An hour after dark, Lia and Hannah sat sipping pinot noir under the stars, surrounded by the Yard’s dense, potted wilderness while they lounged around on last season’s unsold garden chairs. They had citronella candles burning for light (and irony, considering the bugwomen they were trying to repel). The music was turned down to a whisper, though prowling imaginals would, thanks to Lia’s efforts, still perceive a full-volume blare. Tom was curled up nearby, catnapping.
Lia had her laptop open with a number of IM windows displayed on the screen. A collection of internet pervs addressed her variously as Cammie, Chloe, Zoe, Lisa, and Mia. She paid them little mind, typing just enough to keep them going. Which wasn’t much, as the men on the other sides of the message windows needed just a touch of believably female participation to fill in the gaps in their fantasies.
All Lia needed out of them was to be called by the wrong name.
She had the branch she’d torn down earlier propped up next to her chair. She was still prepared for the worst, but she felt far more relaxed now that she knew Hannah, at least, would be safe here until morning.
The rest of the otherworlders must have known the Ant was gone, but they couldn’t know if she’d been destroyed, captured, or if she’d run off of her own accord. The deflective eyes and other wards had neatly concealed the Tzitzimitl’s demise, and they were still preventing the rest of the entities from seeing anything that happened within the fence’s perimeter. The party the otherworlders thought was going on inside the compound still seemed loud and lively.
Lia could imagine the remaining Tzitzimime stalking the streets and scratching their freakish heads, although she didn’t send herself back out to observe them. Better to lay low, at this point. And besides, she knew Black Tom was out there keeping watch around the edges of things, even if his catbody seemed to be asleep beside her.
Hannah leaned back in her chair and looked up at the bright splash of stars overhead. “So, where are we supposed to sleep tonight?” she asked. And then, after a pause, “Are we supposed to sleep tonight?”
Lia looked over. She was feeling better by now, over the shock of Hannah’s close call, soothed by the wine and the quiet. She decided she liked having Han out here for company. Lia tended to protect the Yard like a secret, and therefore rarely entertained. Hannah may have owned the place on paper, but after dark, the territory still belonged to Lia and her Tom. This change of pace was nice, though. Cozy and convivial, in an eye-of-the-hurricane sort of way.
“I was thinking right here, campout-style, if you want,” she said in belated response to Hannah’s query about the sleeping arrangements. “I’ve got sleeping bags, I’ve just gotta go down below to get them.”
“Is it… you know, safe? To go to sleep?”
“Sure,” Lia said. “Everything’s holding. And I can keep an eye on things from my dreams.”
“Can you really?” Hannah seemed charmed by the idea.
Lia nodded, sipping her wine and smiling. She liked the odd combination of candle-and-computerlight. It seemed both warm and ice-cold at the same time.
“That’s amazing,” Hannah said.
“Just something I learned. You could learn too, if you wanted.”
Hannah snorted at the idea. “Yeah, I can see the marquee now: ‘Hannah Potter and the Angry Ant…’” She shook her head and smiled wistfully. “How weird that that’s really my name, though, huh? Like Harry’s long-lost aunt or something.”
Lia grinned back. “That’s a synchronicity,” she told her. “You should take it as a sign.”
Hannah laughed again, but shook her head. “I could never be like you,” she said quietly, seeming to consider her young friend in a brand new light. “You saved my life tonight, I think.”
Lia blushed. “That necklace did,” she said. “Your name did. The palindrome. Just lucky, is all.”
“But you gave me that necklace!” Hannah said. “You made it for me, years ago.”
“Yeah, that’s right, I did, didn’t I?” Lia teased, waggling her fingers in a mesmeric manner. “All part of my master plan.”
“See, now, I can’t even tell if you’re kidding or not.”
“I am,” Lia said. “But that’s still sort of the way these things work, sometimes.”
“Oh.” Hannah seemed unsure of how she wanted to feel about that piece of information. “Well… what about whatsisname, then, down in your place? Dexter?”
