Graves' end

hopped after the intruders instead, snorting up their scent and baring its double rows of sharp, shark-like teeth in a hungry, anticipatory grin.

Tom watched from the office shack’s roof as half a dozen more ravenous Crouchers hopped through the gate, following in the path of the first one.

Chapter Twenty

Graves relaxed while Hannah finished up her cooking. The good, homey smells of frying breakfast filled the air, making him wish bitterly that he still had the plumbing you needed to digest a strip of bacon. He was starting to wonder how long he was apt to stay like this, dead in all but the most fundamental of ways, but such thoughts were not pleasant ones and he pushed them aside in favor of more enjoyable memories of meals he’d eaten two-thirds of a century in the past.

Hannah started munching straightaway, as soon as the eggs were done. Lia’s plate waited for her on the table, steaming mellowly in the mottled light that filtered down through a forest of grown trees-oaks, olives, evergreens and palms-all of which stood rooted in half-ton wooden pots. Hannah told Graves, when he asked, that they rented the exotic specimens out to film productions. There were even several stands of tall bamboo that would rustle and rattle like lonely old bones in all but the gentlest of breezes.

Graves tilted precariously back in his chair and rocked it a bit. He was savoring this quiet and companionable moment with one of his new friends when a leatherclad, helmeted woman came striding out of the foliage toward him.

He was so startled that he tumbled backwards out of his chair.

Hannah jumped up. The new woman knocked her out of the way as she made a beeline for Graves. He found his feet a second before the leather lady seized him by the throat and pinned him to a sapling tree’s wooden support post.

Hannah scrambled up and ran for it, vanishing into the bush after taking one huge-eyed look back. Graves was peripherally relieved to see her escaping.

“King Caradura throws the very best parties, Dexter Graves,” the disguised female said to him from behind her visor. “So what, prithee, be thy major malfunction?”

Graves deftly broke the weird woman’s chokehold and headbutted the mirrored face of her helmet. The silver plastic shattered, revealing the crazy static behind it. “Awww, hell, not you again,” he said.

“Me and all the names I call myself,” Lady Madness confirmed. “Come, Sinister Dexter, the King awaits.”

The being Lia had called an Archon popped her fingers into Graves’ nosehole and eyesockets like his skull was nothing more than a bowling ball and then dragged him, effortlessly, even as he struggled and kicked, off toward the gate.

She waved her other hand across her visor to heal it before she pulled a tiny walkie-talkie out of her pocket. The reflective glass melted back into place, obscuring her static. “Hunt the pretty, my wolves, but don’t break her,” she warned her confederates via the handheld radio. “The King has all the cold girls he can eat.”

“Hey, Bad Signal,” Graves shouted up at her (albeit in a stifled, nasal voice). “You so much as touch Miss Lia and I’ll cancel your broadcast for good. You hearin’ me under that shell, sister?”

The woman-shaped distortion peeled a glove off her statichand and stuffed it into Graves’ mouth as she dragged him along, muffling his threats. “Not anymore, Dexter Graves,” she said, answering his rhetorical question.

A moment later she raked him through the parking lot gravel and threw him into the back of the nearest of her six black cars while the pair of henchmen left to guard the front gate looked on with a high degree of astonished disbelief.

A heavy steel dog screen blocked access to the vehicle’s front seats and there were no door handles here in the back, as Graves discovered in fairly short order. He still had the Archon’s leather glove stuffed between his teeth.

He watched her stride back into the Yard through the open front gate, past a large black cat she didn’t even notice.

“Now for LisaLiaChloeMia, and anybody else she thinks she is,” the unhinged otherworlder said, to nobody in particular.

Chapter Twenty-One

Hannah sprinted through the trees, racing toward Lia and the safety of Bag End with all her might. Lia was already coming on the run when she spotted her friend and angled her trajectory so their paths through the plants would intersect. She was freshly dressed in jeans that clung to her still-damp skin and her hair was barely toweled dry. Tom’s frantic psychic alarms had roused her from her hobbit hole, but the images she was getting from him were jumbled and confused, with so much going on in them. The one thing she knew for certain was that she didn’t have time to sort them out. Dealing with this morning’s new threat, whatever it turned out to be, was going to require improvisation, since she’d had no chance at all to prepare for it.

“Han, what’s happening?” she called out, through the diminishing screen of foliage that separated them. “Tom saw someth-”

A sharp, hard gunshot hammered the air, leaving Lia’s ears ringing. Hannah clutched at her side and went down, driven to the ground by a bullet. She crashed out of sight into a massive billow of blue hydrangeas.

“Hannah!” Lia screamed, like she’d never screamed any other word in her entire life.

She brought her cherry branch up, but more gunfire tore apart a bromeliad that was hanging inches behind her head, and she shrieked as involuntary survival reflexes made her drop to the ground for cover.

She peeked up over a fern frond and saw two men coming toward her. Saw the guns they held in their hands: black and menacing things that seemed out of place here amidst the Yard’s sea of living green. Faced with the weapons, the only thing Lia could do was scramble away, back into the dense camouflage provided by the enveloping plant life she knew so well.

She was shaking by the time she reached the back of the Yard, her guts knotted up with adrenaline. The men with the guns were still pursuing. She could hear them crunching and rustling through the plants somewhere behind her. Directly in front of her was a woodpile, several feet high and seven or eight feet long. A small cluster of century-old walnut and pecan trees stood off to her right. Some of them extended a branch or two out over the Yard’s rear fence.

Lia looked back over her shoulder, cringing against the shots she expected to erupt at any second. Gods and demons were all a part of her program, but guns upset her badly.

For a moment, she almost didn’t know what to do.

Black Tom left his catbody on the shack’s roof and let his awareness bloom large, out over the Yard, then scanned the property for Lia. He still tended to think of her as his Winter Flower, the first name he’d ever known her by, especially when he was scared for her. He’d called out to her on instinct when Lyssa and her crew first pulled up, but now he regretted the impulse. Steering his girl away from this situation would’ve been the smarter thing to do.

If those men hurt his Lia, Black Tom was apt to lose his mind. At which point several distinct forms of hell were likely to break loose. Tom had never been the same man again after the last time he unleashed such a torrent of grief and rage upon others, after Dulce died… even if the others in question had deserved it.