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Graves' end Page 27


  “It need not be hell,” Caradura said, sounding almost defensive about it. “It is Mictlan-a paradise for some and a torment for others, and even these fates are their own creations, deriving from their feelings about the lives they chose to lead.”

  “All of the dead come through here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Regardless of whatever they believed?”

  “Yes, Dexter Graves. Death wears many faces. My cult of worshippers persists in this City of Angels, however. It was their actions, not mine, that first opened the Hole in the Sky, more than a millennia before your birth. Their attentions have helped me to retain this form over generations, while others less remembered by the living world have faded to obscurity, if not oblivion. Mictlan is as vast as memory, and all of this, my kingdom, can be yours… if you desire it.”

  Graves’ ghost chuckled at the assertion. “You don’t say,” he said. “For how many easy payments?”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Ingrid slid on her bare knees into her makeshift Tomcat trap, scraping herself badly as she knocked over the still-lit candles and threw aside the fishtank to grab up the cat before one of her own men could accidentally shoot her.

  If she died now, or if the sun went down on them, then all was truly lost.

  Lia’s aged spirit familiar disappeared from sight at the instant she had hold of his living anchor. She forced the old sorcerer’s ghost down into the cat and fixed it there with a fierce effort of will. She could hardly afford to let the crafty spirit roam free. She’d need a bargaining chip just to buy a chance to explain herself now, and there was so little time left in which to pull off this operation.

  All around the Yard, well-armed gangsters pinned the cops down, firing at them with foliage-rending automatic weapons when they tried to move from cover. The henchmen laughed and cackled, feeling triumphant and having a perverse sort of fun, at least for the moment.

  Lia and the cop she’d called Ben came upon Ingrid as she was getting to her feet, with blood streaming from both knees and a black cat cradled in her arms. She slid a knife from a secret sheath on her thigh and angled its point toward the animal’s neck, for emphasis.

  Lia grabbed Ben’s arm.

  “Now you stop right there, Lia,” Ingrid said, panting for breath. “This has gotten out of hand. Where’s Dexter, is he with you?”

  “I came alone,” Lia said.

  Ingrid’s face fell. She could actually feel herself wilting. “Oh, Lia, no,” she whispered. “Please say you didn’t.”

  When Lia said nothing Ingrid shook her head.

  “Then it’s already too late.” Her last hopes vanished, extinguished like a match pinched between two fingers. She felt almost sick with despair. “The sun’s about to go down.”

  “Too late for what, Ingrid?”

  “For us to finish resurrecting Dexter,” Ingrid said, like it should have been obvious. “It would kill either one of us alone, but both of us, working together, we could survive. We could have survived, that is, and hidden him from Mickey. Mictlantecuhtli. But if Dexter can’t be here within a few minutes, there isn’t anything more we can do. You’ll be dead before dawn, Lia, and I’m sure I’ll be right there with you.”

  She looked down at the cat in her arms, and sighed. “No point in keeping the pawns once the game is lost,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

  As soon as Ingrid dropped the cat, Xavier, her driver, of all fucking people, swooped right out of the glowing sunlit bushes and snatched it up at a run. Ingrid yelped involuntarily. So did Lia’s cop, Ben. Lia shot right after the fleeing gangster with no hesitation, showing them the soles of her shoes.

  Ben tackled Ingrid from the side before she recovered from her very genuine surprise, driving her to the dirt with all of his considerable, athletic weight. Her bone-handled knife went flying. Ben cuffed her before she could move her hands enough to do anything useful with them, and then jumped up to follow after Lia.

  Tom hissed and flailed when Winston Watt-whose false face was beginning to peel around the edges as it dried out-held him up in one hand. Watt also had a fully automatic gun of some kind clutched in his other bony claw, and he fired chattering bursts of lead into the air as he ran. Tom’s sensitive feline ears rang from the staccato gunshots. It felt like having his head clapped between a pair of frying pans a dozen times per second. Ingrid’s rough hexes still had him tied inextricably to his cat, so escape by sending out into another animal wasn’t going to be an option.

