dammit, Lia, don’t be stupid,” Dexter snarled, pounding on the tinted window like he meant to smash it in. He might even manage it, with a few more blows. “Take me with you, at least! I’m not breakable like you are.”

  “I don’t know what you are, or why you are, but Ingrid does,” Lia said, leaning across the passenger seat to look up into Dexter’s empty sockets, which were like a pair of shadowed caves underneath the brim of his fedora. “None of us are safe if she gets anywhere near you, is what I think.”

  “Lia, I swear to whoever you want, you can trust me,” Dexter said, abandoning his assault on the window glass. She didn’t doubt that he meant it. His voice was so earnest it practically broke her heart. But it didn’t change the facts.

  “I’m trusting you to take care of Hannah, Dexter. Please do that for me.”

  Dex nodded helplessly, agreeing that he would of course do that in any case, while still trying to organize an argument. Hannah crowded in beside him, stooping to peer through the chipped passenger window. “Lia, don’t do this,” she said. “Don’t go back there alone.”

  “Hannah, she has my Tom.”

  “Then let us at least come with you,” Han pleaded, echoing Dexter. “Maybe we can help.”

  Lia shook her head, eyeing a fresh red spot of blood on the side of Hannah’s borrowed white t-shirt, which had seeped through the bandage beneath. “I can’t have you hurt on my account. Not any more than you already have been. I can’t, Hannah. Please try to understand that I have to do this, and I can only do it alone.”

  She stomped the accelerator before either of them could wedge another word in. She knew she wouldn’t have withstood another round of protestations. Her wheels spun on the loose dirt of the shoulder before catching pavement. Dexter took one last parting shot at the passenger window with his bony fist, and this time he managed to crack it down the middle, but he was too late.

  Hannah yelled and ran after the sportscar as it shot down the snaking length of blacktop that led back down to the Valley, still begging her not to leave them at the very top of her lungs.

  Lia glanced back in the rearview mirror in time to see Dexter catch her friend when she stumbled and almost fell into the shallow depression at the side of the road, clutching once again at the bleeding wound in her side.

  Retrospective No.4 ~ 1910

  A century ago…

  Oscar closed the metal gate across the front of the platform and advised Tom to hold on before he started the construction elevator’s noisy gasoline engine. The lift rattled and clattered as it carried them up toward the Hole in the Sky. The Hole that would be enclosed by an office at the top of a thirteen-story building within a matter of months. Maybe before the year 1910 had run itself out.

  Old Tom Delgado looked north, toward the surprising number of lights (warm tongues of kerosene flame as well as steadier electric glows) that were then coming on in the windows of the distant houses of Hollywood. It looked like a handful of flickering stars had been strewn across the black foothills.

  This world was already changing faster than he could follow, and it was about to change so much more.

  Now that he’d seen the architectural evidence of el Rey’s ambitions, Tom thought he finally understood how his patron intended to use him. As a placeholder. A bookmark. As something to wedge into the imaginal space Mictlantecuhtli was meant to occupy while ‘Miguel Caradura’ projected himself out into the living world as he desired, in subversion of the ancient laws that bound him.

  King Death himself could never travel beyond the Hole in the Sky. He came right back when he tried, like a dead man arriving. Tom had witnessed it before. Los Muertos, the ordinary denizens of Mictlan, lacked even the ability to step into the first chamber (or the second one, from their point of view, Tom supposed), except on the two nights that followed Halloween, when the worlds experienced a flash of precise synchronization that made such crossings possible. They could exit only then, should their King elect to grant his subjects permission to walk the earth. Which he rarely did, as there was nothing in it for him, generally speaking.

  But Tom’s demise would be unique. Mictlantecuhtli meant to flay him bare with his obsidian blade at the door between the worlds instead of on the second room’s altar stone (as he did with all of the regular dead). In this special case he’d leave Tom’s freely-offered pelt out in the first of his Chambers and wear it into the realworld, rather than feed it to his creatures. Tom himself would become almost the opposite of the King’s emancipated mistress, in effect-a ghost that could never leave the Chambers at all. He’d be deprived of his body but not freed from its obligations, trapped forever in the
two-room airlock between life and death that the twin Chambers comprised.

  While the King would walk free, slipping into the space left empty by Tom’s unfinished death.

