Black Tom stood by in the waiting room, helplessly watching Winston Watt’s old bones threaten Hannah inside the second of the King’s Chambers. Tom knew he couldn’t cross the barrier the way they both had and retain his will, as he was technically dead already and therefore a subject of el Rey’s (even if he’d been absent without leave for the last hundred years). He’d be rendered helpless by Mictlantecuhtli’s influence as soon as he stepped across the threshold, and he’d be no good to anybody, then.
“But I hardly know anything about these things!” Hannah protested, staring down the barrel of Winston’s gun. Tom had no idea what would happen to her if she got shot while standing in the realm of the dead. “I didn’t even know things like you could be, outside of movies,” she insisted.
“The dead like me can walk the earth this time of year, with permission from our King,” Winston informed her. “But a living thing like you has no business being here. You couldn’t be, unless you know something more than you’re letting on, my dear.”
“I really swear I don’t,” Hannah said.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Winston replied. “All I want is for Black Tom Delgado to take over my position in Mictlan. Do you think your Lia will trade him for you?”
“I… I have no idea,” Hannah said. Tom didn’t either. He was glad that Winston couldn’t see him.
“I think you’d better hope so,” Watt said. “Now, summon Dexter Graves. He will bring Mictlantecuhtli, and Mictlantecuhtli must approve the terms.”
“I don’t know how to summon,” Hannah said. “I missed that class.”
“I am getting a bit tired of this obtuse routine, lady.”
Hannah sighed. “Okay, I can try,” she said. “But I wouldn’t expect much.” She put the lighter to her forehead and closed her eyes. “Hannah to Dexter,” she said in a dopey nasal voice. “Hannah to Dexter, come in Dexter…”
Winston looked like he was about to say something pissy in response when Graves’ ghost appeared beside the altar stone.
“Wow,” Hannah said, looking as startled as anyone. “Good reception. There must be a hellphone tower near here.”
King Caradura appeared a moment later, looking none too pleased. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded of Hannah. “Why have you summoned Dexter Graves from our palaver?”
Black Tom faded further back, making himself as hard to perceive as possible. Only distraction was keeping el Rey from spotting him out here. He thanked whatever other gods might be that Mictlantecuhtli wasn’t quite omniscient.
Hannah cocked her thumb at Winston. “He placed the call,” she said. “I’m just the operator.”
“Winston?” ‘Miguel Caradura’ said, raising his dark eyebrows. El Rey was fully dressed as a living human being for this performance, a form in which Tom had rarely seen him. He was even wearing a modern-day suit, one with big shoulders and pinstripes.
“Tomas Delgado is with them, Mictlantecuhtli,” the bony majordomo said. “The witch Lia will trade him for this one. I humbly ask that you force him to assume the mantle I have carried in his place. I’m tired. I just want to sleep. Please, Mictlantecuhtli.”
“I have a better idea,” Hannah said. When she had the King’s full attention, she continued. “Look, in case you haven’t noticed: I’m in here. I walked in and I didn’t melt. Guess that must mean I’m a witch, huh?”
“It… would seem so, Lady,” the King said. “Yes.”
“I’ve helped Lia with her work,” Hannah said. “I’ve fed the doorway demons, and I think I’ve seen them too. I make my living helping things grow out of the earth, and I just now summoned up a ghost. I guess that’s enough to qualify me as a witch or an operator or whatever it is they’re called, technically speaking. And I hear you need one, Mister, um… Death. Sir, I mean.”
“You hear true. What then do you propose, witch?”
“Leave Lia out of this. Do what you’ve gotta do with me.”
“That’s a really bad idea there, Miss Hannah,” Graves’ ghost said.
“Very good.” Caradura agreed with a nod, ignoring Graves utterly. “I accept your terms. Let us, as they say, ‘do this thing.’”
Hannah nodded too, and they shook on it, her slender hand disappearing into el Rey’s powerful mitt. Winston looked on, completely flummoxed.
“Hannah no,” Graves protested. “You can’t just-”
“Hannah!”
Everyone within the second chamber whirled around when Lia, Ingrid and Riley burst into the office. Winston Watt raised his gun and fired. Whether he did it reflexively or on purpose was more than Tom could say. The shot resounded in the tiny, crowded chamber, making every living ear ring.
