Graves realized that Casa de Rojo’s party people had come to terms with his mementomori presence much more readily than most crowds would have. The decayed Dick Tracy, Riley, and Hannah hung out amongst them in the main hall and talked amidst their chatter while Lia finished off her snack: two sandwiches, a banana, and a glass of sweet iced tea.
Hannah nibbled at a leg of crispy duck and sipped from a glass of champagne.
Truth be told, Graves was almost as startled and captivated by Riley’s guests as they were by him, now that he had a chance to look them over. He’d gotten used to the idea that Hannah and Miss Lia wore dungarees all the time, and he figured it had to do with their soil-centric line of work out at Potter’s Yard. (Although Lia’s pants didn’t quite fit, like she’d bought them in the wrong size. They showed off her belly button and a good two inches of skin below that. Not that Graves meant to complain about it, mind you). But the women in this room, as well as some of the men, all wore jeans that barely covered their pubic bones, if not ‘skirts’ that seemed to be little more than narrow bands of fabric stretched taut around slender hips. Shapely legs and plumped-up breasts bulged everywhere he looked, like a part of the decor, and these kids were about as tattooed as a tribe of South Seas savages. Graves had known career Navy men who didn’t sport as much ink as any random twenty-year-old girl at this party, which had apparently been going on for some number of days already.
O brave new world, thought Dexter Graves. These young people had grown up with choices and freedoms arrayed before them that nobody born in his era would’ve been able to imagine.
Graves believed in freedom, as an ideal. He’d fought for it in the big WW, and he was more gratified than he would’ve guessed to see this future generation using it as they were, to strike out into the unknown countries within and between themselves. What sort of new continents might explorers like these discover, given time? Graves may have been overwhelmed and intimidated by their liberally-displayed beauty, but he wished them all the best just the same.
While he was idly musing about days and wonders yet to come, a double-door at the top of the stairs banged open and a wild-eyed figure who could only be freelance shaman Esteban de Rojo (known in some circles as Steb) burst back into the everyday world after an unbroken week of isolation.
All conversation ceased; all heads swiveled up toward him. Graves, Lia, Hannah and Riley all stood up.
Steb zeroed in immediately on Lia.
“Brujachica!” he screamed.
The new lunatic with the flair for entrances leaped down the stairs in three large bounds to seize Lia’s hand. He had a shock of black hair, small glittering eyes, a sharp wedge of a chin, and the letters of some arcane alphabet tattooed down his forearms. “You have returned to me, as I always knew one day you would,” he said.
Graves didn’t know what to think.
“Hi, Steb,” Lia said. “I haven’t returned, I’m just stopping by.”
“Ahhhhh, you say that now but wait,” Esteban chided. “You’ve yet to see the newest wonders we’ve evoked. There is no place else you will care to be once you’ve seen the works that we’re performing here.”
Finally he noticed Graves and was visibly taken aback.
“Whoa,” he said, looking to Lia. “You’ve been scaling new heights too, haven’t you, brujachica?”
“Steb,” she said, “this is Dexter Graves. Dex: Esteban de Rojo.”
Turning to Graves, Steb said, “Charmed, I am certain.”
“Not so much for me,” Graves replied.
“Lia, la brujachica,” Esteban said again, delighted nearly to the point of rapture by the mere fact of her presence. “How can you stay away, mi corazon? What hospitality can I offer you?”
“Riley just made me a sandwich.”
“A sandwich? A fucking sandwich?” Steb turned on Riley. “Why would you make her a sandwich when anything the world can offer is hers for the asking?” he demanded. “What is the matter with you?”
“It’s what I asked for, Steb,” Lia said. “It’s what I wanted.”
“But-”
“You know I hate being told what I’m supposed to like.”
“You always did, didn’t you, brujachica?” Steb smiled. “Hannah Potter,” he said, taking note of the lady for the first time. “I remember you.” He grabbed Hannah up in a bearhug and whirled her around. Riley’d scrounged enough Vicodin for her that it didn’t appear to trouble the slice on her hip at all.
“Hi, Esteban,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”
“And you as well, Dona Hannah.”
“What’ve you been working on, Steb?” Lia asked. “You seem a little… wired.”
“Yeah, man,” Riley said. “Even for you.”
Steb set a slightly dizzy Hannah down, and Graves steadied her.
“Scrying the aethers, mi brujachica,” Steb told Lia. “I’ve been scrying the aethers and such wonders I’ve seen! You must join me. Really, you’re my only peer.”
“What is he, hopped up on bennies?” Graves whispered. “Benzedrine?”
“He’s been in a deeply altered state all week,” Riley said. “He’s supposed to ground himself better before he comes out of seclusion, though.”
“Brujachica!” Steb jumped up onto a coffee table to grandly assume the center of the room. The crowd of hipsters and hexy girls parted around him, except for four female stereo bearers who raised four identical boomboxes (in what Lia and Riley thought of as a Lloyd Dobbler style) and started them all playing the same song.
Steb’s dark eyes blazed with excitement. “I want you to see what I have brought back from the edge of the 30th sphere,” he cried, when he had Lia’s full attention.
