The city still smelled like rain and gasoline even after the sky tore open.
Nobody knew exactly when it happened. One minute the evening news was droning about another politician caught with his pants down, the next minute the horizon folded like wet paper and something older than time spilled through the rip. People on the street looked up, phones already recording, thinking it was another viral stunt until the first scream hit. Then the second. Then the whole damn block.
By midnight, downtown Boston was a graveyard of shattered glass and overturned cars. Streetlights flickered like dying fireflies. The air tasted metallic, the way your tongue does right before a nosebleed. And in the middle of it all, on the cracked asphalt of Tremont Street where the old Granary Burying Ground had once stood quiet for three hundred years, a woman stood alone.
She hadn't been there five minutes ago.
Her name was Lilith, though no one alive had called her that in six thousand years. She wore the skin of a woman in her late thirties: long black hair plastered to her shoulders by the unnatural rain, pale skin that seemed to drink the streetlight rather than reflect it, eyes the color of fresh arterial blood. Her dress—if you could call the shredded silk clinging to her body a dress—was the color of old bruises. She smiled, and the smile was worse than the sky splitting open.
She was pregnant.
Not in the human way. Nothing so gentle as swollen belly and morning sickness. This was something older, hungrier. Her abdomen rippled like water disturbed by stones, and beneath the skin, shapes moved. Small hands. Smaller teeth. Things that should never have seen light pressing outward, eager.
Lilith placed both palms flat against her stomach and laughed. The sound rolled down the empty street like distant thunder that had forgotten how to stop. Somewhere nearby a car alarm wailed, then choked and died.
"Come on, my darlings," she whispered. "Mama's been waiting so long."
The first contraction hit her like a freight train. She doubled over, hair swinging forward, and something inside her screamed in answer. Not pain. Joy. Pure, vicious joy.
She straightened slowly. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth, not from bitten tongue but from the simple effort of holding back laughter. Then she spread her arms wide, fingers splayed, nails lengthening until they curved like black sickles.
The streetlights overhead popped one after another, showering sparks. Darkness rushed in to fill the spaces between buildings. And in that new dark, Lilith began to give birth.
The first one came fast.
It tore through her dress like wet tissue paper, a slick red thing no bigger than a house cat, all limbs and teeth and glowing yellow eyes. It hit the pavement on all fours, shook itself like a dog coming out of water, and looked up at her with something like adoration. Lilith reached down, scooped it up with one hand, and pressed it to her breast. The thing latched on immediately, suckling with wet, greedy noises.
"Good boy," she murmured. "Strong already."
Before the words finished leaving her mouth, the second one followed. This one was larger, shoulders too broad, splitting her open wider. Lilith threw her head back and howled, the sound echoing off the skyscrapers until windows cracked on the upper floors. The creature landed in a crouch, already the size of a ten-year-old child, skin the color of wet coal, horns budding from its forehead like fresh bruises. It snarled at the night, then at its sibling, then at the world.
Lilith laughed again. "Fight later, my love. Plenty of throats for both of you."
The births came faster now, one after another, each one bigger than the last, each one more terrible. A thing with six arms and no face. Another with wings like torn leather that flapped uselessly before hardening into blades. A third whose mouth opened sideways, revealing rows of teeth that spiraled inward like a drill. They spilled onto the street in a tide of afterbirth and black ichor, steaming in the cold air.
By the time the tenth emerged, the pavement was slick with it. Lilith stood in the center of her own carnage, dress hanging in tatters, body already knitting itself closed. She looked around at her children—twenty-three now, maybe twenty-four, she had lost count—and felt something close to contentment.
Then she heard the sirens.
Distant at first, then closer. Red and blue lights flickered at the end of the block. Tires screeched. Voices shouted orders. Flashlights stabbed through the dark.
Lilith tilted her head. "Company," she said softly.
The demons noticed too. They stopped their squabbling, their nursing, their mindless clawing at the asphalt. As one, they turned toward the approaching lights. Ears pricked. Nostrils flared. Lips peeled back from teeth.
