Graves' end

“I will throw you through that door and burn away the life of your pet witch, Dexter Graves,” Mickey spat. “Why do you fight this? She will still be yours, yours in every way!”

“Yeah, to dress up and pose and play with, like a frilly, pretty doll,” Graves sneered. “Right. Gifts like that don’t count unless they’re freely given. Like I once heard a wise woman say: people’s choices gotta be their own!”

Dexter punctuated his declaration by throwing his father-figment over one extended leg and slamming him to the ground. “Thanks for the heads up, Ing,” he said, and then looked back down at Mickey, who was laid out flat on his back, dazed and staring up at them. “C’mon, dad,” Dex teased, planting his hands on his knees and leaning over to look down into Mickey’s face. “Let’s play catch.”

He turned on his heel and raced back up the side of the pyramid, taking the narrow steps three at a time. Mickey leapt to his feet and powered right up after him. Neither of them experienced any physical limitation over here in Mictlan. They could behave like cartoon characters for an eternity if they felt like it, bashing away at each other relentlessly, without suffering any lasting consequence.

Ingrid Catrina sighed and began dragging her own weary bones (which were subject to a very different set of rules) back up the endless steps after them.

Graves led King Caradura in a chase back up to the top of the pyramid, running effortlessly, magically, as though they were in a dream. It was fun, if anything, but Graves was already coming to see that no escalation in the level of violence was ever going to put him on top of this situation. He and Hardface were too evenly matched for that. Ingrid hadn’t been lying. Not on that score, anyway.

A re-awakened Lia and two new skeletons he was pained to recognize as Miss Hannah and that Riley guy all stood aside when he blew past them upon reaching the summit, ducking under the temple door’s low stone lintel and darting back into the King’s inner sanctum. He didn’t know how Lia’s friends had come to lose their skins, but this hardly seemed like the time to ask.

Caradura burst into the dim, torchlit chamber after him. Graves positioned himself in front of the doorway on the far side of the altar stone, the one that led out into the empty antechamber and then the realworld after that, taunting the King.

“C’mon, pops, gimme a push,” he teased.

Caradura jumped up onto the altar and leapt at him from it, his small eyes glittering with rage. Graves dodged aside at the last second. Caradura nearly tumbled through the doorway barrier, but caught himself against the jambs before he fell. Graves tried to push him out of the chamber and across the dividing line before he could scramble back from the threshold, but the King grabbed hold of his arm and swung him hard against the mud brick wall. The impact was concussive enough to break Graves’ nose. It sent one of the torches that had flickered for ages tumbling from its sconce, and Graves’ injury evaporated before it went out in a burst of orange sparks against the cold flagstone floor.

Ingrid’s elegant skeleton led Lia and the remains of Hannah and Riley back inside the temple, away from the Mictlan-side door. Lia was the only one of the bunch who still looked alive. There was no sign anywhere of the Archon who’d taken her captive. Graves assumed the creature had been dealt with-at the cost of Riley and Hannah’s lives.

“Dexter,” Ingrid said, raising her voice to be heard over the ruckus he and the King were making. “If you go through that doorway first, what he is goes with you and it’ll take over your body. You’ll be him, not you. You’ve got to throw him through on his own, into the realworld, and someone on this side has to willingly assume his office, so he can’t come back.”

“Who’s that gonna be?” Graves gasped, craning his head to see her as he struggled with Caradura at the doorway.

“Me!” Ingrid’s skeleton said. “I’ll do it. I’m ready. And I bore his son, so I have a right to succeed him.”

“Your tortures for this treason will never end, Ingrid Redstone,” Caradura bellowed, while Graves tore at his hair. “You’ve refused to be my Queen before!”

“Oh, I’ll be Queen, Mickey,” Ingrid said. “I just won’t be yours.”

Enraged, Caradura seized Graves by the shoulders and launched him bodily at the doorway to the living world. Graves caught either side of it and felt himself stretched across the opening like a trampoline skin when Caradura slammed into his back with all his weight, fighting to ram him through. He peripherally saw the skeletons that had so recently been Hannah and Riley freeze into place before they could join the fray (according to their King’s will, he supposed), but Ingrid and Lia ran over to beat on Caradura’s back with their fists, trying to help.

Caradura turned away from Graves for an instant, knocking them both aside almost without effort.

Knocking Lia to the floor.

Graves saw her fall and his vision went red.

King Caradura hesitated just long enough to make sure his merchandise wasn’t damaged. Lia was the last living witch to’ve touched the lighter, so it was her life that would be forfeit if they made their trade now.

Graves knew it too, and he seized the momentary distraction to come around punching.

He caught Caradura straight across the jaw, first with his right fist, then with his left. He bashed Hardface across the room and out the far door, driving him back with blow after crunching blow to his face.

Nobody hurt his Lia, Dexter Graves thought grimly. Nobody. Not even the big bad king of the goddamn dead. Not without answering to him.

The King missed tripping over his own altar again by bare inches before he staggered out the far door, fighting to keep his balance under the onslaught. Graves discontinued his rain of knuckles when Hardface pinwheeled backwards on the very edge of the pyramid’s steps… then blew on him, sending him tumbling all the way down to the distant chaparral plain below.

He turned to catch Lia up in an embrace when she ran to him, out the door and into his arms. It was the first time she’d gotten a good look at Mictlan proper, and she couldn’t help but exclaim over the breathtaking view from the top of the pyramid. The land of the dead seemed to go on forever, its low hills stretching off toward every horizon.

Caradura was on his way back up to the top again literally as soon as he landed, his bare feet beating a fast tattoo on the rough stone steps. It wouldn’t take him long to regain the pyramid’s summit.

Ingrid’s bones turned to Graves. “Dexter,” she said, looking as though she’d had a sudden flash of inspiration. “It’s still November second out in the world. The dead can walk today if they have permission from the King. Maybe permission from the Prince will do. Call for help to drag him over the barrier!”

It sounded like a decent plan.

Graves looked out across Mictlan. He could see smokestreets and nebulous cities and possibly millions of tiny costumed skeletons in the far distance, if he tried. There were sure to be a lot of disgruntled dead out there. Plenty of possible allies.

King Caradura was about a third of the way back up the stairs.

“I think I can go you one better,” Graves said, looking away from Ingrid Catrina to wide-eyed Lia while he imagined them all, the forlorn dead of every era.

He knew in a flash what he wanted to do.

Graves leapt up, found a handhold between two mud bricks, and hauled himself onto the sanctum’s flat, square roof, onto the absolute top of Mictlantecuhtli’s pyramid. He bent down to help Lia up, too.

He didn’t have to wrack his brain to know how she’d choose to handle this situation.

So he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The shrill shriek cut across the plain like a sharp sonic knife. Skeletons going about their business on the vague smokestreets down below all turned toward the distant pyramid. Even King Caradura paused in his climb. He was more than halfway up the staircase.

“Listen up,” Graves called, projecting his voice easily, as though it were somehow amplified. “Son of Hardface says it’s play day on the earth plane, so all of you-get those bony asses on the streets!”

His penultimate order rolled across the realm of the dead like a peal of thunder, and the Prince’s directive was heard by one and all.

The entire skeletal population of Mictlan, down on the ground and numbering so many billions strong, all paused and looked to one another. They were uncertain for an instant, but not one of them needed to be asked