Graves' end

before foster care even, came bubbling up: a swamp of guilt, grief and confusion as noxious and suffocating as the black goo that bubbled out of the earth itself down at the La Brea tar pits.

The girl whose name had not then been Lia came awake rolling in darkness, bouncing down a hillside, torn at by thorns and branches before coming to a quick, jolting stop with her left arm angled under her body in such a way that it snapped audibly, as neatly as a twig. The wave of pain that surged out from the breakpoint made her lightheaded. She thought she might throw up, or pass out.

She did neither. The screams brought her back around. She raised her head and saw the undercarriage of a minivan angled up at her from where the vehicle lay, some yards further down the embankment, lodged in a copse of thin trees. Its headlight beams lanced through the branches and dissipated into the empty blackness beyond. The girl who was not then Lia remembered they’d been driving home through Topanga Canyon after a weekend at the beach up in Ventura County. She’d been asleep in the rear compartment, behind the big car’s last bench seat, which her mother thought was unsafe but which seemed ironically to have resulted in her being thrown clear when their van went over the side of the road.

Her mother and father and younger brother were still inside it, screaming for help.

Screaming for her help, she thought, as she sat up and hugged a broken arm to her skinny chest. It was a climb down to where they were, and she didn’t know if she could make it. She couldn’t even gauge the drop beyond. It was too dark for that. The scraggly saplings the minivan was lodged against made for a precarious brace. The car looked like it might fall at any minute, and the girl was terrified of falling with it. She didn’t know what to do. She had no experience with emergencies.

Lyssa made Lia watch herself sit there and consider her options. Made her aware of just how long she’d mulled them over while her family screamed in pain and terror, instead of scrambling down the embankment as fast as she could to help them, to save them, to do something other than sit there like a terrified rabbit…

And then the trees gave way. The car plummeted into blackness, crunching several times as it tumbled out of sight, down the side of the canyon.

For a moment there was only silence. Then came a vast airy whoooooshh and a fireball rolled up toward the star-filled sky, painting the night in garish shades of orange and gold.

She hadn’t saved them. She hadn’t even tried, not in time, and it made no difference to her own heart that she’d only been ten years old. Only a child, and in shock. But Lyssa wouldn’t let her forget what she’d failed to do, and Lia’s shrieking psyche responded in the only way it could: by shutting down.

Lyssa flashed a smile and eyes of static up at a startled Graves when he spun around. She looked human in every other way.

“Oh, I am just sick of you,” Graves yelled. “Let her go!”

“After you’ve kept your promise to Mictlantecuhtli,” Lyssa said, “I’ll think it over.”

“No dice, sister.”

Mictlantecuhtli could contain his frustration no longer. He crossed back into his altar chamber, where all of his power was at his command. His cowl lost its integrity and loosened into a caul of smoke, then concretized down around his bones to make a convincing illusion of muscular, tattooed flesh. The King eschewed his double-breasted suit for this iteration, costuming himself instead as a bare-chested Aztec lord from centuries past, with reed sandals on his feet, a loincloth tied at his waist, and an elaborately-woven cape drawn around his shoulders. His skull headdress and eyeball necklace, the indelible symbols of his office, were the only things that stayed the same.

“Don’t make me throw you through that goddamn door, my son,” he said to Graves.

“Like to seeya try, pops.”

Enraged, the King shouted and ran at him. Graves sidestepped and shoved him into the bloodcaked altar, which stood only a little higher than his knees. The King pitched across the round slab gracelessly, face first, and caught himself with both hands before his jaw collided with the flagstone floor. His ceremonial headdress flew off and went skittering right past Lyssa and Lia (who didn’t so much as turn her head to acknowledge it).

It looked to Graves like she’d checked out completely.

Pre-Columbian Caradura was up in half a second and Graves darted in to deliver a fast combination, opening with a jab at his face to get the King’s hands up. He followed that with a hard shot to his liver, then finished off with a devastating left hook that connected so hard with the side of Caradura’s head that it ruptured the cartilage in his ear.

Graves had been in bar fights on three continents, and if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was throw a goddamn punch.

He socked Caradura in the gut while the King was recovering his balance, driving him to his knees, and Caradura seized the opportunity to bite deeply into Graves’ calf. Graves bellowed and kneed Caradura in the face, knocking him aside and sending several teeth flying. Caradura shook his head, spraying strings of blood and spittle, and Graves tackled him with his full weight, sumo-style, before he could get to his feet again.

They rolled across the earthen floor, grappling and tearing at each other’s hair. Before Graves quite knew what was happening they’d wrestled each other out the far door, and then they were spilling over the edge of the giant pyramid’s steep stone steps, with Mictlan’s gray sky spinning wildly above them.

He caught a last glimpse of Hannah, framed up there in the rough doorway, watching them tumble away.

“Oh, God, that can’t be good,” Han said, stepping out into the grayish, sourceless daylight and peering over the stairway’s edge to watch the pugilists roll and bounce as they receded down the Aztec temple’s stepped side. The artificial mountain was taller than seemed credible to her, like a structure in a dream.

Ingrid’s skeleton hurried past her, after the combatants. She held up the hem of her skirt to keep from tripping over it as she dashed down the steps, and the bare bones of her feet rattled against them with a sound like dice being shaken in a cup.

Hannah glanced back over her shoulder to see Riley standing on his tiptoes and craning his neck, trying to watch the action through the far doorway, from the safety of the outer office. He seemed to know instinctually that stepping through the portal was not a thing the living were meant to do. Hannah remembered feeling the same sort of existential dread when she first stepped up to the doorway, and she hoped that Riley wouldn’t try his luck against it in the same way she had.

King Caradura and Dexter Graves hit ground level and continued to bash the crap out of each other down on the plain. Neither of them was doing any real damage here on this side of the barrier. Their injuries righted themselves almost as fast as they could be inflicted. Both combatants were too much a part of the realm of the dead to be significantly hurt within it, even by each other.

“You wasted a witch, making me come back over here,” Caradura barked, snapping his head back to fore after taking a solid right across the jaw. “We’ll have to burn another one to effect the trade now.”

“Gee, ain’t it a sin to be wasteful?” Graves mocked, ducking a punch that whistled over his head before throwing one of his own right back. “Maybe we’ll have to skip the whole damn thing.”

“That, Dexter Graves, is not an option,” the King roared, lowering his head to charge like an angry bull. His solid battering ram of a cranium hammered into Graves’ midsection, expelling the air from his lungs as Lord Death seized him around the ribs and drove him backwards, tackling him to the dirt.

Black Tom clung to the jamb opposite from Riley, watching as Hannah turned away from the pyramid’s magisterial view of Mictlan’s gray plain to come back inside the altar room.

Her eyes went straight to Lyssa, Lady Madness, and her hostage, both of whom were still crouched in a corner of the sacrificial chamber. Lyssa had her pale arm wrapped around Lia’s throat. Lia’s eyes were empty and staring, while Lyssa’s crackled with silver static.

Hannah approached the grinning Archon cautiously, speaking softly and making no sudden moves.

“Lia said your name was Lyssa, I think,” Hannah said, keeping her voice gentle and pitched to soothe. It was, in fact, the very tone she’d needed to use with skittish young Lia years ago, when they’d first met. Tom