Praise for
CAMERON HALEY
and the Underworld cycle

“Fast pacing, pungent wit, surprise twists, thoughtful discussions of morality and escalating, cinematic battles keep the pages turning.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Mob Rules

“With so much urban fantasy currently on the market, it’s hard for a reader to find anything that feels ‘fresh.’ Mob Rules feels fresh. I read it with the same sense of enjoyment and discovery that I felt when the first Tanya Huff and Laurell K. Hamilton fantasies came out years ago.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Mob Rules is exciting and fresh, with a complex and conflicted heroine who grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. This book will make you fall in love with urban fantasy all over again!”

—Diana Rowland, author of Mark of the Demon

“Gangsters and vampires, ghosts and sorcerers, and the mean streets of L.A. Add to the mix a woman who can definitely take care of herself, a plot full of twists and some clever magic, and you’ve got Mob Rules. And a whole lot of fun.”

—John Levitt, author of the Dog Days series

“Domino is a new and interesting character for the urban fantasy world and I want to see…even more horrible, horrible things happen to her. Because she is the most interesting when horrible, horrible things are happening.”

—Dreams and Speculation on “Retribution” in Harvest Moon

“Haley is definitely an author to watch!”

—RT Book Reviews on “Retribution” in Harvest Moon

book two: the underworld cycle

Skeleton Crew
Cameron Haley

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Mashenka

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Acknowledgments

one

It was raining when Terrence Cole buried his soldiers. A late summer downpour was the rarest of miracles in Los Angeles, and I watched as the fresh mounds of earth beside the open graves slowly turned to mud.

Terrence stood in the center of the small, black-clad crowd, his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him. He didn’t have an umbrella, and the rain glistened on the coffee-colored skin of his shaved head. It trickled down his forehead and along his temples, and the wetness on his cheeks almost looked like tears.

The service drew to a close, the coffins were lowered into the damp earth and the mourners quickly dispersed. I wasn’t sure if they were fleeing the elements or the sense of helplessness and despair that hung over the gathering. Probably both. I went to him when Terrence stood alone by the graves.

“Domino,” he said, “I appreciate you being here.” Stylish narrow sunglasses covered his eyes, but his head remained bowed and I didn’t think he’d looked up as I approached.

“I’m sorry about your guys, Terrence. I just found out about it today.”

He nodded, not at me but at the graves. “These two here were my nephews.”

“Jesus, Terrence, if I’d known, maybe I could have—”

“Their moms was my favorite sister. Used to be. Now she just want to see my funeral.”

“You’re not responsible for this.”

Terrence took off the glasses and lifted his head. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he had the look of a man on the run who knows he’s all out of places to hide. “I brought them in. Thought it was the best way to keep them safe, thought I could protect them.” He shook his head and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“What happened?”

“They didn’t even have any juice. Mobley put a posse on them just to send me a message.”

Francis Mobley ran the largest Jamaican outfit in the city. He’d been aligned with Terrence’s former boss, but now he saw the outfit Terrence had inherited as a target, an opportunity to expand his territory. Mobley was brutal, but I knew the executions hadn’t just been a message. The hits would have given Mobley a lot of juice and he’d be planning to use it for something even worse.

It was old-school gang warfare. With magic returning to the world in force, the stronger outfits had more juice than they knew what to do with. Back in the day it hadn’t been like that. There hadn’t been enough magic to go around, and the L.A. outfits fought for whatever piece of it they could get. They’d used tactics like this—one seemingly pointless act of violence feeding juice to the next—to move against their rivals. It was like a game of leapfrog played with murders.

My outfit was the strongest in the city and we didn’t have to resort to those tactics to take care of business. But there was still something in it for a smaller, weaker outfit, as long as the guy calling the shots didn’t let anything like conscience get in the way. I’d never heard Francis Mobley had much of a conscience.

“You’re my ally, Terrence. Give the word and I’ll crush that motherfucker like a bug.”

“Then what, Domino? You gonna move on the Koreans? Word is they want a piece of me, too.”

I hadn’t known about the Koreans, but Terrence was right. As much as I liked the idea of hitting back at Mobley, he was a symptom and not the disease. Taking him out wouldn’t make the problem go away. The problem was Terrence’s outfit was too small and too weak to protect itself. It wouldn’t survive for long—and never mind that it was weak mostly because of what I’d done to it a couple months ago. If it wasn’t Mobley, someone else would move in to cull the herd. That’s the way it worked, and if I put my personal feelings aside, I knew that’s the way it should work. There was no room for weakness in the underworld.

“Are you ready to lay down, Terrence?”

He didn’t say anything for a while. It surprised me, but maybe he was thinking about it. Getting your ass handed to you was no fun in any walk of life, but it really sucked in the underworld. I couldn’t really blame him.

“No fucking way,” Terrence said finally. “I ain’t gonna lay down ’less someone puts me down.”

“Okay, so what are you going to do about it?”

“Mobley ain’t shit. He’s not my problem—motherfucker’s just exploiting my problem. I can hit him just like he’s hitting me. I can drop bodies on his corners and put blood on his streets, but that just makes it worse. I need soldiers, Domino. It’s simple as that.”

“I know where you can get some.”

Terrence narrowed his eyes. “Where’s that, D? You can’t send me muscle—that’s no different than letting you hit the Jamaicans for me. I got to prove my outfit is strong enough to protect itself.”

“I can’t send you troops, but I could let them go if they got the idea on their own.”

“Who you have in mind?”

“Simeon Wale’s crew. The prick likes you a hell of a lot better than me, anyway. He’d cross if you offered him lieutenant. I’d let him.”

“Simeon Wale is a bad nigger and he got juice, but I’m not sure I trust the motherfucker any more than you do. I’d be watching my back night and day if I brought him in.”

“Why you think I’m letting him go? Nothing’s free, Terrence. You know that. Question is, is watching your back better than lying down? I’m getting pressure. Everyone’s worried. If you can’t hold your ground, something else might move in that’d make the Jamaicans look friendly.”

“The Turk is on you about this?”

“No, I don’t even know where that son of a bitch is. He said he was going on sabbatical, left routine operational control of the outfit to the heir apparent.”

Terrence laughed. “Adan’s making trouble for you. My pops always said, be careful what you wish for—it might just get you.”

“Your pops sounds like an asshole.”

“He was, but he might have been right about that.”

Adan Rashan was my boss’s son. He’d been swapped out with a changeling as a baby and spent the first twenty-plus years of his life in Avalon, the fairy otherworld. A few months earlier, I’d killed the changeling and averted a war with the Seelie Court, but not before I’d fallen for the fucking guy. Now the real Adan was back and he was turning out to be a major pain in the ass. I couldn’t just flip the switch and turn off the attraction, either. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t much like it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

“Adan’s got no say in this. I’m still the wartime captain, you’re my ally and supporting our alliances is part of my job description.”

“He can still make trouble.”

“No, all he can do is bitch and moan about it. He’s been doing a lot of that. He can’t move on you unless I give the word.”

“You gonna give the word?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I was ready to push you out.” Even if Terrence hadn’t been my ally, he’d betrayed his former boss to save my life. Maybe saving my ass hadn’t been his only motive, but that kind of thing still counted for something. At least to me.

“So it got to be Wale’s crew?”

I nodded. “Anyone else, it looks like I’m propping you up. This way it just looks like you’re taking advantage of disloyalty in my ranks. No one will have a problem with that.”

“Except Mobley. You think you can arrange a sit-down?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. Mobley thinks he has you by the short ones, Terrence. You’re going to have to hurt him before you sit down.”

“I can put Wale on him,” he said, and laughed. “You got all this worked out, don’t you? Remind me never to piss you off.”

I shrugged. “It’s time to play hardball. You turn Wale loose, Mobley will come to you. He’ll be begging for a sit-down.”

Terrence nodded and was about to respond when a sound like a snapping tree limb split the air. The sound came from behind us.

From the graves.

Terrence and I turned together, toward the sound. Splintered wood from one of the coffins lay scattered around the gravesite. As we watched, one of Terrence’s nephews climbed from his shattered coffin and stood up. He staggered and then braced himself with both hands on the sides of his grave. He looked down at himself, at the dark suit his mother had buried him in, and then he looked around. His gaze landed on us, and his eyes were a dull, filmy gray. They were a dead man’s eyes.

“What the fuck, Uncle T?” he said. “Why you got to put a brother in the ground?”

The kid climbed out of his hole and stumbled toward us. He seemed a little stiff. After a few jerking steps, he wobbled to a stop and fell back on his ass, his legs splayed out in front of him.

Terrence and I just looked at him.

“I feel like shit, Uncle T,” the kid said. He was holding his head in both hands and craning his neck to either side. It snapped and popped like dry kindling in a fire.

“You got shot seven times, Tony,” Terrence said. His voice sounded dry and harsh, like he just woke up from a hard night of drinking and too many cigars.

“Damn, Uncle T, it’s Antoine, I keep telling you that. No one calls me Tony anymore.”

“You got shot seven times, Tony,” Terrence repeated. “One of the bullets went in your brain. They didn’t even bother to dig it out when they put you on the table.”

I thought it was a little more detail than the kid probably needed, but Terrence sounded like he was saying it to remind himself more than for his nephew’s benefit.

Tony raised a hand to his forehead and probed the gray, puckered entry wound with his fingertips. “Why ain’t I dead, Uncle T?”

Terrence didn’t say anything. I didn’t either—I just relaxed my vision and looked at Tony with my witch sight. Terrence had said the kid didn’t have any juice, but that wasn’t exactly right. Every human has a little juice in them—an aura or whatever you want to call it. I could see what was left of Tony’s juice soaking into the soggy earth with the rain. It was exactly what I’d expect to see on a human body that had been dead a couple days.

I dropped the sight and looked over at Terrence. He turned to me and I shook my head.

“Tell me what you remember, Tony,” he said, looking back to the kid again. He stayed where he was, about ten feet from where Tony had dropped into the mud.

“I remember all of it. I remember getting shot. We were just hanging out at the store and the Rastas rolled up on us in a black Escalade. I didn’t even have time to be scared, Uncle T. I saw them roll up and then I was down.”

“What else, Tony? You remember anything after that?”

“I remember everything,” he said. “I remember the uniforms showing up, and later the murder police. And after, when the doctors laid me out and started cutting on me. I was awake but I couldn’t move. It didn’t hurt, you know, but I could feel what they were doing.” The kid started crying but there were no tears. His eyes were dry and gray. “I remember the funeral. But I was lying in that fucking box and I couldn’t see anything. I was able to open my eyes but all I could do was lie there and look up at the ceiling.”

“Any hoodoo on him, Domino?” Terrence asked. You could use magic to raise the dead, to make a zombie out of a corpse. I even knew the spell, though I’d never used it.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Maybe that fairy shit?”

“No, I’d see it.” When I’d killed the changeling who’d replaced Adan, I’d also taken his magic. Now I could see fairy glamour as easily as human sorcery and there was no glamour on Tony. Raising zombies wasn’t exactly the Seelie Court’s style, anyway.

“What you think we should do?”

“No clue.”

“We can’t put him back in the ground.”

“No, that doesn’t seem right.”

“Maybe if we wait awhile he’ll die again.”

“Fuck you, Uncle T. You think I can’t hear you?” Tony had stopped crying and was scowling at us.

“Sorry, Tony, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just not sure what to do about this.”

Tony staggered to his feet again. He was moving jerkily around the grave site when we heard a thumping sound coming from the other coffin. Terrence and I looked at each other and then at the grave. We walked over and looked down.

“I hurt, Uncle T,” Tony called from behind us. “Before I couldn’t feel nothing, now it hurts, real bad.”

“Chill out, Tony. I got to help Keshawn.” Terrence dropped to his knees in the mud, reached into the grave and unlatched the coffin. He opened the lid.

The body lying there didn’t look quite as good as Tony’s. Keshawn had taken one in the head, too, but the exit wound had torn away one side of his skull. The funeral home hadn’t done much more than slap some industrial-strength Maybelline on it. I flowed a little juice to steady my nerves and calm my stomach.

“I think I’m hungry, Uncle T,” Tony called.

“I said chill the fuck out, Tony. Give me a minute and I’ll take you to Mickey D’s.”

