“‘After dark, all cats are leopards.’”
Before any of the men could ask Lia what in the name of hell she was talking about, a sleek, black mountain lion stepped out from behind the woodpile and nuzzled its head against her hip, purring like it had an eight-cylinder engine buried within its massive chest.
The observing gangsters were staggered. Lia saw their eyes go wide, and the color drained from their faces. Late-to-the-show cops looked merely confused as they emerged from the trees.
The enormous black cat, easily the size of a full-grown tiger, roared and pounced on the dead leader with the torn face without further ado. The costumed skeleton went down screaming. The wildcat planted two fist-sized paws on its chest and clamped its leathery skull between his jaws, then shook it with all the force those powerful predator’s shoulders could muster.
“Get him, Tom,” Lia shrieked, her voice gone high and wild as she cackled with crazy glee. “Chew his goddamn face off!”
Incredulous, Ben Leonard stepped up beside her, taking in the surreal scene. Lia barely noticed him, or any of the other officers, either, as she was so busy cheering. Her champion had long ago been christened in honor of his maternal grandfather, a man named Tomas de Leon, Tom the Lion, and Lia knew that one’s true name was always the key to one’s true nature. She knew it because he’d taught her everything he could, and never asked for anything in return.
The six or seven henchmen looked on in horror; the cops in weird wonderment. Nobody could quite countenance what they were seeing, although all of them believed in it. In her fever pitch of excitement Lia was catching impressions from their minds without even trying to. She was sending and receiving all at once, exquisitely aware of every emotion within the vicinity.
Ben Leonard looked down to see Tom the plain old housecat clawing at a screaming, flailing perpetrator-one that happened to be a long-dead skeleton dressed in black jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. (The sort of shit that would never wind up in any report, he thought).
Hardface’s henchmen, however, saw a man-sized, melanistic wildcat, as Lia intended them to. (The police officers hadn’t been within her spell’s sphere of influence when she cast it, and so remained untouched by its effects.) The monstrous cat stopped shaking the gang’s freakish leader by the head and looked up, flashing green eyes at the final lingering knot of the King’s hired men. The mountain lion lowered its head and lunged at them, almost playfully, although it was more than enough to send them screaming away through the darkened trees.
The puzzled Blackdogs saw only a small, ordinary tomcat hissing and puffing its tail after the half-dozen sizable gunmen it’d somehow routed, all by itself. They exchanged confounded looks before they remembered their jobs and went chasing after the escaping suspects.
Ben Leonard walked over and cuffed Mictlantecuhtli’s partially-disguised manservant, tightening the bracelets all the way down to the very last notch to enclose his bony wrists. Lia smiled, watching her new friend restrain the rogue cadaver like a pro.
They could play Ingrid’s brand of mindgames too, she thought, as she picked up and hugged her Tom.
Chapter Forty-Eight
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.