“They’re on the bridge and coming fast, chola. Maybe they saw the helicopters.”
Or the magic show. “Damn it,” I said. “Okay, I got this. Thanks for the heads-up, Chavez.” I stuck the cell back in my pocket and turned to Lowell. “We’ve got company, Lowell. I’m going to hold them off-get your guys on those fucking choppers.”
Lowell frowned. “You going to be okay? I can go with you.”
“They’re on the bridge, Lowell. I’ll be fine.” Even with sorcery, terrain could make a difference. The zombies would be exposed on the bridge instead of wrapped around the Stag team’s hidey-hole. I went out and ran across the loading area, pausing to drop a couple solitary zombies that were more or less on my way. I spun my jump spell and leaped up to the elevated street that spanned the tracks and concrete river to the east.
I walked out onto the bridge to meet the zombie horde charging toward me. I stopped in the middle of the street between two of the old-fashioned lampposts spaced at regular intervals across the length of the bridge. I started pulling juice from the street and from the outfit tags that decorated the bridge abutments. The zombies pounded across the bridge like a barbarian horde mad for blood-which was more or less what they were, despite their lack of swords and battleaxes and except for the part about being dead. When the first ranks were three hundred feet away, I spun my fire wave spell and the orange tsunami began to build behind me.
I kept flowing juice and the wave grew to twenty, then fifty, then a hundred feet high, stretching from one side of the bridge to the other. I fed more juice to the fire and it grew hotter and hotter, shattering the glass in the streetlamps and causing the metal fixtures to glow red. I wanted it hot enough to vaporize. I knew the zombies couldn’t feel pain, but I wasn’t sure they couldn’t still experience something like terror. There would be no horribly burned bodies staggering around on the bridge when I was done with them. There would be nothing left but grease, and ash and smoke.
When the zombie horde was a hundred feet away, I released the tidal wave and it crashed over me, thundering across the bridge and submerging the zombies in a torrent of liquid fire. The leading edges of the fire reached all the way to the overpass that crossed Mission Road. Every inch of the bridge was scoured clean. I dropped to one knee and gasped for breath as the last of the juice flushed out of me. After a few moments, the oily, black smoke began to clear. That’s when I saw the demon.
Its form was an obscene parody of a woman. It was at least seven feet tall and more emaciated than any human could become and still live. Pallid flesh sagged loosely and bones protruded at hard angles like blades. Thin, greasy strands of dark hair hung down to the skeletal waist, and its breasts were tiny, withered pouches that wrinkled its sunken chest. In contrast to the rest of its consumptive frame, the demon’s belly was hideously bloated, swollen to an impossible size. Black veins stood out like cracks in the fish-pale skin stretched tight over the bulging womb.
The demon’s belly convulsed and contorted. It squatted with its feet braced wide apart, and dark fluids splashed onto the pavement. It grinned at me, baring broken, jagged teeth the color of charcoal. The terrible, gaping orifice between the demon’s legs stretched wide, and black, clawed hands appeared, raking the stick-thin legs as something pulled itself forth into the world.
I turned away and emptied my stomach on the street. I’d seen enough to know what had wriggled out of the demon. It was a crawler. I flowed some juice to calm my shaking hands and steeled myself to look. When I did, I saw the crawler racing along the concrete barrier above the bridge abutment. And I saw a second crawler pulling itself from the demon’s womb.
I fought down the nausea and tried to think. I wanted to run. I wanted to get as far away from that bridge as I could and try to forget what I’d seen. What I was seeing. You can’t run from a demon. Even with my Road Runner spell, I doubted I could outrun a crawler. Or two. Nope, check that, three crawlers-another on the way. I couldn’t see them from my angle atop the bridge, but I could hear the sound of the helicopters’ rotors from the direction of the produce warehouse. They were on the ground-taking on Lowell’s soldiers, probably. But still on the ground. I couldn’t run. I had to fight.
My blood was already on fire, but I tapped more juice and spun a countermagic spell at the first crawler. The magic splashed over the demon and it froze in midstride, skidding forward along the abutment a few feet before tumbling over the side to the parched concrete of the river below.