Lia waved off the question and refilled her wineglass. “Let’s not worry about that right now,” she said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
Graves’ first throw bounced off the waterglass on the shelf with a musical clink, down in the old bomb shelter. The glass resounded with a deeper note in response to his second bullseye, something more like a clank, but the force of the hit only tipped the inverted tumbler back on the shelf for an instant, failing to overturn it.
His third throw went ludicrously wide, knocking some other, untargeted knickknack right off Lia’s crowded shelf. He didn’t know what it’d been, hadn’t been looking at it, and couldn’t even hope to guess at the object’s original form after it crashed to the concrete floor and exploded into a thousand ceramic shards. Graves cringed, but he worked yet another small bone loose from his left hand and threw again, harder still. So hard that momentum unbalanced him and his full-body, forward-hopping follow-through left him staring down at the floor between his feet by the time he caught himself against the transparent magical barrier. He heard rather than saw his knucklebone hit the symbolic dome that kept the barrier in place (it made a dull clunk against the glass), and the force field scraped a few encouraging inches across the floor under his weight.
He looked up, his hopes on the rise, but they crested and plummeted when he saw that the impact had merely driven the overturned waterglass further in amongst the books behind it. It was socked in there but good, now, nestled into a pocket of cushioning paper on three sides.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” Graves yelled in frustration. His tiny handbones weren’t cutting it, weight-wise, and he was almost down to throwing toes. “All right, nuts to this.”
He reached down and detached a kneecap. His lower leg promptly fell off, but he ignored it. One problem at a time. Balancing like a flamingo, he hefted the weighty patella in the still-assembled palm of his bony right hand, wound up, and fired off his most forceful fastball.
This time he nailed it. The glass broke and crumpled inward with a satisfying crunch. Graves threw his arms (minus most of his left hand) into the air in triumph. “Steeeeeerike one!” he cried, feeling entirely too pleased with himself. Then, with only one leg left to balance on, he toppled right over and sprawled to the floor with a hollow xylophone clatter.
He was outside that magic circle, though, he noted with satisfaction upon looking up from the smooth concrete. Well outside that circle.
He scrambled over to the shelf and began sweeping up his bones, fitting them together like puzzle pieces as he came across them. “Now I just gotta pull myself together, here,” he muttered to himself.
In one of several open message windows on Lia’s laptop screen, someone using the imaginative nickname of ‘ASSLVR69’ asked ‘Mia’ what sort of panties she was wearing, and Lia responded by pecking out ‘blk lace frm vic scrt,’ although white cotton from Target was, at present, closer to the truth. Not that it was really any of his business.
As if, she thought with a frown, before hitting enter.
She didn’t like doing this at all, using people (even these people), as it felt sordid and made her sad, but she couldn’t argue with the results, either. The Yard hadn’t had another demon problem since they’d exterminated the Ant, and the false names her correspondents addressed her by helped to keep her real one safely obscured from the quartet of creatures that still remained in play.
Hannah stood some way off, leaning against a redwood arbor and gazing up at the stars. There was no moon in the sky this early in the evening. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock.
Hannah shivered. Only slightly, but Lia noticed. “I can go get those sleeping bags now, if you’re cold,” she offered.
Hannah looked over. “I can wait, if you don’t want to, you know, go back down there yet.”
Lia set aside her depleted wineglass, then stood and stretched. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m getting hungry anyway. Here, watch my names for me.”
Neither of them mentioned Dexter Graves, but Lia assumed they were both thinking about him. His imprisonment within her hobbit hole was the only conceivable reason why she might not feel comfortable going underground. Hannah came over to the tiny bistro table Lia’d been sitting at to monitor the laptop as Lia headed off, feeling the black, nighttime foliage engulf her when she waded into it. She found the sensation more comforting than intimidating. This was her darkness, and she felt perfectly at home within it.
The first joint of Graves’ left pinkie fell off as he was reaching up for the hatch’s wheel. He caught it, nearly falling off the exit tube’s ladder for the effort, and stuck it back into place. It stayed, like his bones were magnetized or something. He was already back in his coat and hat, with his left shinbone and the corresponding foot similarly reattached.
He was making his break.
