“You’re wrong, child,” my mother says. “The darkness can find you here, too.”
The room grows cold and I lift my head. It’s dark outside now, and shadows move against the window glass. There are shapes in the shadows-black figures with no faces that scuttle like crabs, writhing tentacles and hairy spider legs, a giant that burns from the inside, a wasted corpse of a woman with a swollen belly.
“No!” I cry. “They can’t come in!” I look at Mama and her eyes are gray and glassy. Her thin body is cold and still.
“You cannot run from it, Dominica,” Mama says. “You must face it, child. If you do not, it will swallow the world.”
“Mama,” I cry, “I’m so afraid.”
“I know, carino. But you needn’t face it alone. Your friends are waiting for you. I am waiting for you.”
“But you’ll die, Mama! You won’t let me help you!”
“Nonsense, Dominica. My time on this earth will end someday, Lord willing. But I will leave part of myself behind, in you, and your children, and in theirs. That is the way it should be. You have seen what happens when the circle is broken.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Go to them, child. Together you will find a way.”
I’m at the front door, and I reach out and grasp the knob. It feels very large in my small hand. I turn it and open the door. The sunlight streams in and wreathes the man standing there in golden light. He smiles and extends his hand. I take it and walk out on the porch. I turn and look back.
My mother is sitting in the ugly green chair, sewing the patch on my favorite jeans. The little girl sits on the floor, making her rag doll turn somersaults in the air. Mama looks up and her face is filled with love. She smiles.
The image blurs as tears fill my eyes. I try to return the smile. “Goodbye, Mama.”
Her smile widens and she shakes her head. “Not yet, carino. Not yet.”
I opened my eyes to a large bedroom with white walls, colorful abstract paintings and sleek, modern furniture. Adan sat beside the bed in a minimalist chair with a wooden seat and back and chromed metal legs. His face was buried in his hands. I thought he might be sleeping.
“Either I’m not dead, or Heaven hired an expensive interior decorator,” I said. My voice rasped, like sandpaper on cement.
Adan looked up and smiled. He moved onto the edge of the bed beside me. “You’re in my father’s house,” he said. “It was the safest place I could think of.”
I nodded. “How long?”
“Two days. Your wounds were serious, but Honey patched you up.” He shook his head. “After that, it was…”
“Yeah, I bought a one-way ticket to Crazytown.”
“Not one way,” he said. “You’re back. You going to be okay?”
I shrugged. “Nothing years of expensive therapy can’t make slightly less horrific.”
“By the time I got there, it was over. I didn’t see what happened.”
“Something wicked came my way,” I said, and shrugged. “They’re demons. I guess they can do worse than try to kill you. What’s the zombie situation?”
Adan nodded. “Mr. Clean is here…somewhere. He says he has something for you. It’s in a box, and it’s dripping-I can guess what it is. He says he either has to deliver it or you have to finish dying, thereby terminating his service to you.”
“I’m touched. So it’s over?”
“The zombie apocalypse is over. Mobley, Valafar and the demons are still an issue.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I missed it.”
“You missed the cleanup, you didn’t miss the hard part.
You did your part, and then some. Everyone is talking about the Battle of the Fourth Street Bridge. No one really knows what happened, just that there were about a thousand zombies and multiple demons involved. And you.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly, “kill enough people and you may become a god.”
“What? You didn’t kill anyone, Domino. You destroyed a bunch of zombies and several demons. You saved a couple dozen soldiers, including Lowell, and who knows how many others. The sanctuary network and the unified response to the zombie threat saved the city.”
“Never mind, it was just something somebody said to me once.” I struggled to sit up on the huge, overstuffed pillows.
“So what’s next?”
“We have to take down Mobley. He’s the gate. Without him, Valafar can’t bring more demons into this world.”
“So let’s go get him. Where is he?”
“He’s holed up in the Salvation Army building on Compton Boulevard.”
“Nice choice.”
“Yeah, but we haven’t been able to get at him. Valafar knows we have to clip Mobley. The place is crawling with demons. Oberon is rolling through Inglewood and Watts, Hawthorne and Lynwood. We thought that might convince Mobley to come out and fight, but I guess Valafar isn’t concerned about the territory anymore.”
“If Mobley can’t get any juice, he won’t be able to open the gate. No more demons.”
“He’s still got enough. He’s got all of Compton down to the north side of Long Beach. And this thing with the zombies…I think it was a sea-change, Domino. We stopped it, but I don’t think it will ever go back to the way it was.”
“The walls are falling.”
Adan nodded. “There’s a lot of holes in them, anyway. Just because no new ones are opening up doesn’t mean we’ve patched the ones that were already there.”
“So Valafar doesn’t care about anything except keeping Mobley alive and bringing in more demons.”
“That’s the way it looks. We don’t know exactly how many demons Valafar has brought over. Enough to stop our efforts to get at Mobley. You know better than anyone, it doesn’t take that many.”
“Mobley’s a tool,” I said. “We can’t even be sure he’s irreplaceable. This round won’t be over until we send Valafar back to Hell.”
