Darklands by Nancy Holzner Page A

extermination still on for tonight. Otherwise, my schedule for the next week had been wiped clean. I didn’t get it. What was happening to all the demons? If not for last night’s Harpy attack, I’d almost think Boston had become a demon-free zone.
    Not what you’d call great PR when Boston’s demon exterminator is the only person in the entire city being attacked by demons.
    I was debating whether to call the ex-client back and argue about his deposit when the phone rang in my hand. Oh, no, I thought as I pushed the button to answer. Please don’t let this beanother cancellation. The few dollars left in my bank account were getting lonely.
    But it wasn’t a client. It was my sister, Gwen.
    “Will you please talk to your niece?” Gwen’s voice sounded like she’d reached the end of her rope and kept on going. “Maria is refusing to go to school.”
    “Sure, put her on.”
    “No, I mean come out here and talk to her. She’s barricaded herself in her room and won’t answer no matter how hard I pound on the door. I bet she’s got her iPod turned up full blast. She’s probably giving herself permanent hearing damage as we speak.” I wondered if Gwen knew how much she sounded like our own mother twenty years ago, except instead of an iPod, Gwen would have been blasting her boom box for the whole neighborhood to hear.
    “What makes you think she’ll open the door for me?”
    “Of course she will. You’re the great and powerful Aunt Vicky who can do no wrong.” The bitterness in her voice made me think that driving out to Gwen’s suburban home and getting in the middle of a mother-daughter dispute might not be the best way to round out my morning. But then she softened. “Please, Vicky. Right now, Maria doesn’t want to hear a word I have to say, but I know she’ll listen to you.”
    “I’m on my way.”
    TEN MINUTES LATER I WAS IN MY JAG, PAST THE CHECKPOINTS out of Deadtown, and driving through the human-controlled world. Navigating rush-hour traffic is never fun in Boston, but at least I was driving out of the city when everyone else was heading in. Inbound traffic on the Mass Pike was bumper-to-bumper, but the westbound side wasn’t so bad once I reached Newton.
    During the half-hour drive out to Needham, I wondered what was going on with my niece. At eleven, Maria was reaching the age where shapeshifting tendencies start to manifest. Gwen had married a human—Nick was a great guy, but at least part of the reason Gwen had picked him was a hope that her kids would be norms, not monsters like her own family. Like me.
    Since Cerddorion females lose the ability to shapeshift when they give birth, Gwen had chosen to be as human as it waspossible for her to be when she became a mom at twenty-two. I don’t know if it was her
very
worst fear that her daughter would become a shapeshifter, but that one was pretty high on the list. And it was happening. Maria was showing all the early signs of being a full-blooded Cerddorion female: shapeshifting dreams, a talent for controlling her dreamscape, an ability to communicate with others of our race while sleeping.
    I wondered what had happened to make Maria so upset she wouldn’t go to school. Probably a dream had turned into a nightmare that she couldn’t control. I’d gone through the same thing at her age, and I remembered how scary it could be. It had to be even worse if you couldn’t go to your mother for comfort. Gwen didn’t mean to let her fears about Maria’s Cerddorion nature show—I was sure of that. Yet the kid couldn’t help but pick up on those fears. They’d surrounded her from the day she was born.
    I STOOD IN THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY OF GWEN’S COLONIAL-style home, knocking on a door decorated with a hand-drawn sign that proclaimed NO BROTHERS ALLOWED . When I’d arrived, Gwen was in the kitchen picking up Cheerios that Justin, her two-year-old, kept dropping on the floor from his high chair. She hadn’t said much, just that Maria was