Sean Traver - Graves' end

“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.

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.

Tom’s catbody was curled up and sleeping on the steps of the office shack when Dex, Lia and the mortal remains of its longtime psychic jockey came crunching across the gravel lot. Black Tom Delgado’s bones, which he could once again call his own, stooped to scratch the animal behind the ear.

Tom felt the old King’s death when it occurred, as had other earthbound ghosts all around the planet. He’d explained it to his Winter Flower on their brief flight home, as best he could, in that wordless way they had. Now that he no longer had to hide from el Rey he was free to show up in whatever form he wished, be it phantasmal or physical. With his skills he could have put his human face back on, if he’d wanted to, the way the Queen had, but for the time being he was happy enough just to wear the visage that all of us share in common, underneath our skins.

He parted from Lia and Dexter at the edge of the parking lot, letting them wander off into the emerald trees together. They needed their space, and besides, there was a party going on out in the world that he did not intend to miss. More than a party, really-the occasion being celebrated out there in the streets was nothing less than the coronation of a new Queen of the Dead. Such an event was likely to be anticipated by the past as well as remembered in the future, Tom guessed. The memory of Mictlan deferred to neither clock nor calendar, and all of los Muertos would recall this day, regardless of when they died. The realworld’s annual Day of the Dead celebrations would therefore always be-and would also always havebeen -observed in honor of the ascension of la Bella Muerta, the Beautiful Death, whose realm could now be a place of reunion and rest rather than one of torment and loss. The transfer of power involved in the Red Witch’s ouster of Mictlantecuhtli was the singular event that had drawn the worlds close enough together for the dead to cross between them, and a sympathetic echo of that happening would forever be reiterated once each year, just after Halloween. Was, had been, and would always be, both backwards and forwards in time, like ripples in the ocean of history.