  El Rey had bought a body from his minion rather than a soul. He’d purchased a niche in the realworld with a tawdry currency of toys, travel, and sex-the pursuits Tom had chosen to drown his pain in after his love had been taken away. (And even that loss had most likely occurred through the machinations of his King, he realized, much too late).

  He was about to pay dearly for those indulgences now. As was everybody else. King Death had been privy to every trick discovered and every truth divined by a thousand generations of sorcerers, and Tom couldn’t imagine a greater threat to the worlds than an unbounded, incarnate Mictlantecuhtli. Restraint had never been a part of his patron’s nature.

  Tom figured the plan also included using the rest of him, the disembodied remainder, to conduct el Rey’s brave new endeavors in this unsuspecting world on a full-time basis. The King needed an administrator more capable and effective than old Winston Watt, whose brain was burnt already after a mere two decades of service. Tom’s ghost, on the other hand, would be hanging around the office for the rest of forever, fully able to manage Miguel Caradura’s affairs with his living employees from there, so his afterlife wasn’t even going to be his own. There’d be no post-mortem reunion with Dulce, or with Ramon, or with anyone else he missed. The physical pain of being torn between life and death might well be with him for an eternity, too, since the King sure as hell wasn’t going to bear it.

  Tom could still run (like he’d meant to after cutting down the Tree, a plan that now seemed to have been formulated at some irrelevant point in distant antiquity), but if he did so his old friend Ramon’s boy Oscar and his yet-to-be-born grandson Juan would be the first to pay the price.

  Poor Oscar had yet to look up from his shoes. Tom didn’t blame him for the ‘betrayal,’ such as it was. Their King had been playing a very long game, and they’d all been his unwitting pawns.

  When the lift reached the top of the incomplete structure’s bare steel skeleton, Tom noticed a small, gray, feral cat that had climbed all the way up here to soak in the view, his lofty ambitions almost a feline equivalent to the King’s. Seeing him there gave Tom an idea.

  Years ago, when he and Ramon had first come to this place, each of the boys had met his nagual, his spirit-animal, so to speak. That particular creature with which he had a special affinity and which might, if asked, guide him across the dreamscapes revealed by vegetal friends like Teonanactl and Mescalito.

  Ramon’s nagual had been the lizard-cool, thoughtful, and prone to disappearing in a flash.

  Tom’s had been the mountain lion. The prince of cats who stalked these hills and canyons. He silently asked the brave little birdstalker who was flashing his eyes from the far end of a girder for a very great favor, and received the animal’s consent.

  Tom sent out his mind and switched places with the cat. He wasn’t sure it would work with such a small specimen, one that resembled a lion about as much as a chihuahua did a wolf, but work it did. After a sickening instant of vertigo those reflective green eyes were his, and he was looking back up at his own human body as the catspirit he’d swapped with steered it down the foot-wide girder and toward the Hole in the Sky, holding onto a rope the work crews had strung between the steel supports for balance.

  Oscar, following behind it, seemed none the wiser.

  Winston Watt was waiting for him, standing inside the first of the two rooms beyond the Hole. The chamber’s rough, torchlit adobe walls remained as Tom remembered them from the old days, although brand new carpeting had been laid down over the floor’s ancient flagstones. Watt cocked his head at an odd angle and examined with a critical eye the awkward, shuffling progress that Tom’s cat-piloted body was making in his direction, but he said nothing about it.

  So far so good, Tom thought. This little catbody’s vision was so much brighter and sharper than what he was accustomed to that the rising moon seemed to cast almost as much light as a midday sun.

  He acknowledged that he’d sold his flesh and bones, and was obligated to send his mortal form through the door between worlds of his own free will. It’d never been stated, however, that he had to be the one driving it at the time. The King was bound by his own rules once he established them, and loopholes in his contracts could be slipped through, if you could find them. Tom had even seen it happen, once or twice before.

  As his aged body stepped through the Hole in the Sky for the very last time and stood before the door to the second room, the altar room, where the King waited to receive all souls, he hoped he was about to see it happen again. Through a cat’s eyes and from a safe distance, this time around. The familiar skeletal image of Mictlantecuhtli hadn’t appeared at the door yet, but Tom trusted that he would, blade in hand, and probably at the very last moment. His patron did have a flair for the dramatic, after all.

  His body only needed to take a few more steps.

  “Tio Tom!”

  Goddammit, Tom thought. Feel guilty tomorrow, why don’t you?

