“I know you are, Chavez, but I don’t want riots in Crenshaw.”
“There’s not much we can do about that. We pump up the volume like you want, people are going to wig out. You know how it works.”
“Yeah, we can’t prepare for war without amping up the juice, and probably things will go to hell. But we don’t have to stand around watching people get killed. We can try to control it.”
“What you want me to do, D?”
“Bring in more soldiers—whatever you need. I want to put more people on the street. Protect civilians, homes, businesses. And put everyone on a shift rotation if you can. We don’t want our own guys going ape-shit.”
“It’ll be complicated, boss. It might slow things down—”
“Bullshit, Chavez. You need more resources, you tell me. I’ll get you what you need. But don’t tell me you can’t do it.”
“Okay, Domino. I’ll make it happen.”
“I know you will. I want to know when everything’s in place. Call me.”
I clicked off the cell and tossed it on the seat. I turned left onto El Segundo and kept driving, though I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. I knew Papa Danwe had ramped up his operations, but most of that would be safely hidden from view unless I really went looking for it. Anyway, the juice was all I needed to see.
The juice.
All that juice was pointless unless Papa Danwe could do something with it. Just like our outfit in Crenshaw, the sorcerer needed to channel it, contain it, so it could be tapped when and where he needed it.
I stopped on the side of the street and got out. I dropped a protective spell on the Lincoln. It wouldn’t hold up long if people started chucking bricks at it or set it on fire, but it was better than nothing.
It wasn’t easy to get at the juice. There was plenty of it, but it wasn’t mine, wasn’t flowing on my territory. The tags were pulling it out of the air and the asphalt and channeling it somewhere else, for someone else.
I started walking, following the graffiti and the magic that flowed through it like blood through arteries. It didn’t take long to see the patterns. All the juice from the surrounding blocks was flowing to a central location, like the drain at the bottom of a swimming pool. Papa Danwe was filling Inglewood with magic and then sucking it dry.
I followed the juice to an old factory that hadn’t been used since the American economy had a manufacturing sector. Almost every inch of the grime-darkened brick was covered in layers of intricate tags. A row of large windows, many of them broken out or painted over, extended the length of each side of the building just below the roofline. Back in the day, they’d probably provided what little ventilation the factory enjoyed. Chain-link fencing topped by razor wire surrounded the site. Unlike the sorry excuse for a building, the fence looked new.
I ducked into the dark recess of an empty storefront across the street. “It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear,” I said. The eye in the sky spell is like my own invisible skycam, and I can even rig it for audio. I sent it flying toward the factory at an altitude of about fifty feet.
When it drew even with the chain-link fence, the eye stopped, like it had run into a wall. That, of course, was exactly what had happened. The factory grounds were warded.
Even so, the eye allowed me to see plenty from the edge of the site. The first thing that caught my attention was the metal tower extending from the roof of the building, maybe a radio antenna or satellite tower. Like the fence, the tower looked new and the unpainted metal dully reflected the sunlight. There were no power lines leading to the tower that I could see, but there did seem to be some kind of gadgetry at the top. I zoomed the eye in as far as it would go but still couldn’t make out any details.
I couldn’t see magic through the eye, but I could sense the ley line running under the factory, and I could feel something pulling at that magic, drawing it up through the earth to the surface.
I could also see that the entire site inside the fence was crawling with gangbangers. Papa Danwe had thugs out front, guarding the gate in the fence. There were patrols moving along the perimeter of the fence and the walls of the factory. There must have been at least thirty outfit guys in there, and those were just the ones I could see. They were armed to the teeth, in broad daylight. Even in Inglewood, that kind of thing draws attention. Clearly Papa Danwe felt the time for subtlety had passed.
I had no idea what this place was, but I knew I didn’t like it. I also knew I’d have to get a better look at it, and that meant getting inside. I dropped the eye and spun my wallflower spell. It wouldn’t make me invisible in any physical sense, but I’d go unnoticed by the gangbangers as long as I didn’t get too close.