“That’s a heavy lift, Domino. If we get to Mobley, we’ll get to Valafar. But there’s going to be a small army of demons standing in our way.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “Are Honey and Jack here?”
Adan nodded.
“Good. Ask them to come in. I’ve got a plan.”
“Are you quite certain a frontal assault was the best idea you could come up with?” Oberon asked.
“I like to keep it simple,” I said. We’d invaded Compton in a classic pincer formation, the Seelie Court moving southeast out of Hawthorne and the outfits moving south from Lynwood. The demons had met us at Wilson Park. I stood with Oberon, Terrence, Adan and Honey on the roof of a VFW post and looked across Palmer at the darkness gathering in the park. It wasn’t much of a battlefield-maybe three city blocks long and one block wide. Demons slouched from the trees at the south end, and more crawled from burning cracks in the world to join the impending conflict.
“They just finished the skatepark a couple years ago,” Terrence said. “Hope it doesn’t get tore up. Seems like we could have done this at a rail yard or something.”
“Demons can be inconsiderate that way,” I said. Once we’d seen where the demons would commit, we’d dropped enough wards around the park to keep the civilians at bay. They wouldn’t know why, exactly, but they’d find someplace better to be while the desperate battle was waged against the forces of Hell.
I’d brought my heavy hitters with me. They stood together with Oberon’s sidhe warriors, strung out along the street and watching the demons mass in the park. I wasn’t sure how many battles it took to be a veteran, but I figured some of them qualified. Ismail Akeem and Amy Chen were down there, and they’d fought beside me in the showdown with Papa Danwe at the old factory in Hawthorne. We’d been trying to stop Oberon from returning to our world, and we’d failed. If we’d succeeded, we’d probably all be having brains for dinner. And even if we’d managed to stop the zombie apocalypse without the sidhe’s help, we’d be standing there facing the demons alone.
“It’s funny how shit works out,” I said.
Oberon glanced over at me and smiled. “It’s almost enough to make you believe in fate, isn’t it?”
“It’s not that funny.”
“What are we waiting for?” Honey said. “Let’s kill them.” Her sword was in her hand, and red and orange pixie dust fell from her wings. She was wearing bright blue war paint, though I guessed it was only glamour. Oberon’s sidhe warriors were similarly decorated.
“Settle down, William Wallace,” I said. “Let them come.”
“I’m worried about Jack,” Honey said.
“I know. That’s why we have to let them come.”
The south end of the park had become a twisted nightmare of darkness and fire, obscene flesh and corrupted biology. There were more of the demon mothers there, and while I didn’t look at them, I saw the crawlers they spawned moving forward to the front of the pack. Fire giants, like the one we’d fought at the Carnival Club, formed up behind them.
“Time for the artillery,” Oberon said.
I looked over at him. “What kind of artillery?”
“Me,” he said, and grinned. He walked forward to the edge of the building, raised his arms and began singing in that strange, haunting language he shared with Honey and Jack. A wind blew in from the coast, tugging at our exposed position and kicking up dust from the infield of the small baseball field. Clouds rolled in overhead, so fast it looked like vapor from a smoke machine crawling across the sky. The clouds undulated and turned in on themselves, and lightning began to flash in their bellies.
Across the field, the demons raised a terrible cry, a discordant symphony of screams, shrieks, roars and stomach-turning moans that crawled along my spine to the base of my brain and flushed my body with cold, stark terror. It was the sound of all the worst things humans had ever imagined waiting for them in dark places since they first dared to climb down from the trees.
Oberon tilted his head up to the sky as the rain began to fall, and the wind whipped his long, auburn hair around his face and shoulders. He began to glow, to shine, as if moonlight had been trapped beneath his skin and was straining to be free. The look on his face was rapturous, orgasmic, and his chant built and swelled with magic until the beautiful, secret words drowned out the demonic cacophony from the far side of the field.
A wave of crawlers raced forward, swarming across the grass and concrete toward us, and the glowering sky attacked. Jagged, crackling lines of blue-white lightning flashed down from the roiling clouds and caressed the scuttling crawlers almost gently, outlining them in fairy fire and reducing them instantly to smoking puddles of black tar. Only a handful made it through, and the sidhe warriors stepped forward to meet them, blades flashing and deadly glamours tearing into the crawlers like wild beasts.
“You’re supposed to hit those guys with countermagic, first,” I said to Oberon. “You got to soften them up so they don’t shrug off your spells.”
The fairy king laughed. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said. Oberon threw back his head and sang, and the sky growled like a belligerent animal in answer to him. A slender funnel cloud formed in the twisting gray blanket overhead and reached for the demon horde assembled below. The tornado split in two and then another uncoiled from the angry sky. Emerald light flashed within the three vortices, and when they touched the south end of Wilson Park, the twisters spat forth an airborne brigade of piskie warriors. The piskies swarmed over the demons and the red-orange pixie dust was so thick it looked like burning snowfall.
“My people,” Honey said. “We kick ass.”
“Join them, if you will,” Oberon said, inclining his head and raising his sword in salute. “Your House is pardoned and it is your right to stand with them. To war, Princess, and red glory!”
The blue war paint on Honey’s face and body pulsed alight and green fire danced along the edge of her sword.
