Lia gasped and turned to flee, only to run face-first into the newly-minted bugwoman that was still churning behind her as it struggled to come into focus. She yelped, instinctually throwing up her hands to dampen the collision, and when a stray centipede scurried across the backs of her fingers, she screamed.
The unstable bug-thing lurched after her as she staggered back, grasping with its multiple arms but not yet facile enough on its obscenely long, chitinous legs to catch her.
Lia shouted again when she stumbled, tripping over her own feet and landing hard on her ass. She cringed, expecting the worst, but Black Tom whacked the bugwoman from behind with his walking stick before it could fall on her, and the swaying conglomeration of half-melded carapaces disintegrated into an avalanche of separate insects. Tom must’ve been biding his time until the demon was solid enough to be attacked. Lia scrambled away from the bugwave that resulted from his efforts, grimacing with revulsion when it washed across the floor and over her shoes.
Tom extended a hand to help her up and together they ran like hell, pursued by the mad, cackling laughter of Miguel Caradura, currently known on the streets as Mickey Hardface, and previously known to the adherents of his ancient cult as Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec King of the Dead.
Chapter Two
Lia and Black Tom burst out through the old building’s front door and back into the unlighted street, pursued by an angry cloud of buzzing, flying, biting creatures. Lia ducked and flailed, trying to keep the insects out of her hair and clothing. They swirled away into three separate funnels that swiftly congealed into lanky, Amazonian female forms. They were a lot faster about it now that they were warming up, she noticed with some concern.
Black Tom turned and stood his ground against them, snarling.
He swung the head of his walking stick up, catching the first of the re-spawned bugwomen under the chin and bursting her into a spectacular shower of insect bodies. He dealt with the other two incipient bug-beings just as deftly, bashing one through the midsection and sweeping the other to the ground, where he stabbed it between its multiple eyes with his cane tip.
Their component colonies began to re-form almost as soon as they came apart.
The bugwomen wouldn’t stay down for long.
Lia, having caught her breath while watching the skirmish from what felt like a reasonably safe distance, now sprinted for the better-lighted street a block to the north. She glanced back to see Black Tom grinning and giving the finger to the camera-concealing gargoyle above the building’s front door, right before he punctured another nearly-whole buglady and batted her back into a shapeless cloud of gnats with his stick. He could reflect enough light to appear on video, briefly, when he made a special effort, so the King was sure to have seen his unambiguous gesture. Lia imagined the robed skeleton at the top of the tower winging his plate of shiny human hearts against his computer monitor in outraged response.
She was almost surprised when she made it to the lighted and pedestrian-packed street up the block without being set upon from behind. This had to be the only Halloween she’d ever been grateful for the Hollywood crowds. The cordoned-off road was awash in masked revelers, mounted police, stiltwalking firebreathers and inebriated hipsters, and the collective mass of them made for at least some cover. The fact that she was still alive suggested the King at the top of the Tower wanted her captured rather than killed, and a crowd panicked by the sudden descent of a biblical plague was something she might well escape into. So the bugs were less apt to attack her directly, now.
Thank the gods for public intoxication, she thought. Dionysus particularly. She’d have to make an appropriate offering later, like buying a shot but leaving it on the bar.
Lia glanced back at the bug-beings gathering in the shadows behind her before she darted out into the costumed throng. The tiny insects they were made of seemed to be melting together, like lumps of sugar over heat, and Black Tom couldn’t continue fighting them all at the same time.
The old people (she knew, from sources Tom had pointed out), had called them Tzitzimime. In the language of the Aztecs it meant ‘nightmares of the sky’ or ‘horrors descended from above.’ They were said to be demon courtiers in thrall to the King of Mictlan, the land of the dead, whom Lia still couldn’t believe she’d just seen with her own two eyes.
Behind her, instead of a swarm, three fully-formed and solid bugwomen stepped out into the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. There was an Ant, a Mantis, and a Wasp, each of them at least six feet tall. They looked stately and dangerous-all grasshopper legs, pinched waists, and curvaceous thoraxes. The Wasp’s long stinger dripped with viscous venom, and Mantis’s snapping mandibles looked as powerful as the jaws on a steel bear trap. Their dramatic appearance drew pleased applause from the crowds.
Shitballs, Lia thought, looking back over her shoulder upon hearing a volley of cheers erupt behind her, rather than a chorus of screams. Those fucking bugs were smarter when they gelled together. At least by a little bit.
They pushed after her, ignoring their admirers. Their fundamental inhumanity was neatly camouflaged by the occasion, and Lia hadn’t counted on a factor like that.
She made it to the far side of the street, elbowing through a knot of glitter-covered, gossamer-winged fairies, and up onto the sidewalk. Only then did she pause to look back again.
The bugwomen were coming, all right. They parted the partiers before them, shoving their way through the crowd and recklessly shunting human beings aside. Mantis and Ant were closest to her. The Wasp lagged behind a bit, using the opportunity to look around.
Lia ducked into a dark and narrow alley, as yet unseen by any of the multilimbed predators. Or so she hoped. She immediately spotted a furtive young tagger crouched beside a dumpster down at the far end of the passage, honing his craft on a patch of virgin wall.
“Hey!” Lia called, startling him. “You, there with the paint, let me see that.”
The bewildered vandal dropped his spray can and ran away, showing her nothing but the soles of his Nikes.
“That works too,” Lia muttered, hurrying over and grabbing up the abandoned can. Glancing back, she spotted Ant and Mantis near the mouth of the alley, scanning and sniffing around for her. There was no sign of Wasp.
Lia turned to the wall and sprayed, in big bold letters:
MADAM, I’M ADAM
— on the theory that palindromes make good imaginal traps.
Semi-intelligent otherworlders, like her current pursuers, were said to get stuck in them, although she’d never had a need to test the idea out before. She didn’t know if this was going to work at all.
Ant spotted her as she was finishing off the last letter of her slogan.
Lia dropped the paint and slipped away while Mantis and Ant shattered into a rustling wave of bugs that poured down the alley after her, as fast as a thought. The pair drew themselves back together to concentrate with every modicum of mental acuity they possessed when they paused before Lia’s hurriedly-scrawled tag. She knew they had to make themselves as human as possible in order to focus and reason, in even the most perfunctory fashion.
They cocked their sleek heads in eerie synchrony, reading and considering the spray-painted words for longer than they meant to, as Lia’d hoped they would. She paused behind another dumpster to watch them, even though her every nerve was vibrating with a suppressed need to flee. She could see the demons’ large, faceted eyes ticking back and forth over the letters that came to the same meaning when read from either the left or the right.