The bullet caught Ingrid square in the chest, slamming her back against the door and exploding the garnet pendant she wore on a silver chain. Tiny shards of the stone rained across the floor like drops of crystallized blood. Everyone shied back against the walls of their respective chamber, except for Winston and el Rey. Ingrid sank to the first room’s carpet amidst a stunned silence, leaving a dark red smear down the door behind her. It matched the evidence of Graves’ long-ago death that still decorated the other side of the deeply-varnished wood.
Graves’ ghost dove back into his bones and they flew across the barrier at Winston, decking and disarming the dirt-encrusted skeleton in one decisive move. The action left him inside the second chamber, though, and Black Tom didn’t know if Graves would be able to exit back out into the realworld again, now that his physical remains had entered Mictlan.
Hannah stepped aside to let Graves’ skeleton bum-rush the trigger-happy manservant out into the first chamber, where Riley caught him, slapped binding bracelets on him, and dumped him to the floor.
Lia, still in the first room, was staring down at Ingrid. She and Tom hadn’t had time to acknowledge one another yet. She knew he was with her, though, and he could feel the dizziness the sight of Ingrid’s scarlet blood caused her. It looked garishly bright against the redhead’s pale skin.
“Thank you, Lady,” Caradura said to Hannah, startling her by snatching Graves’ lighter right out of her hand. “But your services will no longer be required. My first choice just became available.”
Caradura crossed into the outer office, through the barrier, becoming skeletal Mictlantecuhtli in the blink of an eye. Tom knew from experience that el Rey could go no further than this first room, nor could he assume a false form out here, this close to the realworld. No more than his Tzitzimime or his conquered Archons could.
“You stay away from her!” Lia snapped, interposing herself between Mictlantecuhtli and a gasping, trembling Ingrid. “You stay where you are,” Tom’s girl yelled at el Rey, although she might as well have yelled at the ocean for all the good it would do. Mictlantecuhtli was no more reasonable than the waves or the tides or the axial tilt of the earth.
Riley wisely grabbed Lia and yanked her aside. The cowled, emaciated figure of Death strode past them without so much as a glance and bent over dying Ingrid. He took her hand and pressed Graves’ old cigarette lighter into it, then made a gesture like a benediction over it, severing one attachment in favor of another. The Zippo’s metal case sizzled against the redhead’s palm, and Tom thought he saw a wisp of either smoke or steam rise from it. Ingrid looked up at her King, and her blue eyes were wide with terror.
“At last, my love, you’ll be my Queen,” Mictlantecuhtli said, and even as she was on the verge of death, with her life’s blood burbling out through a hole that didn’t belong in her chest, Ingrid’s expression crumbled. Her eyes turned glassy as they filled up with tears of despair.
With her dying breath, Black Tom heard her whisper: “…no…”
As soon as Mictlantecuhtli put the lighter into Ingrid’s hand, Lia felt the connection diverting her life force away to animate Dexter click off as neatly as if someone had thrown a switch. Strength she’d barely realized she was lacking returned to her limbs like a flood of adrenaline. The drain had been subtle and slow enough that she’d chalked its effects up to a lack of sleep, or possibly an oncoming cold.
She understood that Ingrid and her King had been setting her up since the moment Ingrid first contacted her, baiting her good nature with a story that would tempt her up here, to these Chambers, and right into their trap. Dexter’s Zippo lighter had always been the link, and she’d been entangled with him from the moment she picked it up.
But then it seemed like Ingrid hadn’t been able to go through with the plan, or maybe she’d meant to double-cross Death all along.
Either way, she was paying the highest possible price for her schemes now.
Lia looked to Dexter, through the doorway between the King’s Chambers. The membrane between the worlds shimmered between them, a barrier so subtle it hardly seemed to be there at all.
“She said restoring you would kill either one of us, but together we could both survive,” she told the skeleton in the hat. She glanced back at Ingrid, lying on the floor behind her and losing her struggle to breathe through a newly-perforated sternum. “That’s what she wanted to do before dark, back out at the Yard.”
It might be too late for them to share the entire burden now, but Lia thought there was still a little something she might be able to do, for someone who’d at least tried to be of help.
The lighter was right there, and Mictlantecuhtli’s shrouded back was to her. He only had eyes for Ingrid, at the moment.
“Lia, you don’t have to,” Dex warned, guessing at her intentions by tracking the movements of her eyes.
“I know,” Lia said, then scooped the lighter out of Ingrid’s hand and threw herself over the barrier between worlds. Mictlantecuhtli shouted in surprise and made a grab for her back, at the very instant in which Ingrid expired.
