Lia sat down again, crosslegged, cat in her lap, back in the cozy bower where she liked to do her psychic exercises. It was fully dark by now, just after nightfall. She set a notebook computer she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car next to herself on the bare earth. It was on, but closed and quiet, waiting for her in standby mode. She closed her eyes, controlled her breath, and within moments she was able to send herself out, leaving her own body in a sort of standby mode, as Black Tom had long ago taught her to do.
‘Sending out’ was Tom’s term (or at least one he’d surrounded with an aura of approval back when she first thought of it, the same way he once had with his own name). The ever-informative internet had the technique labeled in various places as scrying, astral projection, remote viewing or skywalking, but they were all names for a more or less identical concept. Lia wasn’t as skilled a sender as her Tom, who’d been practicing the art for well more than a century, long outlasting his original body in the process, but Lia didn’t need to be a master in order to help him watch over the Yard’s new fortifications.
She rose up-at least the invisible, non-physical part of her did-nearly to the tops of the Yard’s tallest trees. Tom left his catbody and rose up with her. There was nothing of him to see, nothing of either of them, and yet they each felt the other hovering close by as they chanced a look around.
Potter’s Yard was situated in a semi-industrialized area in the northernmost part of North Hollywood, right before it became Sun Valley on the maps, so there were few homes nearby and little traffic to be seen on a weeknight. Not too many people around. The area managed to feel surprisingly isolated and almost rural, despite being set right in the heart of one of LA’s largest suburbs.
Both Lia and Tom were careful not to rise too high or to extend their awareness beyond the psychic barriers they’d erected earlier in the day-barriers that rippled when the evening’s first otherworlders arrived in the neighborhood like day-late trick-or-treaters, causing Lia’s distant body to break out in gooseflesh and dashing her last faint hopes that the Tzitzimime wouldn’t manage to find their way back here at all.
A striking set of Mictlan’s minions stepped into the nearest lighted intersection, a few dozen feet from the Yard’s front gate. They seemed almost to coalesce out of the shadows themselves. There were two new creatures in the lead, Lia noted. Not Tzitzimime, although, like the bugwomen, these were also doing their best to appear human. With a heavy emphasis on ‘their best.’ In practice, the only disguises the new additions to the crew seemed able to manage were woman-shaped outlines: one of them ink-black and flecked with stars, like the night sky, while the other crackled with a sort of mad static that jumped and flickered in an unhealthy-looking way.
These two were more than demons. They were Archons, Lia guessed-ancient embodiments of fundamental concepts, and who knew how old or how powerful they might be?
She dropped back into herself and flipped open her computer.
Tom gave her a sense that entities such as these Archons were free to pretend to be anything they liked (such as human women) on the other side of the door between worlds, but over here they were compelled to appear more or less as they actually were. They could never completely conceal their fundamental natures out here in the realworld. Lia scanned a webpage or three with that in mind, until she felt reasonably sure she’d pinned down the one who looked like she’d been airbrushed with stars as the goddess of darkness and night. Nyx, the Greeks had called her. The staticy one she was less sure of, although she felt no less threatened by her. The pair might’ve been able to project those womanly forms, but it seemed they couldn’t finish them off with crucial details like hair, clothing, or facial features. Or maybe they were simply too far removed from humanity and its concerns to know how to draw up more than simple representational sketches.
Lia sent herself out again. Carefully, not wanting to be picked out by otherworldly eyes, which could be exceptionally keen under certain circumstances. She rejoined her disembodied Tom, who’d never stopped monitoring the situation from above, and he let her feel that nothing much had changed, as of yet.
She watched as Ant, Mantis and Wasp, the original Tzitzimime, hardened into their three distinct avatars out of an amorphous swarm of gnats.
