Graves' end

(skeletal prisoner notwithstanding), should such a drastic retreat prove necessary.

The team of otherworlders spread out as they approached the simple spraypainted eyes that they experienced as blinding floodlamps. The Tzitzimime spread out literally, separating into many thousands of tiny flying and crawling creatures, in order to cover the widest area possible.

It was then that Lia realized her barrier was working after all.

The otherworlders looked confused, and were clearly not able to penetrate her concentric rings of influence well enough to find the gate. For them, the painted eyes and the glitchy Solitaire game running on the office computer conspired to create the impression of a raging party going on inside the fence. The soft music pouring from Lia’s cheap boombox sounded like a live and amplified band. The demons had come here expecting to find a lone girl in a deserted grove, so this trick alone might convince them to retreat, shaking their misshapen heads in frustration.

The bugs couldn’t even feel the subtle deflective hexwork that rendered the Yard’s green canopy of treetops totally opaque to them when they flew over. They couldn’t sense Lia or Tom at all.

Everything was working beautifully.

Lia’s body grinned, even though it was down on the ground and mostly detached from her spirit.

Around the back of the property, Nyx (the black outline comprising the goddess of night), tried to peer into the lights along the fence. She shied away, however, shielding her featureless face with a hand made out of stars and nothingness, which pleased both Lia and Black Tom to see. Bright light was obviously not Miss Nyx’s thing.

The Archon looked away, down darker streets, bewildered.

Around the front, near the northeastern corner of the Yard, some of the insects swarming in the street pulled together and solidified into the same giant, bipedal, red Ant-woman that had chased Lia the night before, which she took as a probable sign that the creature was trying to think. The bug-based entities couldn’t concentrate without assuming a humanoid form. Intellect just wasn’t an insectile trait.

Ant tried harder than the Archon of Night had against the lights, edging into the hot glare around the fence that the painted eyes provided. She cringed, but forced herself closer, and stopped when her thorax brushed up against solid wood.

Uh-oh, Lia thought. She realized she was biting her lip only when the pain surprised her and she had to force her remote body to quit it.

Ant stepped away from the fence and immediately began blinking her stalky, wavering eyes-clearly feeling the imaginal incandescence once again. Lia and Tom had a moment to hope before the Ant cautiously pressed herself back against the boards, in defiance of all their wishes.

The demon had figured out that the warding eyes’ deflective power was cancelled when she touched the fenceboards and felt what was really in front of her: nothing but cleverly-painted wood. The first of the otherworlders had breached the outer defenses and it was creeping down the fence already, feeling for an opening. The Ant, at least, knew Lia was here.

Shitballs, she thought, preparing to fire her awareness back down into her motionless body.

Then she froze in mid-air, arrested by the sight of movement inside the gate.

Oh, Hannah, no, she wailed without using her voice, upon realizing who it was she saw walking from the office shack and out toward her parked car. Han must’ve left her keys behind in the office. Again. It happened so often that it was a joke between them, and Lia castigated herself now for not remembering Hannah’s absentminded habit.

She could still be all right, though, if she’d just get into her car and drive away. The barriers would still be in effect against all the other entities, since Ant hadn’t yet shared her strategic intelligence with them. The Tzitzimitl (singular for Tzitzimime, according to sources) might try to follow her, but since Hannah didn’t fit Lia’s description it would forget why it was doing so within seconds.

She therefore willed Hannah to go on, to get out of here without delay, before the big Ant could find its way in through the gate to attack her.

Han had her fingers wrapped around her Volvo’s door handle before she looked back longingly, first toward the corner of the Yard that Lia called home, and then over toward the still-open gate. Lia’s diaphanous firewall was the only ward covering the gap, and it alone wouldn’t stop something that really meant to step through. It was little more than a scrim of imaginal camouflage.

Hannah trotted back past the gate and picked up the paper offering plate she’d left beside it earlier, meaning, Lia assumed, to provide the fascinating Crouchers with one last snack before calling it a day.

She certainly could’ve picked a better moment to indulge her sense of wonder.

Lia gritted her distant body’s teeth while she simultaneously tracked both her friend and the menacing Tzitzimitl outside the fence with her mind’s eye, uncertain of what to do. She might invite an attack if she intervened now, and if Hannah would hurry the hell up and drive out through the wards without doing anything else, there might not be a need for it.

Hannah bisected an orange with her pocketknife and set the two halves down atop the paper plate, leaving them like a tip for the unseen guardians of the Yard’s front entrance, hoping they’d work extra hard at their jobs tonight because of it.

She thought she saw something move when she stood up, in the deep shadows outside the Yard’s well-lit parking lot.

“Tom?” she said uncertainly, stepping outside the gate. She peered down the street, looking for Lia’s cat, although a cat was not even close to the sight that confronted her when she turned around and looked up.

Lia slammed back into her body as hard as she could, feeling hot blood surge up into her ears with an oceanic whoosh a second after jumping to her feet from a full lotus position. “Fuck!” she shouted. “Why didn’t she just leave?”

Tom, back in catform, flattened his ears and offered no answers.

“Han, getbackinside,” Lia shrieked, sprinting for the front of the Yard. She couldn’t see Hannah anymore, not now that she was back in her head and down on the ground, so she ran at full speed, unmindful of the many obstacles that might trip her up in the deepening darkness.

She heard a scream before she was halfway there.

“No!” she shouted again, feeling frantic with terror, her lungs burning as she and Tom raced toward Hannah’s last known position at the front gate. Lia muttered “Oh, Hannah, no, oh gods no…” under her breath as they went, without even being aware of it.

She grabbed hold of a fat cherry branch and ripped it loose when she passed by, trusting that the assaulted plant would be willing to forgive her under the circumstances. She and Tom emerged into the parking lot and she swung the wrist-thick branch around, wielding it in a way that suggested she meant to do something pretty impressive with it.

But she pulled up short instead, before the intention she meant to symbolize with the weapon could click in.

Hannah stood framed in the open gate on the far side of the parking lot, frozen in terror in front of the Ant.

“Liiaaaaaaahh,” the six-foot-tall upright female insect hissed, waving her razor-edged mandibles in Hannah’s face. “Where?”

Hannah held her hands up, backing away from the first embodied demon she’d ever had the misfortune to see and triggering its aggressive inclinations. The thing looked strong enough to pull a human being apart without making any particular effort. Lia was about to shout a warning, to try and distract the creature, when the Ant paused of her own volition, staring down at Hannah’s chest and cocking her head in a quizzical manner. It was an expression that might’ve looked cute on a puppy, but not on a murderous, monstrous insect.

Tom touched Lia’s mind and urged her to stay perfectly still. The thing hadn’t seen her yet.