Darkness Calls by Marjorie M. Liu Page B

was much more than that dark, endless hole, I could not help but associate one with the other. Because even if you fell into the good side of the Labyrinth, you might find yourself lost, forever. Wandering from your world to another, and another: a stranger, eternally in a strange land. Abandoned in the maze.
    As Mary had been abandoned. Elsewhere, far from this world. Only she knew how or why it had happened, or where she was from, but it was enough that she was here. Grant called her an Alice who had fallen through the rabbit hole. Like fairy tales told, of men and women who discovered hidden hills, or magic stones; or fell asleep, only to find a hundred years had slipped by. Time passed differently in the Labyrinth. Everything did. And not everyone who stumbled through its doorways was human.
    The demons had used the Labyrinth to slip from one world to another, again and again, harvesting human lives that had begun elsewhere. Following trails of flesh. Until, ten thousand years ago, they had come to earth—and this planet had become the last stand between the demons, Avatars, and humans. As it would be again, when the veil failed. We were all alien in our origins, our roots and blood soaked in worlds I could not dream existed.
    I tried questioning Mary about the drawing on her hand but gave up when she turned away, floating on her toes like an aged ballerina, and started singing Mary Poppins ’s “A Spoonful of Sugar.” I left Rex to handle her, and the marijuana. My mother was probably turning in her grave. A Hunter, working with a zombie, trusting a zombie to be left alone with a human. I was so far removed from everything I had been taught, I hardly knew myself anymore.
    I had friends now. I had a man I loved. I no longer lived in my car or in hotels scattered across North and South America. I was making roots, day by day, and never mind my concerns that I was doing the wrong thing.
    Because if I was here, in this city, no one else was out there . On the road. Traveling from city to city to save the day like some ball-busting, demon-hunting crime fighter (a one-girl A-Team , I liked to imagine). No matter if running around two continents like a chicken with its head cut off had been, in retrospect, the least productive way to save this world from the impending failure of the prison veil. Never mind that there was only one of me, and all I could do was scratch an itch on the toe of a giant. At least I had been doing something . I had saved some lives. Changed a few for the better. Small consolation for knowing that I was going to spend my entire life mostly alone. And die young, murdered. In front of my own child.
    I had no illusions. No way out. I would have a daughter one day. Eventually, the boys would abandon me for her—as they had abandoned my mother. When that happened, I would die. Perhaps shot in the head, just like her.
    Nor was going childless an option. My blood belonged to Zee and the boys. My body, their immortality—their only connection to this world. If I died, they would die. If I never had a child, they would die with me. The boys would never let that happen. They had survived for more millennia than even I could guess, and part of that existence had been upon the bodies of my ancestors—a line of women stretching so far in the past I could not dream their existence beyond my mother and grandmother: a steely-eyed woman murdered six years before my birth.
    My only consolation was that the boys would remember me—in dreams, of women dead and buried and turned to dust. But that did not make the melancholy any less. That did not make me stop missing my mother. Even now, with Grant in my life.
    Nor did it make my choices any less difficult. I still hunted demons, here in Seattle. Tried my best to save people. But it felt wrong not to be on the move. Like a sin. A crime. My mother’s voice, always in my head, telling me I was doing something infinitely wicked by staying more than one night in any