Graves' end

las Cameras del Rey-the King’s Chambers-and her startled, wondering face was bathed in dazzling light.

Miguel Caradura’s office suite was brightly lit and fully functional, in surreal contrast to the rest of the shabby and apparently abandoned modern-day building.

Lia stepped tentatively into the outer office, shielding her eyes and feeling blown away by the sheer weirdness of it all. Instead of the decrepit, run-down room she’d been expecting, she found herself inside an office decorated to rival any top CEO’s establishment. The leather furniture smelled new, and the walls shone with a fresh coat of paint in a designer shade of cool mint green. The waiting room might’ve been refurbished that very afternoon.

The door to the next chamber stood open, beckoning like an invitation.

The overhead lights in there were switched off, but Lia couldn’t miss the huge flatscreen monitor glowing on an executive desktop, so she crept a few steps nearer to that shadowy inner office. The monitor was displaying security-cam angles of locations within the building that were already familiar after her laborious climb up the stairs.

Each window on the display seemed to be showing a short video clip on a loop, in fact, and every clip she saw was of her. Lia’s stomach tightened at the realization. Black Tom wasn’t visible, not anywhere on the screen, but then his presence never had been perceptible by a thing like a camera’s lens. Not unless he wanted it to be.

The clips traced Lia’s progress upwards through the building. Starting in the upper left corner of the screen, she saw herself down at the front entrance, looking up into a fish-eye lens and seeming to scrutinize it with one huge eye. (There had been a stone gargoyle mounted over the door; Lia remembered looking up into its snarling face when trying the bell. The camera must have been hidden inside its mouth.) In the next video window she was pixilated in poor lighting, standing in a downstairs corridor and plainly wondering whether the dusty relic of a camera she was staring up into could possibly still be viable and functioning.

Got my answer on that one now, don’t I?

Yet another window showed infrared footage of her brightly-colored silhouette standing outside the office door, minutes ago, flicking the wheel of a cold blue antique lighter and making psychedelic sparks. The tongue of flame they finally kindled made for a dramatic, multi-hued fireball on the feed from the thermal spy cam.

The very last window, in the lower righthand corner of the screen, showed her right here and right now, real time, standing in the well-lit outer office. As her eyes continued to drift south she realized there was a silver tray sitting next to the monitor, one piled high with what looked to be wet, red, and weakly-pulsing human hearts. Her own heart seemed to stop in her chest at the sight of them. A rose in a cut-glass vase stood beside the tray, completing an elegant presentation. Lia hadn’t registered the grisly offering immediately because of the bright glow from the computer screen, which made everything else in the dim second chamber difficult to see.

Oh, shitballs, she thought, watching herself assess the situation, live on digital video. What is this?

Not what she and Tom had been led to believe, that much was certain. This place wasn’t dormant at all. It was fully awake. Awake, alive, and active. The abandoned-and-vandalized facade it presented to the world was nothing more than stage dressing.

Black Tom faded into a corner of the first room while an appallingly large tarantula descended from the ceiling on a thread of viscous webbing, sinking down to the floor behind Lia. She almost turned, sensing its motion peripherally, but her attention was arrested by the luminous flatscreen on the desk in the darkened second chamber. She paused in the middle of the first room and strained her eyes from where she stood, wanting paradoxically to get a better look at the screen without moving any closer to the next room’s doorway.

Tom hung back and watched as bees and beetles and fat red ants poured out from the baseboards and roiled together in silence, as roaches and wasps and tiny white scorpions teemed up into a swaying tower that stood almost six feet high. Right behind his girl. The looming mass of insects and arachnids seemed to be trying as one to copy a human form, clumping together into a vaguely feminine, hourglass configuration, perhaps using Lia herself as a handy example. They organized into a number of long tentacles that the lady-shaped swarm reached out with while her individual bugs began melting together, working furiously to congeal into a single, outsized specimen.

Lia’s eyes darted away from the mound of shining hearts beside the bright computer screen when she realized that someone was watching her very closely, even still.

A black-cowled figure seated at the desk-a figure obscured by the high back of his chair-now moved for the first time. She saw the reflection of the creature’s robe and his heavy, face-obscuring hood in the dark window beyond the desk when he picked up a half-eaten heart from a linen napkin and tore a squelching bite out of it with his long, gumless teeth. Lia knew immediately that this was not a man, although it still impressed her as being male. The thing’s skeletal hand, she noted with hallucinatory clarity, was stippled with clots of blood and fringed with fresh red shreds of flayed tissue. All she could see beneath the shadow of his cowl was a skeletal grin. Dark heartblood dripped down his bony wedge of a chin.

Lia gasped and turned to flee, only to run face-first into the newly-minted bugwoman that was still churning behind her as it struggled to come into focus. She yelped, instinctually throwing up her hands to dampen the collision, and when a stray centipede scurried across the backs of her fingers, she screamed.

The unstable bug-thing lurched after her as she staggered back, grasping with its multiple arms but not yet facile enough on its obscenely long, chitinous legs to catch her.

Lia shouted again when she stumbled, tripping over her own feet and landing hard on her ass. She cringed, expecting the worst, but Black Tom whacked the bugwoman from behind with his walking stick before it could fall on her, and the swaying conglomeration of half-melded carapaces disintegrated into an avalanche of separate insects. Tom must’ve been biding his time until the demon was solid enough to be attacked. Lia scrambled away from the bugwave that resulted from his efforts, grimacing with revulsion when it washed across the floor and over her shoes.

Tom extended a hand to help her up and together they ran like hell, pursued by the mad, cackling laughter of Miguel Caradura, currently known on the streets as Mickey Hardface, and previously known to the adherents of his ancient cult as Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec King of the Dead.

Chapter Two

Lia and Black Tom burst out through the old building’s front door and back into the unlighted street, pursued by an angry cloud of buzzing, flying, biting creatures. Lia ducked and flailed, trying to keep the insects out of her hair and clothing. They swirled away into three separate funnels that swiftly congealed into lanky, Amazonian female forms. They were a lot faster about it now that they were warming up, she noticed with some concern.

Black Tom turned and stood his ground against them, snarling.

He swung the head of his walking stick up, catching the first of the re-spawned bugwomen under the chin and bursting her into a spectacular shower of insect bodies. He dealt with the other two incipient bug-beings just as deftly, bashing one through the midsection and sweeping the other to the ground, where he stabbed it between its multiple eyes with his cane tip.

Their component colonies began to re-form almost as soon as they came apart.

The bugwomen wouldn’t stay down for long.

Lia, having caught her breath while watching the skirmish from what felt like a reasonably safe distance, now sprinted for the better-lighted street a block to the north. She glanced back to see Black Tom grinning and giving the finger to the camera-concealing gargoyle above the building’s front door, right before he punctured another nearly-whole buglady and batted her back into a shapeless cloud of gnats with his stick. He could reflect enough light to appear on video, briefly, when he made a special effort, so the King was sure to have seen his unambiguous gesture. Lia imagined the robed skeleton at the top of the tower winging his plate of