There’s a ship lying on its side on the street. Another one sticks out from the roof of a demolished building.
Splinters the size of redwood trees are everywhere. Too bad angels aren’t killed like vampires. We could lure them here and have a field day.
There’s a surprisingly intact cruise liner docked in the water. I want to run over, take it across to the island, and yell out for Paige. Instead, I huddle behind a pile of broken crates where I can see but not be seen.
I peer through the binoculars at Alcatraz.
The things swirling in the night sky above the island are too dark to see in detail, but I can make out their silhouettes against the moonlit sky.
The shapes of men.
Wings.
Fat scorpion tails.
WHAT AT FIRST looked like a chaotic swarm turns out to be an ordered flight pattern.
Sort of.
Most of the scorpions follow an angel as he rises, then banks, then dives. The scorpions follow him around like baby birds. Most of them, anyway.
Some lag so far behind that they almost get in the angel’s way as he goes through his flight routine. And it is a routine. He repeats his flight pattern to stay near the island. He varies it here and there but it’s mostly a predictable pattern.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s teaching them to fly.
Baby birds are taught to fly and baby dolphins are taught to breathe air. Maybe baby monsters need to be taught how to be monster-like. Usually, babies are taught by their mothers, but these things don’t have mothers.
The angel is doing a poor job of teaching, though. Several of the scorpions are struggling. Even I can see that a few of them are flapping their wings too fast. They’re not hummingbirds and they’re likely to tire out or give themselves a heart attack, assuming they have a heart.
One of them falls right into the water. It flounders there, screeching.
Another scorpion swings down too low to the fallen one. I can’t tell which scorpion grabs which—whether the one in the air tries to help its buddy or the one in the water grabs the one in the air—but either way, the second one splashes into the water, too.
They thrash and try to climb on top of each other. Each fights for a few more seconds of air by trying to be the one standing on the other. But the winner only gets enough air for one final screech before they both sink.
The first time I saw these things in the aerie basement, they were suspended in tubes of liquid. But I guess they must have had some sort of umbilical cord, or they changed when they were “born,” because now they’re clearly drowning.
Footsteps make me spin and crouch lower. Mom and Clara hunker down beside me behind a broken crate.
There are so many shadows along the pier’s old shopping area that an army could be marching toward us and I wouldn’t see them. We huddle deeper into the darkness.
More footsteps. Running now.
People dart in and out of the shadows and dash into the open where the moonlight exposes them. A small stampede of people desperately running from something.
A couple of them glance behind them with a look of terror as they run.
Aside from their pounding feet on the buckled wooden planks, they don’t make any other noise. No screaming, no calling out to each other.
Even when a woman falls, obviously twisting an ankle, she makes no noise other than the soft thud of her impact. Her face contorts in pain and terror but no sound comes out of her mouth. She gets up and hobbles as fast as she can in a hop-run, frantically trying to keep up with the rest of the stampede.
Their panic echoes in my chest. I have the urge to run even though I have no idea what they’re running from.
Just as my leg twitches from indecision, the things chasing the crowd come around the corner.
There are three of them. Two scorpions hover low to the ground, buzzing on their insect wings. In the center limps an angel who looks like he’s been on steroids.
The huge angel has snowy wings.
Raffe’s wings.
Beliel.
EVEN IN this dangerous situation, my heart twists at seeing Raffe’s beautiful wings on the demon Beliel.
The last time I saw Beliel, he was limping with an injured wing. Someone must have sewn the wing back into place on him after Raffe ripped the stitches. Must be nice to have evil doctors on hand. Beliel’s limp is noticeable but not nearly as bad as it was when Raffe chased him at the airport.
He also has fresh bandages wrapped around his stomach where Raffe sliced him with his sword the first time I met him. It’s good to see more evidence that angel sword wounds don’t speed-heal like other wounds, just like Raffe said.
The scorpions fly leisurely, swinging back and forth, dipping low enough to look into the windows. One smashes a window—probably the last intact window on the pier.
The shattering noise is immediately followed by a panicked shriek. A family with kids darts out of the shop’s door and joins the group running from the monsters.
There’s something about the way the scorpions are moving that raises red flags in my head. They’re not chasing to catch.
They’re flushing out prey.
Before my mind can form the word “trap,” lights blaze on and a fishing net drops from the sky.
That’s when the screams start.
One, two, five fishing nets, as big as house tents, fall from the dark sky.
Darker shadows dive down from above. They land on all fours, scuttling along the ground like real scorpions before standing up on human-shaped legs.
Two of them actually slam into the broken dock face-first, as if they haven’t quite got the hang of landing yet. One of them shrieks its fury at the trapped people, showing a mouth full of lion’s teeth. It viciously yanks the edge of the net, making it whip into people’s ankles.
There are dozens of humans trapped under the nets, clawing and squirming, trying to find the edge of their snare so they can escape. A few jabs of the scorpion stingers cause people to crowd together in the middle of their traps. They cry and scream, all their previous silence gone.
Gunshots ring out from one of the trapped groups. A nearby scorpion goes down, screeching.
As if a dinner bell rang, a bunch of scorpions dive onto the netted group where the shot came from. Stingers lash up and down, repeatedly stinging until blood drips from the tips. Their monster heads latch onto the victims to suck on them.
The screams and thrashing quiet after a minute, leaving only a pile of shriveled bodies twitching beneath a shroud of mesh.
I don’t know if anyone else has a gun, but after that, no one dares to shoot.
A boy of about eight was separated from his father. They reach for each other under different nets. The kid is crying for his dad but it’s the father who looks ashen and utterly terrified at being separated.
The scorpions corral them, half-dragging their nets, half-keeping them moving by threatening with their stingers.
We crouch down farther into the shadows, hardly daring to breathe.
The monsters march the captives to a metal shipping container—the kind that trucks, trains, and ships carry. It’s not far from us but with all the debris strewn around, I hadn’t even noticed it.