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.