instruments appeared in their hands.
“Everything that memory contains is available to enjoy,” Caradura assured Graves, raising his voice over the big bony band when they launched into a lively swing number. More skeletons appeared around them, dancers hopping eagerly to the beat. Flesh and clothing swirled together to cover their bones by the time the band had played three or four bars, and then the gray plain looked like one of the USO shows Graves remembered from the war. Sailors in their whites spun and shimmied with pinup girls who might’ve stepped right down from the nosecones of airplanes and into three glorious dimensions. Their lips were as red as exotic fruits and their legs went on for miles.
“You will want for nothing in this place,” Caradura promised. “The totality of experience will be yours to recreate.”
“You really tellin’ me you’d trade in all this fine and shiny kingliness for the chance to catch a cold or stub your toe or get shot to death for no good reason in some idiotic war?”
“I would, Dexter Graves, I would,” Caradura said. He made a slashing gesture across his throat and the band went silent on the very next note. The dancers stopped and turned to look at them from where they stood, waiting in expectant silence. “All such experiences would shine as jewels in the dark depths of my long memory.”
Graves laughed at that, one terse bark that had no trace of humor in it. “Spoken like a man who’s never had much shrapnel impacted between his ribs,” he said.
Caradura frowned, and the party he’d conjured to tempt his guest with dispersed back into smoke. Only the distant pyramid remained. It seemed to be the one landmark that never changed within this realm that could become a copy of any time or any place, according to its ruler’s will.
Graves paused, soaking in the immense, empty landscape before him as he considered the King’s words, and considered them carefully.
“So,” he said, grabbing the conversational reins when he sensed that Hardface was about to launch back into his sales rap. “Say I actually bit on this line of shit. How would we arrange the trade?”
“Therein, Dexter Graves, lies your ‘catch.’”
“It’s Lia, right?” Graves asked, although he didn’t really need a confirmation by now. “Ingrid wanted outta your deal, so you made her scare up Miss Lia as a replacement.”
“Their homegrown brand of witchwork is rather rare, Dexter Graves,” Caradura said. “Such women are as strange flowers grown up in the cracks between worlds.”
“But helpin’ us to swap would grind her into mulch, wouldn’t it? That’s why Ingrid wouldn’t do it, in the end.”
“You are correct, Dexter Graves. Acting as our bridge will cost the witch her life. At which point she will become your servant here in the kingdom of Mictlan, and subject to your every whim. Think about it. I believe this is what you incarnations call a ‘win-win situation,’ is it not?”
Caradura’s grin as he delivered this last line was as wide and bright as any politician’s.
Chapter Forty-Seven
A bullet whizzed past Lia’s head like an angry, supersonic bee when she snatched up her tomcat at a lucky moment and ran for it, ducking under branches and distancing herself from the gunmen behind her. She was far more agile around here in the gathering gloom than they could ever hope to be. She knew this ground better than anyone ever had.
The sun’s upper arc had sunk dangerously close to the western horizon. The vegetation around her blazed with the last of the afternoon’s smoldering light as she tore across the property, sprinting as hard as she ever had. It was the hour of day Lia normally loved best, although she had no time for smelling roses now.
Her heart was thundering by the time she reached the back of the Yard. Her teeth tasted like copper and she had a deep, lancing stitch in her side, one that threatened to seize into a cramp when she pulled up short and paused in front of the eight-foot-long pile of cordwood that was stacked almost as high as the rear fence.
As vast as it was, the nursery couldn’t go on forever.
The odd, misshapen stump that had been a man earlier that morning was rooted deeply into the earth before the woodpile, like it had been there for a century. Lia let Tom out of her trembling arms and he leapt down onto it with easy, feline grace.
Her first instinct was to run for Bag End, which lay off to her left, but Tom gave her to know that men were coming from that direction, and less than a second later she heard their swift if clumsy approach with her own two ears. So that wasn’t going to work. There’d be no hiding underground.
The thing with a false hood of skin hanging askew over its ivory-yellow facial bones was much nearer, practically in sight of her already and closing fast, by the sound. It would seem to be another reanimated skeleton like Dexter, which both awed and bewildered Lia. There were old trees to her right, the same trees she’d hidden in before (as well as one new, magically-sprouted camellia), but she only had a moment left in which to bolt for cover and the woodpile was closer by.
She snatched up Tom and ducked behind it right before the corpse with the secondhand face burst from the potted treeline at her back. He had at least half a dozen of Mictlantecuhtli’s remaining henchmen at his heels.
Lia felt sure they’d seen her. They must have. She couldn’t have been fast enough. As a hiding place, the woodpile was shot. It was good for nothing but cover now.
Still, she cowered there, trying to breathe quietly while her lungs burned and her blood thundered in her ears, just in case she was wrong and they hadn’t spotted her after all. She clutched her bristle-tailed Tom against her breastbone, wishing as hard as she could that her pursuers would move on.
“All right, now, brujagirl,” the dead henchman in charge said, dashing any hope of a reprieve. “We’re done with this, so come on outta there. You ain’t gonna be happy about it if I have to send my people in.”
With a glance, Tom let Lia know that this was likely true. He’d known this man before, in another era, and was willing to vouch for him as a serious threat. She therefore set her cat down and complied with the skeleton’s order, holding up her hands and stepping out from behind her small mountain of split-and-stacked firewood.
She broke a small branch off from the new camellia shrub as she did so. Almost a twig, really. And yet it was still a wand-a symbolic channel for her will.
She glanced west at the moment the sun finally disappeared from the horizon, leaving the sky above a cloudless cerulean blue that would bleed away to starry blackness within minutes.
It was officially night, and all the worlds’ nocturnals were free to roam.
“Where, pray tell, is the bloody cat?” the dead man with the torn face asked, switching from a Spanish to a British accent for no reason Lia could begin to fathom.
She looked right at him, into the lenses of the cracked sunglasses he hadn’t yet removed, in spite of the gathering darkness. They were the only thing holding his face in position. Lia was no longer afraid, even though she could see teeth through the bloodless rents in his stubbly cheek. A strange calm descended over her, and a subtle breeze she couldn’t feel against her skin nonetheless stirred the leaves of the nearest rooted plants. The trees around her hissed as if in quiet anger, and the living men glanced around themselves nervously, even though they all were armed and Lia plainly was not.
Except for the crooked little stick she raised and pointed in their direction.
She gasped in a breath and straightened her spine when a semi-perceptible shock rolled up her legs from deep within the earth, igniting each of the seven chakra points that ran up the median line of her body as it traveled all the way to the crown of her head. Rising ethereal energies rippled across her skin, trailing fever-waves of gooseflesh after them. Her intentions could now be grounded into manifestation, and she reached out with her mind to share the current, brushing the last of Ingrid’s binding hexes away from Black Tom.
“Boys,” Lia said, smiling wickedly and training her makeshift wand on the gunmen, each in turn, stopping on their leader. “There’s something the old people used to say that I believe applies to this situation.” She let her conscious mind unfurl down the wand’s shaft, pushing at the men’s perceptions with the full force of her will as she quoted a Zuni proverb she’d once read:
“‘After dark,
Before any of the men could ask Lia what in the name of hell she was talking about, a sleek, black mountain
