Daylight flashed again in the sky above Potter’s Yard, as bright and sudden as thunderless lightning. It disappeared as quick, leaving Ingrid’s night vision obscured by brilliant, overlapping afterimages. She’d gone with Lia’s friend, the one called Riley, to see if there was any help she might offer, or anything else she might be able to do. There wasn’t, really, but she was too fascinated by Riley’s technological solution to the Archon problem not to see how his approach panned out.
She saw Nyx duck into an outlying shed and slam the door, pursued by a team of those identically-dressed guardsmen. It seemed that Mickey wasn’t the only individual in town who maintained a small army of mercenaries, and these people behaved like they’d even been trained, in sharp contrast to the motley assortment of lowlifes her King had sent her out here with. Ingrid knelt down some yards back from Riley’s men and closed her eyes, latching onto the perceptions of the ancient entity inside the shack. She caught an impression of the guards’ lights illuminating the windows before Nyx dropped down to the floor.
Outside, Ingrid opened her physical eyes to watch the guards ring the shed, three men to a side as well as one at every corner. The combined glare of their electric sun-lights made the boxy little structure at the center of their circle stand out with hallucinatory clarity. She could feel Nyx cowering under a table, in there.
Riley stepped up next to Ingrid and put his hands on his hips, assessing the situation.
Inside the room, on the floor by her head, Nyx noticed a strip of electrical power outlets, as well as something attached to it. Ingrid felt the attentional snag, closed her lids, and turned her mind’s eye toward the object of the Archon’s focus. It turned out to be a complex, boxy device plugged into the power strip, one that Ingrid guessed to be a timer of some sort, based mostly on the fact that it had a numbered dial on its face. Nyx, she sensed, had no idea what the mechanism was called, although she understood that it was counting down, and that something would happen when it finished.
The timer clicked over to the next hour, and more dazzling sun lamps came on above to nurture a prolific crop of fat, red tomatoes.
Nyx yowled in the lamps’ glare like a boiled cat and Ingrid pulled away from her, back into her own headspace.
Opening her eyes, she found that it was now daytime outside the shed. It just was, despite being nearly eight o’clock in the evening, according to reason. A beautiful mid-morning blue hung over all of Los Angeles (and maybe over all of everywhere, as far as Ingrid knew, since Lady Night was currently unable to fulfill any of her duties).
She got up from her knees and brushed them off. She didn’t want to think about how ragged she must’ve looked in the harsh light of day. Riley nodded, appearing rather pleased with himself when he grinned at her. “I think that’ll do,” he said.
Ingrid had to shade her eyes to look at him. She was apt to freckle now, because of his tricks, and yet she couldn’t help but smile back.
The men in the black suits began propping their burning lights up around the shed, and she and Riley started back toward the last place they’d seen Lia. Nyx went on wailing, unharmed but unhappy about being trapped in the light of an artificial day.
When they came out of the trees, Lia was kneeling in the dirt where the young man called Esteban had been fighting with Mickey’s Tzitzimime. Weird tracks proliferated, scattered across the dirt in no discernible pattern. Ingrid didn’t see any other trace of the bugwomen, but then there was no sign of Lia’s friend, either, and her heart sank. She didn’t know the particulars, but she got a sense of what must’ve happened, all the same. She hoped it hadn’t been terrible for Lia to watch, but she could tell just by looking that the hope was in vain.
“Lia…” she said, very softly, coming up behind the smaller woman and hesitating for a moment before placing a hand on her shoulder. “We’re both alive. They can’t have switched yet. There’s still time. Maybe we can close that door to Mictlan, if we hurry.”
Lia looked up. Her eyes were black and cold.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go do that.”
A column of three police cars blasted down Lankershim Boulevard, their lights flashing and their sirens wailing. Lia sat in the front passenger seat of the lead car. Riley and Ingrid were in the back. Lia was all too aware that theirs were not the only flashing emergency lights out here on the roads. Accidents, awe, and the evidence of panic were everywhere to be seen, right outside her window. Madness and wonder wandered freely through the streets while people stared up into a blue mid-day sky that should’ve been as black as midnight, according to their watches or the clocks on their cellphones.
“They must all think it’s Jesus coming home to roost or Superman turning the planet backwards or, well, shit, I don’t know what they must think,” Riley said, staring out through his own window as they turned onto Ventura from Lankershim, heading into the Cahuenga Pass. It was a rare thing to see either his vocabulary or his imagination desert him, Lia knew.
Panicked crowds were pouring down the hill from Universal Studios, making the intersection all but impassable. Their police car eased past a mad-eyed, bearded man wearing a sandwichboard too-tightly packed with apocalyptic text for any of it to be legible. He harangued anyone whose eye he could catch about the pressing need to repent, and Lia looked away from him. They’d driven past a surprising number of individuals who seemed to share his attitude already. Lia wondered when they’d had the time to hand-print all those ‘The End Is Nigh’ signs. She hated to think that people had them pre-made and socked away in garage rafters or under their beds, in case an unscheduled end of the world should ever catch them unawares.
Lia ignored the hysteria as best she could. She figured people’s existing beliefs would help them reassemble their conceptions of reality later on-assuming that things eventually did return to normal. There were no guarantees on that score, she reminded herself. This was unprecedented territory.
Their cruiser sped up again once they entered the Cahuenga Pass itself. From here they’d reach their destination within minutes, and Lia already knew she meant to send the police escort away as soon as they arrived-using Esteban’s brand of influential tricks, if necessary. The Blackdogs were needed out on these streets more than anybody, and, after what had happened to Ben Leonard, Lia didn’t want any more of their blood on her hands.