Graves' end Read online

  The dashboard compass guided him through run-down residential neighborhoods and stripmall-strewn commercial stretches that he barely glanced at, and before he knew it he was pulling his stolen car into the parking lot at a place that looked a little more like the Valley he remembered. It was called ‘POTTER’S YARD,’ according to its hand-painted sign.

  Graves got out and sniffed at the chlorophyll-scented air, feeling dimly amazed for the first time since digging himself up that he could still smell things. Or speak, or think at all, for that matter. This was the spot all right, though. He’d never been here before in his life, as far as he recalled, but somehow he knew that this was it. He supposed he felt it in his bones.

  It was a nursery, obviously, and a damn big one. Like some kind of a woodland glade right smack in the middle of a dusty beige industrial zone. It seemed very quiet for such a large place. Because of its size Graves figured it might be a wholesale operation, and maybe the buyers came earlier in the day. The stillness didn’t feel suspicious to him.

  A woman came out of the small office on the far edge of the parking lot and Graves sized her up at once with his investigator’s eye. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, with long streaks of gray snaking through honey-blonde curls and pretty crinkles around perceptive blue eyes. They made her look like she’d be quick-witted, kind, and prone to laughter. She wore faded dungarees with a flannel shirt and a necklace of tiny alphabet beads that spelled out the name ‘HANNAH.’ The necklace looked like something a girl might make to give as a gift. Maybe a niece or some other relation had strung it together, Graves guessed, because if Hannah’s own kid had done it, the thing would’ve read ‘MOM.’

  “Hi there,” the lady said, crunching across the gravel lot to greet what she clearly believed was just another customer, out shopping for dirt or flowers or whatever the hell it was that people bought at a place like this. “Can I help you find any… oh.”

  She stopped and trailed off when she got her first good look at the skeletal remains of Dexter Graves.

  “I’m guessing you came to see Lia,” she said.

  If he’d had any, Graves would’ve raised his eyebrows. This woman seemed like she practically expected him, even as shocked as she was by his appearance. “I lost something,” he explained, and cocked a bony thumb back at his stolen car. “Compass in the rocketpod led me here.”

  “Definitely, you want Lia,” the woman called Hannah told him. “She left, a little while ago, but if you’d like to wait-”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Thought you might,” Hannah said, nodding. “You’ve got a patient look.” She examined him critically, doing her best to take him in stride. “Well, I guess you might as well come inside, then,” she decided aloud, perhaps assuming it was best to be polite when confronted with something you couldn’t understand. “I’d offer you a cup of tea, but it looks like it’d go right through you.”

  Graves followed Hannah back into the weathered little office shack. “Yeah, well,” he said, “I’d ask ya for a belt of scotch, except you’re right-I don’t have the stomach for it anymore!”

  Hannah laughed, brightly if a little nervously, before the old screen door slapped shut behind them.

  Chapter Seven

  Lia mentally ran through her checklist for ‘going dark,’ as she conceived it, during the short and familiar drive home. She barely noticed the light traffic on the move all around her.

  First and most vital to the things she meant to do was to understand exactly what they were up against. According to Black Tom and the notions he sent into her head, Tzitzimime and all things like them had once been summed up by the old people as ‘Those Who Are Not Our Brothers,’ because their experience of the worlds is that much different from our own. Symbols were their points of reference, rather than places or things. Meaning, to Lia, that the insectile entities might find her on a symbolic model like a map more easily than they could find her on the street. Their minds were simplified mechanisms, and she figured it shouldn’t be too hard to hide from things that couldn’t hope to find the same 7-11 twice without being given new directions.

  Deflecting them was sure to be safer and more effective than making some sort of desperate stand. If she confused them badly enough, they might forget what they already knew about her. That was possible. If not, she knew of a trap more elaborate than a three-word palindrome that had the potential to pick off the bugs one by one. Such work left no margin for error, but precedent led her to believe that the Aztec entities should be vulnerable to it… assuming she got every detail of the experimental spell’s construction right.

