Given the circumstances, I realized crude was better than dead. "All movements go too far," I said, and hit the twisted wreckage of the Hummer with the telekinesis spell. I picked up the truck and threw it about fifty yards down the street, beyond the roadblock and the kill zone. It hit the street with a hellish crash, rolled a few times and smashed through the metal and glass facade of a dollar store. We finally came to rest upside down. I hung from my seat belt and looked over at Seville.
"That'll buff right out, Frank."
"Fuck it, Domino. I've got GEICO."
We piled out of the truck and staggered into the street, looking back toward the roadblock. Papa Danwe's gangbangers had left the buildings, rooftops and alleyways to either side and were strung out in a line, scrambling down the street toward us. There were at least a couple dozen thugs in the little mob, and they never had a chance.
All six of us, plus Honey, unleashed our nastiest combat spells on them simultaneously. This probably would have been the most impressive magical performance I'd ever seen, except it all happened at once and I didn't really see anything. Magic lit up the street in rapid-fire flashes, and a sound like heaven falling to earth crashed around us. There was a lot of smoke, and when it cleared, the gangbangers were gone. Most of the buildings and storefronts were gone, too. What was left looked like the streets of Dresden after an Allied bombing run.
We all stood there for a moment and looked at our handiwork. A brick fell loose from a demolished building and clattered down a pile of rubble into the street. A shard of glass dropped from a shattered window and smashed against the still-smoking sidewalk. Then all was silent, but for a lone dog barking somewhere in the night.
We covered the rest of the distance to the old factory on foot. We followed the path marked by the friendly graffiti our taggers had put down. There were three more ambushes before we reached the factory. They all ended like the first had, and a lot more quickly. I couldn't be sure because there weren't any bodies to count, but we must have trimmed the size of Papa Danwe's outfit by at least a hundred.
So I wasn't surprised when we arrived and I saw the factory grounds were only lightly guarded, about like they'd been on my first visit. The ward surrounding the site had been reinforced. The magic was much stronger, and a lot more complex. Papa Danwe had probably come down and done it himself, after my little incursion.
The team remained out of sight of the guards and split up. Honey and I stayed out front, along with Ilya Zunin and Sonny Kim. Ismail Akeem took the north side, Amy Chen the east, and Frank Seville the south. When everyone was in place, we all hit the ward's anchor points with chaos magic. It went down within seconds, and the alarm bell began to toll.
Sonny Kim chanted something in Korean, and a cyclone tore through the gangbangers positioned around the building. A few had time to get off a single spell or fire their weapons wildly before they were borne away by the wind, as if a giant had reached down and brushed them aside. We were joined by the other three as we walked across the lot to the factory.
As we approached the building, Zunin flung out one arm and the tattoos inked into his skin burned red. The force spell hit the brick wall like a cruise missile and punched a hole in it large enough to drive a school bus through. The back-blast from the spell blew out all the windows on the west side of the building, and tiny, winking shards of glass showered down on us like rain.
Papa Danwe was waiting for us inside with his own posse of hard-hitting gangsters positioned around the gate machinery in a semicircle. There were a lot more of them than us, enough that I didn't have time to count them all. The Haitian stepped forward when we appeared out of the choking clouds of brick dust and smoke.
He was old and impossibly thin, like a skeleton draped in papery black skin. His eyes were as pale gray as Rashan's. He was stooped, his bony shoulders hunched forward, and his shriveled right hand clutched the silver pommel of a walking stick. A necklace of human finger bones rattled on his chest as he hobbled toward us. I waited for him to get within twenty feet, and then I brought the Mossberg down from my shoulder and leveled it in his general direction.
"That's far enough, old man."
The Haitian squinted at me, as if he wasn't sure what he was seeing. "Where is your master, girl? It is time we finish this." His voice was a dry rasp. Not as bad as Akeem, but still pretty damn hard to understand.
"He couldn't make it. It's amateur night at the strip club, and he's the judge."
"He too craven to face me, yes?" Papa Danwe laughed. It was more of an insane giggle, really.