Lia felt ill with anticipation as the five otherworlders paused to look around. From her projected perspective, she saw her own defenses more clearly than they did. The ring of ghostly flames around the property shimmered, although it would be opaque like a one-way mirror from the other side, and a challenge even to perceive. The eyes she’d painted all down the fence appeared to be blazing like halogen lights. The two flat, feminoid shapes-the Archons-exchanged a look, and Lia felt her earthbound body’s heart speed up in terror when they chose to head in the Yard’s direction, despite the wards intended to shunt their attention aside. The three Tzitzimime trailed after their new leaders, and Lia readied herself to drop back into her head and make a dash for her bomb-shelter home (skeletal prisoner notwithstanding), should such a drastic retreat prove necessary.
The team of otherworlders spread out as they approached the simple spraypainted eyes that they experienced as blinding floodlamps. The Tzitzimime spread out literally, separating into many thousands of tiny flying and crawling creatures, in order to cover the widest area possible.
It was then that Lia realized her barrier was working after all.
The otherworlders looked confused, and were clearly not able to penetrate her concentric rings of influence well enough to find the gate. For them, the painted eyes and the glitchy Solitaire game running on the office computer conspired to create the impression of a raging party going on inside the fence. The soft music pouring from Lia’s cheap boombox sounded like a live and amplified band. The demons had come here expecting to find a lone girl in a deserted grove, so this trick alone might convince them to retreat, shaking their misshapen heads in frustration.
The bugs couldn’t even feel the subtle deflective hexwork that rendered the Yard’s green canopy of treetops totally opaque to them when they flew over. They couldn’t sense Lia or Tom at all.
Everything was working beautifully.
Lia’s body grinned, even though it was down on the ground and mostly detached from her spirit.
Around the back of the property, Nyx (the black outline comprising the goddess of night), tried to peer into the lights along the fence. She shied away, however, shielding her featureless face with a hand made out of stars and nothingness, which pleased both Lia and Black Tom to see. Bright light was obviously not Miss Nyx’s thing.
The Archon looked away, down darker streets, bewildered.
Around the front, near the northeastern corner of the Yard, some of the insects swarming in the street pulled together and solidified into the same giant, bipedal, red Ant-woman that had chased Lia the night before, which she took as a probable sign that the creature was trying to think. The bug-based entities couldn’t concentrate without assuming a humanoid form. Intellect just wasn’t an insectile trait.
Ant tried harder than the Archon of Night had against the lights, edging into the hot glare around the fence that the painted eyes provided. She cringed, but forced herself closer, and stopped when her thorax brushed up against solid wood.
Uh-oh, Lia thought. She realized she was biting her lip only when the pain surprised her and she had to force her remote body to quit it.
Ant stepped away from the fence and immediately began blinking her stalky, wavering eyes-clearly feeling the imaginal incandescence once again. Lia and Tom had a moment to hope before the Ant cautiously pressed herself back against the boards, in defiance of all their wishes.
The demon had figured out that the warding eyes’ deflective power was cancelled when she touched the fenceboards and felt what was really in front of her: nothing but cleverly-painted wood. The first of the otherworlders had breached the outer defenses and it was creeping down the fence already, feeling for an opening. The Ant, at least, knew Lia was here.
Shitballs, she thought, preparing to fire her awareness back down into her motionless body.
Then she froze in mid-air, arrested by the sight of movement inside the gate.
Oh, Hannah, no, she wailed without using her voice, upon realizing who it was she saw walking from the office shack and out toward her parked car. Han must’ve left her keys behind in the office. Again. It happened so often that it was a joke between them, and Lia castigated herself now for not remembering Hannah’s absentminded habit.
She could still be all right, though, if she’d just get into her car and drive away. The barriers would still be in effect against all the other entities, since Ant hadn’t yet shared her strategic intelligence with them. The Tzitzimitl (singular for Tzitzimime, according to sources) might try to follow her, but since Hannah didn’t fit Lia’s description it would forget why it was doing so within seconds.
She therefore willed Hannah to go on, to get out of here without delay, before the big Ant could find its way in through the gate to attack her.
