Sean Traver - Graves' end

Years ago, when he and Ramon had first come to this place, each of the boys had met his nagual , his spirit-animal, so to speak. That particular creature with which he had a special affinity and which might, if asked, guide him across the dreamscapes revealed by vegetal friends like Teonanactl and Mescalito.

Ramon’s nagual had been the lizard-cool, thoughtful, and prone to disappearing in a flash.

Tom’s had been the mountain lion. The prince of cats who stalked these hills and canyons. He silently asked the brave little birdstalker who was flashing his eyes from the far end of a girder for a very great favor, and received the animal’s consent.

Tom sent out his mind and switched places with the cat. He wasn’t sure it would work with such a small specimen, one that resembled a lion about as much as a chihuahua did a wolf, but work it did. After a sickening instant of vertigo those reflective green eyes were his, and he was looking back up at his own human body as the catspirit he’d swapped with steered it down the foot-wide girder and toward the Hole in the Sky, holding onto a rope the work crews had strung between the steel supports for balance.

Oscar, following behind it, seemed none the wiser.

Winston Watt was waiting for him, standing inside the first of the two rooms beyond the Hole. The chamber’s rough, torchlit adobe walls remained as Tom remembered them from the old days, although brand new carpeting had been laid down over the floor’s ancient flagstones. Watt cocked his head at an odd angle and examined with a critical eye the awkward, shuffling progress that Tom’s cat-piloted body was making in his direction, but he said nothing about it.

So far so good , Tom thought. This little catbody’s vision was so much brighter and sharper than what he was accustomed to that the rising moon seemed to cast almost as much light as a midday sun.

He acknowledged that he’d sold his flesh and bones, and was obligated to send his mortal form through the door between worlds of his own free will. It’d never been stated, however, that he had to be the one driving it at the time. The King was bound by his own rules once he established them, and loopholes in his contracts could be slipped through, if you could find them. Tom had even seen it happen, once or twice before.

As his aged body stepped through the Hole in the Sky for the very last time and stood before the door to the second room, the altar room, where the King waited to receive all souls, he hoped he was about to see it happen again. Through a cat’s eyes and from a safe distance, this time around. The familiar skeletal image of Mictlantecuhtli hadn’t appeared at the door yet, but Tom trusted that he would, blade in hand, and probably at the very last moment. His patron did have a flair for the dramatic, after all.

His body only needed to take a few more steps.

“Tio Tom!”

God dammit, Tom thought. Feel guilty tomorrow, why don’t you ?

“Tio, I’m sorry ,” Oscar wailed. His guilt and anguish were real, and so overwhelming that his voice broke, making him sound for a moment like the boy Tom remembered. “Please forgive me, I didn’t have any choice!”

The catspirit walking Tom’s body to the door stopped and turned back, unsure.

Just go , Tom thought at it, and thankfully the catspirit did. Without a word to Oscar, as it had no capacity for verbal language.

“Tio, say something, at least,” Oscar cried, when Tom’s body headed straight for the inner sanctum. “Please, don’t go through there yet. Please, wait !”

The young man lunged after what he thought was still his father’s old friend, trying to catch him by the back of his shirt before he went through Mictlan’s one-way door.

Winston Watt, who’d been silent all this time, now charged after Oscar, flailing his arms and screeching madly. Both Oz and the catspirit inside Tom’s body whirled around, startled by his manic display.

Tom himself, the part that counted, was in the process of jumping from the borrowed cat and back into his rightful head when a large black mockingbird landed on his furry shoulders. It stabbed painfully at the catbody’s neck with its beak, and Tom experienced a sensation that felt like something vital tearing loose from his throat.

Then he was back in his own body, looking out through his own human eyes, but totally unable to speak. He found he had no voice with which to explain himself to Oscar. No words at all to warn off the younger man.

Watt shoved him aside and he staggered back, tumbling through the doorway between the rooms before he could catch himself against the stone jamb. He abandoned his skin with an instant to spare before his now-empty human form fell across the barrier, turning skeletal before it hit the floor. The special flesh Mictlantecuhtli had bargained for was gone. Wasted, just like that.

Amorphous, disembodied Tom rejoined the cat’s body even as the vicious mockingbird clawed at its back and sides.

The bird threw its head back and shook it, swallowing, choking down Tom’s voice once and for all. A tiny, purplish-white wheel of energy the bird had ripped out of Tom’s neck disappeared down its feathered gullet. “What’s the matter, Tom?” it squawked, in a grating, inhuman, yet conscious and comprehending voice of its own. “Cat’s got no tongue?”

Tom realized it was Watt, Winston Watt, in a nagual form of his own-that of an irritating, sarcastic bird.

Fitting , he thought, before he reared back with a hiss and clawed one of the bird’s beady eyes right out of its head.

It shrieked hideously and beat at him with its wings while Oscar, back inside the first room beyond the Hole in the Sky, punched Watt’s birdridden body in the face for having pushed what he thought was Tom and not an empty husk into the second chamber. The bird inside Watt’s skin screeched and clawed and thrashed at Oscar with unwieldy human arms, and Oscar leaned in to pummel its torso with both fists.

Tom’s cat raced down the cold steel girder on nimble paws, bleeding from a dozen punctures and lacerations but still sporting the proper number of eyeballs-which was more than he could say for Winston Watt’s animal form. The half-blind bird swooped down after him, keeping its head cocked to one side so that it could see. He sank his claws into Tom’s back and plucked him off the beam, letting him loose into empty space.

He fell, thrashing and twisting, with an extended, echoing yowl.

Watt reassumed his human body in time to experience Oscar San Martin kneeing it in the crotch. He slumped, groaning, and crumpled to his knees, clutching at the front of San Martin’s stained coverall.

The builder gripped his throat with both strong hands and throttled him, slamming his head back against the brick wall in a steady, bonecracking rhythm.

Tom abandoned his borrowed catform in freefall and caught hold of a mountain lion that was hunting a quarter of a mile away, which was as far as he could reach in the split-second available. He ejected the lion’s indigenous tenant from its seat of consciousness an instant before the honored stray’s small body smashed against the future building’s hard concrete foundation.

The gray cat was dead in a flash.

Tom hoped he’d felt no pain.

Watt, his ears ringing like tuning forks while large black roses bloomed across his field of vision, caught hold of something solidly metallic that was tucked into the back of San Martin’s coveralls, at random, as he flailed for his life.

He got his finger into a ring on one side of the metal object and squeezed.

Tom’s new wildcat heard the small-caliber shot clearly, even at a distance. He raised its head from the still-twitching fawn it had brought down right before his unscheduled arrival in its brainspace and listened for a second shot, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing but crickets and the suddenly enticing rustlings of small rodents in the brush. Even more vivid than those were the rich smells of blood and life all around him, which hit these new predator’s senses of his like a symphony.