I wasn't going to mention why Rashan hadn't made the trip. The vibe I was getting from Papa Danwe led me to believe he should have sat this one out, too. For all I knew, he'd been spinning spells as long as Rashan, and he was clearly on speaking terms with crazy.
"Anything he can do, the six of us can do almost as well."
"Seven," Honey corrected.
"Seven," I said. "Sorry, Honey."
Papa Danwe scowled. "None of you is welcome here. This is my ground. Go now, or I kill you here."
I just shook my head. Everyone knew the game, and the stakes. Why couldn't we just get an early start on killing each other? Why did we have to talk about it first? Probably because bad guys have limited educations and even worse social skills. They just don't know how to act. Once the Haitian started jawing, though, I felt like I at least had to hear him out. Maybe he actually had something to say. Maybe he wanted to back down, if I gave him a chance.
I sighed. "Okay. You and your boys walk away, and we'll take down this gate. There will still be some unfinished business between our outfits, but nothing we can't work out."
"Who are you to give orders to me, girl?" Papa Danwe spat. "I was a king on a gold and ivory throne when your people were still beating each other with sticks. You cannot dream so darkly to imagine what I will do to you."
I gave it due consideration. I tried to work it from every conceivable angle. "Yeah, that's what I figured." I shrugged. "Vi Victa Vis!" I shouted, and hurled a lance of kinetic energy at the old man's withered heart. His counterspell swatted it aside with a lazy wave of his left hand.
The plan was for me to handle the wards on the gate machinery, which meant I didn't have time to tangle with Papa Danwe. Fortunately, my team knew the plan, too. Frank Seville shouted something inarticulate and charged the Haitian. He was flowing all his juice into defensive spells as he barreled at the old man, and the malevolent energy that crashed over him from Papa Danwe's posse lit him up like a fluorescent bulb. He hit the Haitian's shriveled body like a train running down a deer on the tracks, and they tumbled out of sight and out of mind.
I started fighting my way toward the tower. I wasn't entirely sure how the gate apparatus worked, but I was certain I'd been more or less on the money with the Tesla machine theory, when I'd thought it was just a magic cannon. I was convinced the crystal suspended at the top of the tower was the business end, that it was the device that would tear a hole in the world and let the fairies in.
Images of the first few moments of battle were imprinted on my mind. I saw Amy Chen standing her ground, calmly casting spell after spell at the gangsters that tried to bring her down. The phantasmal shapes of serpents, dragons and lions sprung from her outstretched arms and savaged the ranks of her attackers like nerve agents carried on the wind.
Ilya Zunin waded in like a Russian bear, flailing about him with force magic that sliced through flesh and smashed bone. Sonny Kim stayed by his side, spinning protections and defensive spells with impossible precision, carefully deflecting the hostile magic that assaulted Zunin from all sides.
Ismail Akeem danced convulsively in a circle and writhed in pain as he disgorged one spirit after another from his tortured body. The spirits howled and wailed as they descended on their terrified victims and devoured them.
All of this I saw in those first few seconds. After that, the battle dissolved into chaos. There was so much juice coursing through the place and
so many mind-twisting spells in the air it was difficult even to think, let alone make sense of what was happening around me. I would remember the sound. It was like the shriek of ravaged metal and lost souls, and it went on and on and on.
Honey stayed with me. She sang her wind-chime war spells and laid about her with her silver sword. We left a trail of the dead and dying behind us as we fought our way to the tower. I didn't feel like climbing it again, so I spun my levitation spell and fired the Mossberg down at the gangsters who came after us as I rose into the air.
I half expected to find another thug battalion on the roof, but I guess Papa Danwe was running low on guys who had enough juice to make a difference. The roof was deserted. I continued up to the small platform where the crystal sphere was suspended above the silver bezel. I could see the fairy magic warding the device this time, and I knew it would be impervious to both magic and physical attack. I landed on the platform, and Honey and I got to work.
