Sean Traver - Graves' end

Nyx descended unseen into a quiet pocket of Potter’s Yard, in the form of a matte-black sphere that barely stood out at all against the night’s clear and moonless sky. She touched down without a sound and assumed her best humanoid shape: that of a flat female outline aswirl with distant galaxies.

She looked critically at the cherry sapling Lia had generated from a broken branch earlier that morning, then seized it by the trunk and hauled it back up out of the earth, lifting her trapped sister-daughter by the head along with it.

She set Lyssa on her feet, broke off the top of the green young tree, then spun Lady Madness around. Nyx grabbed hold of the tree’s roots and kicked her insane relation off the far end of the splintered trunk with a foot planted in the small of her back. Lyssa staggered forward and fell flat on her face. Her motorcycle helmet’s open visor bit into the earth like a shovel blade. Nyx threw the sapling’s rootball aside.

Star-like points of light that would soon become Wasp and Mantis descended and began drawing local insects together while Lyssa got up, tossed her broken helmet away, and began peeling the black leather clothing from her jittering staticbody.

Lia and Ben hauled Ingrid to her feet and marched her out toward the parking lot together. The towering redhead’s feet were bare and quite dirty, Lia noticed. She would’ve stood as tall as Ben if she’d been wearing heels. Her satin gown was torn and stained with blood from her scraped knees. She looked around everywhere as they went, wide-eyed and frightened, although it could easily have been an act. Ingrid was an excellent liar. Black Tom’s image sauntered along in Lia’s peripheral vision, leaning on his cane. (He’d socked his catbody away deep underneath the office shack, where it wouldn’t be disturbed again until he came back to it.)

“Lia, please,” Ingrid pleaded, cringing back from a frond of dark foliage that brushed her shoulder. “You can’t leave me handcuffed. Nyx is here already, she has to be. Lyssa won’t be far behind, or the Tzitzimime either. Maybe we can fight them if you’ll let me use my hands.”

“I’d rather let a pyromaniac smoke in a fireworks factory,” Lia said, prompting a laugh from Ben.

They emerged from the dark trees and into the parking lot, with Ben leading Ingrid by the arm and the rest of the Blackdogs following behind them.

Lyssa and Nyx were waiting there, blocking the front gate, their paired outlines filled with static and stars, respectively. Everyone stopped where they were and gaped.

“See, I told you, didn’t I tell you?” Ingrid screeched.

Lia had anticipated that Nyx would uproot the tree she’d pinned Lyssa down with as soon as the sun could set. Ingrid didn’t need to warn her about that. She’d just hoped they might find a few more minutes in which to make a getaway, or devise some new defense.

But no.

Insects boiled up out of the gravel and clumped together into tall, churning, half-human suggestions of a Wasp and a Mantis. The buzzing clusters solidified fast, becoming angular mutations that could’ve sprung forth from Pablo Picasso’s worst cubist nightmares. Stark white light from a nearby streetlamp shone on their armored thoraxes, and their large, faceted eyes glittered like alien gems.

The quartet of feminoid imaginals had indeed been expecting them.

Ben stepped forward to confront the creatures, despite Lia’s grab at his arm. “All right, ladies,” he said in his most authoritative tone. “I don’t know who you are or what you are, but we are here as representatives of the laws of men, and we are prepared to tolerate noform of aggression-”

Which was all well and good, until Mantis leaned in and scissored his head right off his shoulders with one single clash of her wicked green mandibles.

It happened almost too fast to process. Black blood fountained up from the sliced-off stump of Ben’s neck. Mantis knocked his spurting body aside and the severed head landed in the gravel at her feet half a second later. The Blackdogs could only stand frozen and stare at the six-foot insect with their colleague’s blood on its jaws, aghast and unable to absorb this sudden reordering of their command structure.

Wasp opened her translucent wings, rose up into the air, and buzzed toward them, angling her jagged stinger forward.

“ Move !” Lia screamed, snapping everyone out of their shock. Horrified cops scattered for cover back inside the Yard, seeking shelter anywhere they could find it. Lia grabbed Ingrid’s still-cuffed arm when she stumbled and dragged her along, chasing after the Blackdogs while two furious Archons and a pair of hissing Tzitzimime pursued them all.

Tom spun around and hurled his cane like a javelin, skewering Wasp through the thorax with it as she dove down through the trees, aiming for Lia. Wasp detonated into a swirling maelstrom of individual hornets and yellowjackets, which made the situation exponentially worse. Mantis joined her sister in bursting apart only to funnel her hopping insects in around Lia and Ingrid, encircling them and backing them against a clump of magnolia saplings.

Separating them from the remaining cops.

Lia tore down a new branch and swung it, swiping it uselessly through amorphous clouds of bugs and brandishing it when the contrasting shapes of Lyssa and Nyx slunk closer, hemming them in. Mantis and Wasp melted back together out of the loose, whirling swarm in order to flank them. Black Tom had no defense against the Archons whatsoever, but he caused Ingrid’s handcuffs to fall away when Lia silently asked that he remove them. Ingrid rubbed at her chafed and reddened wrists, surprised but free now to defend herself, if she could. It only seemed right to Lia.

Then they heard the thudding bass pulse of a car-mounted subwoofer booming toward them through the empty streets outside the Yard. This wasn’t an uncommon noise out here in the Valley by any means, but the snarling roars of several large, overtaxed engines made even the ladydemons turn toward the fence an instant before a black Cadillac SUV came slamming through it about a dozen yards down from them, scattering planks and kicking up dust into its own dazzling headlight beams.

Esteban leapt out on the driver’s side and Riley did the same on the other, before the big vehicle had entirely come to a stop, while it was still rocking on its springs. Their amped-up dance music was louder and clearer now, with both doors hanging open, and the beat seemed to cancel out all other sound.

Three more SUVs skidded up outside the ruined fence and disgorged a team of Steb’s personal security guards in their interchangeable black suits (the guys Lia thought of as his Reservoir Dogs). Each man was armed with a large aluminum light housing and carried a batterypack slung on a strap over his shoulder.

Steb, ever the showman as well as the shaman, leapt forward and raised his arms when his musical selection reached a dramatic crescendo.

Except for Lia and Ingrid, every human being present-Esteban’s mercenaries and Blackdog officers alike-all turned toward the demons and stomped the earth, simultaneously assuming an identical, cross-armed fighting stance. Every other conscious person for five miles in every direction probably did the very same thing, by the feel of it, each of them wired into sequence by the force of Esteban’s projected will. Lia sensed that force radiating off him in rhythmic waves and she recognized what was happening, although this display was so much grander in scope than the tiny demonstration her former lover had arranged for her earlier in the day that it was scarcely the same experience at all. The scale of his intention here was overwhelming, like watching a tsunami rush toward you. Lia had no doubt at all that he’d be able to make half the population of the San Fernando Valley dance the Spanish Panic against their will, if that was what he meant to do.