Graves' end

Mictlantecuhtli’s temple and crowd-surfed back into the world. Lia had to coach Dex on how to do it, as he’d missed out on the era in which the practice was born by a number of decades.

Celebrating skeletons obligingly bore them across the two rooms of the office suite, then on down the stairs and out through the lobby’s double doors, finally depositing them right on the cadaver-crowded street in front of the Silent Tower.

Hannah Catrina and Riley’s well-dressed bones were dancing a sprightly jitterbug together, and they both waved a cheerful hello.

“You like what I did here, dollface?” Dexter asked, grinning his biggest lopsided grin when he turned to face Lia. “It’s the Day of the Dead. I uncorked the otherworld for you!”

“I love it, Dexter, I really do,” Lia said, and cast her wondering eyes around at the cheekbone-to-jowl crowds packed into the narrow street before them. When she looked up at Dexter again, his silly smile only widened. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen!”

She touched his thoughts and was humbled to know that Dex had pulled this incredible trick because he believed she would’ve done the exact same thing, had the power been hers to use.

His eyes told her the same, and his lips confirmed it when he seized her and dipped her in a deep, triumphant kiss.

Skeletons all around whooped and applauded, whistled and cheered, many of them reminded powerfully of a famous old photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse that had once, for so many, symbolically sealed the end of their world’s great war.

Dexter straightened up and set Lia back on her feet, ending their breathless moment. The crowds all around fell silent, and they both looked up to see Ingrid Catrina, the new Queen of Mictlan, smiling down upon them.

Ingrid’s bleached skeleton wore a regal costume now: a long-skirted suit and a broad-brimmed hat pinned over her lustrous, dark red hair. To Lia she seemed to embody everything that was dignified, elegant, timeless and wise, like the Elizabeth of the Otherworld. The dusts of this world swirled about her before settling down onto her bones in a flawless facsimile of flesh. After a few moments her face looked as smooth and radiant as it had in life, and her occluded eyes cleared to a blue as bright as sapphires. She was one of los Muertos now, as well as their Queen, and on their day she could walk the worlds beside them, on her own recognizance. Unlike her imaginal predecessor, this was a Death who had lived.

“Ingrid,” Dexter said, taking off his hat in the presence of royalty. “Or should I say your majesty?”

“Ingrid’s fine,” the new Queen offered. “Or mom. If you like. Not ma, though, please. That’s a sound a sheep would make.”

“But…” Dexter started, then hesitated. Lia looked up and saw that his eyes were full of need and a brand of pain she understood all too well, being an orphan herself. She also knew that the world’s mythologies were rife with tales of semi-divine parentage, and of progeny hidden away by human mothers until such children could come of age to claim their birthrights from otherworldly fathers. The pattern was a classic one, reiterated time and time again.

“Is it really true, what you told me about being my… you know, my mother?” he whispered. “How can it be? I mean, look at us. I’m older than you are.”

“Dexter…” Ingrid explained gently. “I had you in 1915, back when I’m originally from. I left you in the realworld to keep you safe from Mickey, but then I jumped to 1950 to meet you. To see what sort of a man you’d become. I jumped to now to find Lia after Mickey tracked me down again and wouldn’t let me go till I promised I’d deliver you. I’ve taken trips all over time. Any point in human memory is accessible from Mictlan.”

She brushed his face with fingertips of dust-sheathed bone.

“I’m sorry I was never a parent to you,” she said. “I had no idea how to be. I was never very good at normal life. Maybe now… I can be of a different sort of use.”

“Yeah, you’ll make that otherworld a better place, I just know you will,” Dexter said. His voice went hoarse with emotion when Lia unobtrusively took and squeezed his hand. He held on gratefully. “Get out there and liberate those mythologies,” he suggested.

“That already has been done,” pronounced the Queen. Her gaze was growing distant, her focus already turning inward, toward the otherworld’s eternal mysteries.

