Graves' end

understand,” she said at last, although she clearly didn’t.

Lia wanted to hug her, but she could be awkward in her expression of feeling (having been socialized under some fairly unusual circumstances), and the appropriate moment for it passed her by.

It was plain enough that Hannah’s experience of meeting Dexter Graves had called her basic picture of reality into question, sparking an agonizing reappraisal of her entire belief system. Lia felt her searching for words to express herself. She did understand what Hannah was going through, from personal experience, and so she chose to let her friend talk through it, for a minute, despite the approaching darkness.

“Lia?” Hannah ventured in a troubled tone. “This’s all been, I don’t know… so different from the things I’ve seen you do before.”

Lia smiled. “Like getting plants to grow and reading people’s tea leaves?”

“Yeah. I guess,” Hannah said. “And those sorts of things are impressive enough, believe me, but this, this has been… I don’t even know. On another level.”

“C’mon,” Lia said. She helped Hannah up and guided her toward her car, which was parked on the far side of the gravel lot.

“Where’d you even learn these things?” Hannah asked.

Lia shrugged, glancing down at her black cat. She’d never figured out how to explain her teacher, or the relationship they had. It was something else she’d never found the right moment or the right words for.

“The earth,” she said, in partial answer to Hannah’s question. “Books, certain plants…” She hesitated, then told her friend the simple truth: “Black Tom’s taught me more than anyone.”

Hannah’s eyes widened, as eyes do when the people behind them are told something crazy. “You mean your cat?” she said, making no attempt to disguise her knee-jerk incredulity… until she saw how it abraded Lia’s feelings. Then she paused, as they reached her Volvo, and looked down at the animal in question. He blinked back up at her with his bright green eyes.

“He’s not really a cat, you know,” Lia said, trying not to sound defensive. “I mean, yeah, of course that’s a cat, but a cat’s not all that’s in there. If you know what I mean.”

“I… I did not know that, no,” Hannah said. After a beat she admitted, very softly: “Nothing looks like it did to me this morning.”

Lia did hug her then, feeling for her but also feeling the pinch. “Hannah, honey, I know,” she said, into the older woman’s ear. “But we’ll have to talk about it tomorrow.”

Hannah pulled back and offered an awkward smile. “I kind of want to stay and see how some of these things work,” she said, sweeping a hand around in general reference to the nonsensical projects they’d labored over all afternoon.

“But you won’t want to be here if they don’t,” was Lia’s terse reply.

Hannah understood that this was probably so, and nodded reluctantly. Lia herded her into the old Volvo and closed the door behind her. Hannah’s driver’s side window was already down.

“Go home,” Lia told her through it. “And call me when you get there, but don’t call me by my name when you do. Okay? That’s important.”

“Okay.”

“Go on, then,” Lia said. “Get out of here.” She slapped the top of the car like a cowpoke motivating a sluggish steer and then hurried off, back into the darkening Yard and onto other last-minute errands.

Chapter Thirteen

Lia sat down again, crosslegged, cat in her lap, back in the cozy bower where she liked to do her psychic exercises. It was fully dark by now, just after nightfall. She set a notebook computer she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car next to herself on the bare earth. It was on, but closed and quiet, waiting for her in standby mode. She closed her eyes, controlled her breath, and within moments she was able to send herself out, leaving her own body in a sort of standby mode, as Black Tom had long ago taught her to do.

‘Sending out’ was Tom’s term (or at least one he’d surrounded with an aura of approval back when she first thought of it, the same way he once had with his own name). The ever-informative internet had the technique labeled in various places as scrying, astral projection, remote viewing or skywalking, but they were all names for a more or less identical concept. Lia wasn’t as skilled a sender as her Tom, who’d been practicing the art for well more than a century, long outlasting his original body in the process, but Lia didn’t need to be a master in order to help him watch over the Yard’s new fortifications.

She rose up-at least the invisible, non-physical part of her did-nearly to the tops of the Yard’s tallest trees. Tom left his catbody and rose up with her. There was nothing of him to see, nothing of either of them, and yet they each felt the other hovering close by as they chanced a look around.

Potter’s Yard was situated in a semi-industrialized area in the northernmost part of North Hollywood, right before it became Sun Valley on the maps, so there were few homes nearby and little traffic to be seen on a weeknight. Not too many people around. The area managed to feel surprisingly isolated and almost rural, despite being set right in the heart of one of LA’s largest suburbs.

Both Lia and Tom were careful not to rise too high or to extend their awareness beyond the psychic barriers they’d erected earlier in the day-barriers that rippled when the evening’s first otherworlders arrived in the neighborhood like day-late trick-or-treaters, causing Lia’s distant body to break out in gooseflesh and dashing her last faint hopes that the Tzitzimime wouldn’t manage to find their way back here at all.

A striking set of Mictlan’s minions stepped into the nearest lighted intersection, a few dozen feet from the Yard’s front gate. They seemed almost to coalesce out of the shadows themselves. There were two new creatures in the lead, Lia noted. Not Tzitzimime, although, like the bugwomen, these were also doing their best to appear human. With a heavy emphasis on ‘their best.’ In practice, the only disguises the new additions to the crew seemed able to manage were woman-shaped outlines: one of them ink-black and flecked with stars, like the night sky, while the other crackled with a sort of mad static that jumped and flickered in an unhealthy-looking way.

These two were more than demons. They were Archons, Lia guessed-ancient embodiments of fundamental concepts, and who knew how old or how powerful they might be?

She dropped back into herself and flipped open her computer.

Tom gave her a sense that entities such as these Archons were free to pretend to be anything they liked (such as human women) on the other side of the door between worlds, but over here they were compelled to appear more or less as they actually were. They could never completely conceal their fundamental natures out here in the realworld. Lia scanned a webpage or three with that in mind, until she felt reasonably sure she’d pinned down the one who looked like she’d been airbrushed with stars as the goddess of darkness and night. Nyx, the Greeks had called her. The staticy one she was less sure of, although she felt no less threatened by her. The pair might’ve been able to project those womanly forms, but it seemed they couldn’t finish them off with crucial details like hair, clothing, or facial features. Or maybe they were simply too far removed from humanity and its concerns to know how to draw up more than simple representational sketches.

Lia sent herself out again. Carefully, not wanting to be picked out by otherworldly eyes, which could be exceptionally keen under certain circumstances. She rejoined her disembodied Tom, who’d never stopped monitoring the situation from above, and he let her feel that nothing much had changed, as of yet.

She watched as Ant, Mantis and Wasp, the original Tzitzimime, hardened into their three distinct avatars out of an amorphous swarm of gnats.

Lia felt ill with anticipation as the five otherworlders paused to look around. From her projected perspective, she saw her own defenses more clearly than they did. The ring of ghostly flames around the property shimmered, although it would be opaque like a one-way mirror from the other side, and a challenge even to perceive. The eyes she’d painted all down the fence appeared to be blazing like halogen lights. The two flat, feminoid shapes-the Archons-exchanged a look, and Lia felt her earthbound body’s heart speed up in terror when they chose to head in the Yard’s direction, despite the wards intended to shunt their attention aside. The three Tzitzimime trailed after their new leaders, and Lia readied herself to drop back into her head and make a dash for her bomb-shelter home