“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.
Making them fight to the death on her behalf wouldn’t be any more of a trick.
“Esteban, don’t you dare,” she shouted at him, raising her voice over the music as a pregnant pause in the song came to an end and its tooth-loosening beat began pounding once again. “These people aren’t yours to use!”
Steb looked disappointed, but he lowered his arms and released the cops, the guards, Riley, and everyone else in the surrounding neighborhoods from his thrall. He killed the power to his car stereo with a chirp from a tiny handheld remote, and evening quiet rushed back in like displaced water.
“As you wish, brujachica,” he said. “We will do this the hard way.”
He bowed to Lia from the waist, then turned to face Wasp and Mantis.
“Bugbitches!” he challenged, at the top of his voice. “I am Esteban de Rojo.” He drew a razorsharp machete from a sheath on either hip. “And I have come to dance!”
They flew right into it. Wasp slashed at him with her broken stinger, Mantis snapped her mandibles, and Steb sliced, bobbed, and wove in an explosive outburst of acrobatic martial art. Capoiera, Lia thought the style was called. From Brazil, where Steb had spent a portion of his youth. She’d seen him practice its backflips and windmill kicks before, but had never seen any of the techniques actually put to use. Machete blades struck sparks off the bugs’ barbed carapaces when the witchman and the dreamdemons hacked at one another.
Lia and Ingrid were both taken aback by the sudden ferocity of the fight, as were Lyssa and Nyx. Ingrid half-consciously touched a hand to her breastbone while she tracked Esteban’s wild moves with her eyes, and Lia thought she looked thoroughly impressed. At another time and place it might’ve made her jealous.
Somewhere behind them Riley shouted: “Spartans, ho!”
The guards all raised their light housings like shields and turned the power on. Their lamps produced an instant, retina-searing glare, one that turned the world into a washed-out photograph. Lia covered her eyes and Ingrid turned away, but Nyx reacted to it like she was on fire, shrieking and flailing and racing off blindly into the Yard’s sheltering darkness.
The men with the lamps chased after her.
“Hey, Lia!” Riley chirped, pausing to chat while his troops pursued the inky Archon. “Check it out. Hydroponic grow lights. Full spectrum UV, pure artificial sun. Pretty freakin’ nifty, dontcha think?”
“Riley, I can’t believe you guys came,” Lia said. She’d explained their situation to him earlier, in some detail (even claiming credit for last night’s burst of magical daylight, which the news had tried to write off as some sort of atmospheric anomaly), but she’d never asked for nor expected anyone to come riding to her aid.
“You don’t really think I could’ve talked him out of this, do you?” Riley asked, nodding toward Steb and his ongoing three-way fight with the Brobdingnagian bugs before hurrying off after his men. Ingrid went after them too, and Lia didn’t know how concerned about that she needed to be. She realized with a twinge of panic that she couldn’t account for staticy Lyssa’s whereabouts anymore, either.
Lia dropped to her knees and closed her eyes, sending out effortlessly. Black Tom joined her.
She first perceived Lyssa, Lady Madness, cowering in a far corner underneath a large-leafed palm, feeling overwhelmed by all the shouting and unexpected intrusions. Lia sensed the psychotic Archon was terrified by the clarity of thought and ingenuity behind the tiny captive suns the new arrivals had brought to prod Nyx with, and she didn’t care to see what they might have in store for her.
Deciding to cut her losses, Lyssa simply disappeared, and Lia couldn’t tell where in the worlds she might have gone.
Next she spotted that second animated skeleton, the one who still had shriveling skeins of borrowed flesh plastered over his facial bones. Winston, she learned, catching his name from his thoughts and feeling Tom confirm it. Winston could hear Esteban’s commotion from afar, from the distant quarter of the Yard where poor Ben had cuffed him and left him less than twenty minutes ago. Unaware that both Lia and Black Tom were watching with their minds’ eyes, he laid his head down onto the dirt and decayed. His bones crumbled to a soft, powdery dust that the earth absorbed. His clothing, his sunglasses, and even his shoes went with him.