  “Lissen up, eses,” Winston yelled, still posing as Xavier, the gang’s appointed leader. The non-Spanish speakers amongst them must have wondered why he’d address them like they were book reports. “Is time for plan B,” the disguised manservant shouted. “Shoot the pigs and catch the women. I’m givin’ the orders now!”

  Winston skidded to a stop and held the cat up at eye level, looking it in the eyes through his shades.

  “But first,” he said, “we deal with-”

  A frightful screech and a blur of flailing paws interrupted him when Tom brought his untrimmed and razor-sharp claws slashing down around the henchman’s undefended head.

  “No!” Winston screamed, trying to shield himself with his forearms as Tom raked the sunglasses right off his fake face. The eyeless skeleton beneath the skin shrieked, feeling with both hands that his borrowed forehead and cheeks were shredded into bloodless ribbons. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled around for his lost sunglasses, and Tom seized his moment to run for it.

  Lia and her new friend Officer Ben came upon the scene, but gunfire from another of el Rey’s henchmen sent them diving off in opposite directions, into the vegetation. They called out to one another and Tom knew that neither of them had been hit, without breaking his fastest four-legged stride.

  Winston jumped up. He crammed his sunglasses back onto his torn face. “Get the cat and the witch,” he shouted in a rage, and Tom could hear him crashing and crunching through the plants behind him. “Consiga el gato y a la bruja,” he bellowed. “Get the cat and the goddamned witch!”

  The chase was on.

  Two bulky gangsters who looked like they’d probably been playing high school football not too many years before came at Tom from either side and he darted away at the instant they both dove for him. The men collided face-first, with a solid, meaty smack. They fell away to either side, knocked unconscious, upsetting two stepped racks of culinary herbs that rained down around them in a noisy avalanche of tiny plastic pots.

  Tom’s mischievous old heart surged with wild joy as he fled.

  Then one of the older guys almost had him-got a grip around his middle, even, for about half an instant-before tripping over his own feet and somersaulting into a steel-wire shelving unit that housed terracotta pottery. Hundreds of pounds of it. The rack itself was eight feet high, and its entire payload of fired clay came crashing down onto the man’s head and shoulders before he had a chance to exclaim. It sounded to Tom like God’s own busboy had dropped a bin full of plates somewhere behind him.

  If ten large men chasing one puff-tailed tomcat wasn’t a recipe for physical comedy, then he didn’t know what was. Tom would’ve been having a blast, frankly, if he hadn’t been so afraid of somebody shooting his Lia. His Winter Flower. There were far too many guns around his girl just now, and that really would not do.

  Blackdog cops obligingly tackled, disarmed and cuffed another pair of men when Tom lured them through a cluster of potted fan palms, right past the officers he sensed were concealed there, waiting to pounce when they saw a chance.

  That left eight of Mictlantecuhtli’s men in black still standing, by Tom’s hasty count. ‘Xavier,’ known to him a century ago as Winston Fucking Watt, was one of the few still on the loose.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The King snapped his fingers and they were down upon the plain, under the sunless silver sky. The pyramid they’d been at the top of a moment before now stood tall on the dark horizon behind them.

  It
was a pretty nifty trick, Graves thought, in spite of himself.

  Miguel Caradura turned to the soul at his side. “You should know, Dexter Graves, that I am a powerful king,” he said. “My reign extends even beyond the boundaries of my native Mictlan. The territories of my weaker brethren have also become my own as their rulers have lost coherence and their worshippers have died out.”

  Hardface sounded exactly like a salesman, in Graves’ opinion. Not one he’d buy a bridge from, either.

  Mickey Caradura raised his arms, and rank after rank of his conscripted troops appeared from out of the smoke when he spoke of them. They stood at attention, silent and still, awaiting their orders. They were creatures out of myths and dreams, a few of which Graves recognized from stories (such as dragons, centaurs, and what he thought might’ve been a gryphon), although there were many more he could not identify. So many that it boggled his mind to look at them. They became little more than a mass of vaporous, insubstantial sketches as their ranks faded back into the gray distance.