Keshawn opened his eyes. They were gray, empty and lifeless, just like Tony’s. His lips pulled back in a snarl and bared yellow teeth, and his hands flashed up and grabbed Terrence by the throat. Keshawn screamed and thrashed and pulled Terrence into the grave. Terror welled up from someplace deep in my mind and tried to paralyze me. I flowed more juice to take the edge off it and moved forward to help. Then I heard Tony step up behind me.

“I don’t want Mickey D’s, Uncle T,” he said, and I felt his cold, cold hands on my neck.

Everyone has an irrational fear. For some people it’s spiders, for others it’s snakes, or maybe clowns. I have a big fucking problem with zombies. I can deal with ghosts—even the really creepy ones. Hell, I share my condo with a spook, an old woman named Mrs. Dawson. I can also deal with dead bodies—as long as they stay down. If they get up and try to eat me, that’s just too fucking much.

So when Tony put his hands around my neck, I didn’t spin a combat spell. I didn’t trigger the defensive ring on my pinkie finger or do anything else that might have been vaguely constructive. Instead, my body seized up, my hands flew to my face and I screamed like a little girl. Actually, that’s not quite right. I screamed just like a bimbo in a zombie movie.

I stayed like that, frozen in place and screaming at the top of my lungs, until Tony’s teeth clamped down on my ear. In a zombie movie, flesh would have torn and blood would have sprayed, but fortunately, Tony’s teeth weren’t exactly designed for chewing ears. Blunt teeth or not, I can say one thing about having someone bite into your ear, and I think Evander Holyfield would back me up on this: it hurts like a motherfucker.

It hurt enough that it probably saved my life, or at least my profile. When I felt Tony’s teeth sink into my flesh, my scream turned into an outraged roar and I twisted, swinging an elbow into his face. I heard a sickening, crunchy, squelching sound as it slammed into his nose, and he staggered back from the blow. I turned to face him and put one hand to my ear. I looked at the hand and there was blood on my fingers. I looked up at Tony, who was staggering toward me again, his arms outstretched and his hands grasping like claws.

“You dirty, dead motherfucker,” I said. “You bit my fucking ear.” Tony made a terrible moaning, mewling sound. His lips curled away from his teeth, like that hideous thing chimpanzees do, and he kept coming.

“Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and my force spell hit Tony in the chest like a wrecking ball taking a shot at a condemned building. His body hurtled through the air away from me and slammed into the side of a family mausoleum, the marble cratering from the impact.

“Terrence,” I called over my shoulder, “your fucking nephew wants to eat me.” I heard sounds of a struggle from the grave behind me and I remembered Terrence was having his own issues.

“Smoke him,” he grunted. “He’s family, but that shit only goes so far.”

“A great flame follows a little spark,” I said. A ball of fusion fire appeared in my hand. I flicked my arm and threw it at Tony, and it streaked toward him like a meteor burning through the atmosphere. The fireball exploded when it struck the zombie. I had to shield my eyes from the blast, and the shockwave lifted my hair from my shoulders. When I looked again all that was left of Tony was a blast shadow on the mausoleum wall.

I turned and looked back toward the other grave just as Terrence leaped back. He flowed a rhyme from a gangster rap and liquid fire poured into the grave. Keshawn screamed as he burned, but the screaming stopped long before the fire did. I walked back to Terrence and stood beside him, and we watched the flames dancing in the grave.

“That was fucked up,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It must have been Mobley. He must have put a spell on ’em, done a ritual or something.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Mobley?”

Terrence looked over at me. “What you mean, Domino?”

“I mean, what if your nephews aren’t the only ones?” I looked around the cemetery, and shivered. “What if they’re just the first?”

two

That night, I sat on my bed with my laptop in front of me and searched for Tony and Keshawn on FriendTrace.com. I typed their names in the search box and poured juice into the spell I use to contact the dead.

I got a white screen with the words No Results Found on it. I couldn’t force Terrence’s nephews to take my call, but that’s not what my spell was telling me. It was telling me Tony and Keshawn weren’t in the Beyond. Since they were dead—again—there was really only one other place they could be.

I shut down the laptop, threw on some clothes and went out to the living room. Honey, my piskie roommate, was on the coffee table with four of her sisters. They were playing Chinese checkers, but the game seemed more about pelting each other with marbles than the strategies I’d learned as a child. There was a fair amount of violence in it, since the marbles were almost as large to the piskies as a bowling ball would have been to me.

“Hi, Domino! Wanna play?”

“I need to cross over for a bit. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

“I can come with you.”

“Play your game. I should be in and out.” I sank onto the couch, spun my spirit-walking spell and crossed over to the Between. I grabbed the Colt Peacemaker from the closet and belted the rig around my waist. The weapon had belonged to Wyatt Earp and they called it the Dead Man’s Gun in these parts. They also said it was cursed, but it was still a comfort in a place where I couldn’t use sorcery.

I left my condo and strolled down the blue-lit nighttime street outside my building. I entered the pale mist that shrouded the streets of the shadow city, and the world seemed to spin around me like a vinyl record on a turntable. When I stepped out of the fog, I was standing at the gates of the cemetery.

This was my first time visiting a cemetery in the Between. I’d expected it to be a happening place, the ghostly equivalent of a busy hotel. Instead, it was deserted, quiet and still. In the real world, it had been designed from the sod up to ooze peacefulness and serenity. It was pleasant enough you could almost forget it had corpses buried in it.

In the Between, that calm and soothing ambiance was replaced by something else entirely. Not danger, exactly—I didn’t feel threatened by it. The vibe I got from the place was more like loneliness, regret. The cemetery was the last station at the end of the line. “Everyone gets off here,” it seemed to whisper. “There’s no place else to go.”

I went in through the gates and walked down the winding road toward the graves. The ambient blue light of the Between at night was dimmer here. There were no leaves on the trees that flanked the road, and they cast no shadows.

Tony’s grave was still open, a stark, black shape like a doorway in the ground. I walked to the edge and knelt beside it. “Tony?” I whispered. No response. I tightened my jaw, lay down on my stomach and reached into the grave. It was empty—even the coffin was missing. I hastily stood up and brushed the grave dirt from my clothes. I looked around, and seeing nothing, I walked over to the mausoleum where I’d torched Tony with the fireball spell.

The blast shadow was still there. As I approached, it rippled and flowed away from the wall, and then floated toward me. I jumped back and drew Ned, pointing the pistol more or less at the center of the shifting shadow.

The apparition raised its hands. “Yo, Domino, it’s me, Antoine.”

“What the fuck, Tony, you scared the shit out of me.”

The uppermost part of the shadow—presumably Tony’s head—swirled around, like he was checking himself out. “Yeah, kinda creepy. Sorry ’bout that. You nuked me, guess this is the best I can do.”

“You tried to eat me, Tony.”

“Yeah, I got to apologize for that. Your ear okay?”

I nodded. Honey had dusted up a nice healing glam our for me and my ear was good as new. I’d have to get it pierced again, though. “So what was up with that? Why’d you bite me?”

“I don’t know what got into me, Domino. I just needed it, you know? It’s like when you’re real thirsty and you see some water and you just got to have it.”

“Like an instinct.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I didn’t decide to eat you, my body just needed it. I guess it’s a zombie thing, like in the movies.”

“That fucking bite better not turn me into a zombie, Tony, or I’ll come back and kill you again. I’ll come in with a plan and take my fucking time about it.”

“I don’t think it works that way, Domino. I didn’t get bit by a zombie and I still turned into one.”

“So what now, you’re a ghost?”

“Yeah, I guess, but I’m stuck here.” Tony floated toward me again and then stopped abruptly. “See? This is as far as I can go from where you lit me up. It’s like I’m chained to the fucking muslim.”

“Mausoleum.”

“What?”

“It’s a mausoleum, not a Muslim. So you’re trapped in the place where your body was destroyed.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Keshawn still over there, too. We was talking earlier, before you showed up. He can’t leave his hole.”

I had a spell that bound ghosts and I thought I might be able to reverse it to free Tony. I even had a spell that could banish a ghost to the Beyond. Problem was, I couldn’t cast either spell in this place. I could try to summon Tony into the mortal world but the odds didn’t seem good with him tied down in the Between. “Have you tried to manifest in the physical world, Tony? If you can, I might be able to cut you loose.”

“Nah, Domino, I can’t go nowhere. Like I said, I’m stuck.”

“I could shoot you. If I destroy your ghost form or what ever, maybe it would set you free.”

Tony didn’t say anything for a few moments and I got the feeling he was looking at Ned. “Maybe we could try something else.”

“I can’t really think of anything else, Tony.”

“I can wait. Maybe something will come to you.”

I nodded and was about to respond when a writhing mass of fleshy tentacles flashed down from above and coiled around the shadow. Tony screamed as the tentacles lifted him into the air. I looked up.

A severed head hovered in the air about ten feet above us. It looked male and mostly human, though the skin was a mottled gray and the features were twisted hideously. Long, black hair hung in greasy strands from the head, and the thin, glistening lips were drawn back to reveal a mouthful of pointed teeth. I realized the “tentacles” were actually flayed strands of muscle and tendon, impossibly long, extending from the severed neck. The tentacles were lifting Tony toward the toothy maw, and drool spattered down on the helpless shade.

All of this was enough to bump zombies down to Number Two on the list of things I just can’t tolerate. I brought Ned up and aimed, but just before I squeezed the trigger I saw the thing’s yellowed, bloodshot eyes snap to me. I fired, but the severed head dived with dizzying speed and the shot missed. Tony fell to the ground again and the tentacles released him. The creature turned its attention to me.

It zigged and zagged in the air as I tried to draw a bead with Ned. I fired and missed again, and then one of the tentacles flashed out and wrapped around my arm, immobilizing it. I struggled against it, but the tentacle was like a meaty vise and I couldn’t bring Ned up to take another shot. More tentacles shot out and wrapped around my legs and my waist, and the creature laughed. It sounded wet and diseased. Blood and saliva sprayed from the thing’s mouth and neck.

I reached for the fairy magic inside me, but I suddenly didn’t have the strength. I could feel my magic being drawn from me, into those tentacles, and they throbbed like bulging veins as my juice pumped into them.

The creature extended yet another tentacle, slowly this time, and it coiled around my throat, almost gently, like a lover’s caress. Tony finally picked himself up and flew at the monster, but its head snapped around, its mouth opened and Tony was swallowed up like smoke being sucked into an air cleaner. The creature made a vile gulping sound and licked its lips. Then it turned back to me. It drew close and its jaws stretched wide. Its hot breath smelled like rotten meat.

An arrow burst from the thing’s throat, just above its Adam’s apple, and blood and pus spattered my face. It was in my eyes and my mouth, and somewhere deep inside I started screaming.

I reached out with my free hand and grabbed a tentacle, pulling the creature to me. I took hold of the arrow and twisted it, grinding it against the raw edges of the angry wound, and then I head-butted the thing in the face. The creature shrieked and recoiled from me, and the tentacles withdrew.

“Big mistake, motherfucker.” I brought Ned up and fanned the hammer with my left hand. The monster jerked around in the air like a kite in a gale, but it couldn’t dodge all the ethereal lead the weapon threw its way. One shot pierced the wrinkled gray skin of its cheek and the other took it just above the eye. Black blood trickled down its face and sprayed from the exit wound in the back of its skull.

I heard a sharp snap and another arrow slammed into the side of the creature’s head. The arrow penetrated the monster’s temple and burst out the other side. It looked just like the arrow-through-the-head party gag, and I couldn’t hold back the giggle that bubbled up from the part of me that had gone a little mad.

The creature remained in the air for a few moments, bobbing like a cork in a pool. Then its eyes rolled up in its head and it collapsed in a twitching mass of tentacles. I stepped up to it, stuck the Peacemaker’s barrel in its ear and pulled the trigger a couple times. Maybe more than a couple.

I felt a hand on my wrist, pressing firmly but gently. “That’s enough, miss. It’s over.”

I looked up and saw a ghost. He was wearing a long leather coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Brown hair shot with gray spilled down from the hat to his collar. He looked to be in his fifties, and his face had a seamed and weathered appearance that suited him. He was holding an antique wooden crossbow in one hand and a large leather pack was slung over his shoulder. I nodded and reluctantly holstered Ned.

