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.
