“It bit me,” Bob repeated in near hysteria. “It burns—” He hiked up his pant leg. Blood streamed from a jagged mark on his ankle. But that wasn’t the problem. The “bite” was swelling, and way too fast. A series of black rings already ridged the flesh around Bob’s ankle and advanced one by one up his leg.

“What the hell?” Hajo bellowed. “What are these things?”

Another bug skittered up behind Lon, its spiny black legs clicking on the cement. I called out a warning. Lon swiveled in time to raise his foot and stomp. The awful sound of cracking exoskeleton filled my ears, followed by a splatter of brown bug guts across my jeans.

A gurgled cry of fear bubbled up from Bob. The black lines ringing his leg had disappeared past his pushed-up pant leg. He gripped his stomach. I pried his hands away and wrenched up his Hawaiian shirt. The rings had already made it up there, too.

The bugs were venomous.

“Can’t . . . breathe,” Bob choked. “My heart—”

“A little help over here!” Hajo shouted frantically. He’d found another piece of pipe and was swatting at the bugs with savage swings. Squishy, crackling roach deaths echoed off the walls, but the bugs didn’t stop coming. They were still pouring from the cracked skull like brown lava.

I blocked out the scuttling and the hissing and the horrifying flitting of wings to concentrate on a solution. Hajo had definitely tripped a spell when he entered the oval around the skeleton—some kind of magical ward, something big and nasty that I’d never seen before. But if it was just a ward, then these bugs weren’t real. They were thought-forms; illusions designed to instill fear. That seemed more reasonable than a spell that opened up a hole in the cosmos into a nest of Æthyric cockroaches.

“It’s just magick,” I said. “Not real. The pain is psychosomatic. Listen to me, Bob. It’s not real.”

Lon bent over Bob and ripped his shirt open. The black rings were inching up Bob’s throat. His face was dark red. He couldn’t breathe.

“Real or not,” Lon said, “he’s going to have a goddamn heart attack.”

“The bug juice is burning my skin,” Hajo yelled from somewhere nearby.

I glanced at my jeans. He was right. Like acid, the roaches’ pudding-like innards were eating away holes in the fabric.

“Aagghh! Shit!” Lon kicked out, then fired a booming shot, so loud I recoiled in shock.

He dropped to his knees and let the Lupara clank against the floor.

“Lon!” I jerked up the hem of his jeans as he groaned in pain. A craggy puncture wound on his leg, a little higher up than Bob’s. The damn bug had bitten right through his jeans. A moment later, the first black ring circled his skin.

“Counterspell,” Lon shouted at me, gripping his leg in pain.

Meanwhile, Bob was going into convulsions, the heels of his shoes rapidly banging against the floor. I tried to steady him, but it was useless. Nearby, Hajo continued to scream for help as he played baseball with the bugs. I forced myself to focus, reaching inside my jacket for the red ochre chalk. If this was a tripped ward, then I knew exactly two spells that could possibly negate the magick. One of them I’d used several times successfully in the past. The other spell, Silentium, was more powerful, but I’d never used it. I only knew that it required a huge blast of Heka to power it. Kindled Heka—my natural magical mojo reinforced with outside energy. Bodily fluids weren’t going to be enough. I needed electrical current for the kindling, and the cannery had probably been dead for years. . . .

Bob’s convulsions picked up speed as Lon gripped his own thigh, gritting his teeth and squinting into the harsh glare of the flashlight. In the distance, I could feel the rumble of thunder outside. The storm—I wondered if it was close enough for me to pull down lightning.

All I could do was try.

I began sketching the Silentium seal on the floor in front of me, holding the flashlight in my other hand, but before I could even form a small circle, the chalk broke. I was bearing down too hard. I scrambled to retrieve a nub, but one of the bugs dove out of the darkness and lunged for my fingers. I beat it back with the flashlight. As metal collided with cockroach, its glossy brown body cracked . . . and so did the glass lens. The flashlight bulb broke with a pop, and the precious cone of white light sizzled out.

Darkness blanketed the room. Anxious shouting broke out around me. Bob was going to die. Lon was groaning in pain. Hajo was fighting for his life.

Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.

I opened myself up and reached for any current—battery, electricity, lightning. Come on, come on, I thought. As I strained to ferret out a source of energy, something dark stirred inside me. The air shifted. The sounds in the room slipped away, replaced by an unearthly hum. A cold power poured from me into the darkness. The familiar blue pinpoint of light.

My Moonchild ability.

The one bred into me by my psychotic parents. The one I hadn’t used since that horrible night in San Diego weeks ago. The one that tempted me the other night with Hajo. No, no, no! My body shuddered as I desperately tried to shove it back down. But it was like trying to abstain from sneezing. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted to reign it in, I just couldn’t. It was too strong.

Death by magical roaches or use the Moonchild power? Wait, why was I fighting it? I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to be eaten alive by creepy brown bugs the size of rats. I stopped pushing the power away and let it come.