Graves' end Read online

  Tom sent himself out again, without letting go of the big cat entirely. He figured he was going to need a safe place to store his soul for a while.

  Up in the first room beyond the Hole in the Sky, Winston Watt’s vision swam back into focus. The piercing note howling in his ears died away, like someone had turned down the volume on a particularly pointless and obnoxious phonograph recording.

  Oscar San Martin lay beside him, gasping like a landed trout as his life’s red blood pulsed out from the gash a bullet had torn through the small of his back. There was blood all over the new carpet.

  Winston had never even gotten the handgun out from under the man’s coverall, but that hadn’t stopped it from doing its deadly work, had it? Bang, right through something vital. Oscar was bleeding out fast.

  Watt felt a little sick. It could’ve been due to concussion, he thought. (It never occurred to him that Tom might be lingering nearby, projected out from his new lion, and that he might be catching a ghost of a ghost’s reaction.)

  The King’s Englishman pushed himself into a sitting position, then got to his feet, bracing himself against the wall for balance. He waited for his head to clear, then turned around to face the door that opened onto the next room. The one with the bloodcaked stone altar at its center.

  “Mictlantecuhtli?” Watt called into the empty, echoing chamber. “Hello?”

  On the floor behind him, Oscar San Martin breathed his last. His chest rattled when his lungs settled and then failed to reinflate.

  In the next instant his coverall-clad bones materialized from a wisp of smoke right before Winston’s eyes, on the other side of the doorway, while his inert flesh lay cooling in the outer office.

  “The King’s not in right now,” San Martin’s skeleton informed Watt, reaching out and slipping a bony hand around the back of his neck to yank him face-first through the doorway. “Why don’t you come inside and wait?”

  Winston shouted and staggered forward, pulled off balance by a man he’d just killed, then toppled gracelessly into the realm of Mictlan. His living flesh sloughed away from his bones like so much fine, dry dust when he pitched across the threshold.

  He’d never walk the realworld again, he knew, save possibly for one weird weekend each year, and only then with the express permission of his King… except that boon was almost never granted, was it?

  Winston pounded the stone floor with his unfleshed fist. He wanted to cry, but there wasn’t enough moisture left in his bones to form tears. Tom Delgado’s abandoned, unmanned skeleton lay motionless on the floor beside him. It was nothing but a worthless relic now, already disarticulating, softening and collapsing in on itself. Soon it would break down completely, with nothing inside to maintain its integrity.

  When Winston looked up Mictlantecuhtli was there, standing beside San Martin’s skeleton at the altar and staring down in disappointment from out of the shadows that pooled under his heavy gray cowl.

  Tom left them as soon as he felt the presence of the King, drawing his thoughts back into his new feline head. He’d come close enough to the Hole in the Sky to see for himself what had taken place, even though he had too clear an idea already. Winston Watt was dead, as he’d hoped would be the case after hearing the gunshot, but then so was Oscar. His boy Juan would have to grow up without a father, now. There was little enough that Tom could do about it, though. Not with his body ruined and his delicate arrangement with the King in disarray. Death had been denied, and that meant it was no longer safe for Tom to hang around this place. Mictlantecuhtli would know he’d tried to cheat, to breach their contract, and that meant he had no patron anymore.

  He’d been lucky to catch the mountain lion that was currently the only thing anchoring him to the living world. Having a form to cling to meant that Death wouldn’t be able to claim his ghost, despite owning his bones. He wouldn’t be able to stay in a cat forever, obviously, but at least he’d bought himself a little time to try and think of another option. He was sure he’d have an idea before too many hours or days had passed.

  The former necromancer turned and ran up into the hills with his commandeered catamount, into the wild and away from the comforts of civilization, putting as much physical distance between himself and the King’s Chambers as he possibly could.

  Part Five: El Dia de los Muertos

  (The Day of the Dead)

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  A century later…

  Black Tom, still trapped out amidst the hibiscus blooms where Ingrid had evoked and bound him earlier in the afternoon, watched as the tattooed man who’d been spying on her padded silently out of the greenery.

