Graves relaxed while Hannah finished up her cooking. The good, homey smells of frying breakfast filled the air, making him wish bitterly that he still had the plumbing you needed to digest a strip of bacon. He was starting to wonder how long he was apt to stay like this, dead in all but the most fundamental of ways, but such thoughts were not pleasant ones and he pushed them aside in favor of more enjoyable memories of meals he’d eaten two-thirds of a century in the past.
Hannah started munching straightaway, as soon as the eggs were done. Lia’s plate waited for her on the table, steaming mellowly in the mottled light that filtered down through a forest of grown trees-oaks, olives, evergreens and palms-all of which stood rooted in half-ton wooden pots. Hannah told Graves, when he asked, that they rented the exotic specimens out to film productions. There were even several stands of tall bamboo that would rustle and rattle like lonely old bones in all but the gentlest of breezes.
Graves tilted precariously back in his chair and rocked it a bit. He was savoring this quiet and companionable moment with one of his new friends when a leatherclad, helmeted woman came striding out of the foliage toward him.
He was so startled that he tumbled backwards out of his chair.
Hannah jumped up. The new woman knocked her out of the way as she made a beeline for Graves. He found his feet a second before the leather lady seized him by the throat and pinned him to a sapling tree’s wooden support post.
Hannah scrambled up and ran for it, vanishing into the bush after taking one huge-eyed look back. Graves was peripherally relieved to see her escaping.
“King Caradura throws the very best parties, Dexter Graves,” the disguised female said to him from behind her visor. “So what, prithee, be thy major malfunction?”
Graves deftly broke the weird woman’s chokehold and headbutted the mirrored face of her helmet. The silver plastic shattered, revealing the crazy static behind it. “Awww, hell, not you again,” he said.
“Me and all the names I call myself,” Lady Madness confirmed. “Come, Sinister Dexter, the King awaits.”
The being Lia had called an Archon popped her fingers into Graves’ nosehole and eyesockets like his skull was nothing more than a bowling ball and then dragged him, effortlessly, even as he struggled and kicked, off toward the gate.
She waved her other hand across her visor to heal it before she pulled a tiny walkie-talkie out of her pocket. The reflective glass melted back into place, obscuring her static. “Hunt the pretty, my wolves, but don’t break her,” she warned her confederates via the handheld radio. “The King has all the cold girls he can eat.”
“Hey, Bad Signal,” Graves shouted up at her (albeit in a stifled, nasal voice). “You so much as touch Miss Lia and I’ll cancel your broadcast for good. You hearin’ me under that shell, sister?”
The woman-shaped distortion peeled a glove off her statichand and stuffed it into Graves’ mouth as she dragged him along, muffling his threats. “Not anymore, Dexter Graves,” she said, answering his rhetorical question.
A moment later she raked him through the parking lot gravel and threw him into the back of the nearest of her six black cars while the pair of henchmen left to guard the front gate looked on with a high degree of astonished disbelief.
A heavy steel dog screen blocked access to the vehicle’s front seats and there were no door handles here in the back, as Graves discovered in fairly short order. He still had the Archon’s leather glove stuffed between his teeth.
He watched her stride back into the Yard through the open front gate, past a large black cat she didn’t even notice.
“Now for LisaLiaChloeMia, and anybody else she thinks she is,” the unhinged otherworlder said, to nobody in particular.