Ingrid Catrina shaded her bare eyesockets against a wash of brilliant, realworld daylight as the dead leapt through the breach after their former ruler, pouring out of what the old people had always known as the Hole in the Sky.
Mictlantecuhtli’s robe fluttered and snapped as he fell, screaming, and crunched against the cracked blacktop, thirteen stories below. His ancient altar landed on top of him and broke apart into several large pieces.
Skeletons in clothing from every era rained down upon Mictlantecuhtli’s remains, smashing them first to gravel against the pavement, then to powder, and then finally to the dust to which all things are said to return. The durable skeletons themselves landed unharmed and pranced away, out into the streets, elated over the prospect of being free.
Up on the roof of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, Graves and Lia continued staring down at the mass exodus taking place not three feet beneath the soles of their shoes.
Fresh droves of skeletons kept coming, pounding up the pyramid’s steps and even climbing its stacked sides, pouring in from every corner of Mictlan’s plain like a blanketing swarm of locusts.
There seemed to be no end to them, from one horizon to the next.
Dexter Graves and Lia Flores looked up and grinned at each other like a pair of delighted children.
The dead partied outside the Silent Tower and all over the rest of the city, badly disrupting the ‘real’ world of natural laws and social habits. They burrowed out of the ground and broke out of crypts, so hungry for the life they’d been denied that they were unable to wait in an orderly line at the door between worlds any longer.
In cemeteries across town, bones boiled out of manicured plots. Mausoleum slots blew open and whirlwinds of ash danced around the memory gardens with unrestrained glee. So many of the dead sought to act on the permission they’d been granted that the inviolable veil between life and death might as well have come unraveled. Los Angeles was the event’s epicenter, but its results were going global, spreading more swiftly than the planet could turn.
Los Muertos went nuts as soon as they were loose, too overwhelmed and overjoyed not to celebrate their liberation. The blue sky above was a miracle to them-even if the bright sun, which was currently facing a different hemisphere, was nowhere to be seen within it. They hardly noticed such a trifling detail as that after having endured the tedium of Mictlan’s never-ending gray for so long. Their raucous behavior freaked out the living (who were having a hard enough time dealing with the improbable daylight as it was). It looked as though a sepulchral spring break had been declared on the streets of LA. The dead were on holiday, and they meant to make the most of every second they had.
On paved avenues that had once been dirt roads, ranchero skeletons riding pale horses fired their guns into a blameless blue sky. Tribal bones wearing tall fans of feathers performed wildly whirling ghost dances in intersections they remembered only as crossroads, while dead musicians carrying instruments of every stripe gathered together to make as much lively noise as they possibly could. Skeletons in the costumes they remembered best from life danced and twirled and laughed and sang, all of them intoxicated by their unexpected taste of vitality.
Many of the living (who were still horribly confused, but starting to get over that first, debilitating shock that always accompanies an experience of the impossible) began recognizing ancestors. Joyous reunions broke out everywhere, in yards and in stores and on streetcorners, as the liberated dead sought out children, grandchildren, or descendents too far down the timeline for anyone to reckon. Even expired pets, cats and dogs by the skeletal score, hurried home to check up on the friends they’d loved so well in life but had to leave behind.
For one moment, unique in all of time (like every other moment, of course), the living and the dead celebrated together, and all of them believed wholeheartedly, if only for a little while, in the glorious future of their kind.
Chapter Fifty-Five
After what felt like well more than an hour Lia and Dexter hopped down from the roof of Mictlantecuhtli’s temple and crowd-surfed back into the world. Lia had to coach Dex on how to do it, as he’d missed out on the era in which the practice was born by a number of decades.
Celebrating skeletons obligingly bore them across the two rooms of the office suite, then on down the stairs and out through the lobby’s double doors, finally depositing them right on the cadaver-crowded street in front of the Silent Tower.
Hannah Catrina and Riley’s well-dressed bones were dancing a sprightly jitterbug together, and they both waved a cheerful hello.
“You like what I did here, dollface?” Dexter asked, grinning his biggest lopsided grin when he turned to face Lia. “It’s the Day of the Dead. I uncorked the otherworld for you!”
“I love it, Dexter, I really do,” Lia said, and cast her wondering eyes around at the cheekbone-to-jowl crowds packed into the narrow street before them. When she looked up at Dexter again, his silly smile only widened. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen!”
She touched his thoughts and was humbled to know that Dex had pulled this incredible trick because he believed she would’ve done the exact same thing, had the power been hers to use.
His eyes told her the same, and his lips confirmed it when he seized her and dipped her in a deep, triumphant kiss.
Skeletons all around whooped and applauded, whistled and cheered, many of them reminded powerfully of a famous old photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse that had once, for so many, symbolically sealed the end of their world’s great war.
Dexter straightened up and set Lia back on her feet, ending their breathless moment. The crowds all around fell silent, and they both looked up to see Ingrid Catrina, the new Queen of Mictlan, smiling down upon them.
Ingrid’s bleached skeleton wore a regal costume now: a long-skirted suit and a broad-brimmed hat pinned over her lustrous, dark red hair. To Lia she seemed to embody everything that was dignified, elegant, timeless and wise, like the Elizabeth of the Otherworld. The dusts of this world swirled about her before settling down onto her bones in a flawless facsimile of flesh. After a few moments her face looked as smooth and radiant as it had in life, and her occluded eyes cleared to a blue as bright as sapphires. She was one of los Muertos now, as well as their Queen, and on their day she could walk the worlds beside them, on her own recognizance. Unlike her imaginal predecessor, this was a Death who had lived.
“Ingrid,” Dexter said, taking off his hat in the presence of royalty. “Or should I say your majesty?”
“Ingrid’s fine,” the new Queen offered. “Or mom. If you like. Not ma, though, please. That’s a sound a sheep would make.”
“But…” Dexter started, then hesitated. Lia looked up and saw that his eyes were full of need and a brand of pain she understood all too well, being an orphan herself. She also knew that the world’s mythologies were rife with tales of semi-divine parentage, and of progeny hidden away by human mothers until such children could come of age to claim their birthrights from otherworldly fathers. The pattern was a classic one, reiterated time and time again.
“Is it really true, what you told me about being my… you know, my mother?” he whispered. “How can it be? I mean, look at us. I’m older than you are.”