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they’ve been dead and the condition of the body.”
    â€œI think I can handle it. How many are there?”
    â€œMaybe a hundred. Maybe more if we don’t move fast. They’re in the hospital.”
    â€œOh. I’ll probably need some help. I can bring my sisters.”
    â€œYeah, bring your whole family. I’m going, too, but it could get nasty and we need to clean it up fast.”
    â€œOkay, sounds good. I don’t think we’ve been spending enough time together.”
    â€œThing is, it’s not just the zombie killing. There will be a lot of civilians at the hospital. We need to dust them so they don’t remember what happened.”
    â€œSure, that’s easy. We could do something even better. We don’t have to just make them forget—we could make them think something else happened.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œMaybe a weather balloon exploded and killed everyone.”
    â€œWe could just make them forget.”
    â€œGas pocket?”
    â€œNah.”
    â€œWhatever you say. Are you ready to go now?”
    â€œYeah, we need to hurry. You round everyone up and I’ll finish my breakfast.”
    â€œCool,” Honey said, and she flew back into the bedroom.
    Twenty-eight piskies, including Honey, piled into my Lincoln with room to spare. They huddled on the seats and dash, jostling for a favorable position. Honey perched on the steering wheel and pretended to help me drive. They were all invisible to human eyes so this was far less of a spectacle than it sounds.
    All of the piskies were female. Along with Honey, there was a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a few aunts, a handful of sisters and several nieces and cousins. I’d asked Honey about it and she’d said piskie families were always female. The males, apparently, left the nest when they reached puberty and only returned to the females to mate. When the female was pregnant, they left again. Actually, it worked a lot like the barrio where I grew up.
    Most of the “survivors” from the fire at Imperial Courts had been taken to Centinela Medical Center in Inglewood, so that was our first stop. I used my changeling mojo to assume the appearance of a blonde doctor with enough curves to make surgical blues look good. I spun my parking spell and we took a spot reserved for ambulances. I dropped a ward on the building so no one would be able to leave, and then we all went in through the emergency room doors.
    The situation at Centinela had already gone to hell. When the automatic doors closed behind us, we saw a young nurse run screaming from a treatment room to our right. A black male who looked to be in his sixties was chasing her, dragging a metal stand behind him from the IV line still planted in his arm. He had third-degree burns over most of his body and the remains of his clothes were deep-fried into his skin.
    â€œI got this,” I said. “Spread out and clear the place, room by room. Make sure you only hit the dead ones. Some of the victims should still be alive.”
    My weapon of choice was my ghost-binding spell. “At first cock-crow,” I chanted, “the ghosts must go, back to their quiet graves below.” My working theory was that the zombie was just a ghost trapped in its mortal remains. Sure enough, the spell pulled the man’s shade from its ravaged vessel and the barbecued corpse dropped limply to the tile.
    The piskies used their glamour. I didn’t really want to know what they did to kill the zombies. They just flew up to the victims and dusted them, and the walking corpses fell over and stopped moving.
    We moved methodically through the first floor of the hospital and the heaviest work was in the emergency department and triage wards. By the time my kills reached double digits, I’d turned my brain off and stopped registering what I was doing. I saw enough before that happened to realize some of the zombies weren’t