Black Tom watched over the Yard from the peak of the office shack’s corrugated roof, through his catbody’s sharp green eyes. He was in the habit of giving Lia a bit of space in the mornings, so that she could bathe and see to other personal business in relative privacy.
From where Tom was crouched he could see all the way to each edge of the nursery’s property, and far beyond. To the north of them, the DWP generating station’s four red- amp;-white, candy-striped smokestacks poked up into the blue sky. Closer by, he could easily look out over the locked front gate and down into the empty street outside.
While he was lounging in the early sun and lazily watching the Yard’s perimeter, a large black motorcycle piloted by a tall woman in head-to-toe black leather came rumbling down the road. She surprised Tom when she stopped her bike and let it idle right before the Yard’s front gate. Half a dozen long black cars also pulled up and parked at the curbs on either side of the street.
They didn’t look like landscape designers, who rarely if ever traveled by motorcade. Tom sent a note of concern out toward Lia, just one soft alarm bell. For now. He could feel his girl tiptoeing back toward her bomb shelter with her rubber shower-sandals slapping at her heels, still unclothed except for a towel she’d cinched around herself like a fuzzy white mini-dress.
The black-clad woman killed her engine and swung herself off her bike, then wandered up to the fence. Her henchmen, a full dozen of them, got out of their cars and stood around, waiting for orders.
The leatherclad Amazon took in the eyeball-covered fence, with its multiple rings of Pi digits scorch-tattooed onto the silvery wood. She raised her helmet’s mirrored visor for a better look. None of the henchmen were in a position to see Lyssa’s mad static revealed instead of a face, but Tom was.
Lyssa, Lady Madness, was the unknown biker. Crazy as she was, she’d somehow found her way back out here, and this time she had a different kind of reinforcement in tow: a dozen armed men with money as their motivator, in place of a handful of nightmares. Maybe things looked clearer to her by the light of day, which obviously didn’t force her to retreat from reality as it did in the case of her relation Nyx, or the Tzitzimime.
Tom’s psychic warning bell began to clang in earnest, in time with his catbody’s skyrocketing heart rate.
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.