Graves' end

Lia downed the electric window just enough to be heard when she spoke. “I have to go, Dexter,” she explained. “I owe it to Black Tom. You guys walk down to the park on Coldwater and wait for me there, or call a cab and go to Hannah’s house. I’ll find you when this is finished.”

“Dammit, Lia, don’t be stupid,” Dexter snarled, pounding on the tinted window like he meant to smash it in. He might even manage it, with a few more blows. “Take me with you, at least! I’m not breakable like you are.”

“I don’t know what you are, or why you are, but Ingrid does,” Lia said, leaning across the passenger seat to look up into Dexter’s empty sockets, which were like a pair of shadowed caves underneath the brim of his fedora. “None of us are safe if she gets anywhere near you, is what I think.”

“Lia, I swear to whoever you want, you can trust me,” Dexter said, abandoning his assault on the window glass. She didn’t doubt that he meant it. His voice was so earnest it practically broke her heart. But it didn’t change the facts.

“I’m trusting you to take care of Hannah, Dexter. Please do that for me.”

Dex nodded helplessly, agreeing that he would of course do that in any case, while still trying to organize an argument. Hannah crowded in beside him, stooping to peer through the chipped passenger window. “Lia, don’t do this,” she said. “Don’t go back there alone.”

“Hannah, she has my Tom.”

“Then let us at least come with you,” Han pleaded, echoing Dexter. “Maybe we can help.”

Lia shook her head, eyeing a fresh red spot of blood on the side of Hannah’s borrowed white t-shirt, which had seeped through the bandage beneath. “I can’t have you hurt on my account. Not any more than you already have been. I can’t, Hannah. Please try to understand that I have to do this, and I can only do it alone.”

She stomped the accelerator before either of them could wedge another word in. She knew she wouldn’t have withstood another round of protestations. Her wheels spun on the loose dirt of the shoulder before catching pavement. Dexter took one last parting shot at the passenger window with his bony fist, and this time he managed to crack it down the middle, but he was too late.

Hannah yelled and ran after the sportscar as it shot down the snaking length of blacktop that led back down to the Valley, still begging her not to leave them at the very top of her lungs.

Lia glanced back in the rearview mirror in time to see Dexter catch her friend when she stumbled and almost fell into the shallow depression at the side of the road, clutching once again at the bleeding wound in her side.

Retrospective No.4 ~ 1910

A century ago…

Oscar closed the metal gate across the front of the platform and advised Tom to hold on before he started the construction elevator’s noisy gasoline engine. The lift rattled and clattered as it carried them up toward the Hole in the Sky. The Hole that would be enclosed by an office at the top of a thirteen-story building within a matter of months. Maybe before the year 1910 had run itself out.

Old Tom Delgado looked north, toward the surprising number of lights (warm tongues of kerosene flame as well as steadier electric glows) that were then coming on in the windows of the distant houses of Hollywood. It looked like a handful of flickering stars had been strewn across the black foothills.

This world was already changing faster than he could follow, and it was about to change so much more.

Now that he’d seen the architectural evidence of el Rey’s ambitions, Tom thought he finally understood how his patron intended to use him. As a placeholder. A bookmark. As something to wedge into the imaginal space Mictlantecuhtli was meant to occupy while ‘Miguel Caradura’ projected himself out into the living world as he desired, in subversion of the ancient laws that bound him.

King Death himself could never travel beyond the Hole in the Sky. He came right back when he tried, like a dead man arriving. Tom had witnessed it before. Los Muertos, the ordinary denizens of Mictlan, lacked even the ability to step into the first chamber (or the second one, from their point of view, Tom supposed), except on the two nights that followed Halloween, when the worlds experienced a flash of precise synchronization that made such crossings possible. They could exit only then, should their King elect to grant his subjects permission to walk the earth. Which he rarely did, as there was nothing in it for him, generally speaking.

But Tom’s demise would be unique. Mictlantecuhtli meant to flay him bare with his obsidian blade at the door between the worlds instead of on the second room’s altar stone (as he did with all of the regular dead). In this special case he’d leave Tom’s freely-offered pelt out in the first of his Chambers and wear it into the realworld, rather than feed it to his creatures. Tom himself would become almost the opposite of the King’s emancipated mistress, in effect-a ghost that could never leave the Chambers at all. He’d be deprived of his body but not freed from its obligations, trapped forever in the two-room airlock between life and death that the twin Chambers comprised.

While the King would walk free, slipping into the space left empty by Tom’s unfinished death.

El Rey had bought a body from his minion rather than a soul. He’d purchased a niche in the realworld with a tawdry currency of toys, travel, and sex-the pursuits Tom had chosen to drown his pain in after his love had been taken away. (And even that loss had most likely occurred through the machinations of his King, he realized, much too late).

He was about to pay dearly for those indulgences now. As was everybody else. King Death had been privy to every trick discovered and every truth divined by a thousand generations of sorcerers, and Tom couldn’t imagine a greater threat to the worlds than an unbounded, incarnate Mictlantecuhtli. Restraint had never been a part of his patron’s nature.

Tom figured the plan also included using the rest of him, the disembodied remainder, to conduct el Rey’s brave new endeavors in this unsuspecting world on a full-time basis. The King needed an administrator more capable and effective than old Winston Watt, whose brain was burnt already after a mere two decades of service. Tom’s ghost, on the other hand, would be hanging around the office for the rest of forever, fully able to manage Miguel Caradura’s affairs with his living employees from there, so his afterlife wasn’t even going to be his own. There’d be no post-mortem reunion with Dulce, or with Ramon, or with anyone else he missed. The physical pain of being torn between life and death might well be with him for an eternity, too, since the King sure as hell wasn’t going to bear it.

Tom could still run (like he’d meant to after cutting down the Tree, a plan that now seemed to have been formulated at some irrelevant point in distant antiquity), but if he did so his old friend Ramon’s boy Oscar and his yet-to-be-born grandson Juan would be the first to pay the price.

Poor Oscar had yet to look up from his shoes. Tom didn’t blame him for the ‘betrayal,’ such as it was. Their King had been playing a very long game, and they’d all been his unwitting pawns.

When the lift reached the top of the incomplete structure’s bare steel skeleton, Tom noticed a small, gray, feral cat that had climbed all the way up here to soak in the view, his lofty ambitions almost a feline equivalent to the King’s. Seeing him there gave Tom an idea.

Years ago, when he and Ramon had first come to this place, each of the boys had met his nagual, his spirit-animal, so to speak. That particular creature with which he had a special affinity and which might, if asked, guide him across the dreamscapes revealed by vegetal friends like Teonanactl and Mescalito.

Ramon’s nagual had been the lizard-cool, thoughtful, and prone to disappearing in a flash.

Tom’s had been the mountain lion. The prince of cats who stalked these hills and canyons. He silently asked the brave little birdstalker who was flashing his eyes from the far end of a girder for a very great favor, and received the animal’s consent.

Tom sent out his mind and switched places with the cat. He wasn’t sure it would work with such a small specimen, one that resembled a lion about as much as a chihuahua did a wolf, but work it did. After a sickening instant of vertigo those reflective green eyes were his, and he was looking back up at his own human body as the catspirit he’d swapped with steered it down the foot-wide girder and toward the Hole in the Sky, holding onto a rope the work crews had strung between the steel supports for balance.

Oscar, following behind it, seemed none the wiser.