Graves' end

in it.”

Hannah outright snorted with laughter at that one, and Dexter looked over at her. “Okay, now I’m gettin’ the level of the room,” he said. “I pick up on subtleties, y’know. I was a private dick before I died.”

“Private dick?” Lia said. She hadn’t heard that term before. Maybe it was from before her time, like ‘groovy’ or ‘zounds.’ It sounded nasty though, so she was intrigued. “What’s that,” she asked, “like a male prostitute or something?”

“A male…?” Dexter was openly astounded. “No. God, no. What gutter is your mind in, girly? Geez! No, a dick’s a detective. A gumshoe, a seamus. You heard those vocabulary words before?”

“Sure,” Lia said, grinning at his outrage. “But these days, just so you know, a dick’s a penis. Unless it’s a person, then it’s an asshole. Just FYI.”

“I got a lot to bone up on, don’t I?”

“No pun intended, I’m sure,” Lia said.

Mystified, Dexter looked over to Hannah for clarification. “I made a pun?”

Hannah smiled and shook her head. Lia yawned hugely.

“We borin’ you over there, dollface?” Dex asked, swiveling his skull back in her direction. He seemed like he was starting to enjoy the banter.

Lia handed him a rebuilt leg and he popped it into place. The bones stayed put when they were fitted together, like they had magnets embedded in their ends, and she thought the effect was pretty nifty. “It’s been a really long day for me, Dexter. That’s all.”

She sneezed unexpectedly.

“Plus I think I might be getting sick.”

“Well, we can put out the lights and chase down some Zs, if you’re feelin’ the need,” Dexter said, and Lia noticed his voice had become overwhelmingly protective, underneath his hardboiled drawl. Again, she felt warmly glad to have rescued him. “This’s been a sorta trying sunup-to-sundown for me too, you wanna know the truth,” he said.

Lia nodded. Hannah was looking at her with some concern. “Do you want a sleeping bag, Dexter?” Lia asked. “Do you get cold?”

“Y’know, I haven’t really thought about it,” Dex said. After a moment’s consideration: “I guess I’m okay.”

Lia nodded and unrolled her own bag onto the hard floor. She hadn’t realized how tired she really felt until just a few minutes ago.

“Llll…isa?” Hannah said, catching herself on the verge of using Lia’s true name. “Honey? Do you want to sleep in your own bed? I can-”

“Sleeping on this floor’ll kill your back, Han,” Lia said. “Really, I’ll be all right.”

Hannah nodded uncertainly. Lia wriggled into her bag, and Dexter propped himself up against the wall. Tom curled up at Lia’s hip and she reached out a hand to touch his fur. Her eyes were already closing. “Can you get the light?” she said to Hannah.

“Sure.”

Hannah sat up to click off the lamp, and the small bed creaked when she settled back into it.

In the ensuing silence, Lia let her eyes drift back open. Dexter Graves, lit only by the faint digital glow from her few electronic appliances, angled his skull in her direction. Something seemed almost to pass between them, some exchange or communication, although neither of them said a word.

After a moment or two Lia watched the sentient skeleton lean back and settle his misshapen old fedora down over his eyeholes to sleep.

Black Tom felt Lia’s fingers twitch against his fur when she began to dream. He could’ve joined her, tired as he was, and he would have, had he not also been able to tell that her dreaming was of a calm and restful variety. She was all right. So, instead of drifting off after her, he stood up from his motionless catbody and shuffled his ghost over to stand in front of Dexter Graves, leaning on his insubstantial cane out of old, unbreakable habit.

In sleep, the bundle of bones wrapped in a raincoat looked about as divorced from life as a fossil should. If Tom had wandered in for the very first time he might’ve been tempted to believe that Graves had died trapped down here when the bomb shelter was new, and had been a decomposing part of the decor for the subsequent half-century. The clothed bones looked like nothing so much as the Calavera cartoons he remembered seeing in Mexican newspapers back when he’d been alive: engraved illustrations of skeletons getting drunk or riding bicycles or what have you. People still trotted out those old images of domesticated death every October, for use as Halloween decorations.

Try as he might, though, Tom couldn’t sense any ill intent on this skeleton’s behalf. Which, in truth, worried him far more than the direct menace posed by the Archons and the Tzitzimime. Dexter Graves didn’t even seem to know who or what Mictlantecuhtli was, and yet Tom would’ve been an idiot not to assume some connection there. The mere fact of the dead man’s presence meant they weren’t shut of el Rey or his creatures yet, despite all of Lia’s clever if desperate attempts at deflection.

He paused, listening again to his girl’s (and to Hannah’s) almost inaudible respiration in the darkness. Graves didn’t seem to breathe, and there were no other sounds to be heard this deep underground. Tom knew they couldn’t stay down here forever, though.

He was filled with a dreadful certainty that el Rey’s ambitions hadn’t changed at all since the night he’d broken his covenant with the King and fled from his patronage, so many years ago.

He wondered what sort of trap he’d led his girl into, and he could only hope they’d find their way out of it again.

Retrospective No.2 ~ 1910

A century ago…

Southern Pacific’s Toluca Flyer pulled into the Valley Line terminus (at the busy heart of Lankershim Township, about as far to the west as one could travel by rail) right on schedule. The time was just after one o’clock in the afternoon on a temperate autumn day, late in the year 1910.

‘Lankershim,’ Delgado noted, with a wry arch to his brow, as the engine chugged the last few hundred yards down the gleaming tracks and into the station, finally rolling right across ‘Lankershim Boulevard’ itself. The broad dirt street was crowded with pedestrians, horsedrawn carts, and a surprisingly large number of those newfangled motorcars that were already becoming such a menace on the roads back east. The omnipresent name it bore was also a recent addition, both to the street itself and to the greater township at large. It had been contributed by the family of a sheep-magnate-turned-local-investor from someplace up north: one Mr. Isaac Lankershim. Obviously a humble and unassuming sort of man. Or at least that was the picture Los Angeles’ native necromancer had constructed from newspaper stories during this last leg of his long peregrination across the North American continent, as he made his way back home.

Dulce had been dead for a decade, almost to the day. Delgado had planned his return to Los Angeles to coincide with that anniversary, according to the terms of the deal he’d been forced to make in order to avenge her murder… although he didn’t want to contemplate that just now. The pain of her loss had been dulled by time, but he could still feel it as keenly as a new wound whenever he made the mistake of letting memory catch up with him.

The town at the end of the tracks had still been called ‘Toluca’ when he departed from this same station a full ten years before. He was a native Californio, Tomas Delgado was, born on a nearby rancho in the year 1845, and he remembered back to a time when this particular place had enjoyed no proper name at all.

But then the times were changing, weren’t they? Everything was changing, change was absolutely derigueur these days. In the fullness of time, Delgado reflected, this little boondock situated to the north of Hollywood would probably come to be called something else again.

He eased himself down from the private car el Rey’s man had chartered for him and stepped onto the wooden platform, leaning heavily on his cane.