“Well all right,” Dex said, beaming. He pushed his hat back on his head and looked around, at the dead who still crowded the streets, milling about and chatting. “What about the rest of the mess I made?”

Queen Ingrid shrugged. “The dead will return when their day is done,” she said. “And the living will recall this only as a dream. The realworld defends its boundaries too well to let this be remembered. Nyx, I believe, remains your prisoner?”

“Back at the Yard, yeah,” Lia said.

“Free her as it pleases you,” the Queen instructed. “Until then… let the dead enjoy their day.”

Queen Ingrid Catrina, the new Reina de los Muertos, bowed to her son and to Lia before she turned back to her building, the Silent Tower, the thin facade worn by her ancient temple in that patch of the actual currently known as Hollywood. The torrent of still-exiting skeletons parted before their new sovereign to let her enter the building, all of them kneeling and bowing their heads when she passed. No longer out of fear, as would’ve been the case with the previous monarch, but rather as an expression of adoration, admiration, and genuine gratitude.

“I’ll be seeing you,” Ingrid told her son, waggling fingers over her shoulder without turning back. The dust- flesh fell away from her bones as she did so.

“In all the old familiar places,” Dexter replied, in a murmur only Lia was close enough to hear.

Together they turned away as the Queen returned to her realm and its faraway concerns, only to be confronted by Mictlantecuhtli’s dead manservant Winston, who stuck his rusty gun into Lia’s face. She cringed back against Dexter, who moved to shield her with his body.

“Black Tom Delgado,” skeletal Winston rasped. “It’s not fair that he should get away with what he did to me. The degradations I’ve endured. The centuries of humiliation. If all I can do to hurt him is kill what he loves, then that’s what I’ll bloody well do!”

Lia and Dex both flinched when the small gun burst apart, taking most of Winston’s mummified hand along with it. His finger bones went careening off in every direction. One stray knuckle bounced harmlessly off Dexter’s chest. They heard the shot whole seconds later, and were slow to realize that it hadn’t come from Winston’s gun.

Neither of them was hit.

Lia looked up to see a distant sniper atop a tall neighboring building taking aim in their direction through a riflescope. She shouted and jumped when a team of six black-clad Navy SEALs burst from concealment behind parked cars and tackled Winston the would-be assassin to the blacktop, before she or Dexter had any idea what was happening.

Dex drew Lia close while one masked and helmeted member of the SEAL team trussed Winston up with plastic zip-strip restraints and the other five covered him with drawn sidearms. She couldn’t have been more astounded when a gray Seahawk helicopter diced the air above, rising from a helipad atop the sniper’s building and whirring to a three-wheeled landing in the empty lot across the street from the King’s tower. (Make that the Queen’s tower, she corrected herself.) Skeletons ducked and parted to make room for the incoming aircraft. The gunship had a United States Navy insignia on its side, barely visible through the haze of brown dust its rotors kicked up.

It was the same symbol that graced the front of Dexter’s lighter.

Two very old men (one dressed in a heavily decorated Naval uniform) and a skeletal version of Tomas Delgado stepped out of the flying eggbeater, ducking under its roaring blades.

“Black Tom!” Lia cried, feeling limp with relief upon seeing him again, when she hadn’t been at all sure she would.

“Hey, that looks to be my old pal Charlie Lurp with ’em,” Dexter said. “And… holy hell, I think that’s-can that really be Davey Normoyle? Admiral Davey? Still in the Navy!” Dex crowed, sounding more than amazed. He and Lia ran up to meet the new arrivals. Dexter embraced the shriveled Admiral and pumped old Charlie’s gnarled hand. Lia hugged Black Tom’s bones.

“I called in the cavalry for ya, Dex,” Charlie bubbled, plainly enjoying himself more than he had in years. “Your friend Tom there came and Big Juannie knew it meant you was in trouble, but I knew the Admiral here would wanna help you out.”