  “The domains of Olympus and Luxor have long been under my control,” said the King. “As have the spheres of the Kami, the Fair Folk, and the Shemhamephorash. All of those our brothers whose ties to the realworld have slipped away are now my conquered minions to command. My Army of Imaginals. I am Mictlantecuhtli, King of the Forgotten, Lord of the Shades, Emperor of the Archaic and the Arcane-and you can be too, Dexter Graves.”

  “Hey, that all sounds swell, it really does,” Graves said, cocking a ghostly hat back on his transparent head. “But I just know there’s gotta be a catch.”

  He was getting bored with the hard sell already.

  Caradura lowered his arms and let his armies fade until he and his guest were all alone again upon a rolling, empty plain that never seemed to end. “But a small one, Dexter Graves, so hear me out,” the King said. “I, you see, am possessed of ambitions beyond the ordinary dreams of my kind. I would have what no nonbody is ever given to have. Sensation. Experience. The World. Your world. I will walk it, I will conquer it, and it will be mine, the crowning glory of my vast empire!”

  Caradura shouted this mission statement up into the gray sky.

  “But to achieve this,” he said, turning back to Graves, “I will need a body. I need your body, Dexter Graves. I therefore propose that we effect a trade. I will walk the actual in your flesh and with your bones, while you remain here and reign in my stead as Lord of all Mictlan.”

  The King raised his hand and a dozen podiums emblazoned with treble clefs sprang up from the soil like a row of improbable crops. Tuxedoed skeletons coalesced out of the mists to stand behind them, and musical instruments appeared in their hands.

  “Everything that memory contains is available to enjoy,” Caradura assured Graves, raising his voice over the big bony band when they launched into a lively swing number. More skeletons appeared around them, dancers hopping eagerly to the beat. Flesh and clothing swirled together to cover their bones by the time the band had played three or four bars, and then the gray plain looked like one of the USO shows Graves remembered from the war. Sailors in their whites spun and shimmied with pinup girls who might’ve stepped right down from the nosecones of airplanes and into three glorious dimensions. Their lips were as red as exotic fruits and their legs went on for miles.

  “You will want for nothing in this place,” Caradura promised. “The totality of experience will be yours to recreate.”

  “You really tellin’ me you’d trade in all this fine and shiny kingliness for the chance to catch a cold or stub your toe or get shot to death for no good reason in some idiotic war?”

  “I would, Dexter Graves, I would,” Caradura said. He made a slashing gesture across his throat and the band went silent on the very next note. The dancers stopped and turned to look at them from where they stood, waiting in expectant silence. “All such experiences would shine as jewels in the dark depths of my long memory.”

  Graves laughed at that, one terse bark that had no trace of humor in it. “Spoken like a man who’s never had much shrapnel impacted between his ribs,” he said.

  Caradura frowned, and the party he’d conjured to tempt his guest with dispersed back into smoke. Only the distant pyramid remained. It seemed to be the one landmark that never changed within this realm that could become a copy of any time or any place, according to its ruler’s will.

  Graves paused, soaking in the immense, empty landscape before him as he considered the King’s words, and considered them carefully.

  “So,” he said, grabbing the conversational reins when he sensed that Hardface was about to launch back into his sales rap. “Say I actually bit on this line of shit. How would we arrange the trade?”

  “Therein, Dexter Graves, lies your ‘catch.’”

  “It’s Lia, right?” Graves asked, although he didn’t really need a confirmation by now. “Ingrid wanted outta your deal, so you made her scare up Miss Lia as a replacement.”

  “Their homegrown brand of witchwork is rather rare, Dexter Graves,” Caradura said. “Such women are as strange flowers grown up in the cracks between worlds.”

  “But helpin’ us to swap would grind her into mulch, wouldn’t it? That’s why Ingrid wouldn’t do it, in the end.”