“That was a disembodied head that eats ghosts,” I said.

“The Karen tribesmen of Burma call it the kephn.”

“Around here we call it Pac-Man.”

The ghost shrugged and extended his hand. “I’m Abe,” he said. “Abe Warren.”

I shook his hand. “Thanks for your help, Abe. I’m Domino.”

Abe nodded and then squinted at me. “You’re alive.”

“Yeah, barely. Like I said, thanks.”

“What I meant was, you’re not dead. You’re not a spirit.”

“Right on.”

“So you’re a witch.”

“I prefer sorcerer. Or sorceress, if you have to be gender-specific about it.”

“A witch spirit-walking in a boneyard at night…I probably don’t want to know what you’re doing here.”

Abe didn’t seem too fond of witches but at least he was polite about it. “Well, why are you here?”

“I’m a ghost-hunter.”

“You’re a ghost yourself, Abe.”

“Well, yes, I was a ghost-hunter in life. I never saw the point in changing vocations just because I died. Matter of fact, it’s a lot easier to find the bastards this way.”

“What do you have against ghosts?”

“Oh, nothing against most of them, just the troublesome ones. The haunts, revenants and vengeful spirits—those are my prey.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any ghosts like that here. Tony got eaten and Keshawn can’t leave his grave.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I’m on patrol, you see. It’s my job to make sure there aren’t any malevolent entities on the prowl.” He drew a gold watch from his vest pocket and snapped it open. “Since there aren’t, I should be on my way.”

“Yeah, just the head. Thanks again for that.”

“My pleasure. Well, there’s plenty more graveyards to visit before the dawn.” He smiled and tugged on the brim of his hat. “Good evening, miss.”

He turned away and I watched as he walked across the cemetery toward the edge of the mist.

“Say, Abe,” I called. He stopped and turned back to me.

“Yes, Miss Domino?”

“You got any idea why Tony and Keshawn were trapped here? It’s like their ghosts were chained to the place where their bodies were destroyed.”

Abe looked down at his feet and rubbed his chin. He looked back up at me and shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “But I reckon a powerful witch such as yourself will get to the bottom of it.” Then he turned and disappeared into the fog.

I didn’t want to chase him into the mist but I thought about going after him. Not because I needed the company, but because I was pretty sure the son of a bitch was lying.

“Why didn’t you tell me the Koreans were making noise about Terrence’s outfit?”

I was meeting with Adan in the second-floor office of his father’s strip club, the Men’s Room. It was early afternoon and there was a light lunchtime crowd in the club below. The girls danced onstage and gossiped in back of it. The men paid their money and pretended they weren’t lonely for a while.

“It’s a political matter, not directly related to the war effort. I figured you had more important things to worry about, and besides, Dad left this kind of thing to me. Anyway, I’m telling you now.”

“Terrence is our ally, Adan. Supporting our alliances is critical to the war effort, and you damn well know it.”

Adan’s voice softened. “I’m not trying to undercut your authority, Domino. Really, I’m not. I just think you’re being soft on Cole because you feel like you owe him something.”

“Yeah, he saved my life.”

“And we’re all grateful for that. I’m grateful.” Adan smiled and looked at me with his dark, soulful eyes. I’d gotten lost in those eyes once before. I didn’t plan on doing it again.

“So you want to show your gratitude by stabbing him in the fucking back? Remind me never to do you a favor.”

“No one has to get hurt, Domino. I’m not talking about taking him out. He’d get bumped down to lieutenant again, but in a stronger outfit. It’s still a promotion for him, from where he was before. We annex his territory and he runs it for us.”

“I’m pretty sure Terrence wouldn’t see it as a promotion. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t blame him.”

“Maybe. He’s not stupid, though, and I think he’d come around. He’d listen to you, Domino.”

“I’m not going to push him out without giving him a chance.”

Adan sighed. “What do you suggest, then? The current situation isn’t stable. If we don’t push him out, someone’s going to put him down.”

“Simeon Wale’s crew is going to cross. Terrence will give him lieutenant.”

“No one mentioned this to me.”

I shrugged. “I thought you had more important things to worry about. Anyway, I’m telling you now.”

“You’re weakening our outfit to support Terrence.”

“Letting Wale cross doesn’t make us weaker. I know I’ll sleep better at night.”

“The other outfits will know you’re supporting Terrence. It will involve us in the conflict. It could escalate.”

“I don’t see how. The move is between Terrence and Wale. I’m just stepping aside.”

Adan frowned and shook his head. “I don’t like it, Domino. I should have been consulted about this. I don’t like you dropping it on me after it’s already done.”

I smiled. “Yeah, it stings a little, doesn’t it?”

“This is different, Domino. Okay, I didn’t tell you about the Koreans. You made a move that impacts my responsibilities without discussing it with me.”

“There wasn’t anything to discuss. If we can help Terrence get right, we’re going to do it. That’s the way we treat our allies around here. Maybe it’s different where you come from.”

Adan flinched, and I had to admit it was a low blow. Adan may have been the crown prince and maybe he’d made his triumphant return, but he was still an outsider to most of the guys in the outfit. A few even suspected King Oberon of running a long con on us. They figured Adan would turn out to be some kind of Manchurian Candidate even more dangerous to our outfit than the changeling had been. Adan had inherited a certain amount of power—enough to make life difficult for me—but he was isolated. In the underworld, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

In my experience, men weren’t usually very complicated, and Adan was no exception. In the last couple months, he’d made it pretty clear he wanted to be friends. Problem was, I needed an associate I could count on a hell of a lot more than I needed a friend, even if he was nice to look at.

“We’re on the same side,” Adan said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I’m just trying to protect my father’s interests, the same as you. We don’t have to be rivals, Domino.”

I wasn’t sure how we could avoid being rivals if he challenged all my decisions. Maybe he thought we could avoid it if he were the one making all the decisions. If that’s what he had in mind, he was going to be really disappointed.

“There’s something else,” I said. “Terrence had to bury two of his nephews yesterday. I was at the cemetery.”

“That’s rough, but from everything you’ve said about Mobley, that’s the way the Jamaicans play the game.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at. After the service, the kids got back up and tried to eat us.” I told Adan about the zombies and about my visit to the Between.

“And you’re sure it wasn’t something Mobley did?” I shook my head. “There was no magic on the kids. I’ve been down that road before so I don’t want to make too much of it. But it wasn’t sorcery and it wasn’t glamour.”

“So what does that leave?”

“I was hoping you might have an idea.” Avalon, where Adan had grown up, was in the Beyond. He’d had more experience with this kind of thing than I had.

“It could be a plague, like in the movies.”

“Jesus, Adan, I was hoping you’d have something a little more solid than fucking Hollywood. Anyway, I got bit by one of them and I haven’t been feeling any cannibalistic urges or anything.”

“Sorry, Domino, I really don’t know. We didn’t get much in the way of zombies. I guess it could be an Unseelie thing. They were hooked up a little more closely with the realms of the mortal dead than we were.”

“The Unseelie?”

“Yeah. There are twin kingdoms in Faerie, one light and one dark. The dark one is called the Unseelie Court.”

“So the Seelie are supposed to be the good fairies? They swapped you out for a changeling, killed a lot of my guys, tried to kill me and planned to take down your father.”

Adan grinned. “Light and dark, not necessarily good and evil. The distinction is more about personality than morals. The Seelie fey are usually in a better mood.”

I didn’t know the Seelie king well, but I had to admit even when he was conspiring to kill me he’d been pretty cheerful about it. “So you think the Unseelie fey might be raising zombies?”

“I don’t really know, Domino. I was raised by the fey but I was never one of them. Everyone knew who I was, what I was and why I was there. I wasn’t trusted. If I had to guess, I’d say no. The Unseelie are still fey. If there were Unseelie glamour on the zombies you’d have seen it.”

“Should we be expecting the Unseelie to move on us, just like the Seelie did?”

“Another thing I don’t know. There wasn’t much contact between the courts, except for the occasional war. I do know King Oberon has an army of spies whose only job is to keep tabs on them. You could ask him.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll stay in touch.” I stood up and left. Adan might have called after me but I was already out the office door and heading down the stairs to the club.

I’d like to say I was thinking about Terrence, about the Jamaicans, about zombies and the possible involvement of the Unseelie Court. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about Adan. I was thinking about how badly I’d wanted him—or at least, the creature that had taken his place—just a few short months ago. At least I’d thought I wanted him. Looking back, it was hard to remember why. But then Adan would smile and those fucking dimples would soften his chiseled face, or he’d tilt his head to the side as he listened to what I was saying. Just like the changeling. I’d catch the scent of apples and cinnamon and I’d feel that familiar pull. It was just like waking from a pleasant dream and wishing for a moment you could go back to sleep.

This Adan wasn’t a changeling. He wasn’t a monster. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.

I’d averted a war with the Seelie Court by giving them Hollywood. King Oberon had taken over a club on Sunset Boulevard that had belonged to one of the conspirators, a vampire I’d gotten to kill. It had been called the Cannibal Club under the vampire’s management, but Oberon had since changed the name to the Carnival Club. He’d done some remodeling and redecorating, too. The Mardi Gras theme was a lot less played out than the Goth thing, and I had to admit the purple, gold and green decor was a lot more festive—gaudier, too, but what do you want from fairies? All in all, Oberon could have done worse. It wasn’t like the world needed another Irish pub or anything.

I spun my parking spell and left my Lincoln out front, then went inside the club. I found Oberon behind the main bar polishing glasses with a white cloth. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and faded jeans and looked more like the drummer in a garage band than a fairy king. The Carnival Club wouldn’t open for hours but a few sidhe were hanging around, lounging at the tables and booths or drinking at the bar. The fairy queen, Titania, was there, and she didn’t look old enough to be in the club.

“Domino, welcome,” Oberon said. “Tequila? I’ll join you.”

“Too early for me, King. How about some of that apple cider you make?”

Oberon reached below the bar and brought out a carafe of the amber liquid. The cider wasn’t too sweet, a little spicy, and I was pretty sure it had some narcotic qualities. I didn’t care—it was one of the best things I’d ever tasted and it reminded me of better times.

“With ice,” I said as he filled a glass.

“You’re a barbarian, Domino,” the king said, but he dropped a few cubes in my glass. He pushed it across the bar to me as I sat down. “What brings you in?”

“The Unseelie Court.”

Oberon frowned. “What about it?”

“I maybe got a problem with zombies. Adan thought the Unseelie fey might be involved. He said they were more closely aligned with the realms of the dead, and all that.”

“Queen Mab has, at times, made the mortal dead a part of her court. Mostly to torment them, from what I’ve seen.”

“Queen Mab? Is she your sister or something?”

“They were lovers,” said Titania.

Oberon glanced over at her. He looked worried. “That was a long time ago, my dear. We’ve been enemies far longer than we were lovers.”

“She doesn’t do zombies, though,” Titania continued. “Very few mortals can cross physically into Avalon, so you’re not likely to find any animated corpses there.”

“Many of the Unseelie sidhe can raise the dead, though,” Oberon said. “When they cross into Arcadia.”

“She hasn’t crossed, husband. None of them have. I’d know.”

“She will.”

“But not yet. And Domino doesn’t care about that. She’s asking about zombies.”

“Yeah,” I said. “One thing at a time.” Arcadia was the sidhe name for the mortal world. The idea that a grouchier sidhe nation would eventually cross over—that was a problem for another day.

“Tell me about your zombies,” Oberon said. I gave him the whole story, and I have to say, neither he nor his queen seemed all that interested.

Oberon kept polishing his glasses. “I know of the kephn. Human souls are its food of choice, but it’s been known to hunt the fey and other spirits in lean times. It feeds on juice and so it can be quite dangerous to the lesser fey. Graveyards, as you might guess, are its primary hunting ground.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s my problem. It’s dead, and any way, it seemed to have a hankering for ghosts, not zombies.”

“Yes, the kephn is incapable of manifesting in the mortal world. It would have no use for zombies so I doubt it was responsible for their creation.”

“So what’s creating them?”

“What makes you think there will be others? Perhaps it was just something that happened to those two and you’ll never know what caused it.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to waste time hoping there won’t be more. I’m not that lucky.”

“Maybe it’s a plague—a viral outbreak or something.”

“Everyone watches way too many movies.”

