Sean Traver - Graves' end

Closer by, Esteban’s two pinned specimens writhed and screamed in the stuttering flashes of inappropriate daytime, but they couldn’t escape him, not even under conditions that normally would’ve cancelled out their existence.

He turned to face Lia as night spread out above and held its place. She assumed the Archon of Darkness must’ve pulled ahead of her pursuers. Nyx wasn’t easy to see in the shadows, but she’d need a minute to gather herself before she could vanish the way her missing sister-daughter had, and Lia didn’t think Riley’s people were going to give it to her. The thrashing bugwomen relaxed a little in the restored gloom, but Steb was still physically tied to them. He’d achieved a stalemate here, at best.

“These things never die, brujachica,” he said to Lia. “Now they know you, they will never leave you be.”

“I have been worried about that,” Lia confessed.

“Yes,” Steb said, confirming that she should be worried. “But I do have one idea.”

He bit at the empty air, catching something in his teeth. It was nothing more or less than reality itself, Lia knew: the actual fabric of being. It wrinkled where his incisors sank in. He pulled at it, tore at it, worried it open like a dog ripping into an unsecured sack of kibble. There was weird light beyond the flap he tore out of existence.

“I’ve held a ticket to oblivion for a long time now,” Steb said to her, when he’d gotten the hole well started and widened to about half the size of his head. “What better occasion to make the trip? I’ll even have traveling companions this way. Incredible dancers!”

“Steb, what are you talking about?”

“The spaces between the worlds, mi brujachica,” Esteban explained. “Limbo. Oblivion. Nowheresville. Nobody comes back from there.”

“Don’t be crazy,” Lia said. “Those bonds you made won’t be enough to pull them in with you. You’d be killed and it wouldn’t even help.”

“No, you’re right,” Steb said, and yanked both his machetes loose from their moorings, unpinning the bugwomen. They both instantly impaled him, Wasp with her broken-off stinger and Mantis with one slim, barbed, raptorial forearm. He looked to Lia and gasped, “…but these links, I think, should do.”

“Steb, no !” Lia howled, shocked to her core by the sight of him run all the way through in two different places. There was surprisingly little blood. “No, you can’t do this, please don’t do this !”

But Steb only smiled. He could do this. He was perhaps the only human being alive capable of doing this, and she could tell that he meant to see it done. For her sake.

“Te amo, brujachica,” he told her. “Remember me.”

“Oh, Esteban…” Lia said, brushing his cheek with her fingertips before stepping back from him, out of harm’s way. “You know I always will.”

Esteban de Rojo grinned and then, with a shout, the freelance witchman swung his twin machetes around in a wide X. They caught in the gap he’d torn from reality and sliced it open further, just long enough for the resulting rift to suck him and his dance partners into the white nowhere zone beyond the worlds, before it sealed itself back up.

And then they were gone, all three of them.

Lia dropped to her knees, unable to breathe. This was too much to cope with. It was too real. Too irrevocable. Esteban was worse than dead, he was gone . Extinguished. She recalled, randomly, how he’d always brought her cut flowers when they’d been together, even though she lived in a world of flowers, because he somehow knew that contemplating their fleeting beauty as they faded moved her in an odd and personal way. He’d viewed her through a lens no one else ever had, understood feelings she’d never even tried to articulate, and now she’d never see him again. Not in this life or the next one, either. The weight of the sacrifice he’d made on her behalf was devastating.

Lia felt sick and desolated, too gutted even to cry.

Black Tom condensed himself down into the first chamber at the top of the Silent Tower. Winston Watt may have channeled himself across miles through the medium of earth, but he still had to climb a dozen flights of stairs before he’d reach the King’s Chambers, so non-corporeal Tom beat him to the top by a handy margin. He couldn’t tell where the Archon Lyssa had gotten to, either, even though he’d sensed this place as a destination in her mind as well, right before she winked out of existence.

What really surprised him was finding Hannah up here, well ahead of anybody else. She was standing at the door between the rooms and staring through. Lia hadn’t sent her; Tom was certain he would’ve picked up on such a memory had it existed anywhere inside either of their heads. The only sign of Dexter Graves in evidence was a deflated mound of clothing and bones that lay on the floor at the lady’s feet.

Did that mean Graves had gone over already? Made a deal with el Rey? Not yet, Tom thought, although Hannah seemed to believe they might be negotiating when he touched her mind.

She wasn’t focused on Graves at the moment, however. She was instead remembering the Crouchers Lia had taught her how to feed. Recalling the shock of wonder that accompanied the experience.

Tom could guess at what she was about to do next and he dreaded seeing the results, although he also knew that Hannah couldn’t really help herself. He understood the fascination she felt as she stood there at the boundary between the worlds. His Lia had always been possessed of that same sort of curious nature.

Hannah put her hand through the doorway to the inner office. The air seemed to ripple around it, as if she’d touched a plane of glassy-still, vertically-suspended water. But her hand went through, and on the other side it looked to be just fine. The flesh stayed on her fingers. It was hard to say that anything unusual had happened at all.

She put her face through next. Panic spiked Tom in the chest and he leapt toward her instinctually, even though he knew he’d have no chance of pulling her back if going over was her intention. He was no more substantial than a breeze.

Hannah wasn’t yet that bold, however. She stayed right there on the threshold but opened her eyes, like a child dunking her head to look around underwater. She gasped in surprise at what she saw.

Tom touched her thoughts and shared the vision with her. The second chamber was not an office anymore but rather the old inner sanctum of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, as Tom had known it back in its Hole in the Sky days. The carved altar stone crouched where the desk had been, and a rough doorway in the wall beyond it had replaced the illusion of panoramic windows. The impression of modernity the King liked to affect was gone: a projection visible from the first room only.

Hannah pulled her head back across the threshold. She looked all right, as far as Tom could see. He could further tell, from both her expression and her thoughts, that the fancy, well-lit office with the desk was once again what she saw on the doorway’s far side. One image replaced the other as soon as her eyes crossed the dividing line. It was like seeing two television channels switched back and forth.

“Huh,” she said.

Then she bent over and retrieved Graves’ lighter from his bone pile, digging it out from the inner pocket of his ratty, crumpled raincoat. She clutched it to her heart as she straightened up and faced the doorway. She took a single deliberate step inside, setting one foot onto the inner chamber’s stone floor and then planting the second right down beside it. Tom cringed, expecting to see her flesh slide away from her bones like so much loose sand, the way his friend Ramon’s had done so many years ago.