Graves' end

When Lia said nothing Ingrid shook her head.

“Then it’s already too late.” Her last hopes vanished, extinguished like a match pinched between two fingers. She felt almost sick with despair. “The sun’s about to go down.”

“Too late for what, Ingrid?”

“For us to finish resurrecting Dexter,” Ingrid said, like it should have been obvious. “It would kill either one of us alone, but both of us, working together, we could survive. We could have survived, that is, and hidden him from Mickey. Mictlantecuhtli. But if Dexter can’t be here within a few minutes, there isn’t anything more we can do. You’ll be dead before dawn, Lia, and I’m sure I’ll be right there with you.”

She looked down at the cat in her arms, and sighed. “No point in keeping the pawns once the game is lost,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

As soon as Ingrid dropped the cat, Xavier, her driver, of all fucking people, swooped right out of the glowing sunlit bushes and snatched it up at a run. Ingrid yelped involuntarily. So did Lia’s cop, Ben. Lia shot right after the fleeing gangster with no hesitation, showing them the soles of her shoes.

Ben tackled Ingrid from the side before she recovered from her very genuine surprise, driving her to the dirt with all of his considerable, athletic weight. Her bone-handled knife went flying. Ben cuffed her before she could move her hands enough to do anything useful with them, and then jumped up to follow after Lia.

Tom hissed and flailed when Winston Watt-whose false face was beginning to peel around the edges as it dried out-held him up in one hand. Watt also had a fully automatic gun of some kind clutched in his other bony claw, and he fired chattering bursts of lead into the air as he ran. Tom’s sensitive feline ears rang from the staccato gunshots. It felt like having his head clapped between a pair of frying pans a dozen times per second. Ingrid’s rough hexes still had him tied inextricably to his cat, so escape by sending out into another animal wasn’t going to be an option.

“Lissen up, eses,” Winston yelled, still posing as Xavier, the gang’s appointed leader. The non-Spanish speakers amongst them must have wondered why he’d address them like they were book reports. “Is time for plan B,” the disguised manservant shouted. “Shoot the pigs and catch the women. I’m givin’ the orders now!”

Winston skidded to a stop and held the cat up at eye level, looking it in the eyes through his shades.

“But first,” he said, “we deal with-”

A frightful screech and a blur of flailing paws interrupted him when Tom brought his untrimmed and razor- sharp claws slashing down around the henchman’s undefended head.

“No!” Winston screamed, trying to shield himself with his forearms as Tom raked the sunglasses right off his fake face. The eyeless skeleton beneath the skin shrieked, feeling with both hands that his borrowed forehead and cheeks were shredded into bloodless ribbons. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled around for his lost sunglasses, and Tom seized his moment to run for it.

Lia and her new friend Officer Ben came upon the scene, but gunfire from another of el Rey’s henchmen sent them diving off in opposite directions, into the vegetation. They called out to one another and Tom knew that neither of them had been hit, without breaking his fastest four-legged stride.

Winston jumped up. He crammed his sunglasses back onto his torn face. “Get the cat and the witch,” he shouted in a rage, and Tom could hear him crashing and crunching through the plants behind him. “Consiga el gato y a la bruja,” he bellowed. “Get the cat and the goddamned witch!”

The chase was on.

Two bulky gangsters who looked like they’d probably been playing high school football not too many years before came at Tom from either side and he darted away at the instant they both dove for him. The men collided face-first, with a solid, meaty smack. They fell away to either side, knocked unconscious, upsetting two stepped racks of culinary herbs that rained down around them in a noisy avalanche of tiny plastic pots.

Tom’s mischievous old heart surged with wild joy as he fled.

Then one of the older guys almost had him-got a grip around his middle, even, for about half an instant- before tripping over his own feet and somersaulting into a steel-wire shelving unit that housed terracotta pottery. Hundreds of pounds of it. The rack itself was eight feet high, and its entire payload of fired clay came crashing down onto the man’s head and shoulders before he had a chance to exclaim. It sounded to Tom like God’s own busboy had dropped a bin full of plates somewhere behind him.

If ten large men chasing one puff-tailed tomcat wasn’t a recipe for physical comedy, then he didn’t know what was. Tom would’ve been having a blast, frankly, if he hadn’t been so afraid of somebody shooting his Lia. His Winter Flower. There were far too many guns around his girl just now, and that really would not do.

Blackdog cops obligingly tackled, disarmed and cuffed another pair of men when Tom lured them through a cluster of potted fan palms, right past the officers he sensed were concealed there, waiting to pounce when they saw a chance.

That left eight of Mictlantecuhtli’s men in black still standing, by Tom’s hasty count. ‘Xavier,’ known to him a century ago as Winston Fucking Watt, was one of the few still on the loose.

Chapter Forty-Six

The King snapped his fingers and they were down upon the plain, under the sunless silver sky. The pyramid they’d been at the top of a moment before now stood tall on the dark horizon behind them.

It was a pretty nifty trick, Graves thought, in spite of himself.

Miguel Caradura turned to the soul at his side. “You should know, Dexter Graves, that I am a powerful king,” he said. “My reign extends even beyond the boundaries of my native Mictlan. The territories of my weaker brethren have also become my own as their rulers have lost coherence and their worshippers have died out.”

Hardface sounded exactly like a salesman, in Graves’ opinion. Not one he’d buy a bridge from, either.

Mickey Caradura raised his arms, and rank after rank of his conscripted troops appeared from out of the smoke when he spoke of them. They stood at attention, silent and still, awaiting their orders. They were creatures out of myths and dreams, a few of which Graves recognized from stories (such as dragons, centaurs, and what he thought might’ve been a gryphon), although there were many more he could not identify. So many that it boggled his mind to look at them. They became little more than a mass of vaporous, insubstantial sketches as their ranks faded back into the gray distance.

“The domains of Olympus and Luxor have long been under my control,” said the King. “As have the spheres of the Kami, the Fair Folk, and the Shemhamephorash. All of those our brothers whose ties to the realworld have slipped away are now my conquered minions to command. My Army of Imaginals. I am Mictlantecuhtli, King of the Forgotten, Lord of the Shades, Emperor of the Archaic and the Arcane-and you can be too, Dexter Graves.”

“Hey, that all sounds swell, it really does,” Graves said, cocking a ghostly hat back on his transparent head. “But I just know there’s gotta be a catch.”

He was getting bored with the hard sell already.

Caradura lowered his arms and let his armies fade until he and his guest were all alone again upon a rolling, empty plain that never seemed to end. “But a small one, Dexter Graves, so hear me out,” the King said. “I, you see, am possessed of ambitions beyond the ordinary dreams of my kind. I would have what no nonbody is ever given to have. Sensation. Experience. The World. Your world. I will walk it, I will conquer it, and it will be mine, the crowning glory of my vast empire!”

Caradura shouted this mission statement up into the gray sky.

“But to achieve this,” he said, turning back to Graves, “I will need a body. I need your body, Dexter Graves. I therefore propose that we effect a trade. I will walk the actual in your flesh and with your bones, while you remain here and reign in my stead as Lord of all Mictlan.”

The King raised his hand and a dozen podiums emblazoned with treble clefs sprang up from the soil like a row of improbable crops. Tuxedoed skeletons coalesced out of the mists to stand behind them, and musical