Graves' end

bit.

Hannah had to smile, Graves noticed.

“Steb, what are you doing?” Lia asked.

“Just watch, brujachica,” he said. “Unless you are moved to join me.”

Esteban raised a hand and the half-dozen party people nearest to him simultaneously joined in his choreography. Their moves looked expertly coordinated.

“Theatrical bunch, ain’t they?” Graves muttered to Hannah.

Lia twitched her hips as Steb danced at her, not joining him, exactly, but matching his steps a bit. It was a weird tango she wasn’t quite participating in, although she didn’t shy away from it, either.

“You like my dance, brujachica?”

“If it’s leading where I think it is, I might not,” Lia warned over the music.

The song’s intensity redoubled at the chorus and Steb threw his head back in a scream that had the effect of drawing all of his blacksuited bodyguards into the number with impeccable timing. They doffed imaginary hats and spun their big guns like canes. It was both absurd and scary. People instinctively scrambled away from the whirling weapons. Graves and Hannah were stunned, as were the guards themselves, judging by the looks on their faces.

This wasn’t choreography at all. It was mind control.

“All right, Steb, I’m impressed,” Lia said. “Really impressed. But I’d like you to stop now.”

“Ohhh, why don’t you just loosen up?” Steb shouted. He raised his arms above his head and the remainder of the room (including Graves, Hannah, and Riley) were all compelled to join the dance.

Only Lia, the demure axis of all that energy, remained immune. She smiled at Steb’s antics, and Graves thought he sensed in her some desire to take part in the madman’s reel. She clearly knew the steps. She could probably have shown this ‘Steb’ a move or two. Together they’d be plain dangerous.

For the first time, Graves thought he understood Lia’s full potential for terrible and terrifying beauty, like that of a firestorm or a raging angel. She and Esteban could have danced across realities together and molded the worlds anew, into whatever strange and striking forms they might’ve fancied, with no regard for any rules of gods or men.

If she’d wanted to, that was. Graves was glad she didn’t.

Lia edged away toward the door, drawing the whirling crowd along after her.

“Dance with me,” Steb dared, screaming it over the music.

“You mean you’re not gonna force me to?” Lia shouted back.

“Ha!” Esteban laughed. “Never you, brujachica. As if I could.”

“Yeaaah, anyway,” Lia said, “I think it’s time my friends and I were going, now.” She slipped out the front door, pulling Hannah and Graves along with her. Control of their limbs came back to them when she took their hands.

Steb and all of his guests and guards spilled right out the front door after them. A team of gardeners attending to the grounds joined in the crisply-executed dance routine, spinning rakes and smashing garbage can lids together to amplify the beat. Involuntary partiers gyrated on the lawn, more than a few of them still clutching the remainders of spilled drinks in their hands.

“But my operation has just ended, and my party has just begun,” Steb said, pursuing Lia as she backed away down the steps. “We are as one mind with many bodies. Imagine the possibilities!”

“That’s not my kind of party, Steb,” Lia said sadly. “It’s too much. These people aren’t toys. This kind of thing is the reason we can’t be together, and you know it.”

“You limit yourself. Why, brujachica? Why will you not think of what we, together, could be? What more must I do to prove my passion?”

“Nothing!” Lia pleaded. “Please, gods, nothing more. You take risks that scare me, Steb. You sell your skills in ways I can’t abide. I don’t want to change you, or stifle you, or tell you who to be… but I also can’t stand by. And we’ve been over this before.”

At the apex of the song, Steb let the number stop.

The music died away and the dancers quit. Some fell to their knees in fear and relief, while others turned around and went back into the house, in search of fresh drinks.

Steb turned sad and earnest. “But I love you, brujachica,” he said. “I always will.”

Graves looked on, with his ulnae and radii folded across his ribs. Hannah pulled him toward the car. They both got in, Graves in the back, Hannah in the driver’s seat, as Lia kissed Steb’s cheek.

“Take care of yourself, Esteban,” she said. “Don’t let yourself do things you’ll regret. People’s choices have to be their own.”

She pulled away from him, pained by the disappointment evident in his eyes. She turned and took Riley’s hands. “Thank you, Riley, for patching up my Hannah,” she said. “Oh, and that Pi trick you taught me worked really well! I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”

Riley nodded and Lia hopped into the passenger seat of Graves’ stolen fancyass car. She waved out the window when they pulled away, angling down the long, curving drive.

Esteban watched them go from where he stood on the front steps, looking quietly brokenhearted.

“All right,” Graves said from the back seat of the car as they wound their way down the hill. “Can I just ask, what the hell was that?”

“That was Steb,” Hannah said, without looking back from the driver’s seat.

Lia said nothing at all. She stared out her window at expensive houses and sun-mottled vegetation as they rolled silently past.

Then, out of nowhere she shouted: “Wait a minute, where’s Tom?” She looked around, with panic written across her face. “Hannah, stop the car!”

Hannah did so, wide-eyed, skidding to a stop in the middle of the road. Thankfully there was no one behind them. Lia was openly panicked, trying to look in every direction at once, it seemed like.

“I can’t find Black Tom!” she shrieked.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Tomas Delgado-Black Tom, as Lia called him, and others had called him before her-stood alone in the middle of Casa de Rojo’s guest bedroom, testing an invisible boundary like a mime without an audience. He hadn’t been able to move or project himself at all for some minutes now.

At his feet, three lines of fire spontaneously ignited and grew together to form a triangle around him. Tom watched this occurrence curiously until he realized that the well-appointed guest room outside the firelines was fading away and changing, becoming the familiar, engulfing greenery of Potter’s Yard.

The stunning redhead who’d introduced herself to Lia as Ingrid Redstone (first by e-mail and then in person at Paty’s coffee shop not two weeks before), looked on as she forced him into visibility within a space she’d defined by drawing lines in the dirt between three lit candles encased in tall glass jars. Black Tom looked down and saw his catself lying at his ghostfeet. He couldn’t send himself out any further from the cat, nor could he fully re-enter and wake it up. His captor had set her candles around an inverted fishtank, under which she’d trapped his catbody, intuiting that the stuporous animal had to be more than it seemed. She’d been right enough about that, and he’d been too distracted with concern over Lia to feel her sneaking up on it.

He looked up and considered Ingrid.

He may not have known how this was happening, but he thought he finally knew who this was, at least: the King’s Girlfriend. The Red Witch, or la Bruja Roja, as an acquaintance of his had once called her, long, long ago. The mystery woman whose name old Tomas Delgado had never learned, back at the start of the twentieth century.

How the hell could he have known she’d still be alive? How the hell could she still