It was a little like I imagined defusing a bomb would be. The warding spells were woven around and through the apparatus like tiny, intricate threads. I reached out with my mind and the changeling's magic and began unweaving the spells thread by thread. The terrible sound of the battle below cut through the roof and set my teeth on edge. The juice rose like heat from a burning building and lifted all the hair on my body like a static charge.
I'm not sure how long we were at it, but after a time we had undone most of the warding spells. As the threads were pulled free from the whole, they fell apart and the juice evaporated into the air. I'd just isolated the few threads that remained when Honey cried out in alarm.
"Domino, below you!" she yelled. I looked. Papa Danwe was rising through the hole in the roof on an unseen wind. His arms were stretched out to his sides, and he held his walking stick in one hand and Frank Seville's severed head in the other. Frank's head burst into flame, and the Haitian sorcerer hurled it at us. I got my shield up just in time as the fire exploded into us.
Sorcerers' duels are mostly a matter of who can flow more juice and who can spin that juice into combat spells more quickly. If anything, speed is more important than power. With each spell you cast, you have to decide whether to attack or defend, because you can't cast two spells at once. If you can spin attack spells quickly enough, you can force your opponent on the defensive, even if the spells aren't all that strong. All of this has to be done with spontaneous magic, of course-you can't recite quotations quickly enough to spin spells in a duel.
I knew Papa Danwe could tap more juice than I could in this place. In fact, I noticed immediately that our juice was running pretty thin. I also discovered in that first exchange that he was faster than I was. A lot faster. I had two things going for me, and I'd have been toast without either of them. The first was Honey and the second was the fairy magic I'd stolen from the changeling.
The Haitian had warded himself against fairy magic. I wasn't sure how he'd arranged it, but it seemed like a prudent thing to do given what he'd been up to. He'd cut a deal with the Seelie Court, but in the underworld any deal can go wrong. So the bad news was that Papa Danwe was protected. If he hadn't been, Honey and I could have swatted him around like two cats playing with a ball of yarn. The good news was that his protections against fairy magic weren't nearly as good as his defenses against sorcery.
I poured all the juice I could pull up from our tags below into the bare minimum of static defenses that would prevent the Haitian's attacks from instantly reducing me to meat pudding. Whenever I got a second to go on the offensive, I picked away at his defenses, just as I'd been defusing the wards on the gate machinery.
That's what I was doing, but none of it was apparent to the naked eye. It looked like I was just getting my ass kicked. Even this was an advantage, though, because the sorcerer didn't know what I was doing, either. He was protected, but he didn't have any fairy magic of his own.
Papa Danwe's initial assault knocked me from my perch on the platform, and I tumbled to the roof of the factory some twenty feet below. He came after me like a seagull swooping in for a bread crumb on the pier. His attacks were relentless, pummeling me with spell after spell, knocking me from one side of the roof to the other. Honey did what she could, lighting him up with ineffective glamours and wailing away at him with her tiny sword. It was enough to occasionally distract the sorcerer, and I seized each opportunity to pull loose one more thread.
In the end, I just ran out of juice before Papa Danwe ran out of protections. It got harder and harder to keep my defenses up, until finally, I couldn't keep them up at all. The Haitian saw the moment when it came. He grinned evilly, picking me up with a telekinesis spell, lifting me slowly into the air about level with the sphere at the top of the tower. Then he slammed me down into the rooftop with all the strength he could muster.
I managed to get my legs under me before I hit. They shattered on impact, but better them than my back or neck. My body was completely numb from all the juice I'd been flowing, so there wasn't any pain. I levered myself up on one arm and tried to spin one last spell, but I was dry. I was done.
Honey screamed and dive-bombed the sorcerer, but he intercepted her with a writhing bolt of electricity that arced from his outstretched hand. The force of the spell sent the piskie cartwheeling through the air over the edge of the building, and she plummeted, smoking, to the ground below.
Papa Danwe was in the mood to talk some more. He hobbled forward and stopped about ten feet away. "I been looking forward to tasting your juice," he said, licking his cracked lips. It was pornographic, and my stomach turned. "I heard so much about you, that you become so strong." He spat. "I heard wrong. You are weak. You have nothing for me." He cupped his hands before him and they began to fill with baleful juice that sizzled like acid. He started giggling as he came for me.