Han had her fingers wrapped around her Volvo’s door handle before she looked back longingly, first toward the corner of the Yard that Lia called home, and then over toward the still-open gate. Lia’s diaphanous firewall was the only ward covering the gap, and it alone wouldn’t stop something that really meant to step through. It was little more than a scrim of imaginal camouflage.
Hannah trotted back past the gate and picked up the paper offering plate she’d left beside it earlier, meaning, Lia assumed, to provide the fascinating Crouchers with one last snack before calling it a day.
She certainly could’ve picked a better moment to indulge her sense of wonder.
Lia gritted her distant body’s teeth while she simultaneously tracked both her friend and the menacing Tzitzimitl outside the fence with her mind’s eye, uncertain of what to do. She might invite an attack if she intervened now, and if Hannah would hurry the hell up and drive out through the wards without doing anything else, there might not be a need for it.
Hannah bisected an orange with her pocketknife and set the two halves down atop the paper plate, leaving them like a tip for the unseen guardians of the Yard’s front entrance, hoping they’d work extra hard at their jobs tonight because of it.
She thought she saw something move when she stood up, in the deep shadows outside the Yard’s well-lit parking lot.
“Tom?” she said uncertainly, stepping outside the gate. She peered down the street, looking for Lia’s cat, although a cat was not even close to the sight that confronted her when she turned around and looked up.
Lia slammed back into her body as hard as she could, feeling hot blood surge up into her ears with an oceanic whoosh a second after jumping to her feet from a full lotus position. “Fuck!” she shouted. “Why didn’t she just leave?”
Tom, back in catform, flattened his ears and offered no answers.
“Han, getbackinside,” Lia shrieked, sprinting for the front of the Yard. She couldn’t see Hannah anymore, not now that she was back in her head and down on the ground, so she ran at full speed, unmindful of the many obstacles that might trip her up in the deepening darkness.
She heard a scream before she was halfway there.
“No!” she shouted again, feeling frantic with terror, her lungs burning as she and Tom raced toward Hannah’s last known position at the front gate. Lia muttered “Oh, Hannah, no, oh gods no…” under her breath as they went, without even being aware of it.
She grabbed hold of a fat cherry branch and ripped it loose when she passed by, trusting that the assaulted plant would be willing to forgive her under the circumstances. She and Tom emerged into the parking lot and she swung the wrist-thick branch around, wielding it in a way that suggested she meant to do something pretty impressive with it.
But she pulled up short instead, before the intention she meant to symbolize with the weapon could click in.
Hannah stood framed in the open gate on the far side of the parking lot, frozen in terror in front of the Ant.
“Liiaaaaaaahh,” the six-foot-tall upright female insect hissed, waving her razor-edged mandibles in Hannah’s face. “Where?”
Hannah held her hands up, backing away from the first embodied demon she’d ever had the misfortune to see and triggering its aggressive inclinations. The thing looked strong enough to pull a human being apart without making any particular effort. Lia was about to shout a warning, to try and distract the creature, when the Ant paused of her own volition, staring down at Hannah’s chest and cocking her head in a quizzical manner. It was an expression that might’ve looked cute on a puppy, but not on a murderous, monstrous insect.
Tom touched Lia’s mind and urged her to stay perfectly still. The thing hadn’t seen her yet.
“Han…nah?” the ant demon said. She tried out the name again, saying it backwards this time: “Han-nah.”
Lia sucked in a quick breath. She understood what was happening when she saw the Ant’s eyes tick back and forth across the alphabet beads that made up Hannah’s necklace. Little square plastic ones that spelled out her name. Hannah wore the old thing almost every day.
Ant’s exoskeleton pebbled and turned to individual bugs while she stood there ogling the beads, forgetting to concentrate on holding her body together. Hannah shuddered over this new development, gasped, and turned to flee.