The demon mother threw back her head and screamed. She flung out a spindly arm at me, clenching the bony fingers into a fist, and pain exploded in my chest. I fell to both knees and doubled over, clutching at my breast. “God is a scientist,” I choked out, “not a magician.” The magic-killing juice flushed through me and the pain subsided. It didn’t feel any worse than a charley horse in my heart muscle.
I blinked rapidly to clear my vision and struggled to my feet. I reached for the juice and spun another countermagic spell at the second crawler streaking toward me along the sidewalk. The demon mother chopped down through the air with the blade of her hand and I felt my spell come unbound and disintegrate before it reached its target. Without breaking stride, the crawler coiled and leaped at me from fifty feet away. I just had time to trigger my repulsion talisman before it hit me. The magic oozed around the demon, slowing it but not stopping it. Hot claws sank deep into my flesh, and the black, featureless face filled my vision as the demon’s snapping jaws went for my throat.
I grasped that smooth, blank mask with both hands, and my mind tore desperately at the street, deluging my body and spirit with magic. I cried out as I slammed the juice into a force spell. “Vi Victa Vis!” I shouted, and the hammer smashed into the demon’s head and snapped its head back at a ninety-degree angle. The crawler released me and dropped to the pavement, its head lolling and twitching on its whipcord neck. I turned the countermagic on it and kept pouring juice into the spell until the demon’s body began to come apart and run liquid.
I looked up in time to see the final crawler bearing down on me. The demon mother approached with slow, spasmodic steps, hands up and ready to knock down any countermagic I threw at the crawler. I decided to oblige her. I spun the countermagic spell and hurled it at the crawler. When I saw the demon mother’s hand slice down, tearing apart the countermagic, I hit the crawler with my chaining spell. Bands of force encircled the demon. I poured juice into the spell until red and gold light began to flow just under the surface of my skin. My brain felt like it was convulsing as I forced it to contain and channel the magic. I tightened the vise around the demon and it screamed, struggling to slip through the arcane force compressing it. I tightened the chains some more and the mother screamed. I tapped more juice, feeding the spell. The chains tightened, and I screamed.
The demon mother lashed out and I triggered the anti-magic talisman on my left ring finger. A force spell smashed through the shield and struck me in the chest, and I heard ribs snap. I was punched backward thirty feet, and then I hit the asphalt and slid another ten. I’d lost the chaining spell and expected the crawler to be on me in seconds. Clenching my jaw against the pain, I struggled to sit up. The spell had done its work-the crawler had dissolved into a spreading pool of tar on the street. The demon mother kept coming, her stiltlike legs jerking and shaking with every uneven step.
I braced my hands on the street and tried to get my feet under me. The demon smashed a fist down, and force magic hammered me back to the pavement. I stared up into the sky and saw a black helicopter passing slowly overhead. I had the sudden irrational hope that Lowell would jump out of the chopper and save my ass. He didn’t.
The demon began rubbing herself as she hobbled toward me. She made small, loathsome sounds of pleasure and black drool oozed from her open mouth and dripped down her chin. More fluids wet the insides of her shriveled thighs. I turned my head to the side and puked again.
The convulsions in my stomach didn’t get any better-they got worse.
Something twitched and twisted inside me. I managed to rise up on my elbows, and I saw my abdomen convulse, the muscles rippling and contorting. Then I saw my belly begin to rise, swelling like bread dough in the oven. The demon mother giggled and began rubbing herself harder. I felt something move inside me.
I screamed and reached for the juice, but something else was taking it. Something else was feeding on it, and the magic was ripped away from me as surely as if I’d been squeezed. The demon stood over me, now, and fluids gushed from her and spattered my legs and stomach. My belly surged and heaved, and the pain was every bit as maddening as the last time I’d used the shapeshifting magic, when I’d felt as though an alien cancer was growing inside me. In the Between, I’d known the agony would pass. This time I knew the worst was yet to come.
