Ingrid closed her phone and wandered away from the Lyssa tree-a source of amazement for her henchmen that in Ingrid’s opinion almost amounted to an art installation. She was trying to avoid the avid attention of that creepy Xavier, whom she knew had been eavesdropping during her call. The other men hadn’t wanted to hang around the leather-suited Archon with the sapling tree growing up through her head after she tried to talk to them, but Xavier hadn’t been deterred. He hadn’t let Ingrid out of earshot since arriving at the nursery.
Her bare foot encountered something soft and yielding on the ground. Something lying concealed under the cover of a low shrub.
Looking down through the foliage she parted, Ingrid found a black cat. It hadn’t moved, despite being accidentally kicked. It was alive, no doubt about that, yet unresponsive to stimuli. Ingrid made a gesture to knot the oddity up in a precautionary binding hex, one she could shore up later if she saw a need. Then she put away her phone and picked up the limp animal, frowning.
This meant something. She was sure of it.
She was looking critically at the inert black cat when Xavier crept up behind her. “So,” he said out of nowhere. “You think they gonna come, or what?”
Ingrid turned, startled, but kept it cool. She betrayed nothing. She fixed Mickey’s footsoldier with a contemptuous gaze of a sort that usually made men feel self-conscious, to say the least. Xavier had sidled up a lot closer than she might’ve expected. She looked him up and down dismissively, then looked at the cat again, and grinned. “You know, I have a feeling they will,” she said.
Ingrid tucked the animal under her arm and strutted off, through a thicket of potted palms, pointedly ignoring Xavier as he watched her walk away.
He lingered, waiting to make sure Ingrid was really gone. After the Red Witch wandered out of earshot, he fell to his knees and ripped his own face off, gasping. ‘Xavier’ was nothing more than a disguise. While he caught his breath, Winston, the King’s skeletal servant, looked disdainfully down at the floppy face in his hand.
“Bloody hell, I forgot how hot these things can be,” he muttered, his voice and manner changed completely from those of his crudely-drawn character. As if servitude weren’t enough, the final indignity was that he was now being forced to act, like some vagabond gypsy player prancing for coins on a rickety stage.
He looked again at his false face, which was stubble-scalped and marked with a teardrop tattoo at the corner of the left eye. It’d been flayed off a recent arrival in Mictlan mere hours ago. It felt moist, and smelled meaty.
“How do the living tolerate it?” Winston wondered aloud.
He heard a rustling in the oleander behind him and threw his face back on. It shrink-wrapped down onto the bones of his skull. He still had no eyes (the ones that came with a fresh face were impractical, as they tended to deflate or turn cloudy so quickly; and besides, the King prized them as jewelry), but he covered up that fact with his sunglasses and got to his feet before two of the gunmen he’d enlisted ‘rolled up on him,’ to employ the vernacular of the day. He recognized them as Top Shelf (aka Reggie White) and his shadow Andrej Mirovic (known amongst his confederates as the Silent Soviet, due to his lack of English). Winston had hand-picked each member of this crew himself.
“Dude, what you doin’ back up in here, anyways?” Top Shelf said. “Takin’ a leak?”
“Yeah, why,” Winston shot back, dropping into character as Xavier once again. “You wanna watch?”
Top Shelf snorted in contempt and wandered off in the direction Ingrid had gone, with quiet Mirovic trailing along behind him. Winston stared after them through Xavier’s dark lenses.
“Wankers,” he muttered.