“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
