Charlie felt her release his penis, and he threw himself across the alley. She rebounded off the wall with both claws aimed at his face. There was another explosion and she was knocked back again. This time she came up facing the street, and before she could brace to leap, two more shots hit her in the chest and she screeched, the sound like a thousand angry ravens set afire.

Five more quick shots and she was danced backward by the impacts; even as she went she was changing, her arms getting wider, her shoulders smoothing. Two more shots, and the next screech wasn’t even remotely human, but that of a huge raven. She rose into the night sky trailing feathers and spattering a liquid that might have been blood, except that it was black.

Charlie climbed to his feet and staggered out of the alley to where Inspector Alphonse Rivera was still in shooting stance, holding a 9 mm Beretta aimed at the dark sky.

“Do I even want to know what the fuck that was?” Rivera said.

“Probably not,” Charlie said.

“Tie your coat around your waist,” said the cop.

Charlie looked down and saw that the front of his jeans had been shredded as if by razors.

“Thanks,” Charlie said.

“You know,” Rivera said, “this could have all been avoided if you’d just taken the happy ending like everybody else.”

17

WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU?

The next morning, Jane’s girlfriend Cassie heard someone in the hall and opened the door. Charlie stood there, covered in blood, black goo, and smelling of sandalwood and almond oil; he had a cut over his ear, blood crusted in his nose, the front of his pants were in shreds, and there were tiny black feathers stuck to him everywhere.

“Why, Charlie,” she said, somewhat surprised, “it appears that I underestimated you. When you decide to get your freak on, you do not mess around.”

“Shower,” Charlie said.

“Daddy!” Sophie called from her bedroom. She came running out with arms thrown wide, followed by two giant dogs and a lesbian aunt in Brooks Brothers. Halfway across the living room she saw her father, turned, and went squealing out of the room in terror.

Jane pulled up by the couch and stared. “Jesus, Chuck, what’d you do, try to fuck a leopard?”

“Something like that,” Charlie said. He stumbled by her and went through his bedroom to the master bath.

Jane looked at Cassandra, who was trying to keep her smile from breaking into laughter. “You wanted him to get out more.”

“You tell him about Mom?” Jane said.

“Thought that news should come from you,” said Cassandra.

Well, guns suck, I can tell you that,” said Babd, the most recent of the three death divas to make an appearance Above. “Sure, they look great from down here, but up close—noisy, impersonal—give me a battle-ax or a cudgel any day.”

“I like to cudgel,” said Macha, who had her claws up inside Madison McKerny’s severed head and was working the mouth like a hand puppet.

“It’s your own fault,” scolded Nemain. She had one of Madison McKerny’s silicone implants—bits of fuck-puppet gore still clinging to it—and was pressing it to Babd’s wounds to heal them. Even as the black flesh regenerated, the red glow in the implant dimmed. “We’re wasting the power in these. And after waiting years to get another soul?”

Babd sighed. “I suppose in retrospect the hand job wasn’t such a great idea.”

“I suppose the hand job wasn’t such a great idea,” mocked Macha’s hand puppet.

“I did that on the battlefields of the North, what, ten thousand times?” said Babd. “A final wank for the dying warrior—just seemed like the least I could do. I’m especially good at it, you know. It takes a powerful touch to keep a soldier hard when his guts are running between his fingers.”

“She is good at it,” said Orcus. “I’ll vouch for that.” He leaned back on his throne to display three feet of black, bull death-wood to show his enthusiasm.

“Not now, I just did my lipstick,” puppeted Macha with the head, making its eyes bug out with her claws so it appeared that the dead girl was impressed by Orcus’s prodigious unit.

They all snickered. She’d had Orcus and her Morrigan sisters giggling all morning with her puppet show, putting the implants on a shelf and working the head above them. “Of course they’re real, he really paid for them, didn’t he?”

They’d been giddy since pulling the soul vessels out of the fuck puppet’s grave, that victory even overshadowing Babd’s failure to kill the Death Merchant. But as the light ebbed out of the implants, their mood darkened. Nemain threw the useless implant against the bulkhead of the ship and it exploded and spattered the room with clear goo.

“What a waste,” she growled. “We will take the Above, and I will eat his liver while he watches.”

“What is it with you and eating livers?” Babd said. “I hate liver.”

“Patience, Princesses,” said Orcus as he weighed the remaining implant in his talon. “We were a thousand years coming to this place, for this battle, a few more to gather our force will but make the victory sweeter.” He snatched the head away from Macha and took a bite out of it as if it were a crisp, ripe plum. “You really could have passed on the hand job, though,” he said, spraying bits of brain at Babd.

I’ve got us on a flight to Phoenix at two,” Jane said. “We connect there to a commuter and we’re in Sedona by suppertime.”

Charlie had just come out of the shower and wore only a pair of fresh jeans. He was drying his hair with a beige towel, leaving red streaks on it from his still-bleeding scalp. He sat down on the bed.

“Wait, wait, wait. How long has she known?”

“They diagnosed her six months ago. It had already spread from her colon to her other organs.”

“And she waited until now to tell us.”

“She didn’t tell us. A guy named Buddy called. Evidently they’ve been living together. He said she didn’t want us to worry. He broke down on the phone.”

“Mom’s living with a guy?” Charlie was staring at the red stripes on the towel. He’d been up all night, trying to explain to Inspector Rivera what had happened in the alley, without actually telling him anything. He was bleeding, battered, exhausted, and his mother was dying. “I can’t believe her. She flipped when Rachel moved in before we were married.”

“Yeah, well, you can yell at her for being a hypocrite when you see her tonight.”

“I can’t go, Jane. I have the store, and Sophie—she’s too little for something like this.”

“I called Ray and Lily, they’ve got the shop covered. Cassandra will watch Sophie overnight and the Communist-bloc ladies can watch her until Cassie gets home from work.”

“Cassie’s not coming with you?”

“Charlie, Mom still refers to me as her tomboy.”

“Oh yeah, sorry.” Charlie sighed. He was nostalgic for the days when Jane was the freak in the family and he was the normal one. “You going to try to reconcile that with her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really have a plan. I don’t even know if she’s lucid. I’ve been on autopilot since I heard. I was waiting for you to get home so I could fall apart.”

Charlie stood up, went to his sister, and put his arms around her. “You did great. I’m back, I got it from here. What do you need?”

She hugged him back, then pushed back with tears in her eyes. “I need to go home and pack. I’ll come by at noon with a cab to get you, okay?”

“I’ll be ready.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe Mom is living with a guy.”

“A guy named Buddy,” Jane said.

“The slut,” Charlie said.

Jane laughed, which is all that Charlie wanted right then.

Lois Asher was sleeping when Charlie and Jane arrived at her home in Sedona. A potbellied sunburned man wearing Bermuda shorts and a safari shirt let them in: Buddy. He sat at the kitchen table with Charlie and Jane, and professed his love for their mother, told them about his own life as an aircraft mechanic in Illinois before he retired, then recited a play-by-play of what they had done since Lois had been diagnosed. She’d gone through three courses of chemotherapy, then, sick and hairless, she had given in. Charlie and Jane looked at each other, feeling guilty that they hadn’t been there to help.