protest.
She knew exactly where she was going.
In minutes they were up above the houses, on a rough fire access road that ran all the way through Griffith Park, bisecting the vast swath of undeveloped territory that served as a divider between the city of Hollywood on this side and the San Fernando Valley (where they lived), on the other. Wasp slapped lashing foliage aside as Lia sped them through a tunnel of black nighttime trees.
Stretched across the road ahead was a chain with an ineffectually small ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign dangling from it. The chain was set high, for the sake of roving SUVs, and Lia’s car was small. Going slow, she might’ve slid right under it. But she wasn’t going slow. Not at all.
The chain starred her windshield and snapped with an audible twang when the Mazda plowed through it at full speed. Lia’s hand shot up to shield her eyes.
The broken chain whipped upwards, cutting Wasp in half at the middle while flicking her neatly off the roof. The two pieces of her segmented body fell away to burst against the pavement like a pair of rotten pumpkins, exploding into a dazed-looking swarm that rose and dissipated, reluctantly, after Lia’s taillights disappeared over the crest of the hill they’d been climbing.
Black Tom craned around to look back and Lia angled her mirror every which way, but the Wasp seemed to be gone. It was either dead or distracted, at least for the time being. Lia drove on as fast as she dared, down a series of narrow back roads meant only for park service vehicles and the occasional fire truck.
Tom realized he was still holding onto Wasp’s severed stinger. He looked down at it, nonplussed, then tossed it out the window. It clattered to the road surface behind them just before an unlighted, off-the-map tunnel swallowed up Lia’s car.
Chapter Three
Lia’s tires crunched and popped in the gravel when she pulled into the parking lot at the front of Potter’s Yard. Her headlights splashed across the Yard’s small office shack and penetrated the dense wall of greenery behind it, causing a brief wash of weird, bristling shadows to race away through the orderly ranks of sapling trees.
“Home again, home again,” she muttered, then sighed. Peering through the new web of fissures in her windshield during the drive up through the Valley had given her the beginnings of a headache. She gauged how weary she must’ve looked by the concern she saw reflected in Black Tom’s eyes.
She angled into her accustomed spot near the wooden fence and paused to finger the freshly-punched holes in the roof of her car before getting out. “Shitballs,” she muttered to herself, feeling fairly certain that demon attacks were not going to be covered by her insurance policy.
Black Tom stepped out on the passenger side and inspected the holes in the roof for himself while Lia pulled the Yard’s rattling gate closed along its metal track, then locked it for the night.
All around her, lush and leafy life thrived. There were shrubs, flowers, and mature trees in big wooden bins, as well as a large nursery under green nylon shades, a corrugated-plastic greenhouse, and the tiny cabin that looked to be about a hundred years old, which currently housed the establishment’s cash register. Its wood-plank walls were silvery-gray after years of exposure to the weather, and its glassless windows were shuttered closed for the night. Beyond that lay eight full acres of foliage, plants in hundreds of varieties and sizes.
It all felt still, silent and safe-just the way Lia liked it.
She paused to look back toward her car before she’d gotten more than a few feet down a narrow path that ran between two rows of bushy ficus trees.
Black Tom was just then stooping down as if to pet a large black cat that was lying curled up near the gate, as still as a stone. He lifted the feline’s pointy chin with one gnarled hand and then dissolved into a substance that might have been either light or mist in order to funnel himself right down into the animal’s unblinking eyes, so fast that most people would have been able to tell themselves they hadn’t seen it happen.
“C’mon, already,” Lia said, then vanished down the darkly verdant corridor. The spirit she called Black Tom trotted after her, re-ensconced within the catbody that kept him anchored to this world. The ink-colored kitten had been so young and so close to death when he claimed it years ago that it had no volition of its own today, and would sit motionless wherever he left it for as long as his conscious mind was absent.
The reanimated animal was leading the way by the time they reached the center of the Yard: a clearing where pots, fountains, and a large collection of garden statuary were displayed. What Lia chose to see was a fairy ring made up of crouching gnomes, spitting mermaids, and concrete bodhisattvas, all of them frozen in their nighttime revels by her approach.
Potter’s Yard was a place she dearly loved, especially at night, when it was hushed and lit only by the stars. It felt like a shadowy oasis out here in the middle of the industrial suburbs, one that was always awash in some sort of fecund, flowering life, all year round. She breathed in the familiar olfactory chorus of damp, green, earthy smells, and as always, she felt immediately soothed. She even shivered pleasantly in the chilly air.
Lia knew she couldn’t relax yet, however. She might, in fact, never be able to properly relax again, if she wasn’t careful. Those insect women were out there somewhere still, regrouping, and they might even know her name. If they did, it meant they’d never quit. She didn’t need her Tom to tell her that.
Her eye landed on a number of pale green mantises sitting primly on a palm leaf nearby. They seemed to be watching her. That in itself wasn’t so troubling, but when Lia looked down, she realized that an entire line of tiny red ants trailing across her path had also paused, and every one of them seemed to be staring up at her, too.
Only then did she become aware that the night had gone unnaturally silent around her. There wasn’t a single cricket to be heard.
The ants resumed their usual brisk pace as soon as they knew she’d noticed them.
Lia took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing down the panic that was rising in her chest. She knew what this was, all right: a witch test. An assessment of her comfort level in the face of wild improbability. Her Tom had warned her about such things, but she’d never been the subject of an otherworldly assessment like this one before. The surreal occurrence had happened so quickly that an ordinary person would’ve shaken her head, blinked her eyes, and walked away. Someone who knew the Tzitzimime for what they were, however, was apt to react to unusual bug behavior with stark raving terror, thereby marking her sorry self out as a holder of occult knowledge.
Black Tom quietly confirmed her suspicions about this, mind-to-mind.
The King’s consorts weren’t too bright in their insect forms, so Lia figured it was unlikely that this little lapse on her part would catch their attention. Only a big reaction would alert them. Maybe the distinctive stinger-holes in her car’s roof had helped them to spot this place from above, but human faces all looked more or less alike to them, and it seemed they didn’t know her well enough yet to recognize her by sight alone-which was a good thing. They’d want to be sure to get the right girl, and they wouldn’t pounce until they were certain they had her.
If she made a wrong move, though, every bug hidden away within the greenery of Potter’s Yard would be on her in the space of a heartbeat.
She forced herself to giggle aloud, as if chiding herself for imagining she’d seen a thing that simply couldn’t be, before stepping casually over the ant superhighway and moving on, ignoring the attentive cluster of mantises who rubbed their tiny, greedy hands together. Tom hugged close to her ankles until they reached the very back of the Yard.
Lia knew the only thing she could do now was seal herself in and hang on till daylight. Tzitzimime were insidious things by nature, and they’d get in through vents or under doors-at any place a tiny bug or a point of light could. Hiding out from them was a tall order. Fortunately, she happened to be prepared for just this sort of thing.
The nursery’s rear storage corner was packed with pots, planks, bags of soil, and a small forklift. There was also a big, upended concrete cylinder that could’ve been some sort of a well, all of it situated behind a low chainlink fence with a gate marked ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY.’
Lia was relieved to hear the crickets start up again behind her after three points of light that might almost
