“Dexter…” Ingrid explained gently. “I had you in 1915, back when I’m originally from. I left you in the realworld to keep you safe from Mickey, but then I jumped to 1950 to meet you. To see what sort of a man you’d become. I jumped to now to find Lia after Mickey tracked me down again and wouldn’t let me go till I promised I’d deliver you. I’ve taken trips all over time. Any point in human memory is accessible from Mictlan.”
She brushed his face with fingertips of dust-sheathed bone.
“I’m sorry I was never a parent to you,” she said. “I had no idea how to be. I was never very good at normal life. Maybe now… I can be of a different sort of use.”
“Yeah, you’ll make that otherworld a better place, I just know you will,” Dexter said. His voice went hoarse with emotion when Lia unobtrusively took and squeezed his hand. He held on gratefully. “Get out there and liberate those mythologies,” he suggested.
“That already has been done,” pronounced the Queen. Her gaze was growing distant, her focus already turning inward, toward the otherworld’s eternal mysteries.
“Well all right,” Dex said, beaming. He pushed his hat back on his head and looked around, at the dead who still crowded the streets, milling about and chatting. “What about the rest of the mess I made?”
Queen Ingrid shrugged. “The dead will return when their day is done,” she said. “And the living will recall this only as a dream. The realworld defends its boundaries too well to let this be remembered. Nyx, I believe, remains your prisoner?”
“Back at the Yard, yeah,” Lia said.
“Free her as it pleases you,” the Queen instructed. “Until then… let the dead enjoy their day.”
Queen Ingrid Catrina, the new Reina de los Muertos, bowed to her son and to Lia before she turned back to her building, the Silent Tower, the thin facade worn by her ancient temple in that patch of the actual currently known as Hollywood. The torrent of still-exiting skeletons parted before their new sovereign to let her enter the building, all of them kneeling and bowing their heads when she passed. No longer out of fear, as would’ve been the case with the previous monarch, but rather as an expression of adoration, admiration, and genuine gratitude.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Ingrid told her son, waggling fingers over her shoulder without turning back. The dust-flesh fell away from her bones as she did so.
“In all the old familiar places,” Dexter replied, in a murmur only Lia was close enough to hear.
Together they turned away as the Queen returned to her realm and its faraway concerns, only to be confronted by Mictlantecuhtli’s dead manservant Winston, who stuck his rusty gun into Lia’s face. She cringed back against Dexter, who moved to shield her with his body.
“Black Tom Delgado,” skeletal Winston rasped. “It’s not fair that he should get away with what he did to me. The degradations I’ve endured. The centuries of humiliation. If all I can do to hurt him is kill what he loves, then that’s what I’ll bloody well do!”
Lia and Dex both flinched when the small gun burst apart, taking most of Winston’s mummified hand along with it. His finger bones went careening off in every direction. One stray knuckle bounced harmlessly off Dexter’s chest. They heard the shot whole seconds later, and were slow to realize that it hadn’t come from Winston’s gun.
Neither of them was hit.
Lia looked up to see a distant sniper atop a tall neighboring building taking aim in their direction through a riflescope. She shouted and jumped when a team of six black-clad Navy SEALs burst from concealment behind parked cars and tackled Winston the would-be assassin to the blacktop, before she or Dexter had any idea what was happening.
Dex drew Lia close while one masked and helmeted member of the SEAL team trussed Winston up with plastic zip-strip restraints and the other five covered him with drawn sidearms. She couldn’t have been more astounded when a gray Seahawk helicopter diced the air above, rising from a helipad atop the sniper’s building and whirring to a three-wheeled landing in the empty lot across the street from the King’s tower. (Make that the Queen’s tower, she corrected herself.) Skeletons ducked and parted to make room for the incoming aircraft. The gunship had a United States Navy insignia on its side, barely visible through the haze of brown dust its rotors kicked up.
It was the same symbol that graced the front of Dexter’s lighter.
Two very old men (one dressed in a heavily decorated Naval uniform) and a skeletal version of Tomas Delgado stepped out of the flying eggbeater, ducking under its roaring blades.
“Black Tom!” Lia cried, feeling limp with relief upon seeing him again, when she hadn’t been at all sure she would.
“Hey, that looks to be my old pal Charlie Lurp with ’em,” Dexter said. “And… holy hell, I think that’s-can that really be Davey Normoyle? Admiral Davey? Still in the Navy!” Dex crowed, sounding more than amazed. He and Lia ran up to meet the new arrivals. Dexter embraced the shriveled Admiral and pumped old Charlie’s gnarled hand. Lia hugged Black Tom’s bones.
“I called in the cavalry for ya, Dex,” Charlie bubbled, plainly enjoying himself more than he had in years. “Your friend Tom there came and Big Juannie knew it meant you was in trouble, but I knew the Admiral here would wanna help you out.”
“Davey, I can’t believe you did this,” Dexter said. “After all these years!”
“Years I only had because of you, Dex,” the wizened old sailor said.
“Well, all right,” Dexter repeated, and Lia thought he couldn’t have wiped that smile off his face for all the tea in Tokyo. “But isn’t hijacking a helicopter to chase down a ghost story gonna do some violence to your storied career, there, Admiral?”
“Ahhh, hell, they’ll just retire me quiet and chalk it up to Oldtimer’s Disease,” Davey said, waving an arthritic and liver-spotted hand dismissively in the Seahawk’s direction. “That’s if anybody even knows the whirlybird is gone. I got a feeling a lot of things might escape notice to… day? Night? Which is it right now, anyway?”
Dexter saw his point. Lia did too. The bright blue, sunless sky made them feel as though they were somehow paused at the climax of an inverted eclipse, in defiance of all known natural laws. Shadows didn’t know which way to fall.
“Yeah, I guess you might fly under the radar at that,” Dex said. He pointed to Winston’s twist-tied remains, which were lying face-down on the pavement beneath a number of black combat boots and the full weight of the men attached to them. “What about him, then?”
“Hold onto him till dark,” Lia advised. “And keep him off the dirt. He’ll be the Queen’s problem after that.”
“I think my boys can execute that order,” Admiral Normoyle said. He grinned at his old friend Dexter Graves when Dex slipped his arm around his best girl. Lia laid her head against his chest.
“Say, do you two need a ride or anything?” the elderly admiral asked.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The Navy helicopter’s pilot found room to set down in a wide intersection a block away from Potter’s Yard. Lia, Dexter, and Black Tom’s reconstituted skeleton all hopped out and waved when it took off again, rising up into the blue sky on the swirling winds its rotors generated. Davey Normoyle and Charlie Lurp waved back, leaning out the open door in the Seahawk’s side and grinning like a couple of foolish kids.
Skeletons and live folks were still partying and chatting and hanging around the neighborhood, every neighborhood, all over the city and by now the world, everyone glad to be at least sort of alive and enjoying their day in the sun.
Dexter slid his arm around Lia’s waist as they walked into the Yard through the open front gate. They fell into step together easily.