An image flared to life in my mind of the house where I grew up, the little bungalow my mother still lived in. This was a different time, though, long ago. I’m sitting on the floor in the living room, forgotten dolls scattered around me, watching my mother. She’s sitting in the recliner-an ugly, clumsy, green thing that will vanish from the house in a few years-and she’s sewing yet another patch on my favorite pair of jeans. She’s young and beautiful, and the sunlight streaming through the window sets her long, dark, unbound tresses aglow. My mother is an angel, a Madonna, and the father I’ve never known must be an angel, too. God needed him, though, for something terribly important, and that’s why he had to leave. And I’m so happy, because I know I must be special, too, and that’s why I’m always alone, and no matter how ugly the world is outside these walls, our house is a little corner of heaven.
And I know I can go to this place, and I can stay here, forever. I’m standing on the wide porch, looking in through the window at my mother bathed in sunlight, and I know she’ll always be young and beautiful in this place, and she’ll never grow old, or suffer, or die, and neither will I. The little girl is waiting for me, that happy, hopeful child I lost just like the old recliner, and I can find her again. I can be her again. All I have to do is open the door. There’s only darkness behind me. There are terrible things, but I won’t see them as long as I don’t turn around. I can go into that house and close the door behind me, and I can shut them out so they can never touch me. They can never hurt me.
I only have to open the door.
I was crying when I pulled the trigger on the forty-five in my hand. The weapon bucked and the demon mother’s swollen belly exploded in a shower of thick, black fluid and wet, ragged tissue. I squeezed the trigger again and again, and the demon shrieked and reeled back, grasping at the ruined mess her abdomen had become.
“It’s called a gun, you skanky bitch,” I said. The thing that had been growing inside me was gone, leaving behind a sharp, hot pain that lanced through my abdomen and groin. I sat up and blinked to clear the tears from my eyes. I steadied the forty-five, squeezing off another round that struck the demon between her shriveled breasts. “You want back in my world, you better learn how to take a fucking bullet.”
Still screaming, the demon turned and tried to stagger away. I stood up, leveled the forty-five and shot her in the back. She went down, planting her face in the pavement with a sharp crack. She pulled herself to her hands and knees and began to crawl. I put a round in the back of her skull, and black spray patterned the asphalt. I walked around her until I stood in her path, and then I slammed the heel of my boot into her face. The demon mother toppled over on her side, spasms racking her cadaverous body. I filled my mind with juice and poured countermagic over her.
In twenty-three years of killing, I’d never wanted to torture anyone. More times than I could count, I’d been called on to take a life, but not once did I have any desire to cause pain. I did what I did, but if it was up to me, I did it quick. I wanted this demon to suffer, and I wanted to inflict it upon her. I didn’t have any magic black enough to match what she had done to me. I spun up a ball of flame in my hand, but I was careful not to put too much juice into it. I wanted it to burn, but I didn’t want it to destroy.
“Domino,” Adan said. He walked toward me from the west end of the bridge, his sword in his hand. “Finish it…do it right.”
Rage burned through me and I lashed out. The fireball erupted from my hand and streaked toward Adan. He flicked the sword and spoke a word, and the blade flashed white as he batted my spell aside.
“Master your fear and you’ll master the beast,” he said, and he kept walking.
My lips pulled back from my teeth and I started shaking.
I felt magic flowing into me from the street, and the tags that crawled across the bridge and the box cars that sat rusting on the tracks below. I took it into me and I fed it with hate, and a fiery tide began to swell behind me. I wanted the demon to burn. I wanted Adan to burn. I wanted the world to burn.
I wanted to burn.
My hair ignited but it wasn’t consumed, and flames began to dance on my outstretched hands, spreading up my arms and crawling across my chest and back. The inferno behind me rose higher and fiery tongues licked out, like star-fire erupting from the face of the sun.
A brilliant emerald meteor fell from the sky and suddenly Honey was hovering before me, the dragonfly wings a rainbow blur at her back. Her cheeks were wet, but she was smiling.
“Jack asked me to marry him, Domino,” she said.
The roiling wave of fire collapsed in on itself and snuffed out. I crumbled to the street, falling first to my knees and then dropping onto my side. I stared unblinking into the face of the demon mother, and I saw it dissolve into black tar as Adan’s sword flashed down.
