Graves' end

Tom swiveled his head toward a gang of workers who were just then coming across the road, laughing and joking with one another after a wearying day’s labor. They wore coveralls and caps and carried tin lunchpails, and one of them, the foreman (a handsome young man with thick black hair and a face Tom remembered all too well from his younger days), was grinning his ass off and waving to him.

It was Oscar San Martin. Ramon’s boy. He’d been a kid the last time Tom saw him. Now he was well over six feet tall and as broad as an ox through the shoulders. He looked so much like his father that it took Tom’s breath away. Seeing him now was like traveling back in time.

“Bienvenidos, Tio Tomas,” Ramon’s boy said, as Tom made his careful way down from Winston Watt’s Model T. “Welcome home.”

“Oscar,” Tom said, wanting to hug the kid (the ‘kid’ who stood more than a foot taller than him and had a rough shadow of late-day stubble growing along his jaw), but not doing it.

He and Oscar hadn’t been as close as Tom might’ve liked after Ramon… went over.

Xochitl, Ramon’s widow, hadn’t really blamed Tom for what happened. Not exactly, and yet it had been clear enough that he was welcome to keep his distance from her boy after it was done. She hadn’t wanted Oscar following in his father’s (or in his pseudo-uncle’s) footsteps.

Especially if those footsteps led him here, to this field. And, as much as it pained him, Tom had seen the wisdom in that position. It’d even been a factor in his decision to travel the world so late in life. There’d been other reasons for that too, of course, but as far as Oscar went, it’d simply been easier not to be around. Convenient.

And yet, despite the aloofness and the loneliness that resulted from it, here Oscar was. Working for el Rey. Like father, like son. The San Martin family had a legacy now.

Tom clasped the young man’s large, calloused hand in both of his and held it warmly, for a long moment, looking up at him. “Gracias, mijo,” Tom said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Oscar nodded, clearly pleased to see his father’s oldest friend, yet feeling as unsure about the content of their relationship as Tom was himself.

“Oz,” Tom said, as his eyes were drawn back up to the black steel bones superimposed over the purple evening sky, like some sort of artistic photographer’s effect. “What is it you think you’re doing out here?”

“The bidding of el Rey, Tio Tomas. What else?”

“But… this wasn’t your idea, was it?”

“Oh, hell no,” Oscar said, and laughed. He ran his hand back over his hair, a little nervously. “Don’t blame me, I just work here.”

“Then who?”

“La Bruja Roja,” Winston Watt piped up from the Model T’s front seat, jerking himself out of a drunken stupor in order to speak. He craned around to look at the other two men. “The Red Witch,” he said, as if it explained something. “The Scarlet Woman.”

“Who?”

“The King’s new girlfriend,” Oscar said quietly. Turning to Watt, he put a finger to his lips. “Shhh, now, about that.”

Construction laborers were crossing the lot as they knocked off for the day, men piling onto a horsecart that would take them ‘home’ to a nearby migrant camp. Some got into private carriages of their own, horseless and otherwise. (Otherwise if their work happened to be of the more skilled and better paid variety, Tom supposed.)

Watt looked the dispersing workers over and nodded sagely to Oscar, preserving the secret they both were in on. Very craftily, too, Tom thought, raising an eyebrow.

“Have you two been drinking?” Oscar asked quietly.

“Watt insisted we stop,” Tom said, under his breath. “El hombre es un borracho, you know.”

Oscar nodded, watching as Watt observed the last of his crew departing for the day. The final few stragglers were heading home on foot. Within minutes, Tomas, Oscar, and Watt-the preservers of the mysteries of Mictlantecuhtli-were all alone in the gloaming.

“A witch?” Tom said, turning to Oscar for clarification as soon as the last of the workers were out of earshot. “Like a person, a woman?”

Oscar nodded.

“Not a nymph or a succubus or some damn thing like that from over on el Rey’s side of the sky?”

“An actual person,” Oscar said. “Alive. Flesh and bone. And she comes and goes as she pleases, if you can believe that.”

“What, between the rooms?” Tom asked, his tone filled with disbelief. His old friend, Oscar’s father Ramon, had showed them both what was likely to happen when a human being stepped through the door between the worlds and into the King’s sacrificial chamber.

It was supposed to be a one-way trip.

And yet Oscar nodded, verifying that he had indeed observed this thing they’d all long assumed to be impossible. A living, human woman who could cross at will.

“I can’t believe it myself,” Oscar said. “But I’ve seen it happen, once or twice. She walks across like it’s the door between the kitchen and the dining room, and nothing more.”

“She visits so bloody often she needs a mechanical lift,” Watt said contemptuously, reeling a bit when he stepped down from his car’s running board. “She’s hardly the sort to keep climbing up and down a tree.”

“What’s her name?” Tom asked.

Oscar and Watt exchanged a look, and then a shrug. Neither of them wanted to admit to having that piece of information, although Tom suspected Winston Watt might’ve known more than he was owning up to. Oscar might as well, for that matter.

“She doesn’t bother conversing with the help,” Oz said. “Keeps her own counsel.”

“Mictlantecuhtli says she’s to be his Queen,” Watt informed them. “We’re to call her ‘La Reina de los Muertos,’ once she’s crossed over for good.”

This was sounding worse and worse by the minute to old Tom Delgado. He couldn’t help but feel a stab of jealousy when he contemplated this unnamed woman. Not only did the stranger share in his hard-won secrets, she’d also been allowed, somehow, to experience the otherworld without forfeiting her life and her freedom.

It didn’t seem fair. Not when Tom had sold his very soul for a journey far less exotic, for initiations far less significant and experiences that hadn’t done a fraction as much to satisfy his lifelong curiosity about the nature of the worlds as one single day spent freely exploring the possibilities of Mictlan would have.

Tom had to wonder what this new witch offered, that she enjoyed such favor with the King. It occurred to him that the ambitious crazywoman would soon be his mistress, too (and not in the way he liked to have a mistress), according to the letter of Mictlantecuhtli’s contract.

Well, he wasn’t having that. And that’s all there was to it.

“We can go right up to the top if you’re ready, Tom,” Watt said. “There’s a temporary elevator set up.”

Wonderful, Tom thought. They’d thought of everything. While none of the half- baked plans he’d been incubating had ever anticipated a scenario like this one. Tom was at a loss. What sort of excuse could he plausibly make?

It was Oscar who saved him, or at least bought him some time. Thank the Powers That Be for Oscar.

“Maybe you could hold your horses for just a minute there, Mr. Watt,” the young man said. “Mr. Delgado and I have a lot of catching up to do.”

“You can still talk to him once he’s gone over, and the King wants him as soon as possible.”

“Well, it’ll be possible in a few damn minutes, okay?”

Tom was getting the impression that Oscar cared as little for the King’s Englishman as he did himself.

“It’s not the same once people go over,” the young builder said. “Besides which, you might’ve taken a pass on those last few glasses of gin I can smell on your breath if punctuality was your big concern.”

Watt frowned and shot Tom an irritated look, but he was chastened enough not to argue or make accusations. “Fine,” he said. “I think I’ll go up to the Hole and wait for you there.”

“You do that,” Oscar said, looking at Watt in a way that was quietly confident yet not quite combative. “Tio Tomas and I will be up directly.”

The Englishman didn’t know what to do, other than slink away. Tom and Oscar watched him cross the