wall for balance. He waited for his head to clear, then turned around to face the door that opened onto the next room. The one with the bloodcaked stone altar at its center.
“Mictlantecuhtli?” Watt called into the empty, echoing chamber. “Hello?”
On the floor behind him, Oscar San Martin breathed his last. His chest rattled when his lungs settled and then failed to reinflate.
In the next instant his coverall-clad bones materialized from a wisp of smoke right before Winston’s eyes, on the other side of the doorway, while his inert flesh lay cooling in the outer office.
“The King’s not in right now,” San Martin’s skeleton informed Watt, reaching out and slipping a bony hand around the back of his neck to yank him face-first through the doorway. “Why don’t you come inside and wait?”
Winston shouted and staggered forward, pulled off balance by a man he’d just killed, then toppled gracelessly into the realm of Mictlan. His living flesh sloughed away from his bones like so much fine, dry dust when he pitched across the threshold.
He’d never walk the realworld again, he knew, save possibly for one weird weekend each year, and only then with the express permission of his King… except that boon was almost never granted, was it?
Winston pounded the stone floor with his unfleshed fist. He wanted to cry, but there wasn’t enough moisture left in his bones to form tears. Tom Delgado’s abandoned, unmanned skeleton lay motionless on the floor beside him. It was nothing but a worthless relic now, already disarticulating, softening and collapsing in on itself. Soon it would break down completely, with nothing inside to maintain its integrity.
When Winston looked up Mictlantecuhtli was there, standing beside San Martin’s skeleton at the altar and staring down in disappointment from out of the shadows that pooled under his heavy gray cowl.
Tom left them as soon as he felt the presence of the King, drawing his thoughts back into his new feline head. He’d come close enough to the Hole in the Sky to see for himself what had taken place, even though he had too clear an idea already. Winston Watt was dead, as he’d hoped would be the case after hearing the gunshot, but then so was Oscar. His boy Juan would have to grow up without a father, now. There was little enough that Tom could do about it, though. Not with his body ruined and his delicate arrangement with the King in disarray. Death had been denied, and that meant it was no longer safe for Tom to hang around this place. Mictlantecuhtli would know he’d tried to cheat, to breach their contract, and that meant he had no patron anymore.
He’d been lucky to catch the mountain lion that was currently the only thing anchoring him to the living world. Having a form to cling to meant that Death wouldn’t be able to claim his ghost, despite owning his bones. He wouldn’t be able to stay in a cat forever, obviously, but at least he’d bought himself a little time to try and think of another option. He was sure he’d have an idea before too many hours or days had passed.
The former necromancer turned and ran up into the hills with his commandeered catamount, into the wild and away from the comforts of civilization, putting as much physical distance between himself and the King’s Chambers as he possibly could.
Part Five: El Dia de los Muertos
(The Day of the Dead)
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Black Tom, still trapped out amidst the hibiscus blooms where Ingrid had evoked and bound him earlier in the afternoon, watched as the tattooed man who’d been spying on her padded silently out of the greenery.
He circled around Tom’s invisible enclosure, looking him over slowly and thoroughly. Tom did likewise. His examiner’s hair was shaved down to a shadow, and his dark jeans and sweatshirt were each voluminous enough to conceal multiple weapons. He had a greenish-black teardrop inked under the outside corner of his left eye. His sunglasses’ thick frames didn’t quite cover it up.
“You Tomas Delgado, ain’t you?” the gangbanger said. “I get it-del Gato. That’s cute, ese. That’s real clever.”
He got close and looked Tom in the eyes. Through his shades, of course. They were each wearing their own set of impenetrably dark lenses.
“You recognize me, then, ese?” the gangster asked. “You remember me, Tommy del Gato, mister black magic man? Huh? Do you?”
Black Tom shook his head.
Winston pulled off his disguise. His fleshmask, ‘Xavier’s’ secondhand face. “Perhaps this helps to refresh your memory, Tom?” the skeleton underneath asked in his familiar, dry British accent.
Tom felt his eyes go wide behind his glasses. He beat and scrabbled at the walls of his invisible cell in a way that made Winston’s uncovered skull seem to grin. He knew by now that he couldn’t get out, but he was unable to keep from trying again anyway. Like a wild animal caught in a trap.
“Ahh, yes, there we are,” the skeleton on a two-day furlough said. “I didn’t think you’d forget me so soon. You must have known that
Winston stepped back and slipped his face on. He covered his empty sockets with his shades and grinned Xavier’s vicious grin at Black Tom.
“Hardface be comin,’ ese,” Winston said, dropping back into his character’s voice. “An’ he is gonna mess you
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lia blasted back toward North Hollywood in Dexter’s sleek BMW at wildly excessive speeds, cutting in and out of traffic as she shot up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and accelerating through yellow lights at Ventura, at Moorpark, and then again at Riverside in the last nanoseconds before they changed over to red, eliciting honks and shouted curses from the disgruntled left-turners she darted past.
She’d never driven so fast in her life.
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Lia blew past a motorcycle cop’s speedtrap while rocketing east on Sherman Way. Blue and red lights burst like a fireworks display in her rearview mirror and a siren chirped, making her jump in her seat and yelp in startled response. She pulled over into a Home Depot parking lot, feeling sick.
The officer who’d snagged her removed his helmet and left it on the seat of his hulking motorbike before hitching up his gun belt and approaching. He didn’t bother to take off his silver, aviator-style shades.
“License and registration please, ma’am,” the cop said, when Lia rolled down her window to speak with him.
“I… I don’t have them with me,” she said, only then realizing that she really didn’t. Her purse was down in her hobbit hole. She could see her own dismay reflected twice in the officer’s shiny lenses.
“I’m gonna ask you to step out of the vehicle then, ma’am, and turn around and put your hands on the side of it.”
Lia had little choice but to comply. The motorcycle cop (who was tall and young and under better circumstances might’ve been somewhat attractive) frisked her efficiently.
“I just forgot my purse this morning, officer, is all, I really don’t think-”