The witches Dexter Graves was bound to-one by fate and the other by design, one still alive and the other freshly dead-entered Mictlan together, and Graves’ flesh grew back in a flash when they did. Nerves and veins and musculature, organs and skin and hair, all of them knitted together faster than he could put on a shirt. Then his clothing went and regenerated, too. Gum-soled shoes, a good-looking suit, and his favorite floor-length trenchcoat all appeared around him, all as good as new. The pristine fedora he’d taken from one of Riley’s party guests was the only item of clothing he wore that magic didn’t bother to replace.
His connections to life and the world had been re-forged. Graves was alive again.
Alive and in Mictlan, he couldn’t help but notice, even as Lia shouldered past him like he was still a ghost, invisible.
Dex spun around in her wake and saw what she saw: a red-haired skeleton draped in Ingrid’s ragged gown standing right behind him, next to the inner chamber’s round limestone altar. Hannah also noticed her there and gasped in surprise. Ingrid now uncannily resembled a Catrina, Lia thought-an elegant ‘Lady Death’ figure of the sort she associated with traditional Dia de Los Muertos decorations.
Lia seized the new skeleton’s cold, bony hand and shoved the still-warm lighter into it. Most of Ingrid’s vital force had siphoned off into Dexter’s restoration, although the link between them, Dexter’s Zippo, continued to smolder with the last of her transferred energy. Lia hoped that giving the tiny spark back to her would let Ingrid keep her voice and her own free will, at least for as long as she held onto the talisman.
Mictlantecuhtli would want to divert that final glimmer of her life to serve his own purposes, however, and that didn’t leave them with a lot of options. He’d need to do his thing fast, before either the lighter or Ingrid’s realworld corpse turned cold. Further complicating matters was the fact that Lord Death was currently standing out there in the twenty-first century waiting room, also known as the first of his chambers. His shrouded back was turned to Riley, Black Tom, and the only exit, barring the rest of them from escaping out into the land of the living (where all of them but Ingrid still technically belonged).
“I’m standing over here,” Dex noted aloud, prodding the torchlit chamber’s adobe wall with his regenerated fingertips. “Thought I couldn’t do that, in a body.”
“There seem to be a lot of loopholes,” Hannah observed.
Mictlantecuhtli displayed no intention of crossing the barrier after Lia. He stopped short in the doorway instead, leaving Ingrid’s slackening body to cool on the First Chamber’s floor behind him. He held a black obsidian blade in his hand, the one he used to cleave souls from their attachments to the living world. Riley and Black Tom both scooted around the perimeter of the room, staying well out of Death’s way.
“Now we cross into one another, Dexter Graves,” the skeletal King said. “I assume your form on this side, you my attributes on that. Quickly, before the Red Witch’s heat can dissipate. Our link must not grow cold.”
“There’s one thing I still don’t get, though,” Dexter said, completely ignoring Mictlantecuhtli’s declaration of urgency. “Why me? And how am I standin’ over here, all in one piece? I thought you needed special clearance for that.”
Skeletal Ingrid Catrina and fleshless Mictlantecuhtli exchanged a loaded glance, through the doorway that separated them. Dexter stood back next to Lia, folded his arms, and waited to hear what they were both plainly reluctant to tell him.
“Dexter… you have it,” Ingrid Catrina said carefully. “Special clearance, I mean. You’ve always had it. Don’t you know who you are? Haven’t you put it together yet?”
“You, Dexter Graves, are my son,” Mictlantecuhtli said. “Rightful prince of all Mictlan.”
Ingrid touched his living arm with her now-ossified hand. “And I am-or, well, I was-your mother,” she told him.
Dexter stood there for a moment, stock-still and unable to process the news. Nobody else was doing much better. Lia, Riley and Hannah all gaped at one another in open astonishment.
Then Dexter cried, “Oh, my God,” and continued on bellowing like a crazy person, clutching at his head. “Awwwwww, for cryin’ out loud,” he yelled at Ingrid’s bones. “Come on, say it ain’t so! Do you know the torch I carried for you, lady? Do you? Awww, hell, this makes me wanna tear my new eyeballs outta my goddamn head!”
Nobody noticed when Lyssa re-appeared behind Lia during the commotion of Dexter’s outburst. Not even Tom. Hannah and Riley were trying too hard not to laugh over the content of Dex’s reproaches. The Archon looked like a normal enough, dark-haired woman clad in a simple linen dress here on this, the otherworld side of the barrier, inside the second of the King’s Chambers.
She darted forward and seized Lia in a chokehold.