Graves' end

“And what would you know about that?” he said darkly. “What did you do to her?”

Hannah jumped when he shouted.

“Oh, it’s not me doing it, Dex,” Ingrid said. “It’s you.”

Graves hesitated. Hannah, Riley, and Black Tom all stared at him. “What the hell are you yappin’ about, Ingrid?” he said. “I’m not doing a damn thing to Lia. I wouldn’t ever.”

“Haven’t you stopped to wonder how it is you’re up and walking around?” Ingrid asked. “What do you think is powering that? Chthonic potential is what. Earth energy. The sort of force that needs a channel.”

“Then you tell me how to change that channel.”

“When we meet,” Ingrid said. “Before sunset.”

Dexter shouted down the line at her: “You must already have a hole through your goddamn head if you think I’m gonna meet you anywhere outside of hell, sister! Now you tell me how to fix this, you tell me rightnow, before I-”

“What? Come after me?” Ingrid said, cutting him off. “Oh, no! Whatever will I do? I’ll just have to cower here at Potter’s Yard until you track me down, Sherlock. Just be sure you do it before dark. Seriously.”

Ingrid broke the connection, and Lia’s phone burbled a dropped call tone.

Nobody knew what to say. Hannah, Riley, and Black Tom looked up at Graves, but all he could do was shrug, helplessly.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ingrid closed her phone and wandered away from the Lyssa tree-a source of amazement for her henchmen that in Ingrid’s opinion almost amounted to an art installation. She was trying to avoid the avid attention of that creepy Xavier, whom she knew had been eavesdropping during her call. The other men hadn’t wanted to hang around the leather-suited Archon with the sapling tree growing up through her head after she tried to talk to them, but Xavier hadn’t been deterred. He hadn’t let Ingrid out of earshot since arriving at the nursery.

Her bare foot encountered something soft and yielding on the ground. Something lying concealed under the cover of a low shrub.

Looking down through the foliage she parted, Ingrid found a black cat. It hadn’t moved, despite being accidentally kicked. It was alive, no doubt about that, yet unresponsive to stimuli. Ingrid made a gesture to knot the oddity up in a precautionary binding hex, one she could shore up later if she saw a need. Then she put away her phone and picked up the limp animal, frowning.

This meant something. She was sure of it.

She was looking critically at the inert black cat when Xavier crept up behind her. “So,” he said out of nowhere. “You think they gonna come, or what?”

Ingrid turned, startled, but kept it cool. She betrayed nothing. She fixed Mickey’s footsoldier with a contemptuous gaze of a sort that usually made men feel self-conscious, to say the least. Xavier had sidled up a lot closer than she might’ve expected. She looked him up and down dismissively, then looked at the cat again, and grinned. “You know, I have a feeling they will,” she said.

Ingrid tucked the animal under her arm and strutted off, through a thicket of potted palms, pointedly ignoring Xavier as he watched her walk away.

He lingered, waiting to make sure Ingrid was really gone. After the Red Witch wandered out of earshot, he fell to his knees and ripped his own face off, gasping. ‘Xavier’ was nothing more than a disguise. While he caught his breath, Winston, the King’s skeletal servant, looked disdainfully down at the floppy face in his hand.

“Bloody hell, I forgot how hot these things can be,” he muttered, his voice and manner changed completely from those of his crudely-drawn character. As if servitude weren’t enough, the final indignity was that he was now being forced to act, like some vagabond gypsy player prancing for coins on a rickety stage.

He looked again at his false face, which was stubble-scalped and marked with a teardrop tattoo at the corner of the left eye. It’d been flayed off a recent arrival in Mictlan mere hours ago. It felt moist, and smelled meaty.

“How do the living tolerate it?” Winston wondered aloud.

He heard a rustling in the oleander behind him and threw his face back on. It shrink-wrapped down onto the bones of his skull. He still had no eyes (the ones that came with a fresh face were impractical, as they tended to deflate or turn cloudy so quickly; and besides, the King prized them as jewelry), but he covered up that fact with his sunglasses and got to his feet before two of the gunmen he’d enlisted ‘rolled up on him,’ to employ the vernacular of the day. He recognized them as Top Shelf (aka Reggie White) and his shadow Andrej Mirovic (known amongst his confederates as the Silent Soviet, due to his lack of English). Winston had hand-picked each member of this crew himself.

“Dude, what you doin’ back up in here, anyways?” Top Shelf said. “Takin’ a leak?”

“Yeah, why,” Winston shot back, dropping into character as Xavier once again. “You wanna watch?”

Top Shelf snorted in contempt and wandered off in the direction Ingrid had gone, with quiet Mirovic trailing along behind him. Winston stared after them through Xavier’s dark lenses.

“Wankers,” he muttered.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lia got out of bed. Nobody saw her. Nobody was looking in her direction. She was still fully dressed, except for her shoes. She suspected her hair was mussed and she smoothed it self-consciously, probably not doing it any good.

“Dexter?” Hannah said, breaking the silence that filled the guest room at Casa de Rojo. She still hadn’t folded up Lia’s phone, although its screen had gone black. “What are you gonna do?”

“You’re gonna tell me how you can possibly know Ingrid Redstone, for starters,” Lia said, from behind them.

There was a mass turn. Hannah, Dexter, Riley and Black Tom all wheeled around. Hannah ran over and hugged her, hard. “Lia, honey!” she exclaimed. “How are you? You fainted dead away, we were so scared-”

“I did not faint, don’t you say that,” Lia admonished her. Hannah let her go and she slipped back into her shoes. “I never faint. I don’t want to be a girl who faints.” She turned to Graves. “Dexter?”

“What, how did I know Ingrid?” he said. “I met her back in the ’40s, before I… well, you know. She was a singer in a bar I spent kind of a lot of time in back then. She’s gotta be into her nineties by now.”

“If she is, she’s got a great plastic surgeon,” Lia said. “I saw her yesterday morning, and there’s no way she’s more than thirty years old.”

Dexter looked confused. “But that’s not possible,” he said.

“Says the Crypt Keeper,” Riley piped up.

Dex glared at him like he meant to rejoin with something snotty, but then relented. “Yeah, good point,” he admitted. Then: “Lia, she said there’s things we need to know. She said I’m here, somehow, because of you.”

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” Lia said. “And I do think I’d notice. What am I, reanimating in my sleep?” She frowned. “But I guess I did find your lighter in a place she sent me to…”

“Can you undo it?” Dexter asked. “Whatever it is she did to me that’s hurting you?”

Lia shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is. This’s beyond me.”

“That Ingrid woman didn’t seem to think so,” Hannah said.

“No,” Lia agreed reluctantly. “No, I guess she didn’t.” She looked up at Dexter. “So, Dex. We gonna go talk to her, or what?”