Graves' end

(minus most of his left hand) into the air in triumph. “Steeeeeerike one!” he cried, feeling entirely too pleased with himself. Then, with only one leg left to balance on, he toppled right over and sprawled to the floor with a hollow xylophone clatter.

He was outside that magic circle, though, he noted with satisfaction upon looking up from the smooth concrete. Well outside that circle.

He scrambled over to the shelf and began sweeping up his bones, fitting them together like puzzle pieces as he came across them. “Now I just gotta pull myself together, here,” he muttered to himself.

In one of several open message windows on Lia’s laptop screen, someone using the imaginative nickname of ‘ASSLVR69’ asked ‘Mia’ what sort of panties she was wearing, and Lia responded by pecking out ‘blk lace frm vic scrt,’ although white cotton from Target was, at present, closer to the truth. Not that it was really any of his business.

As if, she thought with a frown, before hitting enter.

She didn’t like doing this at all, using people (even these people), as it felt sordid and made her sad, but she couldn’t argue with the results, either. The Yard hadn’t had another demon problem since they’d exterminated the Ant, and the false names her correspondents addressed her by helped to keep her real one safely obscured from the quartet of creatures that still remained in play.

Hannah stood some way off, leaning against a redwood arbor and gazing up at the stars. There was no moon in the sky this early in the evening. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock.

Hannah shivered. Only slightly, but Lia noticed. “I can go get those sleeping bags now, if you’re cold,” she offered.

Hannah looked over. “I can wait, if you don’t want to, you know, go back down there yet.”

Lia set aside her depleted wineglass, then stood and stretched. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m getting hungry anyway. Here, watch my names for me.”

Neither of them mentioned Dexter Graves, but Lia assumed they were both thinking about him. His imprisonment within her hobbit hole was the only conceivable reason why she might not feel comfortable going underground. Hannah came over to the tiny bistro table Lia’d been sitting at to monitor the laptop as Lia headed off, feeling the black, nighttime foliage engulf her when she waded into it. She found the sensation more comforting than intimidating. This was her darkness, and she felt perfectly at home within it.

The first joint of Graves’ left pinkie fell off as he was reaching up for the hatch’s wheel. He caught it, nearly falling off the exit tube’s ladder for the effort, and stuck it back into place. It stayed, like his bones were magnetized or something. He was already back in his coat and hat, with his left shinbone and the corresponding foot similarly reattached.

He was making his break.

The hatch wheel turned on its own before Graves could take hold of it. He almost fell again, cringing back as the hatch cover groaned open on its heavy-duty hinges.

Lia, above, turned away before she could see him dangling there from the tube ladder, framed in the hatch’s mouth like a goddamn portrait.

“Hannah?” she called back into the darkness. “Would you rather have banana chips or cereal? I don’t have much.” She paused, then called again. “Han?”

There was no response from Miss Hannah. The older lady must not’ve heard. The nursery was large, and this Lia didn’t seem like she’d be given to shouting. Graves’ assessment of her modest nature was confirmed when she headed back the way she came, out of his view, rather than standing there and bellowing her question until she got an answer.

He hurried up, scrambling out of the tube she’d left open, then scurried around behind it and watched Lia disappear back into the bush.

Hannah was still stargazing, leaning back in her chair when Lia walked up.

“Hannah? You want something to eat?”

“Weird moon tonight,” Hannah said idly, shaking her head in distracted answer to the question. “Came up fast. In just the last few minutes, it seems like.”

“Shouldn’t be much of a moon tonight,” Lia said. “Just a tiny sliver.”

Hannah looked over at her, letting the front legs of her rocked-back chair touch the earth before she sat up straight. She pointed just above the horizon, through a loose screen of leaves and branches. “Then what’s that?” she asked.

Lia squinted to see. There was something out there, hovering beyond the canopy. The small, bright, full ‘moon’ behind the trees seemed almost to flicker with gray static. Lia frowned, suddenly on her guard. “I don’t know what that is,” she said in a low voice. “But it’s not the moon.”

Hannah stood and looked up with Lia.

As they watched, the staticmoon shuddered drunkenly to one side, leaving a still, black shadow of itself behind, superimposed on the sky.

Lia and Hannah exchanged a nervous look. They both saw it. It was happening. Tom’s catbody woke with a start, and his tail puffed up with panic as he leapt to his paws. Lia knew her defenses had been breached again even before the two basketball-sized orbs (one ultrablack and the other staticy silver) descended into the foliage. The black one came down quite close by.

“Oh, shit,” Hannah said, and seized Lia’s hand. She was galvanized with fresh terror.

Lia put a finger to her lips as the black orb unfolded into the outline of a woman, one who seemed to have been hollowed out and filled with the night sky. The sky-woman paused and seemed to look around. It was difficult to tell, as she didn’t have any eyes.

A second form, this one flickering with static, appeared some distance away, amidst the rosebushes.

“Don’t move,” Lia whispered to Hannah. “I don’t think they see us.” I hope, she didn’t bother to add. She could feel Tom’s worries as vividly as her own.

Still, despite the fact that the Archons had obviously crossed her barriers, she didn’t think all of her tricks had been cancelled. It was the way they swiveled their heads around in irritated confusion, like they were searching through a crowd. Lia believed the music and the multitude of card games playing out on the office computer were still making it look, to the otherworlders, as though they’d dropped into the middle of some weird underground rave scene. Dozens of vague identities would be wandering amongst the plants, from the Archons’ perspective, appearing for a few moments and then disappearing again to be replaced by other images. Lia and Hannah would stay consistent and unchanging amidst the crowd, but there were too many fates coming and going for them to be picked out by the weird women in that manner. So they remained camouflaged. Tom, as well as Lia’s own observations, confirmed it.

The two new ladydemons (the nightsky one Lia’d already pegged as Nyx and that other, the one she now guessed might be ‘Lyssa,’ a face and form related to Nyx that the Greeks had used to explain mental illness) both turned away and strode off toward the back of the Yard. So far the two remaining Tzitzimime had failed to join them, and Lia hoped it meant that the lady-bugs, at least, were still unable to breach her circles. She wasn’t all that squeamish about bugs in general, as someone who lived in a garden, but even she had to make an exception when it came to angry specimens of unusual size.

She picked up her security branch and followed the Archons, at a cautious distance. Tom went after her, flicking his tail in agitation.

Hannah followed too, her hunched-over posture conveying a great deal of trepidation. “What are they?” she whispered when she caught up with Lia. “They’re really sort of beautiful.”

“Archons, I think,” Lia said, looking troubled.

“Like the ant-thing?”

“More like little gods.”

Hannah paused for a long moment of silent consideration. “Is it a good idea to be following them, then?” she asked, catching up with Lia for a second time. “Maybe we oughta go the other way.”

“Whatever they’re seeing, it’s not us,” Lia whispered. “Now, shhh.”

The Archons paused, cocking their simplified heads in creepy synchronization. Both of them had sensed