The first police cruiser rounded the corner at speed, lights blazing. The driver saw what waited in the street and slammed the brakes. The car fishtailed, rubber burning, then stopped dead.
For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then Lilith raised one hand.
"Kill them," she said.
The demons moved.
The six-armed thing reached the cruiser first. It punched through the windshield like the glass wasn't there, grabbed the driver by the throat, and yanked him halfway out. Blood sprayed across the dashboard. The passenger screamed, drew his service weapon, fired six times into the creature's chest. The bullets sank in and vanished. The thing grinned, mouth stretching too wide, then bit down on the driver's face.
Another demon—the one with the sideways mouth—leapt onto the roof of the car, caving it in with its weight. Metal screamed. The roof buckled. The second officer tried to climb out the passenger window, but the winged one caught him mid-air, talons sinking into his shoulders. It lifted him high, then dropped him onto the spikes of a wrought-iron fence lining the sidewalk. He hung there, twitching, gurgling.
More cruisers arrived. Four. Then six. SWAT vans screeched to halts. Officers poured out, shotguns and rifles up. Someone yelled for a containment line. Someone else screamed for backup.
Lilith watched it all with the mild interest of a woman observing fish in an aquarium.
The demons didn't wait for orders this time.
They swarmed.
One of the smaller ones, barely the size of a toddler, darted between legs and sank its teeth into an officer's calf. The man went down howling. Another demon landed on his chest, claws pinning his arms, and began to eat. Methodically. Starting at the stomach.
A SWAT officer opened up with a fully automatic shotgun. Buckshot tore through three demons at once. Black blood sprayed. They staggered, then straightened. The wounds closed almost instantly. One of them—the one with budding horns—laughed, a high piping sound, then charged. It tackled the officer, drove him backward into a storefront window. Glass exploded inward. They disappeared into the darkness of the abandoned coffee shop.
Gunfire lit the street like strobe lights. Bullets whined. Ricochets sparked off brick. Men screamed. Demons roared. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a police radio crackled: "We need heavy ordinance. I repeat, heavy—"
The transmission cut off as Beelzebub's smaller cousin—a thing made mostly of buzzing wings and mandibles—crawled inside the open door of a command van and began eating the driver from the inside out.
Lilith walked forward through the chaos, barefoot on broken glass and cooling blood. None of it touched her. The red rain that fell from the fractured sky slid off her skin like oil.
She stopped beside a fallen officer who was still alive, barely. His legs were gone below the knees. His face was pale, eyes wide with shock. He looked up at her.
"Please," he whispered. "God..."
Lilith knelt. She touched his cheek with fingers that were suddenly gentle. "God left the building a long time ago, sweetheart."
She leaned closer. Her breath smelled of copper and old gardens.
"But Mama's here now."
She kissed him once, softly, on the forehead. Then she pressed her palm against his chest and pushed.
Something cracked inside him. Ribs. Heart. Spine. His eyes rolled back. Blood bubbled from his mouth. He convulsed once, twice, then went still.
Lilith stood.
Behind her, the last cruiser burned. Flames licked the sky. Bodies lay everywhere, some in pieces, some still moving weakly. Her children prowled among them, feeding, fighting over scraps, testing their new strength.
She spread her arms again. The rain fell harder, turning redder.
And in the distance, the sky tore wider.
More rips appeared. One over the harbor. One above Fenway Park. One directly overhead, so close she could smell the sulfur and ozone pouring through.
Lilith smiled wider.
The first birth was done.
The real labor was just beginning.
She looked up into the bleeding sky and whispered to whatever waited on the other side.
"Come and see."
Then she turned and walked into the night, her children trailing behind her like shadows with teeth.
The city of Boston had eleven minutes left as a human place.
After that, it belonged to her.
And to the eleven others who were waking up, one by one, across the broken world.
The twelve.
The Cardinals.
The Dominion had begun.