  The term ‘Tzitzimime’ itself was one Tom had guided her to on the internet several nights before, filling her mind with the knowledge that the beings so-named were something they might expect to see when they ventured up to the top of the Tower, in a worst-case scenario. Lia kept a whole raft of mythology websites bookmarked on her browser, and today she was glad she’d studied them, as every scrap of knowledge about the history or behavior of Mictlantecuhtli’s demon slaves improved her sense of how to deal with them. Tom assured her that all of this was so, and that her understanding was well in place.

  Secondly, then, she needed a way to lose focus. Not a distraction or a diversion, but a systematic approach to fuzzing the mantle of symbols that make up an identity, such as our names. The ones we choose, the ones we’re given, and the ones that just evolve. Blurring such signifiers would make it hard for otherworlders to perceive the actuality behind them, the things most people would’ve said were ‘really’ there. (Although the ‘real,’ as Lia knew, was often less defined and more slippery than those same people would ever care to imagine.)

  At any rate, collecting extra names was a good place to start.

  Lia checked the list of voicemail messages waiting on her phone as she drove. There were quite a number of missed calls, as she tended to leave the ringer off. Many of them were from a number identified as belonging to ATLAS RECOVERY ASSOCIATES.

  Lia hit the reply button. Moments later a voice chirped in her ear: “Atlas Debt Recovery, is this Ms. Camellia Flores speaking?”

  “Yeah, you guys called me, I think?”

  “Yes, Ms. Flores, we’ve left a number of messages,” the bill collector said, managing to sound both solicitous and judgmental at the very same time. “I’m Marco, by the way. Is it all right if I call you Cammie?”

  “It sure is, Marco,” Lia said.

  “Good, Cammie. Thank you. Well, then, were you aware that you still owe-”

  “Y’know,” Lia said, losing interest in his spiel now that her goal in calling back had been achieved. “This isn’t really the best time after all. Call ya back.”

  “Cammie, wait!” Marco cried, with real desperation straining his voice. “Camellia, Ms. Flores, please, it’s extremely important that we-”

  Lia folded up her phone as she came to a red light at Magnolia. More of that later, she promised herself. She had a long list of people she could count on to call her by something other than her personal name, and every time one of them did so it made her a tiny bit harder for imaginal eyes to see.

  Glancing in her rearview mirror, she noticed two plain, almost identical black cars idling amidst the ranks of traffic that had lined up behind her at the light. They looked like a pair of unmarked police cars, although she somehow didn’t think that was what they were.

  “Have they been following us?” she asked of Black Tom. He looked in their Mazda’s side mirror and raised an eyebrow.

  Something about those cars made her nervous. Just in case, just to see, she turned right without signaling and headed east on Chandler, where a two-lane bike path had replaced the train tracks that once ran down the middle of the extra-broad street. She was going out of her way to see if they’d follow.

  They followed, all right. Both cars.

  “Shitballs,” Lia said, her brow tightening with worry as she looked over to Black Tom, only to find that he
’d already vanished.

  Tom faded into a state of semi-solidity in the back seat of the closest of those two black cars when it rolled to a stop behind Lia at the next red light. There were two shaved-headed men sitting up front, and neither of the stalkers noticed his silent appearance. He reached out and put a hand over each of their faces.

  They dropped into sleep so swiftly that it looked as though Tom had pulled their power cords. He dipped into their undefended minds, ascertaining that they and others like them were, as far as they knew, on the payroll of a powerful ‘businessman’ they never expected to meet. Even their dealings with his lieutenants were transacted mostly by phone. When they dared to whisper about their boss, the name they used was ‘Mickey Hardface.’

  Or, in Spanish, ‘Miguel Caradura.’ The very name Tom and Lia had seen stenciled on the door to what he’d called lasCamerasdelRey, the King’s Chambers, back when he’d been alive.

