Buried somewhere in the junk? I snatched a rake from the corner, turned it handle out, and came back to the house swinging and yelling hoarsely, hoping they’d be drawn to me.
One of the pink things reared up like a cobra, its claws shining and flashing so that I could barely see for a second, and then fell onto the other one as I thrust at it with the rake. There was a sickening pop as some plate or scale gave way, a torrent of viscous slime cascading onto the kitchen floor. I retreated as they all turned, a thousand eyes focusing in multicoloured hatred, and pursued me across the shattered remains of chairs and table, couch and TV. That bought me a few seconds as they clambered frantically over the junk; I swung the rake again, caught one of the black creatures in the eye region, sending it reeling.
Something swished past my face, a projectile blob of hairs and venom that scorched the wall at once, sending up blue smoke. My chest seemed to catch on fire too—I started coughing so hard that I began to gag, and watched through tear-filled eyes as they approached, knocking debris out of the way.
“Get down!” someone yelled over the screeching; I dropped flat, and something whizzed above my head, exploding in a deafening cascade of white sparks. For a second I could barely see or hear, then realized something was heading for me, end over end—the couch frame, oh no—and I just managed to cover my face before it landed on me.
BY THE TIME I dug my way out it was all over. I felt as if my head had been wrapped in cotton wool. Through pink-smeared vision, Mom approached from the hallway, and finally the kids from the front door—thank Christ—all three unhurt, it seemed, though sobbing and shaking. I reached automatically for them.
“No, uh-uh,” I dimly heard Johnny say. “There might be things left in the house, hiding. Get out into the street, go find Rutger. Get ready to run.”
“Listen to Johnny, guys,” I heard myself say, through a wrench of loathing. Her fault. Her fault this had happened. Her fault I got dragged in, then my fault they did. But hers to begin with. Like we were all strapped to the mast of a sinking ship, the innocent and the guilty drowning together. “I’ll be out in a minute, after we check the house. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
They stared at her. At me. Their eyes were so full of betrayal and confusion that I wondered how I would be able to even speak to them when I could again, what words I could find except a senseless stream of apology. Or lies. But they filed out, and from the corner of my eye I saw Rutger, disheveled and harried-looking, in a dark suit, beckoning them.
“Up you get,” Johnny said, and I squinted at her lips as if it would help. We quartered the place for more monsters, finding nothing except their remnants—slime and chemical burns, stray hairs and broken claws, and the smashed remains of half the house. They had gotten down to the studs in places, the drywall peeled away like flesh from bone. Holes gaped in the ceiling, leaking ropes of torn pink insulation. I looked down and realized that one of my shoes was gone. How had that happened?
Back in the kitchen, I said, “What did you do? Was that magic?”
“Experimental weapon. Definitely not magic.”
“But you can do magic?”
“Listen, we’d better talk about what to do next, and quick.”
I swallowed, hard. She hadn’t answered the question, and she knew I knew. “There’s a next? What’s next? Look at the house, I... we...”
“I think I have a chance to fix this,” she said. “A slim one, razor-slim, but the best one for a while. I kept thinking: something’s coming. But where’s all the magic coming from? Are things thinning out? So I did some research and... signs are pointing to a window soon, a window in time, an alignment. Like all the doorways in a house moving till they line up in a row. It might be a short one compared to historical windows—maybe just a couple of minutes—but while it’s happening, the biggest and oldest gate in the world could open, and who knows what could get through. It could be everything. All of Them.”
“Not just the ones small enough to fit through the screen door, like now.”
“Yes. The big ones. The real gods. And