  “Tio, I’m sorry,” Oscar wailed. His guilt and anguish were real, and so overwhelming that his voice broke, making him sound for a moment like the boy Tom remembered. “Please forgive me, I didn’t have any choice!”

  The catspirit walking Tom’s body to the door stopped and turned back, unsure.

  Just go, Tom thought at it, and thankfully the catspirit did. Without a word to Oscar, as it had no capacity for verbal language.

  “Tio, say something, at least,” Oscar cried, when Tom’s body headed straight for the inner sanctum. “Please, don’t go through there yet. Please, wait!”

  The young man lunged after what he thought was still his father’s old friend, trying to catch him by the back of his shirt before he went through Mictlan’s one-way door.

  Winston Watt, who’d been silent all this time, now charged after Oscar, flailing his arms and screeching madly. Both Oz and the catspirit inside Tom’s body whirled around, startled by his manic display.

  Tom himself, the part that counted, was in the process of jumping from the borrowed cat and back into his rightful head when a large black mockingbird landed on his furry shoulders. It stabbed painfully at the catbody’s neck with its beak, and Tom experienced a sensation that felt like something vital tearing loose from his throat.

  Then he was back in his own body, looking out through his own human eyes, but totally unable to speak. He found he had no voice with which to explain himself to Oscar. No words at all to warn off the younger man.

  Watt shoved him aside and he staggered back, tumbling through the doorway between the rooms before he could catch himself against the stone jamb. He abandoned his skin with an instant to spare before his now-empty human form fell across the barrier, turning skeletal before it hit the floor. The special flesh Mictlantecuhtli had bargained for was gone. Wasted, just like that.

  Amorphous, disembodied Tom rejoined the cat’s body even as the vicious mockingbird clawed at its back and sides.

  The bird threw its head back and shook it, swallowing, choking down Tom’s voice once and for all. A tiny, purplish-white wheel of energy the bird had ripped out of Tom’s neck disappeared down its feathered gullet. “What’s the matter, Tom?” it squawked, in a grating, inhuman, yet conscious and comprehending voice of its own. “Cat’s got no tongue?”

  Tom realized it was Watt, Winston Watt, in a nagual form of his own-that of an irritating, sarcastic bird.

  Fitting, he thought, before he reared back with a hiss and clawed one of the bird’s beady eyes right out of its head.

  It shrieked hideously and beat at him with its wings while Oscar, back inside the first room beyond the Hole in the Sky, punched Watt’s birdridden body in the face for having pushed what he thought was Tom and not an empty husk into the second chamber. The bird inside Watt’s skin screeched and clawed and thrashed at Oscar with unwieldy human arm
s, and Oscar leaned in to pummel its torso with both fists.

  Tom’s cat raced down the cold steel girder on nimble paws, bleeding from a dozen punctures and lacerations but still sporting the proper number of eyeballs-which was more than he could say for Winston Watt’s animal form. The half-blind bird swooped down after him, keeping its head cocked to one side so that it could see. He sank his claws into Tom’s back and plucked him off the beam, letting him loose into empty space.

  He fell, thrashing and twisting, with an extended, echoing yowl.

  Watt reassumed his human body in time to experience Oscar San Martin kneeing it in the crotch. He slumped, groaning, and crumpled to his knees, clutching at the front of San Martin’s stained coverall.

  The builder gripped his throat with both strong hands and throttled him, slamming his head back against the brick wall in a steady, bonecracking rhythm.

  Tom abandoned his borrowed catform in freefall and caught hold of a mountain lion that was hunting a quarter of a mile away, which was as far as he could reach in the split-second available. He ejected the lion’s indigenous tenant from its seat of consciousness an instant before the honored stray’s small body smashed against the future building’s hard concrete foundation.

  The gray cat was dead in a flash.

  Tom hoped he’d felt no pain.

  Watt, his ears ringing like tuning forks while large black roses bloomed across his field of vision, caught hold of something solidly metallic that was tucked into the back of San Martin’s coveralls, at random, as he flailed for his life.

  He got his finger into a ring on one side of the metal object and squeezed.

  Tom’s new wildcat heard the small-caliber shot clearly, even at a distance. He raised its head from the still-twitching fawn it had brought down right before his unscheduled arrival in its brainspace and listened for a second shot, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing but crickets and the suddenly enticing rustlings of small rodents in the brush. Even more vivid than those were the rich smells of blood and life all around him, which hit these new predator’s senses of his like a symphony.