Graves' end

child dunking her head to look around underwater. She gasped in surprise at what she saw.

Tom touched her thoughts and shared the vision with her. The second chamber was not an office anymore but rather the old inner sanctum of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, as Tom had known it back in its Hole in the Sky days. The carved altar stone crouched where the desk had been, and a rough doorway in the wall beyond it had replaced the illusion of panoramic windows. The impression of modernity the King liked to affect was gone: a projection visible from the first room only.

Hannah pulled her head back across the threshold. She looked all right, as far as Tom could see. He could further tell, from both her expression and her thoughts, that the fancy, well-lit office with the desk was once again what she saw on the doorway’s far side. One image replaced the other as soon as her eyes crossed the dividing line. It was like seeing two television channels switched back and forth.

“Huh,” she said.

Then she bent over and retrieved Graves’ lighter from his bone pile, digging it out from the inner pocket of his ratty, crumpled raincoat. She clutched it to her heart as she straightened up and faced the doorway. She took a single deliberate step inside, setting one foot onto the inner chamber’s stone floor and then planting the second right down beside it. Tom cringed, expecting to see her flesh slide away from her bones like so much loose sand, the way his friend Ramon’s had done so many years ago.

Hannah’s skin didn’t do that, though, and after a few seconds she opened her eyes again. She seemed unchanged, to both her own and to Tom’s very great relief.

Behind her, back in the realworld, shred-faced Winston Watt burst into the outer office, banging the bloodstained door off the wall. His black sweatshirt and jeans looked beige with embedded dirt.

Hannah whirled around at the percussive sound of his entrance.

Watt saw Graves’ cigarette lighter in her hand. He pulled a gun from inside his soil-caked sweatshirt and marched right into Mictlan without undergoing any more metamorphosis when he stepped through the portal than Hannah had a moment before. Tom was indistinct enough to go undetected by both of them.

Hannah put her hands up, clutching the lighter in the left one, when the desiccated gunman shoved his weapon into her face.

“I thought only a bonafide dirtwitch or whatever he called it is supposed to be able to walk through that door,” she said to him, shying back as far as she could without letting her ass come into contact with the grisly altar.

Winston ripped off the remainder of his Xavier mask, sunglasses and all, revealing the bare and eyeless skull beneath it. “Here’s my dirty little secret,” he said over Hannah’s involuntary shriek. “Now what, pray tell, is yours?”

Chapter Fifty-One

Daylight flashed again in the sky above Potter’s Yard, as bright and sudden as thunderless lightning. It disappeared as quick, leaving Ingrid’s night vision obscured by brilliant, overlapping afterimages. She’d gone with Lia’s friend, the one called Riley, to see if there was any help she might offer, or anything else she might be able to do. There wasn’t, really, but she was too fascinated by Riley’s technological solution to the Archon problem not to see how his approach panned out.

She saw Nyx duck into an outlying shed and slam the door, pursued by a team of those identically-dressed guardsmen. It seemed that Mickey wasn’t the only individual in town who maintained a small army of mercenaries, and these people behaved like they’d even been trained, in sharp contrast to the motley assortment of lowlifes her King had sent her out here with. Ingrid knelt down some yards back from Riley’s men and closed her eyes, latching onto the perceptions of the ancient entity inside the shack. She caught an impression of the guards’ lights illuminating the windows before Nyx dropped down to the floor.

Outside, Ingrid opened her physical eyes to watch the guards ring the shed, three men to a side as well as one at every corner. The combined glare of their electric sun-lights made the boxy little structure at the center of their circle stand out with hallucinatory clarity. She could feel Nyx cowering under a table, in there.

Riley stepped up next to Ingrid and put his hands on his hips, assessing the situation.

Inside the room, on the floor by her head, Nyx noticed a strip of electrical power outlets, as well as something attached to it. Ingrid felt the attentional snag, closed her lids, and turned her mind’s eye toward the object of the Archon’s focus. It turned out to be a complex, boxy device plugged into the power strip, one that Ingrid guessed to be a timer of some sort, based mostly on the fact that it had a numbered dial on its face. Nyx, she sensed, had no idea what the mechanism was called, although she understood that it was counting down, and that something would happen when it finished.

The timer clicked over to the next hour, and more dazzling sun lamps came on above to nurture a prolific crop of fat, red tomatoes.

Nyx yowled in the lamps’ glare like a boiled cat and Ingrid pulled away from her, back into her own headspace.

Opening her eyes, she found that it was now daytime outside the shed. It just was, despite being nearly eight o’clock in the evening, according to reason. A beautiful mid-morning blue hung over all of Los Angeles (and maybe over all of everywhere, as far as Ingrid knew, since Lady Night was currently unable to fulfill any of her duties).

She got up from her knees and brushed them off. She didn’t want to think about how ragged she must’ve looked in the harsh light of day. Riley nodded, appearing rather pleased with himself when he grinned at her. “I think that’ll do,” he said.

Ingrid had to shade her eyes to look at him. She was apt to freckle now, because of his tricks, and yet she couldn’t help but smile back.

The men in the black suits began propping their burning lights up around the shed, and she and Riley started back toward the last place they’d seen Lia. Nyx went on wailing, unharmed but unhappy about being trapped in the light of an artificial day.

When they came out of the trees, Lia was kneeling in the dirt where the young man called Esteban had been fighting with Mickey’s Tzitzimime. Weird tracks proliferated, scattered across the dirt in no discernible pattern. Ingrid didn’t see any other trace of the bugwomen, but then there was no sign of Lia’s friend, either, and her heart sank. She didn’t know the particulars, but she got a sense of what must’ve happened, all the same. She hoped it hadn’t been terrible for Lia to watch, but she could tell just by looking that the hope was in vain.

“Lia…” she said, very softly, coming up behind the smaller woman and hesitating for a moment before placing a hand on her shoulder. “We’re both alive. They can’t have switched yet. There’s still time. Maybe we can close that door to Mictlan, if we hurry.”

Lia looked up. Her eyes were black and cold.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go do that.”

A column of three police cars blasted down Lankershim Boulevard, their lights flashing and their sirens wailing. Lia sat in the front passenger seat of the lead car. Riley and Ingrid were in the back. Lia was all too aware that theirs were not the only flashing emergency lights out here on the roads. Accidents, awe, and the evidence of panic were everywhere to be seen, right outside her window. Madness and wonder wandered freely through the streets while people stared up into a blue mid-day sky that should’ve been as black as midnight, according to their watches or the clocks on their cellphones.

“They must all think it’s Jesus coming home to roost or Superman turning the planet backwards or, well, shit, I don’t know what they must think,” Riley said, staring out through his own window as they turned onto Ventura from Lankershim, heading into the Cahuenga Pass. It was a rare thing to see either his vocabulary or his imagination desert him, Lia knew.

Panicked crowds were pouring down the hill from Universal Studios, making the intersection all but impassable. Their police car eased past a mad-eyed, bearded man wearing a sandwichboard too-tightly packed with