“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.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Hannah shouted and it was the last thing Lia heard before the Archon put a hand over her face and sent her quietly, catatonically mad in less than a second, by pointing out in a deft succession of mental images the contradictions and rationalizations Lia needed to remain personally unconscious of in order to function. The memories and knowledge she could not abide. The truth of her past, her childhood, the years before Black Tom, before foster care even, came bubbling up: a swamp of guilt, grief and confusion as noxious and suffocating as the black goo that bubbled out of the earth itself down at the La Brea tar pits.
The girl whose name had not then been Lia came awake rolling in darkness, bouncing down a hillside, torn at by thorns and branches before coming to a quick, jolting stop with her left arm angled under her body in such a way that it snapped audibly, as neatly as a twig. The wave of pain that surged out from the breakpoint made her lightheaded. She thought she might throw up, or pass out.
She did neither. The screams brought her back around. She raised her head and saw the undercarriage of a minivan angled up at her from where the vehicle lay, some yards further down the embankment, lodged in a copse of thin trees. Its headlight beams lanced through the branches and dissipated into the empty blackness beyond. The girl who was not then Lia remembered they’d been driving home through Topanga Canyon after a weekend at the beach up in Ventura County. She’d been asleep in the rear compartment, behind the big car’s last bench seat, which her mother thought was unsafe but which seemed ironically to have resulted in her being thrown clear when their van went over the side of the road.
Her mother and father and younger brother were still inside it, screaming for help.
Screaming for her help, she thought, as she sat up and hugged a broken arm to her skinny chest. It was a climb down to where they were, and she didn’t know if she could make it. She couldn’t even gauge the drop beyond. It was too dark for that. The scraggly saplings the minivan was lodged against made for a precarious brace. The car looked like it might fall at any minute, and the girl was terrified of falling with it. She didn’t know what to do. She had no experience with emergencies.
Lyssa made Lia watch herself sit there and consider her options. Made her aware of just how long she’d mulled them over while her family screamed in pain and terror, instead of scrambling down the embankment as fast as she could to help them, to save them, to do something other than sit there like a terrified rabbit…
And then the trees gave way. The car plummeted into blackness, crunching several times as it tumbled out of sight, down the side of the canyon.
For a moment there was only silence. Then came a vast airy whoooooshh and a fireball rolled up toward the star-filled sky, painting the night in garish shades of orange and gold.
She hadn’t saved them. She hadn’t even tried, not in time, and it made no difference to her own heart that she’d only been ten years old. Only a child, and in shock. But Lyssa wouldn’t let her forget what she’d failed to do, and Lia’s shrieking psyche responded in the only way it could: by shutting down.
Lyssa flashed a smile and eyes of static up at a startled Graves when he spun around. She looked human in every other way.
“Oh, I am just sick of you,” Graves yelled. “Let her go!”
“After you’ve kept your promise to Mictlantecuhtli,” Lyssa said, “I’ll think it over.”
“No dice, sister.”
Mictlantecuhtli could contain his frustration no longer. He crossed back into his altar chamber, where all of his power was at his command. His cowl lost its integrity and loosened into a caul of smoke, then concretized down around his bones to make a convincing illusion of muscular, tattooed flesh. The King eschewed his double-breasted suit for this iteration, costuming himself instead as a bare-chested Aztec lord from centuries past, with reed sandals on his feet, a loincloth tied at his waist, and an elaborately-woven cape drawn around his shoulders. His skull headdress and eyeball necklace, the indelible symbols of his office, were the only things that stayed the same.
“Don’t make me throw you through that goddamn door, my son,” he said to Graves.
“Like to seeya try, pops.”
Enraged, the King shouted and ran at him. Graves sidestepped and shoved him into the bloodcaked altar, which stood only a little higher than his knees. The King pitched across the round slab gracelessly, face first, and caught himself with both hands before his jaw collided with the flagstone floor. His ceremonial headdress flew off and went skittering right past Lyssa and Lia (who didn’t so much as turn her head to acknowledge it).
It looked to Graves like she’d checked out completely.
Pre-Columbian Caradura was up in half a second and Graves darted in to deliver a fast combination, opening with a jab at his face to get the King’s hands up. He followed that with a hard shot to his liver, then finished off with a devastating left hook that connected so hard with the side of Caradura’s head that it ruptured the cartilage in his ear.
Graves had been in bar fights on three continents, and if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was throw a goddamn punch.
He socked Caradura in the gut while the King was recovering his balance, driving him to his knees, and Caradura seized the opportunity to bite deeply into Graves’ calf. Graves bellowed and kneed Caradura in the face, knocking him aside and sending several teeth flying. Caradura shook his head, spraying strings of blood and spittle, and Graves tackled him with his full weight, sumo-style, before he could get to his feet again.