the tentacle with his sword. Then the demon flicked the tentacle and hurled Adan through the night to smash into the back wall of the house.
Honey’s glamour attacked the monster with cold and ice. Frost appeared on one side of its misshapen head and began to spread. Icicles formed on its mandibles and jaws where the fluids froze solid. The demon screamed and flailed with its spider legs where the cold touched its flesh.
I kept firing and looked for some weakness in the monster’s defenses, some vulnerability in its hideous form. I fired again and again, and sapphire flames curled from the holes Ned tore in the demon’s hide. Tentacles darted and slashed at me, and it took everything I’d learned from Adan that day to stay clear of them. I leaped and spun in a deadly dance, rolling under tentacles that sliced at my head, and vaulting gracefully over those that grasped at my legs. I kept firing as I jumped and ducked, bobbed and weaved, zigged and zagged.
Until I zigged when I should have zagged. The demon feinted at my head with a tentacle, and I rolled forward, under it, and impaled myself on the spiked talon that extended from one of its spider legs. The barb struck me just below the sternum and I felt it tear through me and out my back. I could feel the coarse hairs, like steel wool, scraping my insides as the leg twisted and twitched.
A dark curtain fell across my eyes and I sank to my knees. Another spider leg shot out and pierced my shoulder, and another lanced into my stomach. I tried to scream but I was choking on my own juice. I coughed and the azure magic sprayed across the grass, glowing faintly in the monochrome gloom. I tried to lift Ned but my arm wouldn’t move. A tentacle slowly twined around my hips and another around my neck. They tightened and started to pull, and I felt my body stretch like the saltwater taffy I used to get on the Santa Monica Pier when I was a girl. It was far more than my flesh could withstand in the mortal world. The torment was like nothing the human mind was meant to endure.
Then Adan was at my side. He slashed at the tentacles and the severed ends fell twitching into the grass. He sliced through the legs that pierced me and stood between me and the demon when I collapsed to the ground. His sword was a silver blur as the pain-maddened monster attacked, and soon the lawn was littered with bits of demon flesh and slick with the black ichor that oozed from its wounds.
As skilled as he was with the sword, Adan couldn’t protect both of us at the same time. He was impaled again and again by the demon’s spiked talons; tentacles hammered into him and tore at his body. But he was faster than the monster. Each time it hurt him, Adan hurt it worse. The sword spun in his hands and he pressed forward, one step at a time. He butchered the demon as he advanced, slicing through tentacles and severing legs.
For a moment, I thought the monster would run out of appendages before Adan had a chance to finish it off. That’s when I noticed the severed stumps were regenerating. I struggled to a sitting position, and my vision dimmed and then steadied. “Adan,” I croaked. “It’s healing.”
I don’t know if he heard me, but the piskies did. Honey had maintained her glamour and one side of the demon’s head was frozen in a solid sheet of ice. Jack had been working at the other side, bursting black, bulbous eyes and slicing at exposed flesh while the demon focused its attentions on Adan and me. Now the two flew to each other and huddled together. They started singing a new song in a strange and haunting harmony that sounded like a Celtic funeral dirge. They crossed swords and emerald flames licked along the blades. The fairy fire spread up their arms and across their shoulders and chests until their whole bodies were wreathed in the ghostly flames. Jack reached over and pulled Honey to him, kissing her fiercely. Then they dove at their adversary with their burning swords held before them, streaking through the night like tiny falling stars.
When the piskies struck the demon, the explosion made the ground buckle beneath Adan and me and the shockwave knocked us both flat on our backs. A column of green fire erupted into the air and blossomed into a miniature mushroom cloud, bathing the battleground in eerie, emerald ghost-light. The fire was as warm as spring sunshine and smelled like fresh grass.
The cloud burned off and dissipated into the night, plunging the field once again into the blue-lit darkness of the Between. Nothing remained of the demon-not even bits and pieces. It had been vaporized by the blast. Jack and Honey knelt in the grass where it had been. They were kissing.