The warding spell was encircling the factory site, forming a massive cylinder of invisible force. The spell was powered by a small portion of the juice flowing into the site, tied into the graffiti network in four places—north, south, east and west—along its perimeter.
The ward was solid work, but it wasn’t the kind of first-rate craft I would have expected from Papa Danwe. More likely, one of his henchmen had constructed the spell. That was good, because it meant I had a shot at disabling it. The simple approach would be brute force. If I hit the ward with enough chaos magic to undermine its structural integrity, it would come apart like a spiderweb in a strong wind.
Of course, the simple approach would be really stupid. It would drop the whole barrier and it would probably set off alarms. It would likely alert all the gangbangers that they were under attack. And while it would be simple, it wouldn’t be easy. It would take a lot of juice, and I wasn’t sure there was much left that wasn’t already being pumped into the factory.
The easy approach was to pull the plug. If I severed each of the four connections between the warding spell and the graffiti network that was feeding it, I could probably drop the whole thing. I didn’t really want to do that, either. In a best case scenario, it might be interpreted as a failure rather than an attack, but I didn’t think the best case scenario was very likely.
Fortunately I had another option. I went around to the east side of the building and crept up to the fence. A gangbanger stood on the other side about thirty feet away from me. He had a MAC-10 slung over his shoulder, and his rings, gold chains and even some of his tats were juiced. He didn’t look to be a particularly strong sorcerer, but he was prepared.
The gangbanger looked right through my wallflower spell as I went to work on the ward. The endpoint of the graffiti network charging the spell was a telephone pole about ten feet outside the fence. It was layered in tags, grabbing juice from the incoming flow and rerouting it into the spell. It was decent work, but I couldn’t help noticing it wasn’t as elegant or efficient as the tags Jamal had put down. Some of the juice was bleeding out of the glyphs, evaporating into the air. I started pulling in that lost energy to power my spell.
The chaos magic I hit the graffiti node with was about as complicated as a typical computer virus. It infiltrated the arcane structure of the tag and overrode it with conflicting instructions. It wasn’t sophisticated enough to actually reprogram the tag. It just made it stop working.
The warding spell was still taking in juice from three of the four points, so it didn’t go down. But the loss of one of the graffiti nodes was enough to weaken it at the point of failure. I spun my levitation spell and floated over the fence, punched through the compromised barrier with a little juice and landed inside.
I crept up to the building, being careful to keep as much distance as possible between me and the gangbanger on guard duty. I dodged a roaming patrol and approached the wall of the building, angling for a side door that didn’t look like it saw a lot of traffic. I peered at the door with my witch sight and saw that it, too, was warded. The protective spells were being fed by the tags laid down on the brick walls around the door, and I used the same chaos magic I’d used on the perimeter ward to defeat them. I waited until another pa
trol went by, then I spun my B&E spell, opened the door and slipped inside.
Whatever the factory had manufactured at one time, all of the machinery had been torn out and removed. What was left was essentially one huge, high-ceilinged space the size of a modest airplane hangar. There were another dozen or so gangbangers inside, but most of them were lounging on cots that had been lined up along the walls, or sitting at folding tables eating, playing cards and generally wasting time. Whatever this place was, it seemed Papa Danwe’s boys planned to stay a while.
When I’d first seen the antenna outside, I assumed it was just fixed to the roof of the building. Now, I saw that it was actually anchored to the floor in the middle of the factory. It extended up through a crude hole that had been cut in the roof.
The tower rose from the exact center of a metallic ring about fifty feet in diameter that had been set into the concrete floor. I used my witch sight and followed the flow of juice from the graffiti network into the ring. The magic surged around the ring like some arcane particle accelerator.
I moved farther into the building to the edge of the ring. I knelt down and examined it more closely. Silver metal glinted in the light from the overhead industrial fixtures. The ring was about two feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far down into the concrete it went. For all I knew, I could have been looking at the top edge of a cylinder that extended all the way down to the ley line deep below the surface.