Oberon shrugged. “This is Hollywood.”

“So you’ve got nothing for me?”

“I’m no expert on zombies, Domino.”

I sighed. “All right, thanks anyway. How’s everything else going? You settling in okay?”

Oberon grinned. “It’s perfect. Hollywood may not be much to look at, but there’s so much juice here. We’re all quite content, I assure you.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you coming to the Bacchanal Ball?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m throwing a party. Here at the club. You should have received an invitation.”

“Sometimes I forget to check my mail. When is it?”

“Tomorrow night. You must attend, Domino. It will be a celebration quite unlike anything you’ve ever experienced.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“Him,” said Titania. “What else?”

Oberon frowned at her. “Our return to Arcadia. The ceremony with which you celebrated our arrival was simple and elegant, but a little understated. That’s not really how we roll.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll be here. Thanks for the invite. Is it formal?”

“It’s a masquerade, of course.”

“So I need a costume?”

Oberon laughed. “You stole my shapeshifter’s glam our, Domino. I’m certain you’ll come up with something wonderful.”

“All right, but I’m bringing Honey.”

Oberon shrugged. “That’s fine. I don’t hold grudges.” That was a lie—he held them better than just about anyone. “There’s one more thing, Domino, a somewhat more serious matter.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s Terrence Cole’s outfit. We’re concerned. We feel as though we’ve left the back door open while our family sleeps.”

“I’m handling it, King.”

“I’ve no doubt you’ll do what you can, within the limitations of the political situation. I understand you’ve given him Simeon Wale’s crew.”

That didn’t take long, but then Oberon’s spies were better than most. “Wale crossed on his own. Wasn’t my idea. I can live without the bastard, though—if it helps Terrence, that’s just a happy coincidence.”

Oberon nodded and smiled. “I don’t know this man Wale as well as you do, of course, but I’m concerned that it won’t be enough. I’m concerned that I was…too diplomatic…when I agreed to surrender Cole’s territory.”

I let the feeling drain from my face and looked at him. “Your diplomacy meant we didn’t have to kill each other. That’s still what it means.”

Oberon held up his hands in mock surrender. “Easy, Domino. I’m not proposing a breach of our treaty. I’m merely pointing out that I could hold Cole’s ground better than he can, with or without Simeon Wale.”

“You couldn’t hold it without the other outfits behind you. And we’re not. Remember that. Maybe there’s something for you in Reseda if you’re feeling cramped.”

“What the fuck would I do with Reseda? Open a carwash?”

I shrugged.

“And it’s not about feeling cramped, Domino. It’s about security. You of all people should understand that.”

“Yeah, I do. I remember when another outsider tried to move in and take my ground.”

“Precisely. And the same thing can happen to Cole, only this time, the outsider may not be as understanding as I was.”

“That’s why we have a treaty, King. Something comes in, we’re united against it. That’s the way we do it. We protect each other. The strong don’t feed on the weak.”

“That’s the way you’d like to do it. That’s not the way it was done in the past. You can’t even be sure your way is going to work. You still don’t know if you can make an army out of a gang. The old way was less risky.”

“Maybe now it is but not in the long run.”

“In the long run we’re all dead.”

“That’s an odd thing for an immortal fairy king to say.”

“Okay, in the long run you’re all dead.”

I laughed and the king did, too. “That’s better,” I said. “The point is, you should appreciate that we can’t be shortsighted about this. You’re the master of the long-term plan. We’re going to need Terrence. We’re going to need all the outfits to be strong.”

“Very well,” Oberon said. “You’re right, of course—I’ve been called many things, but never shortsighted. But as one who has a great deal of experience with long-term plans, let me offer a word of caution. The most dangerous thing about thinking ahead is that you wait too long when the time comes to act. The line between the short run and the long run is indistinct, Domino. Sometimes you can cross it without even realizing it.”

“I understand, King. Terrence is on a deadline but we give him a chance to stand up. That’s the way it’s going to be.”

“I concede, my dear, and once again you’ve proven that I’m no match for you in negotiations.”

I smiled even though it was bullshit. Oberon’s only reason for bringing this up was to put Terrence and me on the clock. We’d established the Seelie Court couldn’t move on Terrence immediately. But if the clock ran down, I’d be all out of excuses and Terrence would have more than the Jamaicans and Koreans to worry about.

I promised Oberon I’d see him at the party and left the club. I wasn’t real happy about how it had gone, but I wasn’t exactly surprised, either. I’d learned Oberon was someone I could deal with, but the deals always left me feeling like I’d gotten the short end.

But again, what do you want from fairies?

three

I woke up to a phone call from Adan just after dawn the next morning.

“Simeon Wale hit the Jamaicans last night,” he said when I picked up the phone.

“Yeah, good morning to you, too. What fucking time is it?”

“It’s about five-thirty. Did you hear me?”

“Yeah, Wale hit Mobley. What did you think was going to happen?”

“He burned a couple apartment blocks in Imperial Courts, Domino. A lot of people are dead.” Imperial Courts was the largest housing project in L.A., and it was the heart of Francis Mobley’s territory between Watts and Compton.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “What the fuck did he do that for? How many people?”

“According to the news, no confirmed deaths but a lot of serious injuries.”

“I thought you said people were dead.”

“They are, but the news teams haven’t figured it out yet. They’re calling it ‘The Miracle in the Projects.’”

“Oh, fuck me. Zombies?”

“Yeah. Maybe a hundred.”

“Jesus Christ. What’s happening there now?” I heard Adan take a deep breath. “We’re losing it, Domino. I think we maybe lost it already. They’re taking them to the hospitals. There’s not much we can do about it.”

“What’s Mobley doing?”

“Community service. He’s got his posses out there helping with the relief effort. But you can forget about getting him to sit down with Terrence. There won’t be any sit-down, not after this.”

“Stupid fucking Wale,” I said, and slammed the receiver against my skull a few times.

“What are we going to do, Domino?”

I really had no idea but I had to think of one, fast. “It sounds like containment isn’t an option. We’ve got to start thinking about a cleanup. I’m not as worried about the projects, but we’re going to have to put soldiers in the hospitals.”

Adan laughed and there was an ugly edge to it. “That’s it? You want to send death squads to the hospitals? Domino, it’s on the news!”

“Okay, not our soldiers. We’ll handle the projects—we won’t attract much attention there. We can send the fey to the hospitals. They can deal with the zombies and glamour the civilians. They can keep a lid on it, if anyone can.”

“That might work, if Oberon agrees to help. You’ll be indebted to him, though.”

I didn’t answer. If I played my cards right I wouldn’t need Oberon for this. “Why don’t you go ahead and say it, Adan.”

“What?”

“I told you so. You’re thinking it, might as well be man enough to say it.”

The line was silent for a few moments. “I wasn’t thinking it, Domino. You didn’t know Simeon Wale was going to do this. And the zombie problem definitely isn’t your fault.”

“It was my plan to send Wale over, and it went about as wrong as a plan can go.”

“Look, I’m not going to pretend I agreed with your decision. I didn’t, but not because I anticipated anything like this.”

“No, you were just worried it would involve us in the conflict, that it would escalate and pull us in. You were right.”

“Maybe,” Adan said. “And maybe next time I’ll be the one who fucks up. The truth is, I’ve been at this, what, ten weeks? Most of the time I’m just bluffing my way through and hoping no one notices. Neither one of us is my father, Domino. We need each other to do this thing.”

“I’ll try.”

“As will I, starting now. I’ll take care of Imperial Courts. You handle the hospitals.”

“Done,” I said. “Call me.”

“I will. Good luck.”

“You, too. And Adan?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks,” I said and hung up the phone.

“Honey,” I called. I’d thrown on some clothes and I was in the kitchen nuking a frozen snack. Honey flew in from the second bedroom she and her family had converted into the Enchanted Forest.

“Morning, Domino. What’s for breakfast?”

“Hot Pocket,” I said, and looked at the box. “Ham and Cheddar.”

“Ugh. I don’t see how you can eat that stuff.”

“I’m not in the mood for a burrito. Say, Honey, how do feel about killing zombies?”

Honey’s face brightened and her wings scattered orange pixie dust. “Did you get an Xbox?”

“No, I mean real ones.”

“Oh. I’ve never killed one. I bet it’s not as fun as it is in the games.”

“Probably not, but do you think you could handle some zombies?”

“Are they really slow, like in the movies?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only seen two of them. I think it depends on how long they’ve been dead and the condition of the body.”

“I think I can handle it. How many are there?”

“Maybe a hundred. Maybe more if we don’t move fast. They’re in the hospital.”

“Oh. I’ll probably need some help. I can bring my sisters.”

“Yeah, bring your whole family. I’m going, too, but it could get nasty and we need to clean it up fast.”

“Okay, sounds good. I don’t think we’ve been spending enough time together.”

“Thing is, it’s not just the zombie killing. There will be a lot of civilians at the hospital. We need to dust them so they don’t remember what happened.”

“Sure, that’s easy. We could do something even better. We don’t have to just make them forget—we could make them think something else happened.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe a weather balloon exploded and killed everyone.”

“We could just make them forget.”

“Gas pocket?”

“Nah.”

“Whatever you say. Are you ready to go now?”

“Yeah, we need to hurry. You round everyone up and I’ll finish my breakfast.”

“Cool,” Honey said, and she flew back into the bedroom.

Twenty-eight piskies, including Honey, piled into my Lincoln with room to spare. They huddled on the seats and dash, jostling for a favorable position. Honey perched on the steering wheel and pretended to help me drive. They were all invisible to human eyes so this was far less of a spectacle than it sounds.

All of the piskies were female. Along with Honey, there was a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a few aunts, a handful of sisters and several nieces and cousins. I’d asked Honey about it and she’d said piskie families were always female. The males, apparently, left the nest when they reached puberty and only returned to the females to mate. When the female was pregnant, they left again. Actually, it worked a lot like the barrio where I grew up.

Most of the “survivors” from the fire at Imperial Courts had been taken to Centinela Medical Center in Inglewood, so that was our first stop. I used my changeling mojo to assume the appearance of a blonde doctor with enough curves to make surgical blues look good. I spun my parking spell and we took a spot reserved for ambulances. I dropped a ward on the building so no one would be able to leave, and then we all went in through the emergency room doors.

The situation at Centinela had already gone to hell. When the automatic doors closed behind us, we saw a young nurse run screaming from a treatment room to our right. A black male who looked to be in his sixties was chasing her, dragging a metal stand behind him from the IV line still planted in his arm. He had third-degree burns over most of his body and the remains of his clothes were deep-fried into his skin.

“I got this,” I said. “Spread out and clear the place, room by room. Make sure you only hit the dead ones. Some of the victims should still be alive.”

My weapon of choice was my ghost-binding spell. “At first cock-crow,” I chanted, “the ghosts must go, back to their quiet graves below.” My working theory was that the zombie was just a ghost trapped in its mortal remains. Sure enough, the spell pulled the man’s shade from its ravaged vessel and the barbecued corpse dropped limply to the tile.

The piskies used their glamour. I didn’t really want to know what they did to kill the zombies. They just flew up to the victims and dusted them, and the walking corpses fell over and stopped moving.

We moved methodically through the first floor of the hospital and the heaviest work was in the emergency department and triage wards. By the time my kills reached double digits, I’d turned my brain off and stopped registering what I was doing. I saw enough before that happened to realize some of the zombies weren’t victims of the fire. They were nurses, and doctors and candy stripers, and they’d died when their patients fed on them. Some of them were so badly ravaged they were barely recognizable as human. They were still moving, though, and they were still hungry. They dragged themselves along the white tile, leaving smeared blood trails behind them, and they reached for me eagerly before I tore their spirits free.

It took a little over three hours to reach the top floor of the hospital. When we were finished with the zombies, we started back down, floor by floor, glamouring the surviving employees and patients. None of them would remember what had happened and I felt like we were doing them a kindness.

It was a pretty thin cover-up and I knew there’d be an investigation. A lot of questions would be asked but none of them would have any real answers. There were going to be a lot of bodies but in the end it wouldn’t lead anywhere. No witnesses, no leads, no case.

When we arrived at Broadway Hospital for the second phase of the cleanup, Agents Lowell and Granato were standing outside by their black sedan.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “As if I don’t have enough to worry about without these fucking guys showing up. Honey, y’all hang back and let me handle this.”

