Graves' end

“Davey, I can’t believe you did this,” Dexter said. “After all these years!”

“Years I only had because of you, Dex,” the wizened old sailor said.

“Well, all right,” Dexter repeated, and Lia thought he couldn’t have wiped that smile off his face for all the tea in Tokyo. “But isn’t hijacking a helicopter to chase down a ghost story gonna do some violence to your storied career, there, Admiral?”

“Ahhh, hell, they’ll just retire me quiet and chalk it up to Oldtimer’s Disease,” Davey said, waving an arthritic and liver-spotted hand dismissively in the Seahawk’s direction. “That’s if anybody even knows the whirlybird is gone. I got a feeling a lot of things might escape notice to… day? Night? Which is it right now, anyway?”

Dexter saw his point. Lia did too. The bright blue, sunless sky made them feel as though they were somehow paused at the climax of an inverted eclipse, in defiance of all known natural laws. Shadows didn’t know which way to fall.

“Yeah, I guess you might fly under the radar at that,” Dex said. He pointed to Winston’s twist-tied remains, which were lying face-down on the pavement beneath a number of black combat boots and the full weight of the men attached to them. “What about him, then?”

“Hold onto him till dark,” Lia advised. “And keep him off the dirt. He’ll be the Queen’s problem after that.”

“I think my boys can execute that order,” Admiral Normoyle said. He grinned at his old friend Dexter Graves when Dex slipped his arm around his best girl. Lia laid her head against his chest.

“Say, do you two need a ride or anything?” the elderly admiral asked.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The Navy helicopter’s pilot found room to set down in a wide intersection a block away from Potter’s Yard. Lia, Dexter, and Black Tom’s reconstituted skeleton all hopped out and waved when it took off again, rising up into the blue sky on the swirling winds its rotors generated. Davey Normoyle and Charlie Lurp waved back, leaning out the open door in the Seahawk’s side and grinning like a couple of foolish kids.

Skeletons and live folks were still partying and chatting and hanging around the neighborhood, every neighborhood, all over the city and by now the world, everyone glad to be at least sort of alive and enjoying their day in the sun.

Dexter slid his arm around Lia’s waist as they walked into the Yard through the open front gate. They fell into step together easily.

Tom’s catbody was curled up and sleeping on the steps of the office shack when Dex, Lia and the mortal remains of its longtime psychic jockey came crunching across the gravel lot. Black Tom Delgado’s bones, which he could once again call his own, stooped to scratch the animal behind the ear.

Tom felt the old King’s death when it occurred, as had other earthbound ghosts all around the planet. He’d explained it to his Winter Flower on their brief flight home, as best he could, in that wordless way they had. Now that he no longer had to hide from el Rey he was free to show up in whatever form he wished, be it phantasmal or physical. With his skills he could have put his human face back on, if he’d wanted to, the way the Queen had, but for the time being he was happy enough just to wear the visage that all of us share in common, underneath our skins.

He parted from Lia and Dexter at the edge of the parking lot, letting them wander off into the emerald trees together. They needed their space, and besides, there was a party going on out in the world that he did not intend to miss. More than a party, really-the occasion being celebrated out there in the streets was nothing less than the coronation of a new Queen of the Dead. Such an event was likely to be anticipated by the past as well as remembered in the future, Tom guessed. The memory of Mictlan deferred to neither clock nor calendar, and all of los Muertos would recall this day, regardless of when they died. The realworld’s annual Day of the Dead celebrations would therefore always be-and would also always havebeen-observed in honor of the ascension of la Bella Muerta, the Beautiful Death, whose realm could now be a place of reunion and rest rather than one of torment and loss. The transfer of power involved in the Red Witch’s ouster of Mictlantecuhtli was the singular event that had drawn the worlds close enough together for the dead to cross between them, and a sympathetic echo of that happening would forever be reiterated once each year, just after Halloween. Was, had been, and would always be, both backwards and forwards in time, like ripples in the ocean of history.

Tom found the notion delightful.

He turned around, listening to the sounds of music and laughter that floated to him from the neighborhoods nearest the Yard. Everyone who ever died was out there, somewhere, looking for their loved ones.

Tom took a small skull molded from bright white sugar crystals out of his pocket and paused to examine it, striking what must have looked like an alas-poor-Yorick pose, with the little calavera resting on his palm and peering back up at him.

The name written across its forehead was Dulce.

Black Tom set off to find her amongst all of the liberated dead, grinning his amiable grin as he followed the sound of their distant, happy voices and swinging the walking stick he had no real need to lean on anymore, but still enjoyed carrying.

Neither the bodies of the dead nor the handcuffed hoodlums were anywhere to be seen inside the Yard, Lia noted, experiencing twin pangs of relief and remorse when she made the observation. They’d been swept under the rug already, through the auspices of the LA Blackdogs.

Blackdog operations were always kept secret, whatever occurred, so Lia knew there would be no inquiries or repercussions over the death of Ben Leonard… beyond those her own guilt might devise.

Hannah’s hydroponics shed was still ringed with dimming grow lights when Lia and Dexter walked up to it. Nyx still whimpered pitiably within.

Lia stepped into the ring of high-intensity lamps and went around to the back of the little outbuilding, to find its circuit breaker. Dex followed.

“Are you ready, Dexter?” she asked.

“Ready for night to fall on the day of the dead? Yeah, brujachica. I suppose I am.”

Lia killed the power to the shed.

There was a moment of silence… and then a column of starry darkness blew off the hydro shack’s roof as it shot for the sky. It dripped liquid night down the sides of the atmosphere’s vast blue dome, all the way to the horizons.

The bright, distant sounds of laughter and music faded away to be replaced by the peaceful and soothing noises of evening at Potter’s Yard, of crickets and sprinklers and leaves whispering their secrets to the wind.

They were some of Lia’s favorite sounds in all the worlds.

“Y’know, I spent a little time on a farm as a kid,” Dex said softly, in deference to the stillness that now enveloped them. “Soybeans and corn, mainly, out near Riverside. That wasn’t the worst of times for me. Not the worst at all.”

“Then I hope you’ll stay here, Dexter,” Lia said, squeezing his hand and looking up at him with those large, dark eyes that he adored. “Stay for as long as the times are good.”

Dex smiled. “May they never be any other way, little witch,” he said, and Lia knew that he meant it all the way down to the bone. “May they never be any other way.”

They embraced in the darkness and the quiet, tenderly.

After a time, the witchgirl took the former dead man’s hand and led him away, through the shadows and the trees, to her little home sunk deep beneath the nourishing earth.

Epilogue