Graves' end

he was really being heard. “You punched your own ticket, far as I’m concerned.”

The skeletal PI gritted his teeth in grim satisfaction as he drilled the blond man between the eyes with his own partner’s silenced pistol. It made that distinct bzzew! sound again, a little bit louder this time as the baffles inside the suppressor began breaking down under the stress of so many recent firings. It was nowhere near as wrath-of-God satisfying as an unmuffled report from a hand-cannon of this caliber might’ve been, but blood sprayed across the gravel just the same.

Graves spun on his calcaneus bone and headed off into the Yard, hellbent on saving Lia.

Her cat, that old tom, watched him lope away from high up in a pepper tree. Graves caught a flash of bright green eye when he strode past.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lia, crouched behind cover, listened as the three gunmen who were chasing her crept up on the large woodpile at the very back of the Yard. She trusted that Tom was watching over Hannah for her, since she couldn’t see him anywhere.

“Eddie?” one of the men said, only to be shushed by their obvious leader.

“Uh… Miss?” the one called Eddie began, raising his voice to address her, apparently, even though Lia knew they couldn’t have seen her yet. They weren’t looking in the right direction.

The guys he was with both eyeballed Eddie like he sounded asinine, and he shrugged in exasperation. He had sounded asinine, trying to open a dialog under these circumstances, and Lia could tell from his irritated expression that if they had a better opening line to audition, he was more than ready to hear it.

“Listen,” square-faced Eddie continued, speaking up to make himself heard. “We got sent out here by a guy called Mickey Hardface. Maybe you heard that name and maybe not, I dunno, but all he wants to do is talk, okay? Now I apologize for the hostile behavior of the mental defectives I got workin’ under me, and I promise you there is not gonna be any more gunfire. Those are Hardface’s specific orders: nobody gets hurt today.”

“Except you,” Lia said, stepping out from behind the copse of trees that stood beside the men and batting the one called Eddie across the back of his head with her weighty, knot-studded, cherry branch cudgel.

He pitched forward, losing his gun along with his balance. The other two clowns both pointed their weapons and staggered back at the very same time, dancing out of each other’s line of fire.

Lia stepped in to seize Eddie by the throat with both hands before he could regain his feet. She screamed down into his face as she squeezed, with tears of near-psychotic rage streaming down her cheeks, and vines sheathed in rough gray bark twined down her arms to lend an ancient strength to their daughter’s efforts.

Edwin Dane’s face reddened and his eyes bulged grotesquely. Capillaries burst in the whites and bloomed there like tiny red roses. His truest name and certain of his foul memories bloomed similarly into Lia’s mind.

The other two henchmen looked on in abject, uncomprehending terror as green life effloresced all around Lia Flores, sprouting and flourishing at a time-lapse pace. A camellia tree-Lia’s namesake plant as well as her earliest vegetal teacher-shot up from the bare dirt behind her to a height of well over ten feet within a matter of seconds, and its flexible new limbs helped her throttle Eddie Dane until the small bones in his neck crackled and popped like twisted bubblewrap. The sound of it was audible even over the soul-deep scream that blanked out Lia’s conscious mind and empowered her intentions. The earth beneath her feet shook with rage to hear its child’s cry, although Lia herself barely felt it.

All she could think about was Hannah.

Shoots and tendrils grew up through Eddie Dane, piercing and impaling him, rooting him to the ground. His skin roughened into crusty bark, while his limbs shrank and gnarled up into brittle, leafless branches. By the time Lia ran out of breath all that was left of him was a twisted stump that looked a vague bit like a contorted, struggling man.

It was like he’d never even been.

Lia ended her scream and staggered drunkenly when she let go of the stump and stepped aside, panting for air. She fixed the other two men with her raw, red gaze.

They fled, both of them, without another moment of hesitation. One of them actually dropped his gun in his haste to get away. Lia grabbed up her cherry branch and followed after them, flashing murder from her eyes.

Tom looked down from his cat’s perch in the pepper tree to see three of the men who’d gone around to guard the Yard’s periphery returning to the front gate, wondering over the weird noises they heard emanating from the central depths of the property. He could tell they were feeling keyed-up after the brief jolt of an earthquake that had set off car alarms and caused a few dogs to bark, somewhere down the block.

At least they assumed it was an earthquake. Tom, however, figured his Winter Flower must have drawn up a walloping bolt of chthonic force and discharged it at somebody. He knew a psychic shockwave when he felt one.

As the three uncertain joes from outside the fence stood gaping over the two bullet-riddled corpses of their confederates that now lay in the parking lot, a pair of thugs Lia’d routed on her own came racing across the gravel and out the front gate in what Tom could only describe as an undignified panic. Each man hopped into a black car all by himself, and they both peeled away, in opposite directions.

Tom could not have felt any more proud of his girl.

The youngest of the three remaining gate-guards looked over at the other two. “Should we go in there?” he asked.

His nominal elders considered the question and all of its ramifications. “I think we oughta wait,” one of them ventured. “Cover the exits like we were told.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna wait too,” the last man concurred.

Satisfied they weren’t going anywhere, Tom leapt down the tree trunk in two long hops and hurried into the greenery to find his friends.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Graves came across Miss Hannah first. The lady was just then sitting up (possibly having been roused by the swift seismic kick the earth had delivered moments ago), fighting for consciousness and wincing at the obvious pain in her side that rewarded her efforts. She was banged up badly but far from finished off, he was glad to see.

Hannah looked over at a man-shaped bundle of twigs and leaves and rotted crap that was lying in the dirt beside her and she cocked her head, as if it meant something to her but she couldn’t quite remember what. The pile looked like nothing so much as the husk of a mummy, desiccated beyond all recognition-although there was a gun lying next to it. And a pair of shoes at one end. Graves didn’t know what in the hell that thing might’ve been before something sucked it dry, nor did he much care to speculate, not at the moment.

There were significant sights Hannah had yet to see.

Graves, standing a few yards away, watched as she slowly looked up further, only to find the imperious, helmeted figure of Lady Madness looming over her, with her head cocked at a curious angle.

The figure’s visor exploded, showing the static behind it. Hannah flinched, and shards of tinted plastic rained down all around her.

Lady Staticface turned to see the bones of Dexter Graves pointing two silenced handguns at her, from behind. They spat quiet fire as he squeezed off every round in the magazines.

Hannah threw her hands over her head as multiple bullets perforated the Archon’s black suit, traveling on an upward trajectory. Graves had been sure to shoot from the hip, to keep her safe. The spots of bright gray static that showed through Lyssa’s leathers made her look like she was dressed up in costume as her absent sister-mom.