him. This was nothing if not a weird situation, though. His first responses to it were bound to be a little wonky.
The drawer he was dredging yielded up an ancient pack of cigarettes wrapped in a clear, rubbery-feeling bag, on which some suburban wit had jotted ‘IN CASE OF APOCALYPSE,’ in bold black ink. Graves figured today came close enough. There was also a cheap-looking plastic lighter in the bag. He felt heartened at first and clicked the ‘bic’ to life, but then he sighed in disappointment at the device’s meager flash of blue-tinged flame.
“Just ain’t the same, somehow,” he muttered.
Graves kept the cigarettes but chucked the worthless lighter back into the drawer. It landed on what was obviously a spare set of keys to something, jingling them brightly.
They were unlike any other keys Graves knew, with chunky plastic bases and strange grooves down their shafts rather than the little cutout mountain ranges he remembered. Graves picked them up, curious about what sort of vehicle they started, or which door around here they might unlock.
He glanced back out the front window.
A fancy-looking, carlike thing sat parked out there in the driveway. A tiny, rounded, streamlined capsule that would’ve made a lot more sense with wings than it did on wheels.
Graves looked again at the keys.
A minute later the fedora-wearing skeleton closed the fancyass car’s door behind himself, muffling the neighborhood’s sonic backdrop of distant leafblowers and bright birdsong.
He took in the dashboard, with some trepidation. There were more dials, gauges, and knobs in here than you’d find in a goddamn experimental aircraft. And he’d been in Naval intelligence even before the war, so he knew from whence he spoke (
“Still feel like I oughta have a pilot’s license here, though,” Graves said, talking aloud just to hear a human voice-even his own raspy approximation of one-within the unnatural silence of the cushioned cockpit.
The goddamn grave hadn’t been this quiet.
“But it’s just a car, right?” he said, reassuring himself. “May look like something outta Jules Verne’s hangover, but it’s still just a car…”
He put a key in the ignition and started her up. That much, at least, went according to plan. Graves felt heartened. “Okay, then,” he murmured. “Here goes nothin.’”
He backed successfully out into the road. A dashboard compass swung round to south, and that pleased him, for some reason.
Pleased him deeply.
“Yeah, southbound…” he breathed, enraptured by the bobbing of the compass ball within its shiny, fluid-filled globe. It seemed to ease some of the knotted tension in his nonexistent gut, the tension that was nagging at him to go and find his goddamn lighter, wherever the hell it may happen to be. This new sense of direction so thoroughly eclipsed all the rest of the anxiety and astonishment he was feeling in regard to his situation that it was almost like… well, magic.
Graves would’ve been more impressed, but in truth he barely noticed. He only had eyes for that compass.
“Okay, that feels right,” he muttered to himself. “Due south. Retrace my steps, find my lighter. Figure the rest out later. I can do that. Yeah. But for now, due south. And awaaay we go…”
Graves tipped his hat to a stupefied gardener at the corner as he lurched down the street in his commandeered vehicle, following the compass south toward what he remembered to be the farmlands and citrus groves of the northern San Fernando Valley.
Chapter Five
Lia emerged from Bag End’s doortube, followed a moment later by her Tom. She was freshly dressed in a knee-length skirt and a light sweater, in deference to the cool November weather. Tom wandered off, still in his cat-form, while Lia wheeled the hatch shut, stretched, and looked around.
Potter’s Yard was bright green and peaceful in the pure morning light. All clear of ladydemons, as she’d expected it would be. Tzitzimime were nighttime things, drowned out by the sun. They’d be back tonight, she had no doubt, but that was then. There was time. Right now Lia had an appointment to keep, and at it she firmly intended to extricate herself from the situation that had brought those things down on her in the first place.
The memory of insectile legs tickling her skin made it crawl all over again. She couldn’t help but think back on the narrow escape she almost hadn’t made the night before. Tom, who never let her go anywhere ignorant or unprepared, had informed her as best he could about the secret history of that shabby brick building, but now, because of the creatures they’d encountered up there, she might never be able to go out after dark again. That seemed to her like a harsh restriction to live under. No more dinners or drinks or decent music, all of which occurred under the cover of night. If Lia couldn’t do something about this, she feared that her already truncated social life would soon be limited strictly to brunch.
She sighed. What she’d wanted out of last night’s adventure was not only to learn something new (which she’d accomplished, all right), but also to help someone out, if she could, and she didn’t feel she’d managed that. She hated to admit defeat, but now, in the light of a brand new day, all she really wanted was to put the experience behind her. Jeopardy so physical and consequences so real were not what she was used to dealing with. Black Tom’s tutelage may have led her into some unusual experiences over the last few years (including arming law enforcement officers with information about closed-off places they needed to enter, on an occasion or two), but reviving people’s flagging houseplants was still far more familiar and comfortable territory.
Lia never advertised her services, exactly, but word still got around. People knew there was a girl in a garden who could do the things that witches did, and would… provided you asked her nicely and really needed the help.
There were definite limits to her beneficence, however. Lia was neither a saint nor a martyr. She was only herself, and while she might’ve wished there was more she could do in this circumstance, she also knew when to cut her losses. If she and Tom kept poking around, someone was apt to get hurt. Or worse.
As afraid as she was for herself, though, Lia couldn’t up and quit without doing
She brushed her fingers through glowing, sunlit foliage as she made her unhurried way across the Yard. The morning’s handful of wholesale buyers were still loading up their small trucks with flats of seedling plants and other landscaping necessities. The last of them would be gone in an hour or so and then the rest of the day would be quiet, with perhaps a little bit of retail business trickling in later on. They’d be closed tomorrow and Wednesday as well, as there wasn’t enough trade in the fall to bother staying open to the general public in the middle of the week.
Lia liked this time of year, when the weather was crisp and on a normal afternoon there would be little to do beyond the comforting ritual rounds she habitually made in the course of tending to the Yard’s myriad of plants.
Hannah Potter was busy ringing up a purchase in the office shack. She’d been the sole proprietor of Potter’s Yard since purchasing the abandoned property it now occupied about seven years back. These days she was Lia’s boss and nominal landlord as well as her dearest friend, despite a near thirty year difference in their ages.
Lia waved to her through the shack’s un-shuttered window and pointed toward her car, implicitly asking if any help was needed before she took off, even though she’d told Hannah yesterday that she had an appointment to keep this morning. They had a part-time crew that came in during their busier seasons and on weekends, but right now, mid-autumn and on a Monday, it was just the two of them.
Hannah waved back, nodding to indicate that all was under control, and gave her a thumbs up to punctuate it. The canvas gardening glove she had on looked like a big cartoon hand.
Lia’s black tomcat crouched down beneath a distant rhododendron bush and went as still as death (although
