He felt Lia down in her bomb shelter, throwing on clothes she’d laid out before her shower and searching under the furniture for her shoes. She was coming, but she was still far away, down below ground in the most distant corner of the eight-acre Yard. Events were apt to unfold here at the gate before she could make the scene.
Lyssa reached out and touched her gloved fingertips to the fence. “Oooooh, such an angryugly stare,” she murmured, her voice gone soft with wonderment. The painted eyes didn’t seem to trouble her much. “Oh, and a Pi slide; a long, long Pi slide, all the way down, down into the ground…”
Tom watched the nearest pair of henchmen exchange a clear look of no confidence.
Lyssa snapped her visor closed and turned back to them. “This is the Gravesite, yes,” she said decisively, in a somewhat muffled voice. “Surround it now, you vicious boys.”
For a moment, nobody moved. Then the oldest of the assembled men stepped forward. He wore a scuffed leather jacket and his face was both shaped and textured rather like a brick. He looked to be in his early fifties. “Lady, look, I know Mickey Hardface wanted you to bring us out here,” he said carefully. “But ain’t somebody else gonna, like, tell us what to do?” After a beat he added, hopefully: “Anybody?”
Lyssa cocked her helmeted head like she’d never seen such a thing as him before. “The Sun King reigns o’er hard, bright hours,” she said, “and I walk the day by his permissive grace, but my sister-mother never can hold dominion here. Duh. But Dexter Graves has left his grave and I can feel him there amidst the trees again. Our moment grows as ripe as the gibbous moon!”
Brickface exchanged a second look with his buddy, the one he’d shared a car with on the drive out here. It was plain enough to Tom that the faceless wackadoo’s line of horseshit did not sound good to them, not good at all. It didn’t sound so great to him, either.
“So… that’d be a no, then?” the pensive wiseguy pressed, still trying to get an answer on that chain of command issue.
“That’d be a find him find him find him now, before I bite your squishy eyes to feel them pop between my teeth,” Lyssa elucidated. She then raised her voice to address the men en masse: “Go and stalk your prey, my wolves!”
The assigned-by-Hardface henchmen reluctantly did as they were told, the full dozen fanning out, while Lyssa turned back to the closed front gate and raised her leather-sheathed arms to the sky.
Mictlantecuhtli’s footsoldiers moved in quick. Tom had to wonder who’d hired these men on el Rey’s behalf. They seemed very well prepared for the task they’d been set to.
One of the younger men removed the lock on the front gate with boltcutters. A second kid eased the gate open. Two older guys darted through, guns drawn, and feinted to either side. The man Tom thought of as Brickface and his partner entered next, their guns also drawn, and they crouched down as they jogged for cover deeper inside the Yard.
Then Lyssa sauntered right the hell in, rendering all of that stealthy choreography pointless.
The other half of the Henchforce hurried around the outside perimeter of the fence to cover any alternate exits. Tom could feel that Lia was now above ground and coming on the run, but he dreaded the thought of her encountering any of these people.
In the moment of quiet that descended after the goon squad scrambled off to execute their orders, a half-visible thing that looked like a cross between a bulldog and a bullfrog peered around the gate, snuffling after the interlopers.
It was a Croucher, as Tom well knew. The two men assigned to guard the front entrance couldn’t see it at all.
It sniffed at a new offering of fresh fruit Hannah had put out first thing that morning, considered it… then hopped after the intruders instead, snorting up their scent and baring its double rows of sharp, shark-like teeth in a hungry, anticipatory grin.
Tom watched from the office shack’s roof as half a dozen more ravenous Crouchers hopped through the gate, following in the path of the first one.
Chapter Twenty
Graves relaxed while Hannah finished up her cooking. The good, homey smells of frying breakfast filled the air, making him wish bitterly that he still had the plumbing you needed to digest a strip of bacon. He was starting to wonder how long he was apt to stay like this, dead in all but the most fundamental of ways, but such thoughts were not pleasant ones and he pushed them aside in favor of more enjoyable memories of meals he’d eaten two-thirds of a century in the past.
Hannah started munching straightaway, as soon as the eggs were done. Lia’s plate waited for her on the table, steaming mellowly in the mottled light that filtered down through a forest of grown trees-oaks, olives, evergreens and palms-all of which stood rooted in half-ton wooden pots. Hannah told Graves, when he asked, that they rented the exotic specimens out to film productions. There were even several stands of tall bamboo that would rustle and rattle like lonely old bones in all but the gentlest of breezes.
Graves tilted precariously back in his chair and rocked it a bit. He was savoring this quiet and companionable moment with one of his new friends when a leatherclad, helmeted woman came striding out of the foliage toward him.
He was so startled that he tumbled backwards out of his chair.
Hannah jumped up. The new woman knocked her out of the way as she made a beeline for Graves. He found his feet a second before the leather lady seized him by the throat and pinned him to a sapling tree’s wooden support post.
Hannah scrambled up and ran for it, vanishing into the bush after taking one huge-eyed look back. Graves was peripherally relieved to see her escaping.
“King Caradura throws the very best parties, Dexter Graves,” the disguised female said to him from behind her visor. “So what, prithee, be thy major malfunction?”
Graves deftly broke the weird woman’s chokehold and headbutted the mirrored face of her helmet. The silver plastic shattered, revealing the crazy static behind it. “Awww, hell, not you again,” he said.
“Me and all the names I call myself,” Lady Madness confirmed. “Come, Sinister Dexter, the King awaits.”
The being Lia had called an Archon popped her fingers into Graves’ nosehole and eyesockets like his skull was nothing more than a bowling ball and then dragged him, effortlessly, even as he struggled and kicked, off toward the gate.
She waved her other hand across her visor to heal it before she pulled a tiny walkie-talkie out of her pocket. The reflective glass melted back into place, obscuring her static. “Hunt the pretty, my wolves, but don’t break her,” she warned her confederates via the handheld radio. “The King has all the cold girls he can eat.”
“Hey, Bad Signal,” Graves shouted up at her (albeit in a stifled, nasal voice). “You so much as touch Miss Lia and I’ll cancel your broadcast for good. You hearin’ me under that shell, sister?”
The woman-shaped distortion peeled a glove off her statichand and stuffed it into Graves’ mouth as she dragged him along, muffling his threats. “Not anymore, Dexter Graves,” she said, answering his rhetorical question.
A moment later she raked him through the parking lot gravel and threw him into the back of the nearest of her six black cars while the pair of henchmen left to guard the front gate looked on with a high degree of astonished disbelief.
A heavy steel dog screen blocked access to the vehicle’s front seats and there were no door handles here in the back, as Graves discovered in fairly short order. He still had the Archon’s leather glove stuffed between his teeth.
He watched her stride back into the Yard through the open front gate, past a large black cat she didn’t even notice.
“Now for LisaLiaChloeMia, and anybody else she thinks she is,” the unhinged otherworlder said, to nobody in particular.