  He circled around Tom’s invisible enclosure, looking him over slowly and thoroughly. Tom did likewise. His examiner’s hair was shaved down to a shadow, and his dark jeans and sweatshirt were each voluminous enough to conceal multiple weapons. He had a greenish-black teardrop inked under the outside corner of his left eye. His sunglasses’ thick frames didn’t quite cover it up.

  “You Tomas Delgado, ain’t you?” the gangbanger said. “I get it-del Gato. That’s cute, ese. That’s real clever.”

  He got close and looked Tom in the eyes. Through his shades, of course. They were each wearing their own set of impenetrably dark lenses.

  “You recognize me, then, ese?” the gangster asked. “You remember me, Tommy del Gato, mister black magic man? Huh? Do you?”

  Black Tom shook his head.

  Winston pulled off his disguise. His fleshmask, ‘Xavier’s’ secondhand face. “Perhaps this helps to refresh your memory, Tom?” the skeleton underneath asked in his familiar, dry British accent.

  Tom felt his eyes go wide behind his glasses. He beat and scrabbled at the walls of his invisible cell in a way that made Winston’s uncovered skull seem to grin. He knew by now that he couldn’t get out, but he was unable to keep from trying again anyway. Like a wild animal caught in a trap.

  “Ahh, yes, there we are,” the skeleton on a two-day furlough said. “I didn’t think you’d forget me so soon. You must have known that someone would have to fill the position you were groomed for when you opted to breach Mictlantecuhtli’s contract.” He leaned in and said, ominously: “Do you know how long time feels in Mictlan, Tom? How many millennia of servitude I’ve already endured? Because you opted to ditch your freely assumed obligations?”

  Winston stepped back and slipped his face on. He covered his empty sockets with his shades and grinned Xavier’s vicious grin at Black Tom.

  “Hardface be comin,’ ese,” Winston said, dropping back into his character’s voice. “An’ he is gonna mess you up. If not him, then me. Count on it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Lia blasted back toward North Hollywood in Dexter’s sleek BMW at wildly excessive speeds, cutting in and out of traffic as she shot up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and accelerating through yellow lights at Ventura, at Moorpark, and then again at Riverside in the last nanoseconds before they changed over to red, eliciting honks and shouted curses from the disgruntled left-turners she darted past.

  She’d never driven so fast in her life.

  Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Lia blew past a motorcycle cop’s speedtrap while rocketing east on Sherman Way. Blue and red lights burst like a fireworks display in her rearview mirror and a siren chirped, making her jump in her seat and yelp in startled response. She pulled over into a Home Depot parking lot, feeling sick.

  The officer who’d snagged her removed his helmet and left it on the seat of his hulking motorbike before hitching up his gun belt and approaching. He didn’t bother to take off his silver, aviator-style shades.

  “License and registration please, ma’am,” the cop said, when Lia rolled down her window to speak with him.

  “I… I don’t have them with me,” she said, only then realizing that she really didn’t. Her purse was down in her hobbit hole. She could see her own dismay reflected twice in the officer’s shiny lenses.

  “I’m gonna ask you to step out
of the vehicle then, ma’am, and turn around and put your hands on the side of it.”

  Lia had little choice but to comply. The motorcycle cop (who was tall and young and under better circumstances might’ve been somewhat attractive) frisked her efficiently.

  “I just forgot my purse this morning, officer, is all, I really don’t think-”

  “Ma’am, this vehicle was reported stolen yesterday afternoon, so unless you can produce some ID and a good explanation, I’m gonna have to ask you to put your hands behind your back.”

  Lia did as she was told, and the cuffs closed around her wrists with two decisive clicks. A few do-it-yourself shoppers watched the sorry drama from beside their parked SUVs, but all of the day laborers gathered around the hardware store had scattered when lapolicia arrived.

