The last three men covering the Yard’s other possible exits ran for the front gate after seeing the shiny new BMW shoot past them, but it was moving as fast as its expensive engineering allowed, and they were already too late to keep up with it.
Lia’s battered gray Mazda zoomed east on Sheldon Street, turned right onto San Fernando, and shot down toward the Burbank Airport with three V-8 predators closing in behind it.
The little car dodged around a lumbering lunch truck, pulled briefly ahead of the pursuit, and then skidded off the main drag, into an alley marked with a ‘NO OUTLET’ sign that was tucked in between an apartment complex and a liquor store, just past Ensign Street.
Game over, the nearest pursuer thought. That should’ve been it.
Which was exactly the impression Tom and Lia had planned to convey.
The nearest of the large black cars followed the Mazda right down the alley’s narrow corridor. The other two stopped to block the alley’s mouth. Lia’s little sedan skidded all the way around at the far end of the passage and stopped there, rocking on its springs.
There was nobody in it, either behind the wheel or in the passenger seats.
Some distance back, the approaching black car also squealed to a smoking stop. Its driver frowned, realizing that the little gray car up ahead really was empty. His eyes weren’t playing tricks.
“What the…?” he muttered, as Black Tom (who was invisible to the norms but grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless) threw Lia’s car into gear and stomped the accelerator. The tires screamed against the pavement.
Hardface’s man saw the empty Mazda coming at him at an already dangerous and still-increasing rate of speed. He threw his own car into reverse and mashed a blue plastic recycling bin against the side of the alley in his haste to back the fuck up.
The black car slammed ass-first into the blockade comprised of Hardface’s other two vehicles, both of which failed to get out of the way in time. A second later Lia’s car crashed with considerable force into the trapped sedan’s front end, driving it back hard. Both cars’ radiators blew simultaneous jets of steam.
The three shaken henchmen got out of their respective vehicles and peered with disbelief into the unoccupied wreck that had taken them out of commission.
This would not be easy to explain.
Black Tom lingered on for a moment, perfectly invisible, enjoying their looks of astonishment and dread before pulling his awareness back down to the Yard.
He found the only three of Hardface’s henchmen remaining on-site easily enough (without bothering to reclaim the catbody he’d stowed under a bush before driving off in Lia’s car). They were sidling up and trying to come to terms with the sight of Lady Lyssa, who’d somehow been spiked through her helmeted head with a living, rooted tree. Tom gave his girl high marks for style.
“Now how in the hell does that happen?” one of the men in the cheap suits asked rhetorically, eyeing the new sapling.
They all shouted and scattered when the presumed corpse at its base answered. “Which girl was the witchgirl was something we should’ve learned much sooner, is how this happens,” Lyssa said. “Hello? Wolves?”
There was, by then, nobody but invisible Tom around to hear, but still she asked:
“Will one of you please find an axe?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Graves drove his stolen car westbound down Branford, with the women socked away in its small back seat. Hannah was stretched out as much as possible, with her head resting in Lia’s lap. Lia kept steady pressure on the wound that grooved Hannah’s hip, exactly as Graves had demonstrated for her.
He looked again in the rearview mirror. “I don’t see ’em,” he reported. “I don’t see anything. I think we’re in the clear, ladies.”
Lia nodded, squeezing Hannah’s hand. Her eyes were shut painfully tight. In the mirror she looked withdrawn and lost. Graves glanced over his shoulder at her in concern.
“Say,” he said, exchanging a look with Hannah, who seemed to share his worry. “Just outta curiosity, d’you know what that thing was back there? That broad with the bad reception?”
Lia had to drag herself out of her daze to think and answer. Those dark circles were starting to look tattooed under her eyes.
“That was Lyssa, I think,” she said. “The Archon of Madness and Moonlight. Like a goddess, very ancient. Greek originally. Too crazy to be scared of my tricks the way the others were. Too irrational already.”
“Yeah, that lunar chick was a lunatic, all right,” Graves agreed lightly. “Bugs in the brainpan, you ask me. Strong, though. Geez.”
He rolled his neck, cracking vertebrae all up the line. He was pleased to have drawn Lia back out of herself, even if it was only to a tiny degree. At least he knew the trauma of recent events hadn’t left her unreachable.
“So,” he said. “The sooner we get that wound hosed out, the less chance of infection there’s gonna be. Maybe you got some kinda destination in mind, dollface?”
“Head south,” Lia told him. “Over Coldwater Canyon. I know people who’ll help us, up in the hills.”
Graves nodded and made a left when they reached Coldwater, after another two blocks. When he looked over, the short man with the hat and the sunglasses who’d let him out of Hardface’s car was sitting in his passenger seat. He grinned at Graves and doffed his hat without saying a word, like he thought he was Harpo Marx or something.
“Oh,” Graves said in greeting, his capacity for surprise having been much diminished by the events of the last two days. “Hey. So you’re one of Lia’s sort of things too, huh? Guess I mighta known.”
“Who’re you talking to up there, Dexter?” Hannah asked, as he wove the fancyass car through mid-day traffic denser than any he’d ever seen. Everyone in the world had a car of their own by now, it looked like, including kids too young to enlist in the service, and all of them were on the roads all of the goddamn time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ingrid watched as Winston the bony butler finished knotting Miguel Caradura’s fine silk tie, then stepped back from the King. ‘Caradura’ turned to admire himself in a full-length mirror that appeared upon the gray plain in perfectly-timed anticipation of his desire for it.
The King had materialized another elegant, modern-day suit, Italian cut, which he now wore with his golden Aztec armbands over the sleeves and his owl-feather headdress perched upon his brow. The necklace of eyeballs was, as ever, his signature statement. If the vitreous humor that dribbled from the holes they were strung through stained his new clothes, well, then that was just as it had to be.
He turned away from the mirror. “Do you like my suit, my love?” he asked.
Ingrid looked him up and down, from where she sat reclining on her chaise. The step pyramid stood tall against the gray horizon far behind him, like a jagged Mount Fuji. “I do,” she answered, truthfully enough. “You always did know how to wear your clothes, Mickey.”
El Rey grinned. Ingrid figured it probably wasn’t the moment to point out that his taste in accessories did detract somewhat from his outfit’s overall effect.
Nyx, who was still kneeling on the bare ground, stirred and looked pained. She remained dressed in her simple linen and wore her hair in a fat, dark braid, as was her prerogative on this side of reality.
“Mic- Mictlantecuhtli?” she said.
“Yes, Nyx?”
“My sister-daughter… will not be returning, Mictlantecuhtli.”
Mickey blinked calmly, several times. “And why might that be, Nyx?”
“The witchgirl grew a tree down through her head and rooted her to the earth,” the anxious Archon explained. “She… she is quite uncomfortable, Mictlantecuhtli.”