Ingrid wasn’t all that surprised when Lyssa and Nyx showed up again empty-handed. She’d been lounging languidly on a soft chaise for quite some ‘time,’ next to a dark teakwood throne the King had conjured for himself upon Mictlan’s endless plain, and she barely acknowledged the Archons’ reluctant reappearance.
Skeletal Winston quietly continued mixing martinis behind a nearby bar. Besides the bar, her sofa, and the King’s fancy chair, there were no other signs of civilization anywhere beneath the slate-gray sky.
Nyx and Lyssa dropped to their knees before their King. They wore simple linen wraps, as before, and their hair hung down their backs in neat braids. They looked like more or less ordinary women over here (if strikingly lovely ones, in the classical sense). Ingrid couldn’t even guess at what they must’ve looked like out there in the realworld, as strange and vast as they were.
“Well?” Mickey said.
Together, Nyx and Lyssa answered: “He has returned to the cold womb of the earth, Mictlantecuhtli.”
Ingrid suppressed a satisfied smile.
“He’s what?” Mickey said.
“Returned to the cold womb of the earth, Mictlantecuhtli.” Again in unison, with submissively downcast eyes.
“I heard you the first time!” Mickey shouted.
Lyssa and Nyx wisely stayed quiet. The King jumped up, knocking over his throne, and commenced to pace. Ingrid watched him wearily.
“What are you telling me?” he demanded of his playmates. “That he dumped himself back in a hole and pulled the dirt in on top?”
Nyx and Lyssa exchanged a look and a shrug. “Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” they said together. “We no longer feel his presence.”
The King righted his throne and parked his ass, pouting. He sighed. “I did not expect that,” he said.
“Nor did we, Mictlantecuhtli,” the Archons echoed.
“I might’ve guessed,” Ingrid said. Everyone looked over at her, draped elegantly across her chaise. She shrugged. “If history’s any precedent,” she explained.
The illusion of a man that called itself ‘Miguel Caradura’ sneered. He stood again, knocking over his throne for a second time. “Go ahead and laugh, witch!” he barked down at Ingrid. “You’ve got plenty of time for jokes.”
Ingrid swung up into a sitting position, taking a moment to arrange her skirt. “Relax a little, why don’t you?” she suggested, glancing up at Mickey. “So they’re smarter than you thought they’d be. I’m sure your ‘companions’ will find them for you soon enough.”
“Yes, you should keep on hoping that,” the King said.
“Oh, come on, Mickey!” Ingrid cried, finally raising her voice in frustration. She was more than a bit amazed that he hadn’t blown this deal already by trying to get a glimpse of the witch called Lia Flores, perhaps to see if the newer model had a body he might enjoy possessing. “This has nothing to do with me anymore,” Ingrid insisted. “And we had a deal.”
“I am altering the terms of that deal.”
Ingrid rolled her eyes. “Then I’ll just pray you don’t alter them further, Lord Vader,” she said, trying to chide him with a joke, but Mickey turned on her with nuclear rage burning in his eyes.
“Who is this Vader?'” he demanded. “You call me by the name of another man? Who is this person? I will eat his skin while savoring the music of his screams!”
“Mickey, my god, have a drink,” Ingrid said, raising an eyebrow. “Winston?”
Winston brought over a martini on a tray. A spiral curl of citrus peel clung to the rim of the frosty glass. Mickey refused to take it. He continued to glare at Ingrid, actually expecting an answer, it seemed.
“It was a line from a movie, okay?” Ingrid told him, forcing herself not to sigh. “Remember I told you about movies? The dreams the realworlders share in common? What you said sounded like a line from one, is all.” When the King didn’t respond, she flashed her bright blue eyes at him and said, emphatically: “There is no ‘Vader,’ Mickey.”
Mollified, King Caradura finally took Winston’s proffered martini. He looked to Lyssa and Nyx, who had cringed during his outburst, but hadn’t moved from where they knelt upon the ground.
“Can you find again the place where he is buried?” he said to them, after sipping his drink and nodding his approval of it to Winston. “Are you that much smarter than my idiot Tzitzimime?”
“We… we believe so, Mictlantecuhtli,” the sinister sisters replied.
Mickey looked to Ingrid. “Well, that’s something then, isn’t it?” he said.