Whatever its actual dimensions, a lot of juice was flowing through the ring. I reached out for the juice, and I could sense that it was fed both by the graffiti network and the ley line. There was more juice coursing through the ring than I’d ever seen in one place, and I couldn’t reach any of it. It was completely contained within Papa Danwe’s ring, and I didn’t have the access codes.
The tower was obviously meant to draw power from the ring, but I couldn’t see any mechanism for it. There were no lines or spokes connecting the two. I got a mental image of raw magic arcing from the ring through the air and into the tower, like an arcane Tesla machine. Whether this was some uncommon design insight or overwrought imagination, I couldn’t tell.
I decided I needed to get a closer look at the tower. This was tricky, because there were four gangbangers clustered around its base, standing guard. I crept close, willing myself to remain silent and unseen.
When I was still about twenty feet away, my right foot broke a concealed warding circle surrounding the tower. I hadn’t felt it as I approached. I hadn’t spotted it with my witch sight, and I should have been able to. Maybe I was dazzled by the magic show created by all the juice flowing through the silver ring.
The instant I broke the ward I was hit with a true seeing spell that dropped my wallflower, and an alarm bell began to sound. It tolled like Notre Dame at noon on Sunday.
I froze in place, looking about as stupid as a cartoon character who just followed his nemesis over the edge of a cliff. There was a long second in which nothing moved and there was no sound but the tolling of the alarm bell.
Then a dozen gangbangers unloaded on me.
I was just a little faster. I hit my jump spell and leaped to the tower, grabbing onto the superstructure about twenty feet above the ground. The hail of bullets and offensive magic turned the factory floor where I’d been standing into a smoking crater in the concrete. If the tower had been protected by a second barrier ward, I’d have continued with the cartoon theme, slamming into it and sliding to the ground.
There was no barrier, though, and I started climbing as soon as I landed in the gridwork. The gunfire and spellslinging ended abruptly when I made the tower. The gangbangers were well trained and disciplined, and their instructions were probably pretty simple. “Shoot intruders. Don’t shoot the tower.”
I climbed quickly, and I was about halfway up the tower when the first group of thugs started climbing up behind me. I didn’t have the same concerns for the tower, so I paused long enough to lob a force spell down at them. It was hard to find the juice, even for the simple spell. I had to reach all the way down below the building and pull the juice from the ley line, before it was drawn up into the ring.
The force spell knocked all three of the gangbangers off the tower. They didn’t fall far enough to suffer proper injuries, but no one rushed forward to take their place. I grinned and kept climbing.
When I finally got to the factory ceiling, I discovered metal spikes like lightning rods extending from the tower, and I thought my image of the Tesla machine hadn’t been far off. I squeezed between two of the spikes and continued climbing through the hole in the factory roof.
Once outside the building, I kept right on climbing. I could have run across the roof to the edge of the building, and from there made my escape, but I wanted to see what was at the top of the tower.
I climbed another twenty feet and arrived at a circular platform ringing the tower that allowed me a more secure perch. Like the ring below, it was made of silver, and there were arcane runes and glyphs engraved in its surface. They were the old-school equivalent of the graffiti tags and served much the same purpose.
A silver bezel was anchored into the center of the platform, and a crystal about the size of a beach ball was set into the bezel. When I looked closer, I could see that the crystal wasn’t actually set in anything—it was suspended in midair. The bezel was charged with enough juice to keep the crystal in place, but the crystal itself was dormant. It didn’t take a theoretical genius to figure out that the crystal would be charged by the juice coursing through the ring below. The juice would arc into the lightning rods extending from the tower, flow up into the bezel and be drawn into the crystal. Then something bad would happen.