  “You are correct, Dexter Graves. Acting as our bridge will cost the witch her life. At which point she will become your servant here in the kingdom of Mictlan, and subject to your every whim. Think about it. I believe this is what you incarnations call a ‘win-win situation,’ is it not?”

  Caradura’s grin as he delivered this last line was as wide and bright as any politician’s.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  A bullet whizzed past Lia’s head like an angry, supersonic bee when she snatched up her tomcat at a lucky moment and ran for it, ducking under branches and distancing herself from the gunmen behind her. She was far more agile around here in the gathering gloom than they could ever hope to be. She knew this ground better than anyone ever had.

  The sun’s upper arc had sunk dangerously close to the western horizon. The vegetation around her blazed with the last of the afternoon’s smoldering light as she tore across the property, sprinting as hard as she ever had. It was the hour of day Lia normally loved best, although she had no time for smelling roses now.

  Her heart was thundering by the time she reached the back of the Yard. Her teeth tasted like copper and she had a deep, lancing stitch in her side, one that threatened to seize into a cramp when she pulled up short and paused in front of the eight-foot-long pile of cordwood that was stacked almost as high as the rear fence.

  As vast as it was, the nursery couldn’t go on forever.

  The odd, misshapen stump that had been a man earlier that morning was rooted deeply into the earth before the woodpile, like it had been there for a century. Lia let Tom out of her trembling arms and he leapt down onto it with easy, feline grace.

  Her first instinct was to run for Bag End, which lay off to her left, but Tom gave her to know that men were coming from that direction, and less than a second later she heard their swift if clumsy approach with her own two ears. So that wasn’t going to work. There’d be no hiding underground.

  The thing with a false hood of skin hanging askew over its ivory-yellow facial bones was much nearer, practically in sight of her already and closing fast, by the sound. It would seem to be another reanimated skeleton like Dexter, which both awed and bewildered Lia. There were old trees to her right, the same trees she’d hidden in before (as well as one new, magically-sprouted camellia), but she only had a moment left in which to bolt for cover and the woodpile was closer by.

  She snatched up Tom and ducked behind it right before the corpse with the secondhand face burst from the potted treeline at her back. He had at least half a dozen of Mictlantecuhtli’s remaining henchmen at his heels.

  Lia felt sure they’d seen her. They must have. She couldn’t have been fast enough. As a hiding place, the woodpile was shot. It was good for nothing but co
ver now.

  Still, she cowered there, trying to breathe quietly while her lungs burned and her blood thundered in her ears, just in case she was wrong and they hadn’t spotted her after all. She clutched her bristle-tailed Tom against her breastbone, wishing as hard as she could that her pursuers would move on.

  “All right, now, brujagirl,” the dead henchman in charge said, dashing any hope of a reprieve. “We’re done with this, so come on outta there. You ain’t gonna be happy about it if I have to send my people in.”

  With a glance, Tom let Lia know that this was likely true. He’d known this man before, in another era, and was willing to vouch for him as a serious threat. She therefore set her cat down and complied with the skeleton’s order, holding up her hands and stepping out from behind her small mountain of split-and-stacked firewood.

  She broke a small branch off from the new camellia shrub as she did so. Almost a twig, really. And yet it was still a wand-a symbolic channel for her will.

  She glanced west at the moment the sun finally disappeared from the horizon, leaving the sky above a cloudless cerulean blue that would bleed away to starry blackness within minutes.

  It was officially night, and all the worlds’ nocturnals were free to roam.

  “Where, pray tell, is the bloody cat?” the dead man with the torn face asked, switching from a Spanish to a British accent for no reason Lia could begin to fathom.

  She looked right at him, into the lenses of the cracked sunglasses he hadn’t yet removed, in spite of the gathering darkness. They were the only thing holding his face in position. Lia was no longer afraid, even though she could see teeth through the bloodless rents in his stubbly cheek. A strange calm descended over her, and a subtle breeze she couldn’t feel against her skin nonetheless stirred the leaves of the nearest rooted plants. The trees around her hissed as if in quiet anger, and the living men glanced around themselves nervously, even though they all were armed and Lia plainly was not.