without so much as a glance and bent over dying Ingrid. He took her hand and pressed Graves’ old cigarette lighter into it, then made a gesture like a benediction over it, severing one attachment in favor of another. The Zippo’s metal case sizzled against the redhead’s palm, and Tom thought he saw a wisp of either smoke or steam rise from it. Ingrid looked up at her King, and her blue eyes were wide with terror.
“At last, my love, you’ll be my Queen,” Mictlantecuhtli said, and even as she was on the verge of death, with her life’s blood burbling out through a hole that didn’t belong in her chest, Ingrid’s expression crumbled. Her eyes turned glassy as they filled up with tears of despair.
With her dying breath, Black Tom heard her whisper: “…no…”
As soon as Mictlantecuhtli put the lighter into Ingrid’s hand, Lia felt the connection diverting her life force away to animate Dexter click off as neatly as if someone had thrown a switch. Strength she’d barely realized she was lacking returned to her limbs like a flood of adrenaline. The drain had been subtle and slow enough that she’d chalked its effects up to a lack of sleep, or possibly an oncoming cold.
She understood that Ingrid and her King had been setting her up since the moment Ingrid first contacted her, baiting her good nature with a story that would tempt her up here, to these Chambers, and right into their trap. Dexter’s Zippo lighter had always been the link, and she’d been entangled with him from the moment she picked it up.
But then it seemed like Ingrid hadn’t been able to go through with the plan, or maybe she’d meant to double-cross Death all along.
Either way, she was paying the highest possible price for her schemes now.
Lia looked to Dexter, through the doorway between the King’s Chambers. The membrane between the worlds shimmered between them, a barrier so subtle it hardly seemed to be there at all.
“She said restoring you would kill either one of us, but together we could both survive,” she told the skeleton in the hat. She glanced back at Ingrid, lying on the floor behind her and losing her struggle to breathe through a newly-perforated sternum. “That’s what she wanted to do before dark, back out at the Yard.”
It might be too late for them to share the entire burden now, but Lia thought there was still a little something she might be able to do, for someone who’d at least
The lighter was right there, and Mictlantecuhtli’s shrouded back was to her. He only had eyes for Ingrid, at the moment.
“Lia, you don’t have to,” Dex warned, guessing at her intentions by tracking the movements of her eyes.
“I know,” Lia said, then scooped the lighter out of Ingrid’s hand and threw herself over the barrier between worlds. Mictlantecuhtli shouted in surprise and made a grab for her back, at the very instant in which Ingrid expired.
The witches Dexter Graves was bound to-one by fate and the other by design, one still alive and the other freshly dead-entered Mictlan together, and Graves’ flesh grew back in a flash when they did. Nerves and veins and musculature, organs and skin and hair, all of them knitted together faster than he could put on a shirt. Then his clothing went and regenerated, too. Gum-soled shoes, a good-looking suit, and his favorite floor-length trenchcoat all appeared around him, all as good as new. The pristine fedora he’d taken from one of Riley’s party guests was the only item of clothing he wore that magic didn’t bother to replace.
His connections to life and the world had been re-forged. Graves was alive again.
Alive
Dex spun around in her wake and saw what she saw: a red-haired skeleton draped in Ingrid’s ragged gown standing right behind him, next to the inner chamber’s round limestone altar. Hannah also noticed her there and gasped in surprise. Ingrid now uncannily resembled a Catrina, Lia thought-an elegant ‘Lady Death’ figure of the sort she associated with traditional Dia de Los Muertos decorations.
Lia seized the new skeleton’s cold, bony hand and shoved the still-warm lighter into it. Most of Ingrid’s vital force had siphoned off into Dexter’s restoration, although the link between them, Dexter’s Zippo, continued to smolder with the last of her transferred energy. Lia hoped that giving the tiny spark back to her would let Ingrid keep her voice and her own free will, at least for as long as she held onto the talisman.
Mictlantecuhtli would want to divert that final glimmer of her life to serve his own purposes, however, and that didn’t leave them with a lot of options. He’d need to do his thing fast, before either the lighter or Ingrid’s realworld corpse turned cold. Further complicating matters was the fact that Lord Death was currently standing out there in the twenty-first century waiting room, also known as the first of his chambers. His shrouded back was turned to Riley, Black Tom, and the only exit, barring the rest of them from escaping out into the land of the living (where all of them but Ingrid still technically belonged).
“I’m standing over here,” Dex noted aloud, prodding the torchlit chamber’s adobe wall with his regenerated fingertips. “Thought I couldn’t do that, in a body.”
“There seem to be a lot of loopholes,” Hannah observed.
Mictlantecuhtli displayed no intention of crossing the barrier after Lia. He stopped short in the doorway instead, leaving Ingrid’s slackening body to cool on the First Chamber’s floor behind him. He held a black obsidian blade in his hand, the one he used to cleave souls from their attachments to the living world. Riley and Black Tom both scooted around the perimeter of the room, staying well out of Death’s way.
“Now we cross into one another, Dexter Graves,” the skeletal King said. “I assume your form on this side, you my attributes on that. Quickly, before the Red Witch’s heat can dissipate. Our link must not grow cold.”
“There’s one thing I still don’t get, though,” Dexter said, completely ignoring Mictlantecuhtli’s declaration of urgency. “Why me? And how am I standin’ over here, all in one piece? I thought you needed special clearance for that.”
Skeletal Ingrid Catrina and fleshless Mictlantecuhtli exchanged a loaded glance, through the doorway that separated them. Dexter stood back next to Lia, folded his arms, and waited to hear what they were both plainly reluctant to tell him.
“Dexter… you have it,” Ingrid Catrina said carefully. “Special clearance, I mean. You’ve always had it. Don’t you know who you are? Haven’t you put it together yet?”
“You, Dexter Graves, are my son,” Mictlantecuhtli said. “Rightful prince of all Mictlan.”
Ingrid touched his living arm with her now-ossified hand. “And I am-or, well, I
Dexter stood there for a moment, stock-still and unable to process the news. Nobody else was doing much better. Lia, Riley and Hannah all gaped at one another in open astonishment.
Then Dexter cried, “Oh, my
Nobody noticed when Lyssa re-appeared behind Lia during the commotion of Dexter’s outburst. Not even Tom. Hannah and Riley were trying too hard not to laugh over the content of Dex’s reproaches. The Archon looked like a normal enough, dark-haired woman clad in a simple linen dress here on this, the otherworld side of the barrier, inside the second of the King’s Chambers.
She darted forward and seized Lia in a chokehold.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Hannah shouted and it was the last thing Lia heard before the Archon put a hand over her face and sent her quietly, catatonically mad in less than a second, by pointing out in a deft succession of mental images the contradictions and rationalizations Lia needed to remain personally unconscious of in order to function. The memories and knowledge she could not abide. The truth of her past, her childhood, the years before Black Tom,