And then I went looking for that sun-kissed bungalow with the wide porch and the ugly green chair, the mother who would never die and the happy little girl. fourteen
I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my legs tucked under me. My arms are crossed in front of me on the Formica table and my chin is resting on my hands. I’m watching Scooby-Doo on the little black-and-white TV set. The Scooby gang is in some tropical paradise. They find a flying saucer, but skeletons with a single large eye try to scare them away. The skeleton people frighten me and I bury my face in my arms when they come on the screen. The eyes are all wrong. They should be normal eyes, but gray and cloudy, like the surface of an old marble.
Mama is with me in the kitchen. She’s making huevos, and corn tortillas are heating in the oven. The smell fills the room and my mouth waters. A commercial comes on and a genie with a bald head and bushy eyebrows is getting rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute. The genie is smiling and friendly, but I don’t like him. He’s very old, and he knows secrets, and he’s always trying to sell something. The bright, shining eyes and wide grin hide something dangerous and never to be trusted.
A shadow passes in front of the window. I get up from the table and climb up in the armchair by the window to look out. I part the blinds with my small fingers-just a little-and I see a man with dark hair and large eyes standing on the front porch. He’s dressed all in black, and he has an old wooden gun slung over his shoulder and a silver sword at his side. He’s terribly handsome and I’m not afraid of him. He stands on the porch, looking at the front door, but he doesn’t knock.
“He’s waiting for you to open the door, Dominica,” says Mama. She’s standing beside me, looking down at me with a small smile on her face. Maybe breakfast is ready? The eggs will get cold. I hate cold eggs.
“Should I let him in, Mama?” I ask.
“You will have to decide that for yourself, child.”
“If I open the door, I don’t think he will come in. I think he will try to take me away.”
“He doesn’t belong here.”
“But I don’t want to go with him. I don’t like it out there.”
“You don’t belong here, either,” my mother says. “Not anymore.”
I start to cry, the tears welling in my eyes without warning. I shake my head. “I do belong here, Mama. I like it here, with you. There are bad people o
ut there, bad things. We’re safe here, though. They can’t come in.”
I’m in my room, sitting on my small bed and playing with my favorite doll. She has a name, but I can’t remember what it is. It seems strange that I’ve forgotten her name and it makes me sad. I decide to call her Honey, though I can’t remember why. I’m shining the light on her, the light no one else can see. I don’t know what it is, but I call it Glitter. I’m putting Glitter on Honey and making her walk around the room, as if she were alive. I’m certain if I can just put enough Glitter on Honey, I can make her a real girl, like Pinocchio, and she can be my friend. It makes me sad that I don’t have any friends. No one except Honey.
Honey stops and falls awkwardly on her rump, and I giggle. She turns her head and looks at me, and her doll eyes are somehow the bright, perfect blue of the summer sky. “You have to come back, Domino,” she says. “We’re all waiting for you. We need you.”
I shake my head. “My name is Dominica,” I say. “Domino is a stupid name.”
“Come back, Domino,” says Honey. “Please come back.” Tears stream down her face, but I know it’s just the Glitter. Honey isn’t a real girl and she can’t cry.
I’m in the kitchen looking out through the window in the back door at the tiny yard. Butterflies flit in the sun light and Glitter falls from their wings and dances in the air. I want to go out and try to catch them, but I know it isn’t safe. Something horrible is waiting out there. I can’t remember what it is, but it doesn’t matter as long as I stay in the house.
I see a fat man with white hair standing beside the small orange tree. His eyes are on fire and when he smiles at me, a black, forked tongue darts out, flicking at the air. He beck ons for me to come to him. I turn away and run deeper into the house, looking for Mama.
She’s in her room, lying in bed with the blankets drawn up to her chin. Her Bible rests on the table beside her and a crucifix hangs on the wall above her head. Something is wrong. Her hair is thin and gray, and her skin is terribly wrinkled, as if God had reached down and wadded her up like a piece of paper He would throw away. I cry out and run to the bed, leaping atop it and throwing my arms around her. She’s so thin, like part of her has already gone and only a little remains. I bury my face in the blankets and sob.
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