Agent Lowell spoke as I walked up to them. “Ms. Riley, please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“I’m not in the business of raising zombies,” I said. The fact they were here meant they already knew what was going on. No point in lying about it.

“And the project fire?” asked Granato. He always wanted to be the hard ass.

“Not guilty, but I know who did it. We’ll take care of it.”

“And do you know who’s responsible for the zombies?” Lowell asked.

“I was hoping you might know what’s going on. Before this, it was just a couple of gangsters.” Tony and Keshawn hadn’t really been gangsters, but it would have been too fine a distinction for Lowell and Granato.

“It’s not just gangsters and it’s not just the victims of the fire. We’ve gotten reports from all over L.A.—everyone who dies is getting back up.”

“I figured it would go that way. And Stag doesn’t have any intelligence on this thing?” Homeland Security’s Special Threat Assessment Group had compiled a lot of research on the supernatural, even if Lowell and Granato were the only agents with any juice.

“We assume it’s a PNC,” Lowell said.

I’d gotten enough of asking him to explain his fucking acronyms the first time we met, when the sidhe came across in what Stag called an MIE—a Major Incursion Event. I glared at him and waited for the translation.

“Paranormal Contagion,” he said finally. “You know, a zombie plague.”

“Jesus Christ, not you guys, too.”

“I can tell you this,” said Granato, “if there’s anything that concerns the government more than an MIE it’s a PNC.”

“This is extremely serious, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said. “We can’t isolate the pathogen or identify the vector, so we have no way of containing the outbreak. We could lose the city, just for starters. That pushes most of the contingency plans off the table and the decision-makers go right to the unconventional protocols.”

It seemed like every time there was a little supernatural hiccup, someone in the government wanted to reach for the red button. “It’s not a zombie plague, Lowell. I got bit by one of the damn things, and I feel fine—as fine as I can, considering I just had to clear a hundred-plus zombies out of Centinela Hospital.”

“How do you explain what’s happening, then?”

I exhaled slowly and shook my head. “Beats the hell out of me. From what you said, everyone that dies is turning into a zombie—everyone, no matter how they died, no matter where in the city they died. That sounds like a much bigger event than your horror-movie outbreak.”

“A CMI,” Lowell said, nodding thoughtfully. He looked up and noticed my irritation. “Critical Metaphysical Instability. A breakdown in the structure or natural processes of our reality.”

“Yeah, that sounds more like it,” I said.

“If you’re right, this situation represents an extreme threat to the United States.”

“No shit, Lowell.”

“I mean, a CMI…this is End Times stuff, Ms. Riley.”

“Well, I haven’t seen Jesus or heard any trumpets sounding so I guess it’s not all that bad. We just have to figure out what’s causing it and put it right.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“Fuck if I know. Is it just L.A.? Have you gotten any reports from anywhere else?”

“Just L.A.,” Granato said, “for now.”

“That’s good. Okay, I’ll look into it. I’m not sure how, but I’ll figure something out. I can ask Mr. Clean if he knows anything about it, though I consider it a last resort.”

“Mr. Clean?”

“My familiar. We don’t get along real well but he knows his shit.” Problem was, every time I went to him he was playing another angle, trying to get me killed. It was a hate-hate relationship.

“How quickly can you move?” Granato asked. “We have to submit a report on this. We can try to buy you some time and we can…suppress…the media coverage of the story. But the government won’t stand back and watch L.A. turn into a necropolis.”

“A necropolis?”

“Yes,” Lowell said. “Even in the best of times, more than two hundred people die in L.A. every day. We’ve done some, uh, testing in the last twenty-four hours. Everyone who dies seems to go mad and degenerate into cannibalism, eventually, and that just creates more zombies. It won’t take long for this to become a city of the dead.”

“How does the cannibalism tie into your CNE theory?”

“CMI,” said Lowell. “Based on the experiments, feeding on human flesh seems to be the only way to slow the zombies’ physical decomposition.”

“So they eat people, they don’t degenerate?”

Granato shook his head. “They don’t rot as fast. Depending on how they died, some of these freaks don’t even know they’re dead. Either way, it drives them mad when they start in on the other white meat.”

I nodded and rubbed my ear absently. “Okay, guys, I’ll try to hurry. I have other things on my to-do list, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Well, right now, I’ve got to clear some fucking zombies out of another hospital. Maybe you can help with that, it’ll go a lot faster. Then, I’ve got a gang war that just went hot. I’ve got to make sure that doesn’t blow up and put a lot more zombies on the street.”

“Is that all?” Granato said, smirking.

“No, Granato, it’s not—thanks for asking. I’ve also got a party to go to tonight, and I haven’t even decided what to wear.”

Attending the Bacchanal Ball with everything that was going on felt a little like fiddling while Rome burned, but I wasn’t just in it for the free food and booze. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to roll back the zombie outbreak. CMIs aren’t exactly my specialty. If it got out of control I’d need Oberon’s help to defend my territory and my people, and I didn’t want to irritate him by blowing off his little soiree.

I also knew most of the supernatural A-list would be at the ball and I hoped I might find someone who could tell me what was going on. I’d struck out with Mr. Clean. He said it was probably a zombie plague and noted that Night of the Living Dead was on his channel that night.

So I had good reasons not to cancel. Plus, there’d be free food and booze.

The problem was the costume. I thought it’d be cool if Honey and I picked a theme together. I suggested shapeshifting into a gorilla and she could go as a banana. Honey didn’t care for that idea and told me to do something to myself with the banana.

“I know,” said Honey, “you could go as a dominatrix and I could be your whip.”

“Seems like it’d be a little boring to go as an inanimate object, even a whip.”

“You wanted me to be a banana.”

“Yeah, but you could be like the Fruit of the Loom guy, with arms, and legs, a face and stuff.”

“Forget it, Domino. Anyway, I don’t think the Fruit of the Loom guys have a banana.”

“Okay, I could go as a pirate captain and you could be my parrot. You perch on my shoulder all the time anyway.”

“Too unoriginal. There will probably be a lot of pirates there.”

“Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle.”

“Only if you’re Tinkerbelle.”

“Witch and black cat.”

“We’re going to a ball, not trick-or-treating.”

“Jesus, Honey, we’re never going to come up with anything.”

“Oh, I know! You can be an angel and I’ll be a little devil on your shoulder. Like the parrot, but sexier.”

“Ironic. I like it. But I thought fairies didn’t like Christian stuff.”

“Christians didn’t come up with angels and devils.”

“Whatever, let’s not get into it.” I got enough blasphemy from Mr. Clean—I didn’t need it from Honey, too.

What followed was a game of one-upmanship as we tried to outdo each other for the sexiest costume. Since I was shapeshifting and Honey was using her piskie glamour, it escalated quickly. We finally decided to call it a draw, but by that time we looked like we’d walked off the set of a porn video with a paranormal theme.

I was wearing a sheer white shift that might have reached midthigh if I pulled on the hem real hard. A halo of golden light encircled my head and elegant feathery wings fluttered at my back. I chose a pair of white stilettos that hurt like hell but did amazing things to my calves. I added some curves to fill out the shift, and most of them were plainly visible through the thin fabric. I thought I heard Mr. Clean’s chuckling at one point, but the TV wasn’t on.

I finished off the ensemble with a white garter, panties and stockings to maintain some sense of modesty, at least from the waist down.

Honey went with classic red leather. It started out as a bustier but was quickly reduced to a thong, thigh-high boots and something that might have been a bra or pasties, depending on where you draw the line. She completed the look with cute little horns, a tail and the requisite pitchfork.

When we were finished, we stood in the middle of my bedroom and admired our handiwork in the full-length mirror hanging on the closet door.

“We’re going to do some damage,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think I’m cheating with the shapeshifting?”

“No way, it’s a masquerade. Besides, your boobs are spectacular.”

“Yeah. I always hoped they’d look like this when I grew up.”

“You should keep them.”

“Nah, just for the party. One night is enough.”

“Not for me it’s not.”

“You’ll live. Buy a magazine or something.”

“You’re beautiful, Domino.”

I smiled. “I have to be to keep up with you.”

If the End Times were upon us, the Bacchanal Ball was the right kind of party to close things out. Oberon had glamoured the whole club. I could see the magic plainly enough, but even without the witch sight I’d have known it the instant Honey and I walked in the door. All my worries and inhibitions literally dropped away from me at the threshold. I’d had a little headache when we left the condo but it vanished when I entered the club. I didn’t want to think. I only wanted to see, and hear, and smell and taste. I just wanted to feel.

Luckily, Oberon had provided plenty of amusements to indulge the partygoers’ senses. Witch-light cast a soft, surreal glow across the club, and the space was filled with hundreds—maybe thousands—of exotic flowers. The main bar was gone and it had been replaced by a huge oak banquet table piled high with food and drink of every description. A chamber orchestra performed on the stage—all of the musicians sidhe—and the music they played made me ache with longing for something beautiful I’d lost and then forgotten.

The costumes were incredible—no surprise, given all the glamour and sorcery in the room. Oberon appeared as Pan, standing at least seven feet tall on a goat’s legs, with curling ram’s horns, golden hair and a roguish thatch of whiskers on his chin. Titania was a forest nymph, which meant she was more than half naked and had leaves in her long red curls. These images suited them somehow, and I found myself wondering if these were their true forms, or had been once.

“Welcome to Arcadia, m’ladies,” the king said, bowing dramatically. “Welcome to the Dream.”

And that’s just what it was, that first true night in the fairy king’s Arcadia. Later, the memories would dance away from my conscious thoughts like embers on the wind. I remember we ate and drank, and everything I tasted was the very best thing, each morsel and sip a unique delight.

Terrence was there, an ebon-skinned Egyptian god with the head of a jackal. I remember Adan, and he tasted like cinnamon and apples again. I remember Honey lying beside me and a handsome young piskie named Jack, and I remember the joy I felt when I saw them together.

I remember Anton was there but I don’t remember what he was doing. I can only hope he wasn’t doing much.

At some point during the endless revel, I heard a song I recognized. A single violin played a sad, sweet melody that was at once haunting and seductive. The instrumental went on for a long time, and then Titania stepped onto the stage and began to sing.

The song was “Hotel California.” I remember looking around at the crowd. Some danced, slowly swaying as if in a trance, and others stood quietly watching the stage. All were weeping, and I realized I was, too. I can’t describe what I heard, and anyway, the sound was only part of it. The queen poured an immortal lifetime of passion and sorrow into the song. I remember thinking if there were real angels, this was the song they would sing.

I don’t remember the song ending, but Titania had left the stage when the dream turned into a nightmare.

I was reclining on a velvet couch with my dress bunched around my waist. Adan was draped over me and he was kissing my neck. Honey was curled around my forearm, naked and sleeping, and Jack was spooning her. He was also naked.

I heard screams and shouts, and I smelled sulfur and decay. Bodies were hurled away from the center of the room or crumpled where they stood. I heard the sound of tearing flesh and cracking bone. I saw blood splash like buckets of paint on the walls and the floor.

“Fomoiri!” Oberon yelled, and I saw him charge the dance floor with a silver greatsword in his hands.

I didn’t recognize the king’s name for it, but finally, I saw the demon.

It was massive, towering above the crowd, but darkness clung to it and its form was constantly shifting, twisting, so that my eyes didn’t want to focus on it. It was vaguely humanoid and it was burning from the inside out, flame spilling from its eyes and mouth.

There were no batwings or horns. As I forced myself to look at it, I realized it was very like a human, except for the size, the special effects and the hideous deformities. Its back was hunched, its skull was misshapen and bone spurs pierced the mottled hide stretched over rippling bands of muscle.

The demon turned to Oberon as he charged, and it roared. Fire exploded from its mouth and engulfed the king, but it didn’t slow him down. He slammed into the thing and buried the sword in its side. The demon howled and swung one impossibly long arm. Its fist smashed into Oberon’s head with a sickening crunch, and the king went down.

The fairy king went down.

This was enough, at last, to shock me from my stupor. I got up and advanced on the monster. I started spinning spontaneous combat spells as fast as I could pull the juice, and they flowed around the demon like water around a stone. I hit the thing with malevolent glamours and it didn’t even notice.