  Shitballs, Lia thought.

  She was fucked and she knew it.

  The tall cop guided her to a seat on a concrete block at the front of a parking spot. She was cuffed tight. Black Tom could’ve let her loose in an eyeblink, but he wasn’t available right now.

  The officer paused to jot down some notes. Lia noticed a small black tattoo in the shape of a dog on the back of his left hand when he flipped open his notebook.

  She felt a small kindling of hope.

  “Hey. Blackdog,” she said.

  The cop slowly turned his head. “What did you say?”

  “Your tattoo,” Lia said. “You’re a Blackdog.”

  “And what would you know about that?”

  “Before you call this in or whatever,” Lia begged, “will you do me one favor? Will you call Frank Chudabala for me? Captain Chudabala? Please?”

  “And what would you want me to tell him?” the cop asked.

  “Tell him Lia la brujachica needs the Blackdogs,” she said. “Tell him I’ve fallen down a well.”

  The young patrolman didn’t stop frowning, but he did pull a personal cellphone out of his pocket and dialed it, never once taking his mirror-covered eyes off of Lia.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Ingrid Redstone stood in the door of the Yard’s ancient office shack, leafing through a dog-eared paperback copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker she always carried in her purse and waiting as the day grew long. Her gangsters hung around their cars out in the gravel parking lot, most of them smoking nasty, chemical-scented, factory-rolled cigarettes. A bit of a surprise, that was, really. At least to Ingrid. It’d seemed to her that people didn’t do that so much anymore, in this baffling new madhouse of an era.

  The twenty-first century had been on for over a decade already, if you could believe it. The fateful events of 1950 seemed like they’d happened a few short months ago (which, for Ingrid, they sort of had).

  The important thing was that Dexter was really back, in this time and place, after sixty years in the dirt.

  Ingrid was quietly awed by the idea. He wouldn’t be quite alive again, yet, but he was above ground at least. Walking the earth. Hearing his voice over the wireless telephone had finally made it real for her.

  She’d been sure (well, pretty sure) that he wouldn’t die all the way when she shot him in the head so far back along this new timeline. Dexter was different, due in part to the feelings she had for him and the protective net of hexwork she’d once wrapped him up in, quite without his knowledge. He was special. She’d gambled that Mictlan would have no authority to draw him in if and when he ‘died’ in the realworld. She’d bet that he, his soul or whatever, would stay with his bones for as long as they lasted. The only way Dexter Graves would ever cross the threshold between the rooms was by agreement, as an act of his own free will.

  It was good to see her theory finally borne out. The stakes on that wager had been so very high, and they remained so now, really. Her whole plan could still go wrong in any number of ways.

  Ingrid had many regrets when it came to Dexter, not the least of which was that she’d never been able to tell him the truth about herself. She’d never gotten to know him as well as she might’ve liked. It had simply been too dangerous. She hadn’t dared to let him meet the King-not when he might’ve taken Mickey up on the offer she knew he intended to make. Dexter had still been raw from the experience of war as of the winter’s day in 1950 on which he’d expired. Physically healed from his wounds, yes, but still ungrounded, adrift and in need of an emotional reconstruction he had no idea how to perform. The escape from remorse the King would’ve promised might have sounded all too enticing to a man in that precarious frame of mind. A man with little to nothing anchoring him to the ongoing life of his world.

  Shooting him had been easier than facing the consequences, ultimately.

  But Mickey found out about him anyway, of course. Mickey’s influence in this world was limited, to say the least, but even so, he had his spies everywhere.

  If she’d just run away when she first realized that the cons outweighed the pros when it came to being Mickey’s Queen, if she’d just left the city and put as much distance between herself and the building Mickey’d erected for her as she possibly could… then none of this would’ve happened.