Then a ball of liquid fire burst over his head and poured down on him, scouring the thin, dry flesh from the back of his skull and one side of his face. It would have devoured him completely, but he reacted quickly, extinguishing the fire with protective magic. He turned slowly and I followed his gaze to see Terrence Cole's wide head poking through the hole in the roof. Papa Danwe roared in pain and fury and unloaded on his erstwhile lieutenant.
Terrence didn't run. He came all the way out onto the roof and pushed forward, knocking aside his boss's attacks and pummeling the sorcerer with his own. He took one step at a time, bent forward as if battling a gale-force wind.
I reached out and untangled the last knotted threads that protected Papa Danwe from what I could do to him. When his defenses had burned away into the ether, I poured out the fairy magic inside me and turned him into a toad.
Terrence stopped and stared. I collapsed onto the roof and rolled over on my back, staring up at the starless, electric-orange L.A. sky. Terrence started laughing. I tried to join in but I didn't have it in me.
After a while, Terrence's laughter subsided. "What you want me to do with the frog, Domino?" he asked. I turned my head and looked over at him. He'd caught the toad and was holding it up, peering at it curiously. It struggled in his wide hands and its mouth opened and closed spasmodically.
"Squeeze the motherfucker," I said, and Terrence did.
"Domino?" I opened my eyes and saw Honey hovering over me. I was still lying on the roof, and Terrence had covered me with his jacket. The juice buzz was gone, and the pain was welling up from my legs like bile in my gullet.
"Honey, I thought you were dead." She was burned, but it didn't look like anything her healing magic couldn't handle. "I guess you're pretty hard to kill."
"Warrior-princess," she said, and smiled. "Just like you, Domino."
Honey was able to finish dismantling the wards on the crystal sphere without my help. It was a good thing, too, because it took whatever reserves I had just to stay conscious.
With the wards down, the destruction of the gate was a little anticlimactic. Amy Chen hit the sphere with an entropy spell and it just came apart, melting like an i
ce sculpture in summer. She even captured some of the free juice and poured it into me, returning my body to blessed numbness.
All of them had survived-all except Frank Seville. I'd never gotten to know the man very well, and now I regretted it. I remembered what Vernon Case had told me, that Frank had brought Rick Macy into the outfit. I wondered what else he had done for us over the years. I knew what he'd done at the end.
Amy got on her cell and called Chavez to give him the news and request an extraction. I certainly wasn't going to be walking back to Crenshaw. She started issuing orders and then fell silent. Amy wasn't one for emotional displays, but she didn't look happy. Finally she handed the phone to me.
"You'd better hear this for yourself," she said.
I took the phone. "What is it, Chavez? The gate is down, the deed is done and I'm all fucked up. Send some guys out here to give us a ride back to town."
"They're already on the way, Domino, but that's not the problem."
"Spit it out, Chavez, or I'm likely to pass out before you get the chance."
"Reports have been coming in for the last hour, chola. Gates are opening all over South Central." Fifteen Honey's healing magic had me up and limping around with a cane within a couple days. I'd taken Papa Danwe's walking stick. The black wood was carved into the likeness of a cobra twining around the shaft, and its hooded head worked in silver formed the pommel. The stick had some juice, and I thought it was the least he could do.
A guerilla war had broken out all over South Central L.A. Our battle plan had become more of a counterinsurgency operation since the other gates opened, and near as I could tell, we were losing. I'd become so fixated on the Hawthorne gate that I'd never really considered the possibility of others. It had been an obvious, terrible mistake. It was even worse, because I'd known they didn't have to be huge, permanent structures like the one in Hawthorne. I had one of them tied off to a sports bottle in my kitchen.
In hindsight, it seemed a perfect match for King Oberon's way of thinking. Give your enemy a big shiny to focus on, and he won't even notice anything else you're doing. He'd been playing Three Card Monty with me since this whole thing started. I was getting hustled.
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