By this time, the other survivors had recovered, too, and the air around the demon had become a storm of arcane energy. It just kept killing, and it finally dawned on me that there might have been a reason Oberon had attacked it with a sword.

“Physical attacks!” I shouted, and my words were followed shortly by the deafening sound of gunfire as all the gangsters who were still alive unloaded on the demon. I’d left my forty-five at home on account of my minimalist costume. I could have hidden it with glamour, but it would have ruined the experience. I snatched a semiautomatic from the waistband of a fallen soldier and emptied the magazine at the demon.

Bullets didn’t seem to have much effect, either.

I turned and ran back the way I’d come, diving behind the couch I’d been lying on. “I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness,” I said, and I crossed into the Between.

In the spirit world, the demon was all special effects and no nasty body. It was a massive black shadow of shifting darkness marked only by the fire in its eyes and mouth. I got up and ran for the door. When I got outside, I kept running and plunged into the mist. I retrieved Ned from the front closet of my condo and made it back to the club in no more time than it would take the demon to kill a couple dozen revelers.

I eased inside and pressed my back against the wall, the Peacemaker gripped in both hands in front of me.

“I know you’re cursed, Ned,” I whispered. “I know this would be a really great time for the curse to show up, for you to earn your nickname. But the guy who sold you to me said you were an artifact, and I really, really need you right now.”

I brought the gun to my lips and kissed the barrel.

“So please, Ned, I’m begging you, just this once. Get hostile with this ugly motherfucker.” Then I extended my arms, aimed as steadily as I could, thumbed back the hammer and squeezed the trigger.

I squeezed it a lot, as fast as I could work the action. Ned danced gaily in my hands and burning sapphire holes opened in the demonic shadow. It threw back its head and screamed as the holes widened, the blue fire feeding eagerly on the darkness.

Then it turned and came for me. I closed my eyes and kept firing.

I’m not sure how long I kept at it after the demon was dead. When I finally opened my eyes, the thing was a smoking puddle of black tar on the floor, the ephemeral fire still flickering on the surface. Adan stood on the other side of the evil pool, the king’s greatsword in his hands. Black tar oozed along the blade and spattered against the floor.

I sank to the floor and struggled for air with huge gasping breaths. “Domino, you silly bitch, you don’t even really breathe here,” I whispered, and then I started giggling.

“It’s okay, Domino,” Adan said. “You killed it.”

“I did or you did?” Adan grinned. “We did.”

“How did you get here?”

“The same way I got to Arcadia—through that first gate you built for Oberon.”

“You’re really here. You’re not spirit-walking, like me—you’re physical.”

“I don’t know why I’m able to do it. Maybe it’s a gift I was born with.”

“Or maybe it’s something Oberon did to you when he took you.”

“Maybe,” he said. “And still, you got here first.”

I looked at the spreading, toxic sludge. I reached out and dabbed my fingers in the tar, and tasted them. The taste was foul, putrescence and fresh blood, with enough acidity to burn my tongue. There were a couple familiar notes, too. One of them I couldn’t quite put my finger on; the other one pissed me off.

I stood up and holstered Ned. “See you on the other side,” I said. I didn’t want to leave the weapon in the club, so I had to make another round-trip to my condo. When I returned, I stepped back into the mortal world and into the slaughterhouse.

The dead were everywhere, but only the fey were staying down. The humans were nursing wounds they couldn’t possibly have survived and some of them were already starting to look a little crazy.

Oberon was stretched out on the floor, his head cradled in Titania’s lap. He’d returned to his youthful, sidhe form. He was bleeding but at least he was conscious. The queen wouldn’t let anyone else get close, but she didn’t object when Oberon waved me over.

“You slew the Fomoiri,” the king said.

“We did,” I said, nodding at Adan. I looked but there was no corpse in this world, not even a puddle of tar.

“I’m in your debt, Domino.”

“Nah. Really it was just self-defense.”

“This was my party. I’m the host.” He paused and looked up at Titania, and smiled. “You defended my queen.”

I shrugged. “You want to return the favor someday, I’m not going to argue much.”

Oberon nodded and then his face hardened. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to clean this up.”

I looked around the room at the carnage. Most of the living dead were my soldiers. I saw Honey. She was sitting on the couch again with Jack, though I remembered hearing her battle cry during the fight.

I also saw Anton. He sagged against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him. His torso had been torn open and he was trying to shovel his guts back into the cavity.

I shook my head. “No way, King. I’m not putting them down.” Then I walked over to Anton. He looked up as I approached and I saw he was crying.

“I was dancing, Domino,” he said. “Did you see me?”

“I missed it, Anton. I bet you danced real good.”

“I was dancing with the pretty fairy.” He looked toward the dance floor, and then tucked his chin into his chest and bawled. I turned and saw a bloody tangle of meat that might once have been a female sidhe.

I tightened my jaw, bit down on my lip and turned away. Honey and Jack flew over to me and Adan followed.

“What are you going to do, Domino?” Honey whispered.

I stared at her, blinked and ground my teeth. “I will not put that fat son of a bitch down.”

“We don’t have a choice, Domino,” Adan said. “You know what will happen if we don’t.” He tried to put his arm around me but I jerked away.

“Honey, you and the other fey see what you can do. Save the ones that are still alive, then patch up the dead the best you can.” I pointed to Anton. “Start with him.”

I walked to the center of the dance floor and looked around. “Listen up,” I said. “Those of you who died tonight, you’re going to start getting hungry. You know the drill—you’ve all seen enough fucking zombie movies. You’re going to want human flesh. You’re going to need it.”

I paused and looked at Anton. “You can have all you want,” I said quietly, and then I looked out at the survivors again. “Eat up. It might keep your bodies intact, keep you more or less human. But there’s only one place you can feed. If I find you anywhere else, I put you down.”

“Where should we go, Domino?” Anton asked. “I’m hungry already.”

“You go find Mobley and his boys, Anton.”

Adan came up behind me and whispered in my ear. “Domino, no, you can’t do this. You don’t even know Mobley was responsible for that thing.”

I turned and looked at him, and whatever he saw in my eyes made him step back. “I know,” I said. “I tasted his fucking juice on it.”

I turned back to Anton and nodded. “Go on,” I said, and smiled. “Pig out.”

four

The dream had become a nightmare, and now the party turned into a war council. Oberon had converted an unused storage space in the back of the club into a conference room. Terrence, Adan and I followed him in and joined the fairy king and his queen at the long, rectangular table.

“Who’s Fomoiri?” I asked when we were seated. “It’s a demon, isn’t it?”

Oberon nodded. “Not who, what. A Fomorian. It is what some of your kind call the Firstborn.”

I’d always thought demons were fallen angels, but Mr. Clean claimed they were actually Preadamites—the first race given souls and granted dominion over the earth. According to the jinn, they lacked empathy, conscience, the knowledge of good and evil, and so they had become corrupted and were cast out of the mortal world.

It seemed they were back.

“They are an ancient race,” the king said. “An ancient enemy.”

“Francis Mobley brought it here,” I said. “A summoning of some kind.”

Oberon looked at me and his face went hard. “No, Domino. You brought it here. Your actions on behalf of this man,” he said, gesturing at Terrence, “brought this thing into my house. Your efforts in defense of my queen do not absolve you of that crime.”

“Ain’t got nothing to do with Domino,” Terrence said. “Mobley sent that thing after me.” Terrence’s Egyptian costume was gone, and he reached a hand inside his jacket. He pulled out a fancy parchment envelope and threw it on the table. “I guess I didn’t invite myself here tonight.”

Oberon stared at the invitation and then at Terrence. The muscles under the skin of his face shifted and rippled, like something hidden was trying to get out. “Nevertheless,” the king said, “it was not prudent for Domino to throw in with you, Mr. Cole. Even the acting boss of her own outfit opposed her decision.”

“I’m not Domino’s boss, Sire,” said Adan. “And I supported her decision. I still do. Terrence is our ally, just as you are. Mobley is our enemy. It isn’t complicated.” I looked at him and tried to keep the surprise from my face. He didn’t return the look and his expression remained impassive. He was a good liar.

Oberon’s cold stare locked on Adan for a few moments, and then his face relaxed. “Very well,” he said, and looked at me. “It appears I misjudged the situation. Domino, I beg forgiveness for my ill-considered accusations. It has been a difficult night.”

“Unnecessary but accepted, King. Adan has it right— Mobley is the bad guy. There’s no profit in turning against each other. I figure that’s why he sent the demon here and not to Terrence’s bedroom some night.”

Oberon inclined his head, deeply enough that it was almost a bow. “The question is, then, what do we do about it?”

“The bad news is the conflict between Terrence and Mobley has escalated,” I said. “The good news is, the political niceties just got flushed and the gloves are off. Mobley is an easy problem to solve.”

“You sure, D?” Terrence asked. “Motherfucker summoned a demon. I don’t know where he got the juice. Don’t know where he got the chops. It ain’t nothing I could do.”

“And if he summoned one,” Adan said, “we have to assume he can do it again.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s work that angle. How the fuck did he do it?”

“There are rituals, of course,” said Oberon. “But I hadn’t thought there was yet enough magic in the world to sustain the Fomoire—nor for a man like Mobley to call one.”

“I got a taste of the juice. I can try to reconstruct the ritual.” That still wouldn’t explain where Mobley got the craft or the juice to pull it off, but it was a start.

“That sounds real good, D,” said Terrence, “but Mobley ain’t even our only problem. Zombie motherfuckers is getting out of control.”

Oberon shrugged. “Our concern is the Fomoire, not the zombies.”

“How do you figure?” I asked. “Looks to me like the zombies are everybody’s problem.”

“You may have noticed,” the king said, “that my people are immune to this plague.”

“I have a theory about that,” Adan said. “The zombies are created when souls are unable to leave the body after death.”

“So why are the sidhe immune?” I asked.

“We don’t have souls,” Titania said.

Awkward. I felt like I’d just told an off-color joke in mixed company.

Oberon chuckled. “There’s no reason for discomfort, Domino. It’s not a matter of lack or misfortune. We are creatures of spirit wrapped in a thin veil of flesh. You are flesh that imprisons a small measure of spirit. Neither better nor worse, only different.”

“Okay, so the Seelie Court won’t go zombie,” I said. “That’s good. But it’s still bad news for you if the rest of the city does.”

Oberon didn’t say anything and the expression on his face made it clear he didn’t entirely agree. Was it possible he viewed a Los Angeles without humans—living ones, anyway—as an opportunity?

“She’s right, husband,” Titania said. “We need them.” The “for now” at the end of the sentence was no less obvious for being unspoken.

“Yeah,” I said, “you need us. Oh, and let’s not forget the moral tragedy of the whole fucking human race being wiped out by fucking zombies. Maybe we should consider that, too.”

Oberon and Titania looked at each other and then back to me. They smiled in unison. “Of course,” they said.

“We are your friends, Domino,” the king said. “We wish you no harm. But our first obligation is to our own people. We would expect no less of you.”

“I’m overwhelmed, King. Thing is, I need your help with the zombies. Someone has to contain this thing and your people are obviously better suited to it than mine. I send my soldiers out to herd zombies, some of them are going to end up swelling their ranks. I don’t like the math. Eventually, I’m out of soldiers and I’ve got more zombies than ever.”

“And what of the Fomoire?”

“We can deal with Mobley. Anton and his crew should keep them busy for a while. Terrence, you help them out. Hit that motherfucker with everything you’ve got. There will have to be a reckoning with Simeon Wale at some point, but not now. We need him.”

“Consider it done, Domino.”

“In the meantime, I’ll try to figure out how Mobley called the demon and what’s causing the zombie plague. Adan, I’d like your help with that.”

He nodded. “I think they may be related.”

“How so?”

“The king is right—there shouldn’t be enough magic to pull the Firstborn into this world and keep them here. Not yet. The dead rising, though…the normal rules are breaking down. Whatever’s causing it, there are consequences to something like that. The walls are falling. It would make a summoning much easier.”

“A Critical Metaphysical Instability,” I said, and Adan cocked an eyebrow at me. “Never mind. But I’ll bet you’re right.”

“I don’t like the idea that your attention will be divided between the zombies and the Fomoire, Domino,” Oberon said. “If Mobley is capable of summoning more of the Fomoire into this world, nothing is a higher priority. Not even a zombie plague.”

