Skeleton Crew (26 page)

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.

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 out 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.

“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,
cariño.
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,
cariño.
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 con
vince 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.