  This was getting serious, then. The nocturnal Tzitzimime, worse than useless when it came to numbers and addresses, must at least have furnished el Rey with a description of Lia’s car and the general area they’d chased her to last night. He couldn’t tell when or where they’d picked up their current tails, only that it must have been within the last few minutes, since departing from the coffee shop. His sentiments fell somewhere between a hope and an assumption that their pursuers hadn’t seen Lia meeting with Ingrid Redstone, the woman who’d asked her to help find a missing member of her family. A relation claimed by Mictlantecuhtli wasn’t one the lady would enjoy seeing again, although even if Tom could have told her so he doubted it would’ve brought much comfort. He had to admit that Lia might be right, that the lovely Miss Redstone was better off being encouraged to walk away. He presumed she’d be all right as long as she did so.

  A left-turn arrow flashed green in front of them and Lia drove on. The second black car followed after her, although the one Tom was in did not. Traffic piled up behind it, and it wasn’t half a minute before an angry horn sounded, waking the pair of napping henchmen in the front seats with a violent start. The driver stomped on the gas, taking the turn onto Vineland a hair’s breadth ahead of oncoming traffic while he scanned for Lia, and promptly plowed them right into the tailgate of a pickup truck that was making a slow turn at the end of the next block.

  Lia’s little car was long gone, the goons noted in dismay. They exchanged an uneasy look as two big, angry rednecks stepped out of the truck they’d collided with and started toward them, displaying prison tattoos along with an unfriendly attitude.

  Feeling satisfied with his work on a deeply personal level, Black Tom moved on.

  Lia’s car picked up speed as she headed up Vineland. The remaining pursuer followed, tailing her much more aggressively now and cutting people off to do it.

  Black Tom poked his head out from under the front end of this second black sedan, as though he were somehow clinging to its undercarriage. Neither his clothes nor his gray-streaked hair moved in the breeze generated by the car’s momentum. Even his hat stayed firmly planted atop his head, as if wind resistance meant nothing to him at all. Which, in fact, it didn’t.

  Tom reached up the black car’s grille, found the hood release, and popped it. The hood flew up, blocking the entire windshield and obscuring the occupants’ view of the road. Tom heard two grown men yelp in surprise from inside the car.

  The unseen driver slammed on the brakes. Tom became diffuse, letting his awareness rise up above the scene while the vehicle he’d been hovering under fishtailed to a stop in the middle of the road, snarling traffic in both directions. Horns blared. Curses were shouted. Both lanes clogged up, making the street impassable. The man in the dark sedan’s passenger seat jumped out to slam the hood closed, but Lia had already zipped through the next light up the street as it changed from yellow to red, and was gone.

  She bumped fists with Black Tom as soon as he re-appeared in the seat beside her and they made their getaway, leaving busy Vineland just above Burbank before heading further north on Lankershim.

  Some little bit of time later they pulled into the lot at Potter’s Yard. Lia parked next to a gleaming new BMW, a sporty little thing, and eyed it as she got out. It probably belonged to some production manager looking to rent plants at a later date, she guessed. She couldn’t imagine anyone stuffing sacks of fertilizer into that trunk, or cramming potted seedlings into that luxurious back seat.

  Lia’s black cat blinked at the sound of her car door closing-a sound its sensitive ears registered and recognized even from the distant, shady pocket of the property where Tom had left it earlier. The cat shook its head and stretched as the ex-necromancer’s wandering mind reassumed control of its nervous system, his ghost relaxing into its skin after the strange, yoga-like exertion involved in sending himself out.

  Comfortably planted back in the only body he had left to call his own, Tom trotted off to greet his girl.

  He ran up as Lia was crossing the parking lot. Her mental image of ‘Black Tom’ had vanished from the passenger seat at the instant the cat awoke, which Lia accepted as a matter of course. She didn’t even think about such things anymore. She crouched down to pet the cat, her Tom in any form, while he purred and nuzzled at her ankles, making her feel at home.