“My attention won’t be divided—not for long. I need to break down the spell because I tasted the juice. Once that’s done, I’ll give you and Terrence what I’ve got and you can deal with it.”

The king smiled and bowed his head. “That is acceptable to us.”

I’m so happy for you. “Okay, this sounds like a plan,” I said. “Terrence and his outfit go stone-cold gangster on Mobley. The Seelie Court cowboys up on the zombies. Adan and I run down the summoning spell and then look for whatever’s putting Death out of business.”

There were nods all around the table and the council broke up. Adan and I sat together in silence after the others had left. He reclined in his chair, drinking wine from a crystal goblet, lost in thought. I knew what was coming—the Talk—and I really wasn’t in the mood. The way I saw it, whatever happened between us at the party had happened, and that was all there was to it. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what had happened—Oberon had slipped us all a magic roofie when we walked in the club.

But I just knew Adan felt the need to talk it over. I could see he was thinking about it, the way he sat there, staring at his goblet and turning it in circles on the table. The only question was what type he’d turn out to be. There was the annoyingly sensitive “we’ve got to share our feelings” type. Or he could be the irritatingly analytical “we’ve got to dissect this and figure out exactly what it means” type. If I was really unlucky, he could turn out to be the nice guy “I’ll pretend I’m not needy and then stalk you” type. I hated that type.

Adan sighed and shook his head, and then looked up at me. Here it came. “I just have to know,” he said, “did we have a foursome with those piskies?”

I laughed, choked and felt wine flood my nasal passages. Adan started laughing, too, and that made it worse. I hooted and howled, my eyes watering and my stomach clenching painfully. I finally managed to catch a little breath and gasped, “The guy, Jack, had to be a full nine inches.” Adan doubled over and started slapping the table, and I lost it completely. All the pain, and fear, and horror of the demon attack and the zombie plague that threatened to tear the city apart from the inside out—all of it just got flushed away. It was the oldest and most powerful magic, the kind of magic humans had always used to banish the darkness.

After long, helpless minutes we finally managed to control ourselves. Adan took deep, shuddering breaths and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Finally, he looked at me and grinned. “Are we cool?”

“Like the other side of the pillow,” I said.

As if on cue, Honey and Jack buzzed into the room. They stopped, hovering together in midair, and looked at us. “Oh, Domino, what’s wrong?” Honey said. “Have you two been crying? Has something else happened?”

Adan and I looked at the piskies and then at each other. Adan made a sound that was half choke and half sneeze, like he’d taken a deep drag on a harsh joint. The laughter bubbled up again and brightened the world for a while.

I ran down a senior citizen on the way back to my condo from the Carnival Club. Adan, Honey and Jack were all with me in the car when it happened—Adan riding shotgun, the piskies in the back doing whatever. We were cruising down Silver Lake and I was using the traffic spell to make good time when an elderly gentleman stumbled into the street between two parked cars, arms windmilling, right in front of the Lincoln.

Adan shouted and braced one arm on the dash as I hit the brakes, but the old man never had a chance. There was a loud thump and the car shuddered as the grille slammed into his left hip. He flipped over the hood, twisting like a stuffed toy tossed into the air by a pit bull, and smashed against the windshield before somersaulting into the backseat of the open convertible. The piskies bailed just in time to avoid being crushed by the limp, broken body.

The Lincoln’s tires squealed as I locked up the brakes and finally brought the car to a skidding stop. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly I thought my fingers might snap when I released it. I glanced in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see the old man, but the white upholstery of the backseat looked like it had been painted red by a really sloppy tagger. I looked through the starred glass of the windshield and saw blood there, too.

Adan and I just sat there for a moment, neither of us speaking. Then the screaming started. We looked to our right. An old woman with curlers in her hair stood on the sidewalk, one clutched hand wrinkling the front of her muumuu. And she shrieked.

“Tell me that didn’t just happen,” I said quietly.

“Where the hell did he come from?” said Adan.

“Domino…” Honey said. She was hovering at the edge of the street, between the car and the old woman.

“Pearl, stop that wailing!” the old man said, appearing in the rearview mirror as he sat up in the backseat. “You’re like to wake the dead.” He made a horrible hacking, wheezing sound and his shoulders shook. He was laughing. The left side of his skull was caved in and a wet flap of skin hung down over his cheek. His teeth were broken and bloody, and a couple of the lower ones were protruding from his bottom lip. He was wearing a nightgown, an old-school Ebenezer Scrooge number.

“Henry, you bastard!” yelled Pearl. “You bit me, you miserable old snake!” The woman shambled toward the car, raising her arm above her head. She was holding a butcher knife. Blood ran from a wound on her neck onto the green-and-orange muumuu. At least he hadn’t gotten her ear. Adan and I jumped out of the car and backed away.

Henry twisted in the backseat and started crawling out onto the trunk. Most of his body didn’t seem to be responding very well, and he dragged himself along on his belly, using his elbows for leverage. Point to Pearl—he did kind of look like a snake. He was also smearing blood all over my car.

I held up my hands. “Chill the fuck out, Pearl,” I said. “Let’s see if we can talk this through.”

Pearl stopped and looked at me, still holding the knife in stabbing position. “Talk?” she shrieked. “You want me to talk? He tried to eat me!”

“I feel you,” I said, rubbing my ear. “Believe me. But I’m not going to let you stick Henry, okay?”

“He died already!” Pearl yelled.

“Twice,” said Henry. He’d rolled over on his back and lay splayed out on the trunk, chuckling wetly.

“Okay,” I said. “How do you know he died, Pearl?”

“The machine! He’s been hooked up to those damn machines for months, good for nothing except lying in bed shitting himself.” She shook with fury. “I had to clean it up!”

“And he died?”

“Yes! He flatlined. When you get to be my age, honey, you’ll know what it looks like. And he shit himself again!” Now that she mentioned it, Henry did smell a bit fragrant.

“Code Blue!” Henry said, cackling.

“Okay, okay. Then what happened, Pearl?”

Pearl calmed a bit and the knife dropped to her side. “I was feeling poorly myself, so I turned off the machines and went to lie down a bit. I must have dozed off, so then I got up and came back and unhooked him. And I was going to clean him up again, for the last time, praise Jesus, and he…he…he fucking bit me!” Pearl dropped the f-bomb like she hadn’t dropped one in a few decades. Maybe never.

I looked at Henry. It hadn’t taken him long to go cannibal. I had the idea he may have been homicidal even before he turned, at least where Pearl was concerned.

Henry returned my stare and bobbed his head, like he knew what I was thinking. “I ate the old bag’s terrible cooking for fifty-seven years,” he said. “Figured it was time I got a decent meal out of her!” He convulsed with laughter, blood and bile burbling over his lips.

“Charming,” Adan said.

“Let me dust this asshole,” said Honey.

“Wait!” Henry said. “That’s not even the funny part.”

A crowd had gathered. Cars and pedestrians had stopped and people stood at a safe distance, not understanding what they were seeing, unwilling or unable to either approach or run screaming.

“We’re on crowd-control,” Honey said. She and Jack buzzed over the onlookers’ heads, crop-dusting them with some discombobulating piskie glamour. The civilians began to mill about in confusion, some standing slack-jawed and others wandering in circles or just walking away. It wasn’t really control, if you asked me, but at least it would keep the rubberneckers from getting up in our business.

“The funny part is,” Henry continued, his torn mouth slurring the words, “when I bit her, she was already cold! Can you believe that? I finally get a chance at a nice dinner and the bitch serves it up cold!”

I peered at Pearl with my witch sight. What little juice she’d had when she was alive was settling in her tissues like lividity and just beginning to ooze from her skin. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and glassy. Pearl was dead as disco but she obviously hadn’t noticed it yet.

“Let’s just do what we have to do and get out of here, Domino,” Adan said. “No point in having a conversation about it.”

“Henry and Pearl are zombies, Adan,” I said.

“Well, I never!” Pearl protested. “I’m Presbyterian, young lady.”

“Yeah, so we have to put them down,” Adan said.

“We’re talking to a couple of zombies.”

“What’s your point?”

“Braaaiiins,” Henry said, giggling. He slid his broken body off the trunk and staggered to his feet.

“Let’s say your home computer wasn’t working, and you needed to figure out what was wrong with it. What would you do?”

“I don’t have a computer,” Adan said.

“Damn, you’re country.”

“I grew up in Faerie.”

“If you had a computer and it wasn’t working, you could run a diagnostic program…okay, skip the analogy. The point is, we need to figure out what’s causing the zombie outbreak. Here we happen to have a couple zombies. We could ask them.”

“That’s the worst analogy I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not my strong point,” I allowed.

“You already talked to Terrence’s nephews. One of them, anyway. You said he really didn’t know anything. Pearl here doesn’t even know she’s dead.”

“I am not dead!” Pearl said.

“See?” Adan said.

“I never finished talking to Tony, because Pac-Man ate him. Plus, no disrespect to the mostly dead, but Tony wasn’t that bright. Pearl might have better answers.”

“What about Henry?”

“What about him?”

“He’s stepping up on you.” Adan nodded his head, looking over my shoulder.

I jumped, turning, and sure enough Henry was creeping up on me from behind, his arms outstretched and his hands grasping spasmodically. His eyes shone with madness and wickedness, though I had the feeling the wickedness, at least, had probably been there even before he died.

“Vi Victa Vis!” I yelled, and the force spell hurled him back and slammed him into the Lincoln’s rear suicide door. His already abused skull made a pulpy sound when it struck steel, and he slumped to the ground, moaning.

I pulled juice from the streets—I was on my home turf now and it came easily. “At first cock-crow the ghosts must go back to their quiet graves below,” I said. The magic burned through Henry’s ravaged body and wrenched his spirit free of the flesh. The corpse toppled over and lay still on the sidewalk.

Pearl screamed and rushed to Henry’s body. She dropped to her knees on the concrete hard enough to tear skin, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She cradled him in her arms and sobbed, and then she jerked her head around to look at me. There were no tears but there was genuine hate in her eyes. “What did you do,” she snarled.

Jesus Christ. “He was dead, Pearl,” I said. “I just ended his suffering.”

“You killed him!” she wailed.

“No, Pearl. He was already dead, remember? You told me that. You also told me he tried to eat you. I had the idea you hated his guts.”

“He was my husband. For fifty-seven years. Of course I hated him! But he was the love of my life. He gave me three beautiful children. Oh, God, how I loved him when we were young. He was so handsome and strong…all of my friends were jealous and I was so proud. He was a good man. What am I supposed to do now?” Pearl buried her face in Henry’s chest and sobbed uncontrollably.

You’re supposed to get hungry and start eating people, I thought. “I have to ask you some questions about what happened, Pearl,” I said. “This is going down all over the city and it’s wrong. You see that, don’t you?”

Pearl lifted her head and nodded. She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with wrinkled hands. “How can you stop it? Are you a pastor or something? I don’t hold with women pastors.”

“Not a pastor, Pearl, but something like it. Will you answer my questions?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me what happened after Henry died.”

“I already told you—I didn’t feel well, so I went to lie down for a while. It was just too much, finally, do you understand? I just couldn’t deal with it all right then.”

“I understand, Pearl. But tell me more about what you felt. Did you notice anything unusual?”

“It was my heart,” she said. “It’s always my heart. I had chest pains, dizziness. Maybe it was a little worse than usual. I took one of my pills but it didn’t seem to help. I felt worse, so I went to lie down on the bed for a while. And like I said, I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember is waking up.”

“How did you feel when you woke up?”

“Strange, I suppose. Nothing I could put my finger on that felt wrong…just, nothing felt quite right. You get used to the way your body feels—you even get used to your pain, when you’re my age. It just felt off, like it wasn’t the body I was used to. Was Henry right? Am I dead, too?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t think of a good lie, or any reason to use one on her if I could.

“Why hasn’t the Lord called me home? I’m ready to go.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Tell me anything else you remember.”

“I felt alone,” Pearl whispered. “I thought it was just because of Henry dying, but now I don’t think so. It felt like…waiting.”

“Do you know what you were waiting for, Pearl?”

