The catspirit walking Tom’s body to the door stopped and turned back, unsure.
Just go, Tom thought at it, and thankfully the catspirit did. Without a word to Oscar, as it had no capacity for verbal language.
“Tio, say something, at least,” Oscar cried, when Tom’s body headed straight for the inner sanctum. “Please, don’t go through there yet. Please, wait!”
The young man lunged after what he thought was still his father’s old friend, trying to catch him by the back of his shirt before he went through Mictlan’s one-way door.
Winston Watt, who’d been silent all this time, now charged after Oscar, flailing his arms and screeching madly. Both Oz and the catspirit inside Tom’s body whirled around, startled by his manic display.
Tom himself, the part that counted, was in the process of jumping from the borrowed cat and back into his rightful head when a large black mockingbird landed on his furry shoulders. It stabbed painfully at the catbody’s neck with its beak, and Tom experienced a sensation that felt like something vital tearing loose from his throat.
Then he was back in his own body, looking out through his own human eyes, but totally unable to speak. He found he had no voice with which to explain himself to Oscar. No words at all to warn off the younger man.
Watt shoved him aside and he staggered back, tumbling through the doorway between the rooms before he could catch himself against the stone jamb. He abandoned his skin with an instant to spare before his now-empty human form fell across the barrier, turning skeletal before it hit the floor. The special flesh Mictlantecuhtli had bargained for was gone. Wasted, just like that.
Amorphous, disembodied Tom rejoined the cat’s body even as the vicious mockingbird clawed at its back and sides.
The bird threw its head back and shook it, swallowing, choking down Tom’s voice once and for all. A tiny, purplish-white wheel of energy the bird had ripped out of Tom’s neck disappeared down its feathered gullet. “What’s the matter, Tom?” it squawked, in a grating, inhuman, yet conscious and comprehending voice of its own. “Cat’s got no tongue?”
Tom realized it was Watt, Winston Watt, in a nagual form of his own-that of an irritating, sarcastic bird.
Fitting, he thought, before he reared back with a hiss and clawed one of the bird’s beady eyes right out of its head.
It shrieked hideously and beat at him with its wings while Oscar, back inside the first room beyond the Hole in the Sky, punched Watt’s birdridden body in the face for having pushed what he thought was Tom and not an empty husk into the second chamber. The bird inside Watt’s skin screeched and clawed and thrashed at Oscar with unwieldy human arms, and Oscar leaned in to pummel its torso with both fists.
Tom’s cat raced down the cold steel girder on nimble paws, bleeding from a dozen punctures and lacerations but still sporting the proper number of eyeballs-which was more than he could say for Winston Watt’s animal form. The half-blind bird swooped down after him, keeping its head cocked to one side so that it could see. He sank his claws into Tom’s back and plucked him off the beam, letting him loose into empty space.
He fell, thrashing and twisting, with an extended, echoing yowl.
Watt reassumed his human body in time to experience Oscar San Martin kneeing it in the crotch. He slumped, groaning, and crumpled to his knees, clutching at the front of San Martin’s stained coverall.
The builder gripped his throat with both strong hands and throttled him, slamming his head back against the brick wall in a steady, bonecracking rhythm.
Tom abandoned his borrowed catform in freefall and caught hold of a mountain lion that was hunting a quarter of a mile away, which was as far as he could reach in the split-second available. He ejected the lion’s indigenous tenant from its seat of consciousness an instant before the honored stray’s small body smashed against the future building’s hard concrete foundation.
The gray cat was dead in a flash.
Tom hoped he’d felt no pain.
Watt, his ears ringing like tuning forks while large black roses bloomed across his field of vision, caught hold of something solidly metallic that was tucked into the back of San Martin’s coveralls, at random, as he flailed for his life.
He got his finger into a ring on one side of the metal object and squeezed.
Tom’s new wildcat heard the small-caliber shot clearly, even at a distance. He raised its head from the still-twitching fawn it had brought down right before his unscheduled arrival in its brainspace and listened for a second shot, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing but crickets and the suddenly enticing rustlings of small rodents in the brush. Even more vivid than those were the rich smells of blood and life all around him, which hit these new predator’s senses of his like a symphony.
Tom sent himself out again, without letting go of the big cat entirely. He figured he was going to need a safe place to store his soul for a while.
Up in the first room beyond the Hole in the Sky, Winston Watt’s vision swam back into focus. The piercing note howling in his ears died away, like someone had turned down the volume on a particularly pointless and obnoxious phonograph recording.
Oscar San Martin lay beside him, gasping like a landed trout as his life’s red blood pulsed out from the gash a bullet had torn through the small of his back. There was blood all over the new carpet.
Winston had never even gotten the handgun out from under the man’s coverall, but that hadn’t stopped it from doing its deadly work, had it? Bang, right through something vital. Oscar was bleeding out fast.
Watt felt a little sick. It could’ve been due to concussion, he thought. (It never occurred to him that Tom might be lingering nearby, projected out from his new lion, and that he might be catching a ghost of a ghost’s reaction.)
The King’s Englishman pushed himself into a sitting position, then got to his feet, bracing himself against the wall for balance. He waited for his head to clear, then turned around to face the door that opened onto the next room. The one with the bloodcaked stone altar at its center.
“Mictlantecuhtli?” Watt called into the empty, echoing chamber. “Hello?”
On the floor behind him, Oscar San Martin breathed his last. His chest rattled when his lungs settled and then failed to reinflate.
In the next instant his coverall-clad bones materialized from a wisp of smoke right before Winston’s eyes, on the other side of the doorway, while his inert flesh lay cooling in the outer office.
“The King’s not in right now,” San Martin’s skeleton informed Watt, reaching out and slipping a bony hand around the back of his neck to yank him face-first through the doorway. “Why don’t you come inside and wait?”
Winston shouted and staggered forward, pulled off balance by a man he’d just killed, then toppled gracelessly into the realm of Mictlan. His living flesh sloughed away from his bones like so much fine, dry dust when he pitched across the threshold.
He’d never walk the realworld again, he knew, save possibly for one weird weekend each year, and only then with the express permission of his King… except that boon was almost never granted, was it?
Winston pounded the stone floor with his unfleshed fist. He wanted to cry, but there wasn’t enough moisture left in his bones to form tears. Tom Delgado’s abandoned, unmanned skeleton lay motionless on the floor beside him. It was nothing but a worthless relic now, already disarticulating, softening and collapsing in on itself. Soon it would break down completely, with nothing inside to maintain its integrity.
When Winston looked up Mictlantecuhtli was there, standing beside San Martin’s skeleton at the altar and staring down in disappointment from out of the shadows that pooled under his heavy gray cowl.