Graves' end

“Gin plus tonic, super plus sonic, you plus moronic, if you think that’s gonna help you, Dexter Graves,” she said.

Graves shrugged. “Never know until you try,” he replied. Then he threw the empty guns aside and charged at her, bellowing at the top of lungs he no longer possessed.

The thing called Lady Madness hauled off and backhanded his skull right off the top of his spine, almost without effort. The skull landed in the dirt many yards away. Graves saw the rest of his frantic skeleton caroming off the trees from his new, low-angle perspective, while Miss Madness turned back to Hannah.

“LiaMiaZoeClioTia,” she said. “Where is they?”

“Right behind you,” answered the woman in question.

The Queen of Crazy spun around in time for Lia to ram the jagged, torn end of her cherry branch right through Lyssa’s broken visor. Lia ran her backwards with it, shouting, until the leatherclad demon tripped over Graves’ skull and went sprawling.

As Lia savagely ground the splintered branch into Lady Madness’s open helmet, grunting with the effort of it, roots broke out through the back of the hard plastic braincase and slithered down into the earth. The demon drummed her heels and fists on the ground while the branch blossomed into a new sapling under Lia’s influence, pinning her helplessly to the dirt like some monstrous approximation of a scientific specimen.

Both Graves’ skull and Hannah watched this happen with quiet shock. Neither of them would ever have guessed that such a thing could occur, much less that Lia might be the one to cause it.

Her moment finally broke. Lia stumbled back from the fresh sapling and the madwoman whose head it was staked through, falling on her ass next to Graves’ disconnected headbone.

She looked both stunned and depleted. Such intense acts of will took an immediate and visible toll on her.

“That thing dead enough for you yet?” Graves’ skull asked. It happened to be facing the new tree, and had enjoyed an excellent view of the whole improbable event.

“You can’t kill the moon,” Lia said, distracted. “But that might hold it till sunset. Maybe.”

She picked up his skull when she got to her feet and shoved it against Graves’ ribs when the rest of him went running by. The skeleton grabbed its proffered top gratefully and crammed it back down onto its spine once again.

Lia fell to her knees beside Hannah. Her black cat came running up to them, switching its fat tail back and forth. Graves hurried over and knelt down too, quickly assessing the lady’s injuries.

“Awww, hey there, that’s not so bad, is it?” he said, squeezing Miss Hannah’s hand. “Not deep. Just grazed your side, is all. More of a mess than anything.”

“Are you sure? Dexter?” Lia sounded wobbly. He hated hearing that terrible, sick fear in her voice. “There’s so much blood, I don’t know what to do, oh, Hannah, I’m so sorry…”

“Pressure right now,” Graves said, ripping the lining out of his coat. “Stop that bleeding. Here. Hold this, nice and firm.” He balled up the fabric and put it into Lia’s hands, then guided them to Hannah’s wound and demonstrated an effective amount of force to apply.

“Yes, okay, thank you Dexter,” Lia babbled, holding that wad of cloth against Hannah’s hip like all the world depended on it. “Are you sure she’s okay? She’ll be okay? You’ve done this sort of thing before?”

“Back in the war, field surgeon woulda called you a sissy for wantin’ a band-aid on a scratch like that,” Graves said.

“Some scratch,” Hannah gasped. “Feels like I’ve been chopped in two.”

Graves looked to Lia. His manner was serious. “Maybe it’s time we got the hell outta here, whaddaya think?” he whispered. “There could be a whole stack of those guys out there in the trees.”

Lia thought about it, frowning. “You’re right,” she agreed, after exchanging a quick glance with her black cat. “But we’ve gotta do it carefully.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Lia’s car came barreling out of the Yard’s gravel parking lot, scattering the three henchmen who’d gathered at the gate after the earthquake. They must not’ve been watching carefully; they hadn’t seen anybody get into the Mazda. They hurried to pursue it in three of the four black cars they had remaining after the high-speed defections of the terrified pair who’d resigned without notice after encountering Lia. That put the score at three dead, two fled, and three more hopelessly distracted.

A second after the cars all squealed away, Graves’ stolen fancyass number blew out of the lot and skidded around the corner. It headed west, unlike the Mazda, which had gone east, toward Burbank.

The last three men covering the Yard’s other possible exits ran for the front gate after seeing the shiny new BMW shoot past them, but it was moving as fast as its expensive engineering allowed, and they were already too late to keep up with it.

Lia’s battered gray Mazda zoomed east on Sheldon Street, turned right onto San Fernando, and shot down toward the Burbank Airport with three V-8 predators closing in behind it.

The little car dodged around a lumbering lunch truck, pulled briefly ahead of the pursuit, and then skidded off the main drag, into an alley marked with a ‘NO OUTLET’ sign that was tucked in between an apartment complex and a liquor store, just past Ensign Street.

Game over, the nearest pursuer thought. That should’ve been it.

Which was exactly the impression Tom and Lia had planned to convey.

The nearest of the large black cars followed the Mazda right down the alley’s narrow corridor. The other two stopped to block the alley’s mouth. Lia’s little sedan skidded all the way around at the far end of the passage and stopped there, rocking on its springs.

There was nobody in it, either behind the wheel or in the passenger seats.

Some distance back, the approaching black car also squealed to a smoking stop. Its driver frowned, realizing that the little gray car up ahead really was empty. His eyes weren’t playing tricks.

“What the…?” he muttered, as Black Tom (who was invisible to the norms but grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless) threw Lia’s car into gear and stomped the accelerator. The tires screamed against the pavement.

Hardface’s man saw the empty Mazda coming at him at an already dangerous and still-increasing rate of speed. He threw his own car into reverse and mashed a blue plastic recycling bin against the side of the alley in his haste to back the fuck up.

The black car slammed ass-first into the blockade comprised of Hardface’s other two vehicles, both of which failed to get out of the way in time. A second later Lia’s car crashed with considerable force into the trapped sedan’s front end, driving it back hard. Both cars’ radiators blew simultaneous jets of steam.

The three shaken henchmen got out of their respective vehicles and peered with disbelief into the unoccupied wreck that had taken them out of commission.

This would not be easy to explain.

Black Tom lingered on for a moment, perfectly invisible, enjoying their looks of astonishment and dread before pulling his awareness back down to the Yard.

He found the only three of Hardface’s henchmen remaining on-site easily enough (without bothering to reclaim the catbody he’d stowed under a bush before driving off in Lia’s car). They were sidling up and trying to come to terms with the sight of Lady Lyssa, who’d somehow been spiked through her helmeted head with a living, rooted tree. Tom gave his girl high marks for style.

“Now how in the hell does that happen?” one of the men in the cheap suits asked rhetorically, eyeing the new sapling.

They all shouted and scattered when the presumed corpse at its base answered. “Which girl was the witchgirl was something we should’ve learned much sooner, is how this happens,” Lyssa said. “Hello? Wolves?”