  This, she thought, returning to the checklist in her mind, was the third and final thing she required for her planned operation: a place to go to ground. A base of operations, a place to protect and be protected by.

  This, right here, Potter’s Yard, was hers. Her roots were here (at least those she’d set down for herself, with Tom’s assistance), and by nightfall she intended to have the place hexed up so tight Saint Anthony himself would never be able to find her. Nothing was going to track her back here, not ever again. Not if she had anything to say about it.

  She looked up at the sky before she started across to the office shack. There were still a few hours left before dark. Should be time enough, she thought. If she hurried.

  Hannah was nowhere to be seen when she entered the office, and Lia frowned. Absence wasn’t Han’s style. She was the lynchpin of the operation here (although Lia knew Hannah would’ve modestly claimed that it was her, Lia’s, green thumb that kept the place afloat).

  “Hannah?” she said, uncertainly.

  Then, from the back room, she heard the low rumble of a male voice, and it was followed by a pretty peal of Hannah’s irrepressible laughter.

  Lia smiled, feeling impressed, surprised, and pleased to think that Hannah should have a gentleman caller back there. A gentleman of means, too, judging by the deluxe piece of German engineering he’d left on display out in the parking lot. She headed in the direction of the voices, parting Hannah’s Japanese, noren-style half-curtain with Hokusai’s famous wave printed on it before stepping into the shack’s back room.

  She was halted in her tracks by the remarkable sight of a well-rotted cadaver in a toy hat and a torn raincoat lounging at the table with her boss, who had a very full glass of red wine in her hand.

  “Oh, Lia!” Hannah said cheerfully. “Good, you’re back. This is-or, this was-Dexter Graves.”

  “Miss.” The thing called ‘Graves’ stood up and took off his fake fedora. He offered a skeletal hand to Lia, who dumbly took it, despite herself.

  Hannah grinned. “He’s come a hell of a long way to find you,” she said.

  Chapter Eight

  Ingrid stood on the trash-strewn sidewalk and looked up as the limousine that had just dropped her off pulled away from the curb, leaving her alone on the deserted street. The century-old office building before her still seemed to stretch into the sky, even though most of its neighbors rivaled it in height, these days.

  Silly girl, she thought, smiling gently as she recalled Lia’s well-intentioned warnings about returning here. As if such efforts at deflection would keep her away from this place. As if anything ever could. The building was even named for her, in a manner of speaking.

  The Silent Tower.


  Trying the knob on the front door, she found it unlocked. Entering, she found the interior looking… new. Clean and pristine. Not at all the way she’d left it earlier that morning, when she went out to meet with Lia. The potted palms on either side of the double-doors down at the end of the entryway were green and thriving. She fancied she could even smell a ghost of fresh paint.

  You’re too good to me, Mickey, she thought.

  She knew she was expected, but a welcome mat this impressive still came as quite a surprise. The place hadn’t looked this slick since 1950, when Mickey locked the doors rather than risk having the last object Dexter Graves ever touched-a cigarette lighter he’d dropped while dying-disturbed by the wrong sort of hands. Mictlantecuhtli’s reach had always been at its longest this time of year, close to what the locals liked to call el Dia de los Muertos (and her own, more northerly ancestors had once celebrated as Samhain, or All Hallow’s Eve), but this was getting out of hand. The King’s power in this world remained limited, for the time being, but Ingrid had to wonder what would happen when his influence was strong enough to spill out into the street.

  She felt unsettled, but she had a purpose here. There was no sense in putting it off.

  When she clicked down the hall on her dramatic, blood-red heels, the front door closed on its own and the lights behind her went out, one by one.

  She made it a point of pride not to look back.

  The foyer’s double-doors opened before her and she saw that the downstairs lobby was also in perfect repair. The floorlamps glowed a mellow yellow, and the floor tiles were polished to a mirror sheen.