Graves' end

“Hell no, we’re not gonna go talk to her!” Dexter said. “You know how to spell ‘trap,’ sister? That’d be I-N-G, uh,” — he thought about it- “R-I-D.”

“But what about all those ‘things we need to know?’” Lia asked.

“That’s a bluff,” Dex said. “She’s bluffing. It’s bullshit.”

“What if it’s not, Dexter?” Hannah asked quietly.

Hannah and Dexter exchanged a private glance, and Lia knew they were both thinking of her. She must still have looked pretty worn out. She hadn’t really expected that three hours of sleep would erase those dark, haunted circles from underneath her eyes.

“If that’s the case,” Dexter reassured Hannah, “then we’ll find out what she knows some other way. But playing by Ingrid’s rules is not gonna be the smart move, here, I’m tellin’ you. I’m getting a notion she’s a better tactician than I ever knew.”

“You guys are welcome here for as long as you need,” Riley said. “We’re defended. Let ’em come.”

“Thank you, Riley,” Lia said, touching his arm affectionately. “But I don’t think that’s really gonna work.”

“Why not?” Dexter and Hannah said together.

“It’s nice here,” Dex elaborated. “Swanky.”

“And safe,” Hannah supplied.

“You’ll see, if we hang around long enough,” Lia told them. “Riley, can I have a drink of water? Maybe a sandwich or something, before Steb wakes up? I don’t know if I can handle him today.”

“Of course you can,” Riley said. “You can have roast duck and chilled caviar, if you like.”

“PB amp;J’ll be fine.”

Hannah meekly raised her hand. “I might try the duck and caviar.”

“Come on,” Riley said. “We just restocked the kitchen.”

They all filed out into the hall, except for Black Tom. Lia noticed, but she figured he’d be along directly. He wasn’t her shadow, after all.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Graves realized that Casa de Rojo’s party people had come to terms with his mementomori presence much more readily than most crowds would have. The decayed Dick Tracy, Riley, and Hannah hung out amongst them in the main hall and talked amidst their chatter while Lia finished off her snack: two sandwiches, a banana, and a glass of sweet iced tea.

Hannah nibbled at a leg of crispy duck and sipped from a glass of champagne.

Truth be told, Graves was almost as startled and captivated by Riley’s guests as they were by him, now that he had a chance to look them over. He’d gotten used to the idea that Hannah and Miss Lia wore dungarees all the time, and he figured it had to do with their soil-centric line of work out at Potter’s Yard. (Although Lia’s pants didn’t quite fit, like she’d bought them in the wrong size. They showed off her belly button and a good two inches of skin below that. Not that Graves meant to complain about it, mind you). But the women in this room, as well as some of the men, all wore jeans that barely covered their pubic bones, if not ‘skirts’ that seemed to be little more than narrow bands of fabric stretched taut around slender hips. Shapely legs and plumped-up breasts bulged everywhere he looked, like a part of the decor, and these kids were about as tattooed as a tribe of South Seas savages. Graves had known career Navy men who didn’t sport as much ink as any random twenty-year-old girl at this party, which had apparently been going on for some number of days already.

O brave new world, thought Dexter Graves. These young people had grown up with choices and freedoms arrayed before them that nobody born in his era would’ve been able to imagine.

Graves believed in freedom, as an ideal. He’d fought for it in the big WW, and he was more gratified than he would’ve guessed to see this future generation using it as they were, to strike out into the unknown countries within and between themselves. What sort of new continents might explorers like these discover, given time? Graves may have been overwhelmed and intimidated by their liberally-displayed beauty, but he wished them all the best just the same.

While he was idly musing about days and wonders yet to come, a double-door at the top of the stairs banged open and a wild-eyed figure who could only be freelance shaman Esteban de Rojo (known in some circles as Steb) burst back into the everyday world after an unbroken week of isolation.

All conversation ceased; all heads swiveled up toward him. Graves, Lia, Hannah and Riley all stood up.

Steb zeroed in immediately on Lia.

“Brujachica!” he screamed.

The new lunatic with the flair for entrances leaped down the stairs in three large bounds to seize Lia’s hand. He had a shock of black hair, small glittering eyes, a sharp wedge of a chin, and the letters of some arcane alphabet tattooed down his forearms. “You have returned to me, as I always knew one day you would,” he said.

Graves didn’t know what to think.

“Hi, Steb,” Lia said. “I haven’t returned, I’m just stopping by.”

“Ahhhhh, you say that now but wait,” Esteban chided. “You’ve yet to see the newest wonders we’ve evoked. There is no place else you will care to be once you’ve seen the works that we’re performing here.”

Finally he noticed Graves and was visibly taken aback.

“Whoa,” he said, looking to Lia. “You’ve been scaling new heights too, haven’t you, brujachica?”

“Steb,” she said, “this is Dexter Graves. Dex: Esteban de Rojo.”

Turning to Graves, Steb said, “Charmed, I am certain.”

“Not so much for me,” Graves replied.

“Lia, la brujachica,” Esteban said again, delighted nearly to the point of rapture by the mere fact of her presence. “How can you stay away, mi corazon? What hospitality can I offer you?”

“Riley just made me a sandwich.”

“A sandwich? A fucking sandwich?” Steb turned on Riley. “Why would you make her a sandwich when anything the world can offer is hers for the asking?” he demanded. “What is the matter with you?”

“It’s what I asked for, Steb,” Lia said. “It’s what I wanted.”

“But-”

“You know I hate being told what I’m supposed to like.”

“You always did, didn’t you, brujachica?” Steb smiled. “Hannah Potter,” he said, taking note of the lady for the first time. “I remember you.” He grabbed Hannah up in a bearhug and whirled her around. Riley’d scrounged enough Vicodin for her that it didn’t appear to trouble the slice on her hip at all.

“Hi, Esteban,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you as well, Dona Hannah.”

“What’ve you been working on, Steb?” Lia asked. “You seem a little… wired.”

“Yeah, man,” Riley said. “Even for you.”

Steb set a slightly dizzy Hannah down, and Graves steadied her.

“Scrying the aethers, mi brujachica,” Steb told Lia. “I’ve been scrying the aethers and such wonders I’ve seen! You must join me. Really, you’re my only peer.”

“What is he, hopped up on bennies?” Graves whispered. “Benzedrine?”

“He’s been in a deeply altered state all week,” Riley said. “He’s supposed to ground himself better before he comes out of seclusion, though.”

“Brujachica!” Steb jumped up onto a coffee table to grandly assume the center of the room. The crowd of hipsters and hexy girls parted around him, except for four female stereo bearers who raised four identical boomboxes (in what Lia and Riley thought of as a Lloyd Dobbler style) and started them all playing the same song.

Steb’s dark eyes blazed with excitement. “I want you to see what I have brought back from the edge of the 30th sphere,” he cried, when he had Lia’s full attention.

Esteban began to dance to the dark, manic beat that poured from the sexy caryatids’ upraised radios. Slowly at first, then faster as the tempo increased. All of his attention was focused on Lia, who wasn’t intimidated one