The hatch wheel turned on its own before Graves could take hold of it. He almost fell again, cringing back as the hatch cover groaned open on its heavy-duty hinges.
Lia, above, turned away before she could see him dangling there from the tube ladder, framed in the hatch’s mouth like a goddamn portrait.
“Hannah?” she called back into the darkness. “Would you rather have banana chips or cereal? I don’t have much.” She paused, then called again. “Han?”
There was no response from Miss Hannah. The older lady must not’ve heard. The nursery was large, and this Lia didn’t seem like she’d be given to shouting. Graves’ assessment of her modest nature was confirmed when she headed back the way she came, out of his view, rather than standing there and bellowing her question until she got an answer.
He hurried up, scrambling out of the tube she’d left open, then scurried around behind it and watched Lia disappear back into the bush.
Hannah was still stargazing, leaning back in her chair when Lia walked up.
“Hannah? You want something to eat?”
“Weird moon tonight,” Hannah said idly, shaking her head in distracted answer to the question. “Came up fast. In just the last few minutes, it seems like.”
“Shouldn’t be much of a moon tonight,” Lia said. “Just a tiny sliver.”
Hannah looked over at her, letting the front legs of her rocked-back chair touch the earth before she sat up straight. She pointed just above the horizon, through a loose screen of leaves and branches. “Then what’s that?” she asked.
Lia squinted to see. There was something out there, hovering beyond the canopy. The small, bright, full ‘moon’ behind the trees seemed almost to flicker with gray static. Lia frowned, suddenly on her guard. “I don’t know what that is,” she said in a low voice. “But it’s not the moon.”
Hannah stood and looked up with Lia.
As they watched, the staticmoon shuddered drunkenly to one side, leaving a still, black shadow of itself behind, superimposed on the sky.
Lia and Hannah exchanged a nervous look. They both saw it. It was happening. Tom’s catbody woke with a start, and his tail puffed up with panic as he leapt to his paws. Lia knew her defenses had been breached again even before the two basketball-sized orbs (one ultrablack and the other staticy silver) descended into the foliage. The black one came down quite close by.
“Oh, shit,” Hannah said, and seized Lia’s hand. She was galvanized with fresh terror.
Lia put a finger to her lips as the black orb unfolded into the outline of a woman, one who seemed to have been hollowed out and filled with the night sky. The sky-woman paused and seemed to look around. It was difficult to tell, as she didn’t have any eyes.
A second form, this one flickering with static, appeared some distance away, amidst the rosebushes.
“Don’t move,” Lia whispered to Hannah. “I don’t think they see us.” I hope, she didn’t bother to add. She could feel Tom’s worries as vividly as her own.
Still, despite the fact that the Archons had obviously crossed her barriers, she didn’t think all of her tricks had been cancelled. It was the way they swiveled their heads around in irritated confusion, like they were searching through a crowd. Lia believed the music and the multitude of card games playing out on the office computer were still making it look, to the otherworlders, as though they’d dropped into the middle of some weird underground rave scene. Dozens of vague identities would be wandering amongst the plants, from the Archons’ perspective, appearing for a few moments and then disappearing again to be replaced by other images. Lia and Hannah would stay consistent and unchanging amidst the crowd, but there were too many fates coming and going for them to be picked out by the weird women in that manner. So they remained camouflaged. Tom, as well as Lia’s own observations, confirmed it.
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.
She hung there, some feet above the floor, as the Archons on the other side of the hatch jerked the wheel she was gripping back up. She screamed. The heavy hatch door lurched and clanked again, shaking Lia around like a marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer.
“Hannah, help,” she cried. “Turn me, turn me, turnme!”
Hannah grabbed Lia by the hips and spun her bodily in order to turn the wheel and seal the hatch. After a few shoulder-wrenching revolutions Lia was able to throw the bolt that sealed them in, and then they were safe.
Hannah tried to catch her when she dropped and both women tumbled to the floor, hard. They stayed there for a breathless minute or two. Then Lia sat up. So did Hannah. They exchanged a look.
“I guess we can sleep down here tonight,” Lia said.