Esteban began to dance to the dark, manic beat that poured from the sexy caryatids’ upraised radios. Slowly at first, then faster as the tempo increased. All of his attention was focused on Lia, who wasn’t intimidated one bit.
Hannah had to smile, Graves noticed.
“Steb, what are you doing?” Lia asked.
“Just watch, brujachica,” he said. “Unless you are moved to join me.”
Esteban raised a hand and the half-dozen party people nearest to him simultaneously joined in his choreography. Their moves looked expertly coordinated.
“Theatrical bunch, ain’t they?” Graves muttered to Hannah.
Lia twitched her hips as Steb danced at her, not joining him, exactly, but matching his steps a bit. It was a weird tango she wasn’t quite participating in, although she didn’t shy away from it, either.
“You like my dance, brujachica?”
“If it’s leading where I think it is, I might not,” Lia warned over the music.
The song’s intensity redoubled at the chorus and Steb threw his head back in a scream that had the effect of drawing all of his blacksuited bodyguards into the number with impeccable timing. They doffed imaginary hats and spun their big guns like canes. It was both absurd and scary. People instinctively scrambled away from the whirling weapons. Graves and Hannah were stunned, as were the guards themselves, judging by the looks on their faces.
This wasn’t choreography at all. It was mind control.
“All right, Steb, I’m impressed,” Lia said. “Really impressed. But I’d like you to stop now.”
“Ohhh, why don’t you just loosen up?” Steb shouted. He raised his arms above his head and the remainder of the room (including Graves, Hannah, and Riley) were all compelled to join the dance.
Only Lia, the demure axis of all that energy, remained immune. She smiled at Steb’s antics, and Graves thought he sensed in her some desire to take part in the madman’s reel. She clearly knew the steps. She could probably have shown this ‘Steb’ a move or two. Together they’d be plain dangerous.
For the first time, Graves thought he understood Lia’s full potential for terrible and terrifying beauty, like that of a firestorm or a raging angel. She and Esteban could have danced across realities together and molded the worlds anew, into whatever strange and striking forms they might’ve fancied, with no regard for any rules of gods or men.
If she’d wanted to, that was. Graves was glad she didn’t.
Lia edged away toward the door, drawing the whirling crowd along after her.
“Dance with me,” Steb dared, screaming it over the music.
“You mean you’re not gonna force me to?” Lia shouted back.
“Ha!” Esteban laughed. “Never you, brujachica. As if I could.”
“Yeaaah, anyway,” Lia said, “I think it’s time my friends and I were going, now.” She slipped out the front door, pulling Hannah and Graves along with her. Control of their limbs came back to them when she took their hands.
Steb and all of his guests and guards spilled right out the front door after them. A team of gardeners attending to the grounds joined in the crisply-executed dance routine, spinning rakes and smashing garbage can lids together to amplify the beat. Involuntary partiers gyrated on the lawn, more than a few of them still clutching the remainders of spilled drinks in their hands.
“But my operation has just ended, and my party has just begun,” Steb said, pursuing Lia as she backed away down the steps. “We are as one mind with many bodies. Imagine the possibilities!”
“That’s not my kind of party, Steb,” Lia said sadly. “It’s too much. These people aren’t toys. This kind of thing is the reason we can’t be together, and you know it.”
“You limit yourself. Why, brujachica? Why will you not think of what we, together, could be? What more must I do to prove my passion?”
“Nothing!” Lia pleaded. “Please, gods, nothing more. You take risks that scare me, Steb. You sell your skills in ways I can’t abide. I don’t want to change you, or stifle you, or tell you who to be… but I also can’t stand by. And we’ve been over this before.”
At the apex of the song, Steb let the number stop.
The music died away and the dancers quit. Some fell to their knees in fear and relief, while others turned around and went back into the house, in search of fresh drinks.
Steb turned sad and earnest. “But I love you, brujachica,” he said. “I always will.”
Graves looked on, with his ulnae and radii folded across his ribs. Hannah pulled him toward the car. They both got in, Graves in the back, Hannah in the driver’s seat, as Lia kissed Steb’s cheek.
“Take care of yourself, Esteban,” she said. “Don’t let yourself do things you’ll regret. People’s choices have to be their own.”
She pulled away from him, pained by the disappointment evident in his eyes. She turned and took Riley’s hands. “Thank you, Riley, for patching up my Hannah,” she said. “Oh, and that Pi trick you taught me worked really well! I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”
Riley nodded and Lia hopped into the passenger seat of Graves’ stolen fancyass car. She waved out the window when they pulled away, angling down the long, curving drive.
Esteban watched them go from where he stood on the front steps, looking quietly brokenhearted.
“All right,” Graves said from the back seat of the car as they wound their way down the hill. “Can I just ask, what the hell was that?”
“That was Steb,” Hannah said, without looking back from the driver’s seat.
Lia said nothing at all. She stared out her window at expensive houses and sun-mottled vegetation as they rolled silently past.
Then, out of nowhere she shouted: “Wait a minute, where’s Tom?” She looked around, with panic written across her face. “Hannah, stop the car!”
Hannah did so, wide-eyed, skidding to a stop in the middle of the road. Thankfully there was no one behind them. Lia was openly panicked, trying to look in every direction at once, it seemed like.
“I can’t find Black Tom!” she shrieked.