The two new ladydemons (the nightsky one Lia’d already pegged as Nyx and that other, the one she now guessed might be ‘Lyssa,’ a face and form related to Nyx that the Greeks had used to explain mental illness) both turned away and strode off toward the back of the Yard. So far the two remaining Tzitzimime had failed to join them, and Lia hoped it meant that the lady-bugs, at least, were still unable to breach her circles. She wasn’t all that squeamish about bugs in general, as someone who lived in a garden, but even she had to make an exception when it came to angry specimens of unusual size.
She picked up her security branch and followed the Archons, at a cautious distance. Tom went after her, flicking his tail in agitation.
Hannah followed too, her hunched-over posture conveying a great deal of trepidation. “What are they?” she whispered when she caught up with Lia. “They’re really sort of beautiful.”
“Archons, I think,” Lia said, looking troubled.
“Like the ant-thing?”
“More like little gods.”
Hannah paused for a long moment of silent consideration. “Is it a good idea to be following them, then?” she asked, catching up with Lia for a second time. “Maybe we oughta go the other way.”
“Whatever they’re seeing, it’s not us,” Lia whispered. “Now, shhh.”
The Archons paused, cocking their simplified heads in creepy synchronization. Both of them had sensed something.
Lia and Hannah crouched down behind plant cover to spy on them. Tom hunkered down too, watching the scene with his keen feline eyes.
Some yards away, a stark white skull in a worn fedora popped up from behind a broad-leafed bird of paradise bush, and that, at least, was obvious enough to the Archons, even amidst the flocks of normal-if-temporary individuals they thought were roaming all around them.
“Oh, for the love of-” Lia cursed quietly, fuming inside. It was bad enough that the otherworlders had penetrated her barriers, but this was way too much. How in the hell could that walking anatomical specimen have slipped the bonds she’d put him under?
Lia grabbed Hannah’s hand when Graves broke from his cover and shot for the fence. Han, she could feel, was likewise ready to flee, in the opposite direction.
“Wait,” she breathed. She wanted to see where this was going.
Graves’ bones were halfway over the wall before Nyx (the black outline) grabbed his coat and Lyssa (the staticy one) seized his shinbone. They hauled him back down off the fence together and threw him to the dirt.
“So it’s him they’ve been after all along?” Hannah asked quietly. “How’d he even get out of your thing?”
Lia scowled and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said grimly. But they can have him if he’s gonna be that stupid.
She felt a little ill as soon as that notion fluttered through her brain.
Dexter Graves scrambled up, but he was quickly backed against the fence by those flat woman-shapes. There was nowhere left for him to go. He held up his hands to fend them off, and he got them to pause before pouncing on him, which Lia found surprising.
“Whoa, now-” he said. “Who the hell are you two? What the hell are you two? What happened to those other ones, Hannah and Miss Lia?”
“You will call me Lady Night,” the nightsky outline told him. She indicated her static-filled friend, who was standing there beside her. “This, my sister-daughter, is Lady Madness.”
“Sister-daughter, huh? That must make for some weird Thanksgivings.”
Those old bones sure could tap-dance for time, Lia thought, considering her options while Graves continued stalling. She was grimly satisfied to know she’d identified Lyssa correctly, even without a field guide to demons handy.
“Shut up,” Lady Night said, in response to the corpse’s quip. “King Caradura would hold palaver with you, Dexter Graves.”
“Oh, so it’s King Caradura now, is it?” Graves said. “That’s fancy. Sounds like Hardface’s head’s gettin’ a little too fat for his hat, you ask me.”
“We will escort you to his temple now,” said Lady Madness.
“And I’ll escort my bony foot up your out-of-focus ass if you so much as lay a hand, sister,” Graves shot back. “I am tellin’ you now, backoff.”
Lia decided what she wanted to do. Tom seconded her notion with a silent affirmation.
Quietly, she took one of her red dreamcatchers down from a nearby tree. “Hannah,” she said, without ever taking her eyes off the scene that was unfolding over by the fence. “I want you to get underground. Make sure Tom is with you. Keep the hatch open and be ready for me.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“What nobody else can do,” Lia said. “Now hurry.”
Hannah did as she was asked, padding back the way they’d come and disappearing into darkness.
Lia took up her cherry branch as well as her dreamcatcher and began to circle around, surefooted on her home turf even in the night, meaning to creep up on the Archons.
“-All right, okay, let’s just talk about this now, ladies,” Graves was in the middle of saying. “Emperor Hardface wants to see me, that’s fine. Let’s just make an appointment like professional people, and-”
Lia broke from cover and swatted Lady Madness decisively to the ground with her fat cherry branch. The dense wood cracked against the creature’s featureless, scrambled-signal head with a satisfying snap. In the next instant Lia threw the big red dreamcatcher over Lady Night’s head. She hissed “Sidestep this, bitch,” when she did it. The ring fell as far as Nyx’s star-spangled hips, erasing her from reality from the waist up.
As soon as the dream-net fell over the Archon of Darkness, night became day. Literally. Blue sky and brilliant sunlight replaced the depthless black dome overhead. Lady Madness screamed in the sudden noontime glare.
Lia, squinting in pain, grabbed Graves’ emaciated hand and together they fled, racing away as fast as they could. Graves glanced over at his savior as they sprinted through the foliage and gasped: “And here I thought you didn’t even like me!”
“Not sure I do,” Lia replied, shielding her eyes from the blinding onslaught of off-schedule sunlight. “But I’m pretty sure I loathe them.”
“Whatever you say, sister. I’ll take it.”
Nyx, somewhere behind them, must have thrown off the dreamcatcher, because night resumed in a flash. The sky and all the plant life around them turned back to black. Lyssa’s repetitive banshee screaming continued on in the darkness.
Lia saw Hannah’s wide eyes peering over the top of the tube as she and the bones of Dexter Graves pounded toward it, even though her night-vision was still murky after that blast of magical daylight.
“Get down, get down!” Lia yelled.
Hannah dropped out of sight.
Graves reached the tube and looked in over its lip. It went a long way down, and Hannah had barely reached the bottom of the ladder.
“Just jump,” Lia commanded. “Go, quickly!”
She pushed him. Graves tipped into the tube at the waist, shouting. Lia grabbed his legs and dumped him the rest of the way in. He tumbled right past Hannah, headfirst, his coat flapping, missing her only by inches, and shattered against the hard concrete floor. Han and Graves both shrieked as his bones went skittering everywhere. Cat-bodied Tom had to dive under the bed to get out of the path of the bouncing skull.
Lia was swinging her legs over the lip and into the tube when Lyssa and Nyx, the lady gods, came screeching out of the trees behind her. She dropped, catching the wheel as she fell and slamming the hatch cover down after herself.