Graves' end

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.

Ingrid crossed to the bank of three elevators waiting on the far side of the room and stepped into the center car. The doors closed behind her, and as soon as they did so, the vitality drained out of the foyer. It decayed back into the dusty, ravaged ruin that lay underneath the King’s illusions, now that she wasn’t there to see them anymore.

Starting off as a similar sort of moldy wreck, the upstairs corridor brightened and restored itself in perfect anticipation of the elevator’s bell.

Ingrid stepped out of the car and into the hall, onto carpeting that matched her shoes. She hadn’t seen the transformation occur, but she sensed that it had. The magic left a charged, electric feeling hanging in the air. She went straight to Miguel Caradura’s office door.

The name painted there at eye level was still marred by Graves’ bloodstain, even after the passage of more than sixty years. That much had not been cleaned up in honor of her visit. Ingrid contemplated the rusty smear for a moment before opening the door. She knew better than to think that leaving it there had been an oversight.

The outer office she walked into looked mostly appropriate to the modern world, although its far wall was constructed of rough mud bricks that didn’t match the rest of the decor one bit. Ingrid could see Mictlantecuhtli’s bloodcaked altar through the doorway in the adobe wall: a round slab of limestone carved with hearts, skulls, and others of the King’s symbols. Beyond that was yet another doorway-a doorless portal to the outside world, ancient and simple in its style-one that admitted a sort of weak, gray daylight into the sacrificial room.

“Hello?” Ingrid said.

There was no answer. The place was empty.

Ingrid frowned as she stepped through the doorway between the Chambers and into the inner sanctum. She gave the altar a wide berth on her way to the far door.

Then she stepped outside and found herself on the top level of a monumental Aztec pyramid. It was the only structure of any kind anywhere in sight.

Silver stars and a line of moons in progressing phases hung motionless across a matte gray sky, above her. Pale, fog-shrouded suns hovered at either horizon, and the untrammeled landscape looked like the Los Angeles area would have back in the days when the world was still flat.

This was Mictlan, the Realm of the Shades, where Time did not apply. Which meant that events here felt like they were either taking forever or happening instantaneously, and sometimes both at once.

Ingrid sighed, looking down the excessively long and steep set of rough stone steps that lay at her feet. There was no other way down the side of the pyramid.

“Dammit, Mickey…” she muttered, taking off her impractical heels. She carried them by their thin straps as she began picking her way down the precarious stairs in nothing but her stocking feet.

Some indeterminate and utterly meaningless span of the pseudotime Mickey insisted on playing around with later, Ingrid reached ground level.

Her hair was mussed, she was out of breath, and her feet were screaming. Her silk stockings were a total write-off. She sat down on the last step and considered putting her pumps back on, then just threw them aside instead.

“Lady Redstone.”

Ingrid looked up. Standing a few yards away from her was a tall and dignified-looking skeleton in dapper black tie and tails. This was Winston, Mickey’s majordomo and the overseer of his affairs out in the realworld. Ingrid knew him all too well. “Winston,” she said.

“Mictlantecuhtli would see you,” the dead manservant told her.

“Good for him,” was her terse reply. She was still irritated over having been made to climb down the pyramid’s side when Mickey normally met her at the door between life and death, the one between his Chambers. These games of his were so uncalled for. Being pawned off on a servant was nothing she appreciated, either.