The staring monsters’ smooth carapaces soon pebbled and roughened, then separated into tiny bugs that drifted lazily away.
The entities were hypnotized by the words, their simplified minds bouncing back and forth between the strange phrase’s beginning and its end, completely foxed by the unexpected experience of finding the same message in either direction. It was like feedback in the symbolism, something entrancing and compelling. At least for them.
Lia knew a child’s wordgame wouldn’t hold the Tzitzimime forever. It might not even hold them for long. But it was something, anyway.
Within moments all that remained of the statuesque ladydemons were two vague swirls of wan, white light hovering before a nonsensical legend written on a concrete wall.
Lia had to wrench herself away from the fascinating sight of them.
She was shaking by the time she emerged from the alley’s far end and onto the next street over, not only from an adrenaline surge that was just now subsiding, but also from the manic, triumphant thrill that always hit her after seeing one of Black Tom’s old tricks come off without a hitch.
This block was residential, tree-lined, stacked with apartment buildings and packed with parked cars, but far less crowded with pedestrians than the main drag had been.
So it was no place to linger.
Lia, looking ever over her shoulder, hurried down the sidewalk to her battered gray Mazda. It was identifiable at any distance by its proliferation of stickers proclaiming the names of her favorite bands or displaying slogans that amused her. A vivid purple example on the rear bumper exhorted its readers to ‘Visualize Whirled Peas.’
She fumbled out her keys and got in. Tom was already waiting in the passenger seat. He tipped his hat with his customary wry smile before she started up the engine and pulled away from the curb, out onto the dark and traffic-free street, wasting no more time about it. She was opening her mouth to tell him about her success with the palindrome trap when something long and straight and deadly sharp plunged down through the car’s roof, barely missing her head. She lost control of the wheel as her eyes tried to focus on the fat black needle that had almost lobotomized her, crushing a trash bin with her front bumper before the car squealed to an involuntary halt against the curb. Its ill-maintained engine burbled, faltered, and stalled.
While Lia twisted the key, fighting to restart the car, the unidentified spike withdrew with a loud metallic screech and slammed down again, punching a second hole in her roof.
This time Black Tom grabbed the thing, whatever it was, and held on. He leaned out the passenger window and looked up.
An enormous wasp/woman hybrid glared back down at him, enraged at having her stinger trapped.
Black Tom pulled his head back into the car when the engine coughed and roared again. Gripping the thrashing stinger for dear life, he frantically indicated that they should go. The faster the better.
Lia floored it and the little car lurched away from the curb, off down the street at full speed, with Wasp pinned to the roof by her considerable, yellow- amp;-brown-striped ass. Lia could hear her unfurled wings crackling in the wind as she piloted them straight up into the hills, climbing hard, with her Mazda’s puny engine howling in protest.
She knew exactly where she was going.
In minutes they were up above the houses, on a rough fire access road that ran all the way through Griffith Park, bisecting the vast swath of undeveloped territory that served as a divider between the city of Hollywood on this side and the San Fernando Valley (where they lived), on the other. Wasp slapped lashing foliage aside as Lia sped them through a tunnel of black nighttime trees.
Stretched across the road ahead was a chain with an ineffectually small ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign dangling from it. The chain was set high, for the sake of roving SUVs, and Lia’s car was small. Going slow, she might’ve slid right under it. But she wasn’t going slow. Not at all.
The chain starred her windshield and snapped with an audible twang when the Mazda plowed through it at full speed. Lia’s hand shot up to shield her eyes.
The broken chain whipped upwards, cutting Wasp in half at the middle while flicking her neatly off the roof. The two pieces of her segmented body fell away to burst against the pavement like a pair of rotten pumpkins, exploding into a dazed-looking swarm that rose and dissipated, reluctantly, after Lia’s taillights disappeared over the crest of the hill they’d been climbing.
Black Tom craned around to look back and Lia angled her mirror every which way, but the Wasp seemed to be gone. It was either dead or distracted, at least for the time being. Lia drove on as fast as she dared, down a series of narrow back roads meant only for park service vehicles and the occasional fire truck.
Tom realized he was still holding onto Wasp’s severed stinger. He looked down at it, nonplussed, then tossed it out the window. It clattered to the road surface behind them just before an unlighted, off-the-map tunnel swallowed up Lia’s car.
Chapter Three
Lia’s tires crunched and popped in the gravel when she pulled into the parking lot at the front of Potter’s Yard. Her headlights splashed across the Yard’s small office shack and penetrated the dense wall of greenery behind it, causing a brief wash of weird, bristling shadows to race away through the orderly ranks of sapling trees.
“Home again, home again,” she muttered, then sighed. Peering through the new web of fissures in her windshield during the drive up through the Valley had given her the beginnings of a headache. She gauged how weary she must’ve looked by the concern she saw reflected in Black Tom’s eyes.
She angled into her accustomed spot near the wooden fence and paused to finger the freshly-punched holes in the roof of her car before getting out. “Shitballs,” she muttered to herself, feeling fairly certain that demon attacks were not going to be covered by her insurance policy.
Black Tom stepped out on the passenger side and inspected the holes in the roof for himself while Lia pulled the Yard’s rattling gate closed along its metal track, then locked it for the night.
All around her, lush and leafy life thrived. There were shrubs, flowers, and mature trees in big wooden bins, as well as a large nursery under green nylon shades, a corrugated-plastic greenhouse, and the tiny cabin that looked to be about a hundred years old, which currently housed the establishment’s cash register. Its wood-plank walls were silvery-gray after years of exposure to the weather, and its glassless windows were shuttered closed for the night. Beyond that lay eight full acres of foliage, plants in hundreds of varieties and sizes.
It all felt still, silent and safe-just the way Lia liked it.
She paused to look back toward her car before she’d gotten more than a few feet down a narrow path that ran between two rows of bushy ficus trees.
Black Tom was just then stooping down as if to pet a large black cat that was lying curled up near the gate, as still as a stone. He lifted the feline’s pointy chin with one gnarled hand and then dissolved into a substance that might have been either light or mist in order to funnel himself right down into the animal’s unblinking eyes, so fast that most people would have been able to tell themselves they hadn’t seen it happen.
“C’mon, already,” Lia said, then vanished down the darkly verdant corridor. The spirit she called Black Tom trotted after her, re-ensconced within the catbody that kept him anchored to this world. The ink-colored kitten had been so young and so close to death when he claimed it years ago that it had no volition of its own today, and would sit motionless wherever he left it for as long as his conscious mind was absent.