“Get a room,” I muttered as I struggled to my feet.
Adan started laughing. “The Troll King’s Lament,” he said. “All the years I spent in Faerie, I never got to see it. I thought it was just a legend the piskies fed to buy a little insurance.”
Honey and Jack broke away from each other and glared at him. “If it was just a legend,” Honey said, “you and the sidhe would all be speaking Troll right now.”
I limped over to them with one hand clutching my perforated abdomen and the other gripping Ned at my side. “You might have mentioned you can nuke a motherfucker,” I said.
“The legends say it comes at great cost,” said Adan.
“It’s just juice,” Jack said.
“Then why-” I started to ask, but Honey interrupted me.
“A piskie’s life is just juice and we’re only given so much of it,” she said. “It’s just juice, Domino, but we measure the cost in years.”
I shut my mouth and let that sink in. Once it did, I wanted to cry. “Thank you,” I said finally. It seemed horribly inadequate. “Please don’t ever do that again.”
“It is ours to give,” Jack said, “and we gave it freely.”
Slow applause echoed over the lawn from the direction of the house. I turned and saw Valafar standing on a balcony overlooking the patio and pool. He stopped clapping and rested his hands on the wrought-iron railing. “Most impressive,” he said. He spoke softly, but I heard his voice clearly despite the distance. “Of course, that-”
He was rudely interrupted by a hail of unearthly gunfire as Adan and I let loose with our magical weapons. Ethereal lead sprayed the balcony and exploded against the wall of the house behind him. Valafar ducked and quickly retreated into the shadows. We kept shooting until we were sure he was gone. I’d been spared the villainous monologue with La Calavera-I wasn’t about to sit through one with Valafar.
“He’s a demon,” Adan said when it was over.
“That’s my guess. Motherfucker has a forked tongue-should have seen that one coming.”
“That’s how Mobley is commanding the Firstborn he gates in.”
“Yeah, he’s not commanding them at all. Valafar is.”
“So what does that make Valafar?”
“A hell of a lot of trouble.” eleven
We returned to the mortal world and a city on the edge of chaos. I awoke stretched out on the sofa with several generations of Honey’s family perched on my body. I rubbed my eyes, dislodging one of Honey’s aunts from my forehead, and sat up. The piskies were watching the news on my plasma TV.
“The young ones are out fighting,” said the aunt. I think her name was Daisy. Or maybe Petunia. I was pretty sure it was Daisy. She looked at me accusingly, as if she couldn’t understand why her daughters and nieces were battling zombies while I was lying on the couch.
I looked at the TV screen. The apocalypse will be televised. Live video from a news helicopter followed what was clearly a pack…no, a horde…of zombies that had just broken through the gates in Victoria Park. There had to be a hundred of them and the horde stretched all the way down West Boulevard to Pico. The black metal fence that protected the gated community from the rest of Mid-City hadn’t been built with marauding zombies in mind, but it had been barricaded with cars, stacked tires, backyard swing sets and other junk pulled hastily from garages and storage sheds.
A few civilians defended the makeshift wall with shotguns, hunting rifles, handguns and lawn equipment. They started retreating down Victoria Park Drive when the horde broke through, but they didn’t do it fast enough. A blood-drenched woman in a tattered hospital gown leaped at a man in a golf shirt and khaki shorts. He caved in the side of her head with an aluminum softball bat, and then she dragged him down to the street. In seconds, both vanished under the wave of zombies that crashed over them.
“Jesus Christ, we lost it,” I said as Adan came into the room with Honey and Jack.
“King Oberon says there are at least a hundred thousand zombies in the city,” said Aunt Daisy. I knew she was older than Honey, but she didn’t look her age. She looked almost exactly like Honey. In fact, all the piskies in Honey’s family looked alike, not to be insensitive about it.
“He was supposed to contain them,” I said, an edge of hard bitterness in my voice I hadn’t intended. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” There was no audio in the coverage, but the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen said BLOODY RIOTS IN LOS ANGELES. The governor had called in the National Guard and declared a
