Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

The fact was, I wasn’t sure I could take him. Despite what I knew it would do to me, I would have considered using glamour on him, except I could see he was protected.

I could use my fairy magic to defeat those wards, but I was pretty sure the juice would incapacitate me before I could pull them down. There wouldn’t be any shortcuts or clever angles in this fight. If I wanted to beat Wale, I had to do it straight up. I began alternating between defensive magic and killing magic, spinning the spontaneous spells as quickly as my mind could give birth to them.

As we pulled more and more juice out of the street, the magic began to encroach more forcibly on the physical world. The arcane energies we were harnessing clashed in the space between us, creating a nimbus of shifting colors that danced and played along the edges of human vision. A sound that began as the soft murmur of the ocean in a sea-shell soon built to the deafening shriek of a jet engine. The nimbus between us went white, blinding in its radiance, and tendrils of ghost-light radiated from the newborn star, crawling over the pavement like spectral serpents.

Cracks appeared in the street and overpass as the concrete and asphalt was torn from within by unseen stresses. The streetlights to either side of us blew out all at once, showering the street with electrical sparks and broken glass. A manhole cover was ripped from its moorings with the sound of a tolling bell and launched into the air on a column of golden light.

The juice burned through me and it felt like the shuddering convulsions of an orgasm as I hurled it into the arcane conflagration. Then I saw Wale falter. He wobbled and dipped a little in the air as his levitation spell weakened and nearly failed. I smiled and pressed the attack, abandoning all but the bare minimum of defense. The brilliant star that turned and pulsed between us began to move, slowly at first and then picking up speed. It moved toward Simeon Wale.

He might have been dead, but Wale wasn’t stupid. Without lowering his magical defenses against my onslaught, he dropped his levitation spell and triggered a jump talisman as soon as his feet hit the pavement. He flipped up and back onto the edge of the freeway overpass, teetering precariously for a moment. “A great flame follows a little spark!” I shouted, and my fireball streaked out and exploded into the side of the bridge. Wale leaped away just ahead of the spell and raced out of sight across the overpass. He moved pretty well for a zombie.

I pushed my levitation spell higher and slowly rose to the overpass. I dropped down on the roof of a U-Haul trailer and looked around. Wale was nowhere to be seen. “It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting that it must be clear,” I said, and threw my eye-in-the-sky spell into the air. I sent it racing up about a hundred feet and panned around. Wale was heading west on the freeway, running and leaping along the line of gridlocked cars. He was heading away from the club, but no way was I letting him go.

“The kids are safe,” Adan called inside my head. “Open a gate.”

I almost laughed out loud. “Meep-meep,” I said, and spun my Road Runner spell. I leaped from the trailer over a couple cars onto the hood of an SUV, and then I was off, racing after Simeon Wale across the stalled traffic that stretched before me like stepping stones in a pond.

Adan called again. “Domino, bring me in.” This time I did laugh aloud. “Can’t,” I answered. “Chasing.”

“Chasing? Domino, he could be leading you into a trap.”

I didn’t think Wale had thought that far ahead, but it wouldn’t have changed my mind, anyway. I was high as a hippie at a Grateful Dead show, and I just wanted to run, and jump and rain lethal magic down on Simeon Wale’s head until he was burned to a cinder.

We reached the Central Avenue exit by the time I ran him down. I jumped from a FedEx truck to the top of the exit sign and saw him streaking down the ramp below me. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and the force spell knocked him off the ramp and down onto the Sixteenth Street feeder. He pulled himself off the pavement and turned to face me long enough to fire back with an attack spell of his own. I caught it with countermagic and snuffed it out before it even had a chance to form, and then I hit him with another force spell that knocked him across the feeder into a metal fence that topped the low brick wall fronting the street. A section of the fence went down and Wale tumbled through into a small private parking lot.

He tried to drag himself back to his feet, but I guessed enough of Wale’s corpse was broken that even magic couldn’t move it anymore. He struggled for a few seconds, and then collapsed facedown on the pavement. I jumped over the twisted fence and landed beside him. I nudged him with the toe of my boot and rolled him onto his back. He stared up at me with dead, gray eyes.

“Suicide by gangster,” he said, and his laughter was dry and ragged.

“You might have mentioned that’s all you needed from me. It would have wasted a lot less of my time.”

“Wanted to know if I was better than you.”

I shrugged. “You’re not,” I said. “You never were.” I spun my ghost-binding spell and finished the job. thirteen

The ivy covering the beige, synthetic stucco walls of the Men’s Room looked as natural as double-Ds on a hundred-pound stripper. Fortunately, the vines didn’t crawl up to the second story, and the glowing, red-and-silver tag that spelled out the word SANCTUARY was easily visible against the prefabricated drabness. We had muscle in the parking lot and on the roof of the club-it squatted in the shadow of the freeway and that was an obvious angle of attack if any zombies up there got the idea to do a little one-stop grocery shopping.

Inside, the Men’s Room was packed to the lap-dance couches with civilians. I hadn’t seen so many people in the club since a celebrity porn star wiggled through on a special appearance tour. I’d been worried about the mental state of our wards based on what Chavez had said. The juice we were pumping into the club would have been enough to give them a case of the crazies, even without a zombie apocalypse to adjust to. So I was surprised when I walked in the front door and found a fairly respectable party going on.

Chavez had both bars humming like an assembly line. I glanced up at the ticker running over the main bar and quickly saw why-it was advertising free drinks all night. The sound system was cranked up to Armageddon and the stages were crowded ass-to-elbow with naked dancers. Judging by the standards of physical fitness and dancing prowess on display, none of them were professionals.

Adan pushed through the crowd and took my elbow. “You were supposed to gate me back in,” he said, leaning in and shouting in my ear.

“Didn’t really have the time,” I said. “Where are the boys?”

Adan blushed. “I took them back to the dressing room. Some of the girls are looking after them.”

I drew my head back and looked at him. “Are you shy, Adan? They’re just dancers. They’re working their way through college.”

“I’m not shy,” he said. “It’s just…not a lot of experience with human women. It’s different, somehow.”

“Just remember, the club is a lot like the Seelie Court. You got to be able to dance, lie and fight. Well, most of the girls can’t fight for shit.”

Adan grinned. “Let’s go see Chavez.” We walked to the back of the club and up the stairs to the office. Chavez had Rashan’s parchment map of Greater Los Angeles spread out on the desk, the corners weighted down with cell phones. Two dancers stood beside him holding cells in both hands, ready to speed dial or slap a phone against his ear if he got an important call.