Graves' end

He was distracted, scattered, trying to keep track of more than a dozen people all at once, but the percussive sound of a gunshot caused him to draw all of his awareness straight down toward it.

Hannah was the one who’d been shot, he saw instantly, as he watched the man he’d labeled Brickface deftly disarm the trigger-happy fool responsible for it. Mr. Brick’s technique looked like some fancy martial arts sort of thing, perhaps military training. The gunman hit the ground with a solid thud that was nowhere near satisfying enough for Tom.

“What the hell, man?” the shooter said, looking up at Brickface, who’d thrown him down and taken his weapon before he so much as knew what was happening.

“Do you know what ‘alive’ means, you goddamn idiot?” Brickface barked down at him. “It tends to be the exact fuckin’ opposite of bein’ fulla bulletholes!”

“What’d we all bring guns for, then?” the shooter asked, getting to his feet and rubbing at the back of his head.

“To point ’em,” Brickface yelled. “Not to fire ’em! They’re fuckin’ motivational tools, is all.”

He dropped the clip out of the grip and cleared the chamber before giving the younger man his weapon back, shaking his head as he did so. “You just better pray that Lia chick’s not the one you hit,” he said. “For your sake.”

Tom thought he had no idea how right he was about that, as Brickface tromped off in the direction Lia had fled. His Winter Flower was all right, Tom sensed, terrified but still unharmed… which was more than he could say for poor Hannah.

She was fading. Lying in the dirt, surrounded by broken blue flowers, with both hands clamped to her injured side. Blood was soaking through her clothes. There was blood everywhere, it seemed like. Tom knew his girl would not have wanted him to leave Hannah’s side, so he moved in close enough to feel her pain as well as touch her thoughts, to see if there might be anything he could do.

Hannah looked up, and Tom thought for an instant that she was somehow seeing him.

Then he looked back (or rather he let his disembodied self experience three hundred and sixty degrees of visual awareness. There was no need to turn around when he wasn’t using physical eyes to see. Habit was always a considerable force when it came to perception, though).

Sitting behind him and looking right through him, a few feet away from Hannah, were, well, things. Frogdogs, was the best description Han’s unstrung mind would offer. A sizable ring of them hunkered there, watching her, behaving like exemplary models of calm and patience. She had no idea what they were, or even if they were real, although Tom recognized them as the entire clan of Crouchers he and his Winter Flower had long ago petitioned to guard their front gate. The same ones that had trailed el Rey’s mercenaries into the Yard a few minutes ago.

Hannah looked pale. Tom could feel that she was blacking out, possibly for good. The Crouchers all watched her in silence, with hungry expressions on their lumpy, curious faces. The man who’d shot her also stepped up to view his handywork, and Han turned her head, with an effort, to squint up at him.

The gunman couldn’t see the Crouchers. Tom touched his mind and knew that it was so. All the guy saw, lying in the bushes, was a nice, mom-type lady whose clothes had gone a dark, wet red all down her left side. Tom sensed that he’d shot men before, several of them, but this, he did not feel good about.

That’s much too little, much too late, cabron, Tom thought, feeling not the slightest glimmer of pity for the gunman, even though he knew from firsthand experience what was going to happen next.

Hannah rolled her head away from her shooter in order to look back at her Crouchers, all of which squatted close to her eye level. She was seeing them, all right. They were fully visible to her. Her gunshot wound must have temporarily shocked her eyes open to the subtler aspects of being, Tom surmised. Such things were not unheard of.

He looked back down and saw that the creatures had all turned around to consider the armed intruder who’d come to stand over Hannah.

He also saw, with no surprise (before he winked away to drum up more assistance), that every last one of them was grinning.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Graves hooked his fingerbones through the unbendable metal screen that penned him into the car’s back seat while the two front gate guards looked at one another uneasily, then peered back in through the car’s windshield, doing precious little to conceal their stupefaction. You’d think they’d never seen a skeleton get manhandled by a crazy lady before. Their voices were faint, muffled by the heavy window glass, but Graves could hear them. He felt like a zoo animal in a goddamn cage.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing in the back of that car?” the taller and darker-haired of the two men asked.

“I dunno. What’re you seeing?” was the shorter, blond man’s evasive reply.

“I don’t wanna say unless you’re seeing it too,” the first guard said. Something darted across the parking lot behind him and he whirled around, catching the movement in the corner of his eye. “You see that, then?” he demanded.

“What? A cat?”

Graves, too, had seen Lia’s cat, a large black tom, go bounding past the Yard’s main entrance.

“No, it was a guy,” the blond man said. “I saw a guy, like a little old guy! Fast like a freak, though.”

Darkhair nodded and motioned that they should go and check it out. Mr. Blond eased into the Yard, clicking off his gun’s safety, with his partner first covering and then following after him.

A small, bearded man in sunglasses rapped on Graves’ window with the back of his hand as soon as the sentries were out of sight.

Graves, who’d been yanking on the metal dog screen, looked over and finally thought to pull that goddamn glove out of his mouth. “Hey, pal,” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard through the insulating glass. “Lemme outta here, whaddaya say? I’ll owe you the moon and the goddamn stars!”

The little man, who wore a hat and carried a walking stick, opened the door and even held it for him, graciously. Graves jumped out and threw his arms around the liberating stranger, who accepted an embrace from a partially-dressed skeleton with wordless aplomb. “I love ya, man, I really do,” Graves said.

Then he turned and strode into the Yard, just as the gate guards were returning to their post after a fruitless check of the parking lot’s perimeter.

The dark-haired man saw him first. Wide-eyed with horror, he drew a gun with a silencer screwed onto the barrel and unloaded.

Bone chips flew from Graves’ cranium and bullets cracked a few of his ribs, but he incurred no damage that would stop him. He walked right up and twisted the gun out of the shooter’s grip, wrenching the man’s shoulder to drive him to his knees in the same motion. Graves genuflected behind him and shoved his head back viciously, snapping the henchman’s neck over his fleshless femur like a dry twig.

Done. Graves claimed the man’s gun and dumped his slack body aside.

He turned on the second guy, who backed away, dropping his weapon and holding up his hands. “Hey, come on, man, we weren’t gonna hurt nobody,” he said. “We had orders not to-”

The silenced weapon made an anticlimactic sound-sort of a ‘bzzew’-when Graves dropped the sniveling fuck with a perfect shot through his thigh. The man groaned rather than screamed, his face turning purple as veins stood out in the sides of his neck. His eyes rolled back to the whites.

Graves walked up and loomed over the writhing mercenary, training the automatic down at him. “The minute you point guns at my friends is the minute I stop givin’ a shit about your perspective,” he said, although he doubted