It also didn’t take a genius to recognize God’s own magic wand. The tower was clearly an arcane weapon of some kind. It was a weapon that could draw a hell of a lot of juice, not just from the magic contained in the ring but from the ley line and the graffiti network that fed it.
I had a few options, and my first choice was to knock the whole tower down. The problem with that option was that I couldn’t reach enough juice. My second choice was to circumcise it. I didn’t know much about magic wands, but the big crystal on the tip had to be pretty important.
I do a better job of learning from mistakes than the average cartoon character, so I took a good look at the contraption with my witch sight before blasting it. There was plenty of juice in the bezel, but I could get a good enough sense of its pattern to be sure it was just holding the crystal in place. No ward. I shrugged, placed my right palm against the cool surface of the crystal and blasted it.
The ward that wasn’t there turned my spell around, punched me in the chest and sent me hurtling into the blue California sky.
This sounds bad, but there was an upside. The ward hit me hard enough that I cleared the fence and the barrier around the site completely. In fact, by the time gravity started to bend my trajectory into the ground, I was a good two or three blocks away from the factory and the gangbangers who wanted to kill me.
Even the downside, so to speak, wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I can’t fly, but I can levitate, and I could use the spell to at least take some of the crash out of my landing. Unfortunately I was tumbling through the air having just been hit by some fairly painful combat magic, and I couldn’t pull enough juice out of Papa Danwe’s turf to properly execute the levitation spell.
This being Southern California, I might have hoped for a swimming pool or at least a fucking palm tree to land in. Instead I got a gravel parking lot. My half-assed levitation spell was enough to get my feet right side down. I hit the gravel, stumbled, fell, tumbled a few times and then skidded across the parking lot to slam into the brick wall of a body shop.
I lay there for a few moments, squinting into the sun and waiting for the pain to hit. It didn’t take long. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, because my whole body hurt. My hands, knees and back were torn, and the abrasions had picked up most of the gravel from the parking lot.
I’d managed to skid along on my face for a stretch, and my chin, nose and forehead were bleeding. Despite the haze of pain, I was able to focus well enough to confirm that my nose wasn’t in the usual position. All of these new injuries were neatly layered over the ones I received from the ghost dogs the night before.
I forced myself up and started making my way back to my car. I might have lain there and died, but there were a lot of factors arguing against it. I needed to warn Rashan about the big-ass magic wand, and anyway, Papa Danwe’s boys would probably find me before I managed to die. But there was something else that really got me up and moving.
I had a date with Adan that night.
Six
The first thing I did when I returned to my condo was grab the bottle of aspirin out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I don’t need a spell to treat pain. If I flow enough juice, I can numb myself into oblivion. But the injuries I’d sustained in the last couple days were serious enough that I needed a little more than pain relief. The aspirin was a useful prop and I had a spell that would, in principle, fix everything from broken bones to a critical appendix.
Sadly, I really suck at healing magic. Sorcery is funny that way. Even when you have all the pieces to the puzzle, sometimes you just can’t seem to bring them all together. I could handle other spells just fine, ones that on the surface would seem to be closely related, like the purification spell that let me suck down Camels without regard for the Surgeon General’s warning. That spell wasn’t real healing magic, though. It was equal parts destruction and protection mojo, designed to vaporize the bad stuff and shield healthy tissue from harm. If I actually got cancer, it’d be about as much use as acupuncture. Probably less.
So I gave the aspirin spell a shot, but my expectations were low. I stripped off my clothes and chased a handful of Bayer with a glass of wine.
“We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full,” I said. The spell, as it came together, looked more like a tangle than a pattern, and the more juice I poured into it the uglier it got. I put my glass on the edge of the sink and examined myself in the mirror. My nose looked a little straighter and most of my cuts and scrapes were no longer bleeding. The pain had subsided to a dull, full-body throb, but that might have just been the juice. By my standards, the spell was a rousing success, but I still looked like hell. I topped it off with a purification spell to nuke any infections that might want to set up shop and called it good.
Mob Rules Page 8