“Until death and darkness and the world’s sorrow, my King,” she said, and then she was off, blazing across the field like an emerald comet falling into the sun.
“Yeah, Honey, don’t let me hold you back,” I muttered.
Despite the piskies’ ass-kicking prowess, the fire giants pressed forward, tromping across the field and churning the turf into mud. They were armed with an array of the Dark Ages’ most advanced weaponry: massive black iron swords with serrated edges, spiked balls on the ends of heavy chains that looked like they could demolish a house, mauls the size of small trees. The twisters roared through their ranks, scattering earth, foliage and playground equipment, but the fire giants leaned forward into the storm and marched on.
“What else you got, Oberon?” I said. “We had trouble with one of these guys in the club, and there’s six of them here.”
“Seven,” Terrence said. “There’s another one behind that big guy.”
“They’re all big guys, Terrence,” I said.
“The really big motherfucker with the big fucking ax.”
The figure striding across the field at the center of the giants’ ranks towered over his fellows. He wore an ornate iron helm engraved with leaves and vines, and topped with a crown of fire that twined and branched like the antlers of a great stag. Flames burst from his eyes and from a mouth that was nearly hidden in a full beard that wreathed his craggy face like a wild tangle of spun silver.
“Oh, him,” I said. “Is this guy someone we should know about, Oberon?”
The king shrugged. “Some lesser hero of the Fomoire. They have no shortage of them.”
“Lesser hero, huh? Dime a dozen. That’s great.”
The Fomoiri hero roared a challenge and fire engulfed the front ranks of sidhe warriors. Defensive glamour flashed and glowed and most of the sidhe were spared. Some of them burned. A rumbling, baritone chant went up among the giants and rattled the windows of the VFW building below us. The giants began to run, and the earth trembled. I felt the tremors in the soles of my feet, thrumming bone-deep through my ankles and my legs.
Below, Ismail Akeem danced on Palmer Street, his thin body convulsing as he disgorged the spirits he had eaten.
Amy Chen released phantasmal beasts and monsters that drifted silently through the rank of charging giants, vanishing completely within the massive bodies when they darted in to strike at their relentless, unwavering quarry. When the fire giants were only a few strides away, the sidhe rushed forward and attacked, lashing out with spell and blade to savage the demons’ deformed and burning flesh.
For a moment, it appeared the sorcerers and sidhe warriors would stop the charge and cut the Fomoire down where they stood. Then the giants’ blows began to land, and sidhe blood and crushed bodies fell on the grass like detritus scattered by the tornadoes.
“Time to pay the rent,” Terrence said. He dropped a levitation spell and floated down to the street, and he was already spinning attack spells when his feet touched the pavement. Adan flashed a fierce grin at me and then leaped down after him.
I’d have preferred to battle the Firstborn as I had in the Carnival Club-from the Between, and with Ned in my hands. I’d decided against it because I didn’t want to leave my helpless body lying around anywhere close to the battlefield. I was pretty sure I couldn’t hide so well that no demons would find me, and it would only take one to ruin my day.
On the other hand, I didn’t really want to see a repeat performance of the slaughter at the club, multiplied by seven and not even counting the rest of the demons on the field.
I knew what they could do and I knew how effective our weapons and magic would be against them. The demons were relentless, unstoppable, and I did not believe we could stand against them.
That’s why I came prepared to cheat. Mr. Clean’s TV sat on the rooftop behind me. I wasn’t planning to let the jinn have a piece of this fight, but I did need all the juice he could give me. I also carried the walking stick I’d taken from Papa Danwe when I killed him, for the same reason. I was physically recovered from what the demon
had done to me on the bridge and I didn’t need the stick to walk. I just needed the juice.
“Your first day of prison, they say you should find the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the cell block and take a shot at him,” I said. “Maybe you do a little damage, maybe not, but you prove you’re not a punk and the rest of the convicts will leave you alone after that.”
“And that really works?” Oberon asked.
“No, it just means you get your ass kicked on the first day. The secret is, it’s really for you-you prove to yourself you’re not a punk. After that, you can take your beatings and whatever else comes and you can hold your head up.”
Oberon nodded. “I believe it is the same at court.”
“Yeah, but there’s less dancing in prison.” I raised my arms, with the walking stick in one hand and the other out stretched to the sky. I tapped juice from the street until my body burned with it and then I reached out with my mind and opened my familiar’s veins, taking all he could give, as well.
I stepped forward to the edge of the building and pointed the walking stick at the Fomoiri hero. “Friends have all things in common,” I said, and a torrent of magic rushed out of me and coursed over and through him. It was a simple friendship charm, one of the first spells you learn as a kid to make your way through life a little easier than it is for other people. It was a simple spell, but it was backed with a lot of juice. A combat spell with that much magic behind it might have seriously wounded or even killed the Fomoiri.
One down, and then we’d just have six more fire giants and the rest of the demonic army to deal with.
The Fomoiri hero lifted his ax, a wicked implement more than ten feet long, and then he froze. He stood up straight, almost at attention, and stared at me as the sidhe warriors rained blows and lethal glamour upon him.
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