Graves' end

something.

Lia and Hannah crouched down behind plant cover to spy on them. Tom hunkered down too, watching the scene with his keen feline eyes.

Some yards away, a stark white skull in a worn fedora popped up from behind a broad-leafed bird of paradise bush, and that, at least, was obvious enough to the Archons, even amidst the flocks of normal-if-temporary individuals they thought were roaming all around them.

“Oh, for the love of-” Lia cursed quietly, fuming inside. It was bad enough that the otherworlders had penetrated her barriers, but this was way too much. How in the hell could that walking anatomical specimen have slipped the bonds she’d put him under?

Lia grabbed Hannah’s hand when Graves broke from his cover and shot for the fence. Han, she could feel, was likewise ready to flee, in the opposite direction.

“Wait,” she breathed. She wanted to see where this was going.

Graves’ bones were halfway over the wall before Nyx (the black outline) grabbed his coat and Lyssa (the staticy one) seized his shinbone. They hauled him back down off the fence together and threw him to the dirt.

“So it’s him they’ve been after all along?” Hannah asked quietly. “How’d he even get out of your thing?”

Lia scowled and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said grimly. But they can have him if he’s gonna be that stupid.

She felt a little ill as soon as that notion fluttered through her brain.

Dexter Graves scrambled up, but he was quickly backed against the fence by those flat woman-shapes. There was nowhere left for him to go. He held up his hands to fend them off, and he got them to pause before pouncing on him, which Lia found surprising.

“Whoa, now-” he said. “Who the hell are you two? What the hell are you two? What happened to those other ones, Hannah and Miss Lia?”

“You will call me Lady Night,” the nightsky outline told him. She indicated her static-filled friend, who was standing there beside her. “This, my sister-daughter, is Lady Madness.”

“Sister-daughter, huh? That must make for some weird Thanksgivings.”

Those old bones sure could tap-dance for time, Lia thought, considering her options while Graves continued stalling. She was grimly satisfied to know she’d identified Lyssa correctly, even without a field guide to demons handy.

“Shut up,” Lady Night said, in response to the corpse’s quip. “King Caradura would hold palaver with you, Dexter Graves.”

“Oh, so it’s King Caradura now, is it?” Graves said. “That’s fancy. Sounds like Hardface’s head’s gettin’ a little too fat for his hat, you ask me.”

“We will escort you to his temple now,” said Lady Madness.

“And I’ll escort my bony foot up your out-of-focus ass if you so much as lay a hand, sister,” Graves shot back. “I am tellin’ you now, backoff.”

Lia decided what she wanted to do. Tom seconded her notion with a silent affirmation.

Quietly, she took one of her red dreamcatchers down from a nearby tree. “Hannah,” she said, without ever taking her eyes off the scene that was unfolding over by the fence. “I want you to get underground. Make sure Tom is with you. Keep the hatch open and be ready for me.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“What nobody else can do,” Lia said. “Now hurry.”

Hannah did as she was asked, padding back the way they’d come and disappearing into darkness.

Lia took up her cherry branch as well as her dreamcatcher and began to circle around, surefooted on her home turf even in the night, meaning to creep up on the Archons.

“-All right, okay, let’s just talk about this now, ladies,” Graves was in the middle of saying. “Emperor Hardface wants to see me, that’s fine. Let’s just make an appointment like professional people, and-”

Lia broke from cover and swatted Lady Madness decisively to the ground with her fat cherry branch. The dense wood cracked against the creature’s featureless, scrambled-signal head with a satisfying snap. In the next instant Lia threw the big red dreamcatcher over Lady Night’s head. She hissed “Sidestep this, bitch,” when she did it. The ring fell as far as Nyx’s star-spangled hips, erasing her from reality from the waist up.

As soon as the dream-net fell over the Archon of Darkness, night became day. Literally. Blue sky and brilliant sunlight replaced the depthless black dome overhead. Lady Madness screamed in the sudden noontime glare.

Lia, squinting in pain, grabbed Graves’ emaciated hand and together they fled, racing away as fast as they could. Graves glanced over at his savior as they sprinted through the foliage and gasped: “And here I thought you didn’t even like me!”

“Not sure I do,” Lia replied, shielding her eyes from the blinding onslaught of off-schedule sunlight. “But I’m pretty sure I loathe them.”

“Whatever you say, sister. I’ll take it.”

Nyx, somewhere behind them, must have thrown off the dreamcatcher, because night resumed in a flash. The sky and all the plant life around them turned back to black. Lyssa’s repetitive banshee screaming continued on in the darkness.

Lia saw Hannah’s wide eyes peering over the top of the tube as she and the bones of Dexter Graves pounded toward it, even though her night-vision was still murky after that blast of magical daylight.

“Get down, get down!” Lia yelled.

Hannah dropped out of sight.

Graves reached the tube and looked in over its lip. It went a long way down, and Hannah had barely reached the bottom of the ladder.

“Just jump,” Lia commanded. “Go, quickly!”

She pushed him. Graves tipped into the tube at the waist, shouting. Lia grabbed his legs and dumped him the rest of the way in. He tumbled right past Hannah, headfirst, his coat flapping, missing her only by inches, and shattered against the hard concrete floor. Han and Graves both shrieked as his bones went skittering everywhere. Cat-bodied Tom had to dive under the bed to get out of the path of the bouncing skull.

Lia was swinging her legs over the lip and into the tube when Lyssa and Nyx, the lady gods, came screeching out of the trees behind her. She dropped, catching the wheel as she fell and slamming the hatch cover down after herself.

She hung there, some feet above the floor, as the Archons on the other side of the hatch jerked the wheel she was gripping back up. She screamed. The heavy hatch door lurched and clanked again, shaking Lia around like a marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer.

“Hannah, help,” she cried. “Turn me, turn me, turnme!”

Hannah grabbed Lia by the hips and spun her bodily in order to turn the wheel and seal the hatch. After a few shoulder-wrenching revolutions Lia was able to throw the bolt that sealed them in, and then they were safe.

Hannah tried to catch her when she dropped and both women tumbled to the floor, hard. They stayed there for a breathless minute or two. Then Lia sat up. So did Hannah. They exchanged a look.

“I guess we can sleep down here tonight,” Lia said.

Chapter Sixteen

Ingrid wasn’t all that surprised when Lyssa and Nyx showed up again empty-handed. She’d been lounging languidly on a soft chaise for quite some ‘time,’ next to a dark teakwood throne the King had conjured for himself upon Mictlan’s endless plain, and she barely acknowledged the Archons’ reluctant reappearance.

Skeletal Winston quietly continued mixing martinis behind a nearby bar. Besides the bar, her sofa, and the King’s fancy chair, there were no other signs of civilization anywhere beneath the slate-gray sky.

Nyx and Lyssa dropped to their knees before their King. They wore simple linen wraps, as before, and their hair hung down their backs in neat braids. They looked like more or less ordinary women over here (if strikingly