“No, it’s not like that.” Pearl shook her head and thought for a moment. “I was born during the Great Depression,” she said finally. “We came out here from Oklahoma when I was a little girl, and my father worked in the orchards and the fields. He’d be gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes we didn’t know when he’d come back. When I was a little older, he enlisted and went away to the war. That was even worse—we didn’t know if he’d come back at all. I know what it feels like to wait for someone, honey. This feeling wasn’t the same. With Daddy, the feeling was always about him. I was waiting for him. This time…it was just an absence and a sense of expectation that hung there in the room, thick enough to breathe. I was just waiting.”

I glanced at Adan and he shrugged. I turned back to Pearl. “Is there anything else you can tell me? How are you feeling now?”

“I hurt. Everything feels…tight. Inside. Like cramps, but sharp and hot.” She started crying again and covered her curler-studded hair with her arms. “I’m hungry. Oh, God, I’m so hungry, and I know what I want. I know what I want and I can’t bear it!” She began rocking herself and clawing at her head, pulling out fistfuls of fine, white hair and blue curlers.

“Domino…” Adan warned.

“You won’t have to wait much longer, Pearl. I promise. It’ll just be a little while and then you can go home.” I knelt down and touched her wrinkled face, tilting it up to me. I smiled at her, putting as much warmth in it as I could find, and then I spun the spell and pulled her spirit free. I laid her body down beside Henry’s as gently as I could.

“We need to get out of here,” Adan said.

I stood there looking down at Pearl’s body. “I know, but we can’t just leave them here like this.”

“Let’s get moving,” he said. “I’ll call 911. I do have a cell phone,” he added, smiling.

I nodded and whistled to the piskies, who were still flying air patrol over the crowd. We all piled into the Lincoln. I reached for the ignition and then slumped back in my seat. “It’s never like this in the movies.”

“What’s that?” Adan asked.

“This shit is cruel, man. Dying’s got to be bad enough, but this is just brutal. It’s just wrong. I don’t care if it’s God Himself fucking with us—I’m going to find out who’s responsible, and I’m going to break off a foot in his ass.”

five

When we got back to my condo, Honey took Jack in to meet her family. They seemed to be moving pretty fast, but I wasn’t exactly qualified to offer relationship advice. The last time I’d gotten involved the man of my dreams turned out to be a shapeshifter who wanted to skin me and steal my magic. Honey couldn’t do much worse than I had with Adan’s changeling. And Jack seemed okay—the strong, silent type, as piskies went.

“What?” Adan said.

“What, what?”

“You were staring at me.”

Damn. “I was just thinking about, uh, where to start.” I gestured vaguely at the living room. “Have a seat.” I went into my bedroom and came back with my laptop. I pushed the Chinese checkers board out of the way and put the computer on the coffee table.

“Domino, I told you, I’m not really into gadgets.”

“Gadgets? It’s a computer, Adan. And I use it for divination magic.”

“Why? You could just use—”

“Skip it, Adan. Okay, we do the summoning ritual first, just so we can get it off our plate and deal with the zombie problem.”

“You want to identify the ritual,” Adan said, and I nodded. “Okay, what can I do to help?”

“Let’s see what I get. Then you can help me think it through.” I brought up Wikipedia on the browser and tapped the ley line running under my condo. As the magic poured into me, I fed in the juice I’d tasted from the demon’s manifestation in the Between. The screen flickered and displayed the results.

The entry was titled Interdimensional Gate and I already knew most of what it said. “What the hell? It’s just a gate. It’s not that different from the one Honey showed me. It’s built to draw a lot more juice and it’s more complex…”

“Your gate was only designed to open a way to the Between,” Adan said, scanning the words and diagrams on the screen. “This spell is meant to tunnel all the way into the Deep Beyond.”

“Like to Avalon or something?”

“No, a lot deeper than that. Wherever the Fomoire were banished, I guess. The Celtic legends say the ancient fey drove them into the sea.”

“The sea? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Adan shrugged. “Eire is an island. To the Celts, the sea was the edge of the world. They tried to make sense of it the best they could and I guess they were close enough. What do the Christian legends say? They were cast into the Pit or something?”

I frowned. “No clue. Either way, it doesn’t help us much. And the point is, the spell’s just a gate. This isn’t a real summoning, Adan. There’s nothing here to bind and command an entity. Mobley just threw open a door.”

“Yeah, but look here.” He pointed at a diagram that looked like something Leonardo might have drawn after a particularly bad nightmare. “Mobley is the gate. He allowed the demon to possess him. That’s how it crossed into this world.”

“That thing we fought definitely wasn’t Mobley.”

“No, once it came through, it could go anywhere it wanted, in the Between or in the mortal world. Actually, it makes a little more sense this way. This gate would be a lot easier to handle than a demon summoning, especially with the zombie outbreak softening things up.”

“Yeah, easy—you just have to let a demon possess you. Okay, let’s say Mobley has the juice to do this. Where did he learn the ritual? And how did he talk the demon into doing his dirty work without any magic to compel it?”

“Well, look, Mobley wasn’t pulling all that juice. He was giving some of his own magic up to the demon. It fed off him. Otherwise, yeah, you’re exactly right,” Adan said. “Mobley ran the same game Papa Danwe did with Oberon. He cut a deal.”

“How exactly did he make a deal with something that couldn’t manifest in this plane of existence?”

“The demon couldn’t get here without the gate, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t communicate with Mobley.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.” I went to the kitchen and came back with a couple beers. I handed one to Adan, popped the cap off the other and took a long pull. “The last time, with Papa Danwe, I made a lot of assumptions. I was wrong about most of them and right about just enough to be dangerous. I don’t want to do it the same way this time.”

“Fair enough. All we really know is Mobley created a gate using his own body and soul, and a demon came through and attacked Oberon’s party.”

“Yeah, and we know he didn’t command or compel the demon with magic.”

Adan shook his head. “We don’t really know that. We just know you didn’t get anything from the juice the demon left behind.”

I felt like arguing, but he was right. Actually, Adan seemed to be in the habit of being right and I didn’t like it much. It was like having a neat-freak for a roommate—occasionally useful but mostly just irritating. This was probably one of the useful times so I decided to let it go.

“Okay, but I think there’s one more thing we do know. Look at the spell. Never mind how Mobley learned it—it doesn’t take that much juice. I know better than most, it’s not that hard to tear holes in the world. This one’s deep, yeah, but it’s doable, especially since he can feed the demons with his own magic. Mobley will be using the war with Terrence, and if he puts everything he has behind it, he’s got this kind of juice.”

“So he can do it again,” Adan said.

“Yeah, but only if he’s got more demons lined up he can cut deals with. Otherwise, he’s just letting them in with no way to guarantee they’ll do what he wants. They could come after him. And he can’t play host for long—from what Mr. Clean told me about demons, letting them possess you has to be bad for your health.”

“The demons probably don’t want to put Mobley at risk. They want all the players back in the game.”

“We’re speculating again,” I said. “Truth is, we don’t really know enough to hand this off to Terrence and Oberon. We saw what one of those things could do. If Mobley can bring more in, it’s fucking stupid to give him an excuse.”

“Mobley isn’t giving Terrence much of a choice. He’s either got to soldier up or lay down.”

“You’re picking up the lingo pretty good, even if you are country. Terrence has to fight, no doubt. Hell, Mobley will get suspicious if he does anything else at this point. But we can’t go at him directly. We can’t back him into a corner as long as he might have some demons in his back pocket.”

Adan nodded. “The only way we can stop him from gating in more demons is to deny him the juice he needs to work the ritual.”

“Right on, so it’s just another gang war. Terrence needs to take his streets, muscle him off his corners. No juice, no demons. Once we dry his ass out real good, then we can move in and take him down.”

“It’s a good strategy,” Adan said.

“Thanks.”

“But I don’t think it’s going to work.”

I frowned and did my best to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Why’s that?”

“Look at it from Mobley’s perspective. He put a demon in King Oberon’s house. Maybe you’re right and he was just trying to sow dissension in the ranks, but even so it’s a damned aggressive move. He didn’t have to bring the fey into it. He didn’t even have to bring us into it. Yeah, he knew what it meant when Simeon Wale went over to Terrence’s outfit, but he could have let it go. That gave him an excuse to escalate but he didn’t have to seize the opportunity if he didn’t want to. He’s fully committed, Domino. He’s got to know he doesn’t see the other side of this thing unless he takes us all out—you, me, Terrence, Oberon. Everyone’s got to die. Which means…”

“…if he’s got more demons, he’ll use them,” I finished. “And we can’t just put a crew together and take him down. Even if we bring in the other outfits, it’s not clear we’d win an all-out war.”

“We need time,” Adan said, “but Mobley obviously isn’t going to give us any.”

“So we don’t give him any choice in it. All we really need to do is avoid committing our forces to a fight we can’t win. We can do that as long as Mobley has something to keep him busy.”

“Terrence. You’re willing to sacrifice him?”

“Call it what you want, Adan, Terrence is on the frontlines. If I’m going to be the wartime captain, some hard decisions are going to come with that. It’s the right move. If this is a fight we can’t win, our objective has to be not losing. The only way we do that is by not fully engaging the enemy. We need cannon fodder.”

“I agree, it’s the best play we’ve got. I’m just surprised. I know it can’t be an easy decision.” I met his gaze and saw something in his eyes. It was something I’d become used to seeing but had never really earned. It was respect. I didn’t feel like I’d earned it now, either. What’s so respectable about giving up a friend?

“Damn it!” I said, and slammed the laptop closed. I rubbed my eyes and temples and let out a long breath. “I was going to make an army out of this outfit, Adan, but I haven’t done shit. We should have been doing…army stuff. Training, organizing, gathering intelligence. Our guys are gangsters. They don’t know anything about being real soldiers. I don’t know anything about it, either. Now something happens, it’s exactly the kind of thing we were supposed to prepare for, and we’re sitting here with our thumbs in our asses. And the only move I’ve got is to sacrifice a friend just to buy a little time.”

“I’m not sure how much training or organizing you can do with this bunch. Even if you can turn the outfits into that kind of army, it’s not going to happen overnight. You’ve got them looking at the big picture. They’re willing to fight with you, and for something more than their own corners and rackets. That’s a small miracle in itself.”

“Intelligence is the big problem,” I said. “I may not be much of a soldier, but even a gangster knows you can’t win a war if you’re always reacting. You have to know who the enemy is, what he’s planning, and you have to go on the offensive. We can’t do that because we don’t know what’s coming or when. That’s why we don’t have any options with Mobley. We’re on defense and it’s getting our people killed.”

“We can talk to the other outfits,” Adan said. “Maybe some of them have more capabilities in that area than we do. I’ll put Chavez on it. I need to check in anyway, make sure nothing else is on fire.”

“Yeah, that’s good. Make sure he talks to Sonny Kim—the Koreans pride themselves on having better information than anybody else. And if they do have something, it’d be just like them to keep it to themselves unless we come asking.”

“What’s your next move?”

I sighed. “I have to tell Terrence to charge the fucking machine-gun nest. I have to figure out what to do about the zombies, and there’s another angle on the intelligence problem I want to try.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to the Feds. Those motherfuckers have to be good for something.”

All the bosses in L.A. have front businesses. Sometimes these businesses are juice boxes, like Rashan’s strip clubs and massage parlors. Other times, though, they’re just mundane enterprises meant to grease the wheels of the illegal commerce that keeps the juice flowing in the boss’s neighborhoods. Sometimes they’re even legitimate.

Terrence owned about a dozen Laundromats in South Central, and I met him at the store on Normandie the next morning. The business shared a battered, peach-colored concrete building with a tiny storefront Baptist church and a check-cashing joint. There were tags on the walls but they were defensive wards—Terrence wasn’t getting any juice from it when people fed quarters into his machines. Of the three businesses, the Laundromat seemed to be doing a more robust trade, but that may have been because it was a Tuesday.

Once the muscle out front passed me through, I found Terrence in the back working on a seventies-era dryer. The venerable machine was partially disassembled, and Terrence knelt on a drop cloth on the stained, concrete floor, pounding on something with a crescent wrench.

“Seems like you could find someone else to beat on your washing machines for you,” I noted.

Terrence jumped and banged his head on the edge of the access panel. He swore impressively and wiggled back a ways on his knees so he could turn around. He wasn’t exactly the right size to get inside most home appliances.

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