The demon’s forelimb re-solidified in the flash it took to shoot out and snag Hannah’s wrist. The disproportionately-strong insect jerked her around like she was nothing but a ragdoll. Ant caught sight of the alphabet beads again and lapsed back into her trance before she could bite, although she didn’t let go of Hannah’s arm. Lia could tell the tall Tzitzimitl was fighting hard to shrug off the palindrome-induced cognitive dissonance the necklace beads caused her and retain her physical form.
Lia also understood that Hannah was stuck. Hopelessly stuck, because Ant would snap back to herself at the instant those beads were out of her sight. Hannah seemed to understand at least some of this when she looked over toward Lia with wide and horrified eyes. “Little help? Please?” she said in a tiny voice, as if afraid to disturb the distorted, shimmering Ant in even the slightest of ways.
Lia set her broken-off branch aside and approached her friend with a bomb-squad degree of caution, sizing up the situation. “It’s gonna be okay, Han,” she reassured, and thought she sounded at least mostly convincing. “It’s all right. Just don’t move until I say. But then be ready to do it fast.”
She edged in carefully, meaning to untie Hannah’s necklace at the nape of her neck and remove it without taking it out of the Ant’s eye-line.
“I’m sorry, L-”
“Stop, right there, just shut up,” Lia said harshly. Then she whispered, “The instant you say my name we both die, so be very, very careful when you speak. Okay?”
“O- okay.”
Lia undid the necklace and lifted it off Hannah’s chest, leading Ant away with it as though the string of beads were a carrot on a stick. She hung the necklace on a nail just outside the gate. It was still holding Ant’s attention, but only barely. The creature almost seemed to understand that its quarry was within reach, and yet it couldn’t quite force itself to ignore the series of lettered beads that spelled out the same word in either direction.
“Get inside,” Lia said.
Hannah complied, springing over the property line like a schoolgirl skipping rope. Lia jumped back alongside her and threw the gate shut, shoving the wheeled length of fencing down its uneven track with all her might.
Ant shook off her paralysis and lunged, but she was a moment too late. The corrugated sheetmetal gate rattled shut, nearly cutting off two of her six limbs. She yanked them back with an ugly, high-pitched shriek.
A sequence of red spraypainted numbers rolled in front of her eyes along with the closing gate:
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937…
…and Ant jerked like she was having a seizure.
Her bugbody burst apart and the white light at her core rocketed down the line of numbers (which started at Hannah’s eye-level and went around and around and around the fence, all the way down to the sidewalks), scorching the digits onto the wood planks as it went. Ant’s inner light whizzed around the Yard’s perimeter multiple times in less than a second, chasing the Pi line like a firework flower, and then it winked out in a flash.
She was gone, just like that. Pursuing Pi into eternity.
Inside the fence, night’s stillness resumed. Crickets picked up their interrupted songs. Woodsmoke rose lazily from the outer side of the fenceboards, and Lia thought it smelled bizarrely nice.
She turned to Hannah. “You okay?” she asked. She figured her face was waxy pale, bloodless, and her wide, frightened eyes felt like they took up half of it.
Hannah nodded vigorously, assuring her that she was indeed unharmed, to the best of her knowledge.
“Okay, good,” Lia said. “That’s good. Yeah.”
Now that the crisis had passed and they were both provisionally safe, she turned away from Hannah and went over to the cherry branch she’d dropped in the parking lot gravel, where she sat down beside it and burst into a wrenching squall of post-traumatic sobs.
Being in danger herself was one thing, in Lia’s mind, and bad enough, but seeing that danger threaten someone she loved was entirely another.
Hannah all but slid into home in her rush to throw her arms around her friend. Tom ran up too, offering his feline brand of comfort. Lia let Hannah squeeze her fiercely for a moment, soaking in the concern and affection, then pulled herself together and drew away, feeling self-conscious.
She swiped at her nose and looked up at Hannah from beneath the fringe of her thick, black bangs. “I really hope you and Skeletor didn’t finish off that bottle of wine,” she said.