  But she’d exited the otherworld into 1950 instead, and that hadn’t been enough distance in either time or space. Mickey’s Tzitzimime tracked her easily across the years and he sent a new man (a big fellow called Juan, the son of architect Oscar San Martin in fact) to fetch her back to him. She might’ve done better if she’d just stayed when she was and put more miles between them, like maybe the span of a continent or an ocean.

  Now Dexter was yet another pawn in her long chess game with Death.

  That Mickey’d been willing to make a deal at all, that he’d given her this chance to find an understudy for her role in this production, was an indication of how desperately he coveted what Dexter and Lia, together, might be able to do for him.

  Her King was only diplomatic when he absolutely had to be.

  Still, Ingrid’s upper hand could only be played for so much advantage here. Turning up another operator like herself-an initiate of the eternal cycles of generation and decay, one thoroughly schooled in the mysteries of the tripartite plane of being-had proved difficult enough that Mickey’d missed out on the entire twentieth century while Ingrid searched, and questioned people, and tracked down leads across any number of decades. All he had were the tales and memories that trickled into Mictlan along with the dead, and he was pissed about what he heard. He mourned Studio 54, and bemoaned his missed opportunity to attend a thing called ‘Woodstock.’ Burning Man was still on his agenda, even though he’d heard by ‘now’ that it was becoming too commercial.

  Commitment to a timeline was a new and frustrating experience for the King.

  Witches of Ingrid’s caliber were rare and independent creatures, though, clever and wary of those who sought them out. Not easy to track down, and less so to set up. Ingrid had taken a good long while to find Mickey his girl. She’d been sure to. She bought time by obfuscating the issue and doing what she could to cover her tracks, but her King’s patience was far from endless. She’d finally had to deliver her discovery, Lia Flores, little Camellia Flower herself, here in the second decade of the mindbendingly distant twenty-first century.

  That Dexter Graves was up and ambulatory was proof that the first phase of her operation had succeeded. Lia had picked up that lighter, the link to Dexter, despite her protestations to the contrary. Her touch had sparked Ingrid’s long-dormant hex to life, and Dexter’s bones along with it. Lia’s abilities must have been the full equivalent of Ingrid’s own, or else the enchanted symbol would not have awakened for her. Had Ingrid ever returned for the lighter herself during the intervening sixty years, she would’ve been right back on Mickey’s hook.

  She sighed, thinking about it.

  She couldn’t help but identify with Lia, this young operator she’d uncovered, and she didn’t want to see her hurt, above all things. Lia’s basic affinities seemed to be vegetal rather than mineral, like Ingrid’s own, but they still had an amazing amo
unt in common.

  That knowledge made her wistful. Equals in her field had, in Ingrid’s experience, been few and far between. It took a fortitude few possessed to live full-time in the actual, when the real was the only world most people would let themselves believe in. The otherworld could be scary, since it was but partially mapped and minimally understood. Daunting as it was, though, most folks at least acknowledged its existence as a metaphor or a frivolous fantasyscape, if nothing more.

  The actual, though… hidden in that subtle distinction was the witches’ world, the liminal tract of headspace wherein events deemed impossible or untenable by the standards of the realworld might nonetheless occasionally occur, to be remembered, contemplated, and learned from, by those who dared.

  Ingrid had good reason to believe Lia knew that territory as well as she did. She’d sensed it from the moment they first corresponded, through the mediation of an entity called Craig who kept lists of the messages posted to the incredible public internetwork. Ingrid imagined he needed a staff of thousands. The planet’s new invisible information-sharing web seemed to her like nothing less than a man-made astral plane, one summoned up with secret words and viewed through flat black scrying-screens, very much in the classical tradition. The greatest of medieval sorcerers would’ve killed to possess even the cheapest example of the computation machines that made it all possible, and today they were used by everyone, including children.

  Ingrid shook her head. So much had changed, and yet a lot remained the same.

  Her old familiar loneliness felt like an ache in her chest today. She longed to be able to talk with Lia about any of these things. Ingrid’s modern-day counterpart was sure to be versed in concepts and cosmologies similar to the ones she employed.