Sean Traver - Graves' end

Appearing in that one early flicker show was the only acting she ever got to do in Los Angeles, but that didn’t matter to her, much. It was fun, but it wasn’t what she’d really come for. There was magic in the movies, certainly, but by then she’d needed more stimulation than shadow, light, and make-believe were able to provide.

Instead of pursuing theatrical ambitions, she talked her way into the Golden Dawn’s sister organization here in Los Angeles: the Ordo Aurea Catena, or the Order of the Golden Chain. Their attitude had proved rapacious, however, their rituals staid and uncreative. Ingrid stayed with them only until she managed to goad one of their initiates into showing her a map drawn and sold to the association years before by a penniless independent named Ramon San Martin, a jealously-guarded map that showed the infamous SkyHole’s secret location…

Her education had mostly been her own affair, after that.

Hers, and Mickey’s.

The King was an experience like no other at first. His attention was exhilarating, his company exciting, the physical presence he put on for her erotic and enticing, modeled as it was after her own personal aesthetic ideals.

It was the subtle changes wrought in her by the practice of her art, she believed (the alignment with the earth’s secret graces that such work engenders, especially in a woman who starts young) that imbued her with the rare ability to cross back and forth between the King’s Chambers, and that made her tantalizing to Mickey, captivating and bewitching, at least as much as he was to her.

She was a unique creature according to him, a nonpareil, completely free to walk the worlds, and she’d fast become the favorite amongst his handful of human servants. Really she’d been more like a protege. Together they’d made of her an unassailable independent operator in an age when magical practice was dominated by rigid and phallocentric orders with classical pretensions. It was a rather unusual accomplishment. Ingrid felt daring and dangerous simply for knowing King Death, while his lusts for her, his fascination with her living flesh, had known no satiety.

She might’ve guessed at the ways in which their relationship would get out of hand, but at the time she’d been too willing a beneficiary of the King’s largess to bother with things like worrying about the future or planning ahead. Her magical ambitions had grown to quite an unsupportable size by then. She’d actually imagined she could rewrite the ancient inequities of the realworld from the absurd office building she talked Mickey into erecting around the Hole in the Sky, almost by accident.

That place was her own Silent Tower, a crazy brick-and-mortar monument to her dreams. The King had altered the pasts of certain of his human servants in order to produce a man capable of putting up the structure and then charged him with the task, merely as a demonstration of his transworld influence and generative prowess. The Tree was gone and the building was up, almost before she challenged Mictlantecuhtli to prove himself. Workmen arrived on-site at the literal instant in which Ingrid joked that a smart new skyscraper might be better suited to the sensibilities of her twentieth-century world than was some root-rotted old mistletoe factory.

It was how she first learned about Mictlan’s special relationship with human time. The King might almost as easily have remodeled a much larger chunk of architectural and social history in order to make the building appear in a complete, fully-realized form as soon as she imagined it, but thankfully, he hadn’t yet learned to think that big.

Not then, anyway.

Mickey, who aped every trait of hers that fascinated him, especially her passions for creation, novelty, and change, soon enough seized upon the example of her aspirations to begin laying schemes of his own, on his side of the barrier. He conquered and claimed foreign mythological ground in the name of his kingdom, taking over moribund animist pantheons by the score and rearranging a large swath of the otherworld according to his own lights in the process. You couldn’t put an idea in his head that he wouldn’t extrapolate to the furthest degree. Before long, he even had designs on those unwieldy monotheisms that still dominate so much of humanity’s imaginal space.

Otherworld victories weren’t what he really coveted anymore, of course, but for quite a while Ingrid’s native reality remained, for the King, just tantalizingly out of reach. The barrier between worlds held firm, even as she foolishly plotted to help the relentless monarchetype transcend his limitations, in the belief that her own power could only increase with his.

That it’d all seemed romantic and magical rather than mad at the time was all she could say about it now.

Then Mickey went and surprised her in a way that changed the terms of their relationship forever.

Ingrid sighed again, reflecting on the unprecedented turns her life had taken.

She’d tried her best to right her King’s wrongs, and she was trying still. If Dex and his dirtgirl would now get their asses back out here , before night fell, then maybe the three of them together would still have a chance to turn this thing around, before it ended badly for everyone but Mickey.

Ahoodie-shrouded homeless man pushed a woman wearing a fedora down a Studio City side street in a rattling, clanking shopping cart. Other pedestrians ignored them with a zeal that rendered them effectively invisible. Lia herself might not have recognized them as Hannah Potter and Dexter Graves.

“I seem to recall Miss Lia sayin’ something about us takin’ a cab…?” Graves said ruefully. He was in the process of discovering that his reanimated bones could still ache like a bastard when he’d been on his feet for a while. It was going to be a long walk back to North Hollywood.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t bring my purse, or my phone, or anything,” Hannah said. “I didn’t expect to be leaving the way we did.”

“And I didn’t guess we’d get dumped off at the top of Mulholland Drive.”

They rumbled past a pair of very old men playing chess out in front of a rundown nursing home, a few blocks north of Ventura. One of the players was very big, as well as very old. Large enough that sheer size must have been his defining feature for his entire life.

Graves stopped the cart and came back after a moment, to have another look at the big fella, but Big Fella wouldn’t look up from the chessboard.

“Hey,” Graves said, after a moment of silence. “Your name’s Juan, ain’t it? Juan San Martin?”

Big Juan kept his eyes on the chessgame. “Not if you’re a cop or a process server, it ain’t.”

“Nah, nothin’ like that,” Graves said. “This is strictly personal.”

Big Juan looked up, and Graves pushed back his filthy hood, revealing the bullet-cratered bone beneath. “If I recall,” he said, “you were the only schmuck that showed up at my funeral.”

Big Juan leapt to his feet, upsetting the chessboard, and booked it (as fast as a fat nonagenarian dragging an oxygen tank could, anyway), shuffling off down a nearby alley.

Hannah hopped out of the shopping cart and was after him in a wincing, relative flash, limping along in deference to her bullet-grooved side, but Graves and the second old guy who’d been playing chess had seen one another by then, and for them, time had all but stopped.

The antique looked up like he was seeing a ghost. He wore a stiff Navy baseball cap with the insignia of the USS Jubal A. Early embroidered across the crown.

“Dex?” he said, squinting like he expected his vision to resolve into something he could process. “Dexter Graves? Can that really be you?”