Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

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.

“It’s funny how shit works out,” I said.

Oberon glanced over at me and smiled. “It’s almost enough to make you believe in fate, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that funny.”

“What are we waiting for?” Honey said. “Let’s kill them.” Her sword was in her hand, and red and orange pixie dust fell from her wings. She was wearing bright blue war paint, though I guessed it was only glamour. Oberon’s sidhe warriors were similarly decorated.

“Settle down, William Wallace,” I said. “Let them come.”

“I’m worried about Jack,” Honey said.

“I know. That’s why we have to let them come.”

The south end of the park had become a twisted nightmare of darkness and fire, obscene flesh and corrupted biology. There were more of the demon mothers there, and while I didn’t look at them, I saw the crawlers they spawned moving forward to the front of the pack. Fire giants, like the one we’d fought at the Carnival Club, formed up behind them.

“Time for the artillery,” Oberon said.

I looked over at him. “What kind of artillery?”

“Me,” he said, and grinned. He walked forward to the edge of the building, raised his arms and began singing in that strange, haunting language he shared with Honey and Jack. A wind blew in from the coast, tugging at our exposed position and kicking up dust from the infield of the small baseball field. Clouds rolled in overhead, so fast it looked like vapor from a smoke machine crawling across the sky. The clouds undulated and turned in on themselves, and lightning began to flash in their bellies.

Across the field, the demons raised a terrible cry, a discordant symphony of screams, shrieks, roars and stomach-turning moans that crawled along my spine to the base of my brain and flushed my body with cold, stark terror. It was the sound of all the worst things humans had ever imagined waiting for them in dark places since they first dared to climb down from the trees.

Oberon tilted his head up to the sky as the rain began to fall, and the wind whipped his long, auburn hair around his face and shoulders. He began to glow, to shine, as if moonlight had been trapped beneath his skin and was straining to be free. The look on his face was rapturous, orgasmic, and his chant built and swelled with magic until the beautiful, secret words drowned out the demonic cacophony from the far side of the field.

A wave of crawlers raced forward, swarming across the grass and concrete toward us, and the glowering sky attacked. Jagged, crackling lines of blue-white lightning flashed down from the roiling clouds and caressed the scuttling crawlers almost gently, outlining them in fairy fire and reducing them instantly to smoking puddles of black tar. Only a handful made it through, and the sidhe warriors stepped forward to meet them, blades flashing and deadly glamours tearing into the crawlers like wild beasts.

“You’re supposed to hit those guys with countermagic, first,” I said to Oberon. “You got to soften them up so they don’t shrug off your spells.”

The fairy king laughed. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said. Oberon threw back his head and sang, and the sky growled like a belligerent animal in answer to him. A slender funnel cloud formed in the twisting gray blanket overhead and reached for the demon horde assembled below. The tornado split in two and then another uncoiled from the angry sky. Emerald light flashed within the three vortices, and when they touched the south end of Wilson Park, the twisters spat forth an airborne brigade of piskie warriors. The piskies swarmed over the demons and the red-orange pixie dust was so thick it looked like burning snowfall.

“My people,” Honey said. “We kick ass.”

“Join them, if you will,” Oberon said, inclining his head and raising his sword in salute. “Your House is pardoned and it is your right to stand with them. To war, Princess, and red glory!”

The blue war paint on Honey’s face and body pulsed alight and green fire danced along the edge of her sword.

“Until death and darkness and the world’s sorrow, my King,” she said, and then she was off, blazing across the field like an emerald comet falling into the sun.

“Yeah, Honey, don’t let me hold you back,” I muttered.

Despite the piskies’ ass-kicking prowess, the fire giants pressed forward, tromping across the field and churning the turf into mud. They were armed with an array of the Dark Ages’ most advanced weaponry: massive black iron swords with serrated edges, spiked balls on the ends of heavy chains that looked like they could demolish a house, mauls the size of small trees. The twisters roared through their ranks, scattering earth, foliage and playground equipment, but the fire giants leaned forward into the storm and marched on.

“What else you got, Oberon?” I said. “We had trouble with one of these guys in the club, and there’s six of them here.”

“Seven,” Terrence said. “There’s another one behind that big guy.”

“They’re all big guys, Terrence,” I said.

“The really big motherfucker with the big fucking ax.”

The figure striding across the field at the center of the giants’ ranks towered over his fellows. He wore an ornate iron helm engraved with leaves and vines, and topped with a crown of fire that twined and branched like the antlers of a great stag. Flames burst from his eyes and from a mouth that was nearly hidden in a full beard that wreathed his craggy face like a wild tangle of spun silver.

“Oh, him,” I said. “Is this guy someone we should know about, Oberon?”

The king shrugged. “Some lesser hero of the Fomoire. They have no shortage of them.”

“Lesser hero, huh? Dime a dozen. That’s great.”

The Fomoiri hero roared a challenge and fire engulfed the front ranks of sidhe warriors. Defensive glamour flashed and glowed and most of the sidhe were spared. Some of them burned. A rumbling, baritone chant went up among the giants and rattled the windows of the VFW building below us. The giants began to run, and the earth trembled. I felt the tremors in the soles of my feet, thrumming bone-deep through my ankles and my legs.