He, like Lyssa, was gone in a wink, leaving nothing but his handcuffs behind.
Earth was Lia’s element, however, and in this case she could follow him down into its fecund blackness. She listened hard for his fading thoughts, holding on to her last impression of his mind, even though it was difficult to do. She’d never sent herself out this far before. She felt Winston reconstitute his bones from the soil of the empty lot across the street from Caradura’s office building, and caught an image of the place through his eyes. He rose up from the dirt, shook it off his shoulders in a dusty cloud, and then went sprinting for the Tower’s front door, darting around the back end of a new Jaguar that was parked out in front of it.
Lia lost her sense of him when he went inside. The place was warded up pretty good. She could’ve sawed her way through the old hexes with a bit of effort, but there was so much still happening back at the Yard. She could hear the extravagant noise of Esteban’s clash with the Tzitzimime through her physical ears, although it sounded much more distant from her than it actually was.
Tom’s spirit shot right after Winston, faster than a thought, bashing through the wards before Lia could so much as ask him what they ought to do next. He was diffuse and invisible, so he couldn’t nod his customary acknowledgement, but Lia felt him vanish when he ducked inside the building.
ChapterForty-Nine
Lia pulled her thoughts back into her head as soon as Tom was gone. The clanging of cold steel against rigid exoskeletons grew in volume and she opened her eyes in time to see Steb nailing Mantis to a sturdy pear tree. Right through the middle section of her segmented body, with one of his machetes. The damaged Tzitzimitl’s chitinous armor bubbled, rippled, and almost broke apart into a cataract of bugs, but resourceful Esteban looped a beaded bracelet over the serrated equivalent of her wrist and then looped it again around his own.
“Oh, no,” he admonished, shaking a finger in her triangular and out-of-focus face. “That would be the coward’s way out!”
Mantis re-solidified against her will, her disintegration canceled.
Esteban next swept Wasp to the ground when she snuck up behind him and pinned her face-down in the dirt with his second machete. He bound her with a bracelet as well, preventing her from coming apart with the same hex he’d used on Mantis, although he was now effectively tied between the two of them. Wasp’s twitching wings crackled and snapped like crumpled cellophane when she tried to rise and fly away.
Lia could also hear Riley and his people in the distance, shouting to each other while they chased Nyx around the Yard. The sky above flashed blue every time they startled the frantic Archon with their lights. The ultraviolet bulbs inside them burned with the intensity of tiny suns and cast weird, dancing shadows all down the long rows of leafy trees.
Dawn broke with full and instantaneous force and held onto the sky for almost half a minute when a number of the black-clad security specialists managed to surround Nyx, hemming her in from all sides with phony daylight until she arced out over the top of their circle and raced off into the darkness that resumed as soon as she could turn her featureless face away from their lamps.
Closer by, Esteban’s two pinned specimens writhed and screamed in the stuttering flashes of inappropriate daytime, but they couldn’t escape him, not even under conditions that normally would’ve cancelled out their existence.
He turned to face Lia as night spread out above and held its place. She assumed the Archon of Darkness must’ve pulled ahead of her pursuers. Nyx wasn’t easy to see in the shadows, but she’d need a minute to gather herself before she could vanish the way her missing sister-daughter had, and Lia didn’t think Riley’s people were going to give it to her. The thrashing bugwomen relaxed a little in the restored gloom, but Steb was still physically tied to them. He’d achieved a stalemate here, at best.
“These things never die, brujachica,” he said to Lia. “Now they know you, they will never leave you be.”
“I have been worried about that,” Lia confessed.
“Yes,” Steb said, confirming that she should be worried. “But I do have one idea.”
He bit at the empty air, catching something in his teeth. It was nothing more or less than reality itself, Lia knew: the actual fabric of being. It wrinkled where his incisors sank in. He pulled at it, tore at it, worried it open like a dog ripping into an unsecured sack of kibble. There was weird light beyond the flap he tore out of existence.
“I’ve held a ticket to oblivion for a long time now,” Steb said to her, when he’d gotten the hole well started and widened to about half the size of his head. “What better occasion to make the trip? I’ll even have traveling companions this way. Incredible dancers!”
“Steb, what are you talking about?”
“The spaces between the worlds, mi brujachica,” Esteban explained. “Limbo. Oblivion. Nowheresville. Nobody comes back from there.”
“Don’t be crazy,” Lia said. “Those bonds you made won’t be enough to pull them in with you. You’d be killed and it wouldn’t even help.”
“No, you’re right,” Steb said, and yanked both his machetes loose from their moorings, unpinning the bugwomen. They both instantly impaled him, Wasp with her broken-off stinger and Mantis with one slim, barbed, raptorial forearm. He looked to Lia and gasped, “…but these links, I think, should do.”
“Steb, no!” Lia howled, shocked to her core by the sight of him run all the way through in two different places. There was surprisingly little blood. “No, you can’t do this, please don’t do this!”
But Steb only smiled. He could do this. He was perhaps the only human being alive capable of doing this, and she could tell that he meant to see it done. For her sake.
“Te amo, brujachica,” he told her. “Remember me.”
“Oh, Esteban…” Lia said, brushing his cheek with her fingertips before stepping back from him, out of harm’s way. “You know I always will.”
Esteban de Rojo grinned and then, with a shout, the freelance witchman swung his twin machetes around in a wide X. They caught in the gap he’d torn from reality and sliced it open further, just long enough for the resulting rift to suck him and his dance partners into the white nowhere zone beyond the worlds, before it sealed itself back up.
And then they were gone, all three of them.
Lia dropped to her knees, unable to breathe. This was too much to cope with. It was too real. Too irrevocable. Esteban was worse than dead, he was gone. Extinguished. She recalled, randomly, how he’d always brought her cut flowers when they’d been together, even though she lived in a world of flowers, because he somehow knew that contemplating their fleeting beauty as they faded moved her in an odd and personal way. He’d viewed her through a lens no one else ever had, understood feelings she’d never even tried to articulate, and now she’d never see him again. Not in this life or the next one, either. The weight of the sacrifice he’d made on her behalf was devastating.
Lia felt sick and desolated, too gutted even to cry.
Chapter Fifty
Black Tom condensed himself down into the first chamber at the top of the Silent Tower. Winston Watt may have channeled himself across miles through the medium of earth, but he still had to climb a dozen flights of stairs before he’d reach the King’s Chambers, so non-corporeal Tom beat him to the top by a handy margin. He couldn’t tell where the Archon Lyssa had gotten to, either, even though he’d sensed this place as a destination in her mind as well, right before she winked out of existence.
What really surprised him was finding Hannah up here, well ahead of anybody else. She was standing at the door between the rooms and staring through. Lia hadn’t sent her; Tom was certain he would’ve picked up on such a memory had it existed anywhere inside either of their heads. The only sign of Dexter Graves in evidence was a deflated mound of clothing and bones that lay on the floor at the lady’s feet.