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 patrol went by, then I spun my B amp;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 fa
ctory 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.
I caught a quick shower, taking care not to undo with the loofah what little work my spell had done. When I was out, dried and dressed, I put in a call to Rafael Chavez. I briefed him on what I'd found at the factory in Inglewood, and ordered him to put some boots on the ground in the neighborhood to keep an eye on it.
"We should hit it, Domino. Why wait for Papa Danwe to use it on us?" Chavez had juice, but he was still a man.
"Did I mention the wards, Chavez?"
"Yeah, but-"
"Did I mention that I couldn't even see a couple of them, including the one that almost knocked me into the OC?"
"Yeah, boss, it's just-"
"That's what I thought. We send guys in there without knowing what we're up against, chances are good this war goes hot, on the Haitian's terms, and our people wind up dead."
"You're right, Domino. I just don't want to give him time to use the fucking thing on us. Whatever it is."
"Neither do I, Chavez. If I was sure we could take it out without knowing what it is, how it works, how it's protected, I'd say fuck it and send in the Marines."
"Okay, D. I can have some theory geeks look at it."
"Good idea, but make sure everyone knows this is strictly surveillance. No one goes inside that fence, Chavez."
"Thing is, boss, this is some fucked-up shit. Guys getting squeezed by another outfit, that I can get my head around. Making a move on Crenshaw, trying to push Rashan out, that I can understand. Maybe it's not exactly business as usual, but yeah, sometimes gangs go to war. We do shit like that, you know? We don't build the fucking Death Star in the middle of Inglewood."
It seemed obvious, but Chavez made an important point. The outfits survived by existing on the margins. We got away with a hell of a lot by not attracting attention to ourselves, keeping our heads down well below the veneer of civilization. But we did not, under any circumstances, draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.
The craziest thing about this new development was that Papa Danwe had apparently decided he didn't care. There would never be one hundred percent agreement on the rules of our thing, but you don't build a magic cannon in Inglewood. It was so far beyond the pale it would have seemed ridiculous if I hadn't seen it myself, hadn't felt the juice Papa Danwe was pumping into it.
It was like the Cosa Nostra deciding to build a battleship in the Hudson River. Apart from the fact that it seemed like a really stupid idea, there could be no doubt that someone wasn't just changing the rules, they were changing the game.
"I hear you, Chavez. It doesn't make any sense. Even if you can build it, I don't see how you can use it. You light the fuse on something like that, this whole party's over."
"Unless…" said Chavez, his voice fading out. "Unless you think the party's already over. Maybe it's like the nuclear option, chola. You only bring out the nukes when you know it doesn't really matter anymore."
"Maybe, but the party isn't over. It's not even winding down. Papa Danwe isn't being threatened. Not by us, not by any of the other outfits. Why go nuclear when life is good?"
"I don't know, boss. Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe the Haitian doesn't see it the same way."
"Okay, here's what we do. I'm still not willing to hit that thing until we know what's going on, but I want you to put a strike team together. Have them standing by. If Papa Danwe tries to go nuclear, we take it out."
"How big a team you want, boss?"
"Jesus, Chavez, I don't know. Just some big hitters, bring them in from wherever. And send a few guys to run some tags in there, as close as you can get without blowing the lid off this thing. It won't do us any good to send in the heavy artillery if they can't get any juice."
"Okay, boss, I'll get it done. You coming down here?"
"Not yet. I'm going to try to get a sit-down with Terrence Cole. I don't know the guy, really, but I know him better than anyone else in Papa Danwe's outfit."
"I don't know, boss. I don't like the idea of you sitting down with those cocksuckers. They ought to come to us."
"Even Nixon went to China, Chavez. This is getting out of hand. If sitting down with Terrence means I can cool this out, I'll do it."
"If you say so, boss."
"Plus, I think he's into this thing up to his earrings. Maybe I can learn something."
My next call went to Sonny Kim. The Koreans had come down on our side, but they'd previously had a cordial relationship with Papa Danwe. They shared some of the same ghettos and generally managed to do it without killing each other. I knew Sonny Kim knew Terrence, and he was a good candidate for a go-between.
Kim promised he'd do what he could, and congratulated me on my clearheaded diplomacy in a time of crisis. Ten minutes later, he called back. Terrence Cole would meet me in Hollywood at the same bar where I'd sealed the deal with Kim and Zunin.
Unfortunately, there was no way I'd be able to meet with Terrence and still make my dinner date with Adan. Kim had arranged the sit-down for nine o'clock, and it would probably take an hour or so, plus drive time.
Then there was the whole question of whether I should be going out on a date with my boss's son when my outfit was at war. I considered it and decided I definitely wanted to see Adan if I could find the time. I'd made all the preparations I could. Sitting around my condo waiting wasn't going to do anyone any good, and besides, I had to eat. I was also still concerned about the Fred connection. I knew the vampire was involved in the escalating conflict with Papa Danwe, and I was concerned he had plans to somehow use Adan to the Haitian's advantage. So, really, I'd still be working if I kept my date with him. Sort of.
I decided I could make it work if Adan would agree to a late dinner. I called, and he did. He understood I sometimes had to keep odd hours-he reminded me who his father was, as if I might have forgotten.
I got to the bar at eight-thirty. I'd asked for the sit-down, it was on neutral ground, so I should get there first. Pick my spot, mark my territory, that kind of thing. Terrence was already there, waiting for me at a table in the back. He stood to greet me as I approached.
Terrence was the kind of guy you want to describe in one word. His word was wide. He had a wide forehead, wide-set eyes resting on wide cheekbones, a wide nose, wide mouth and a wide chin. He had no neck to speak of, but his muscular body was wide, too, all the way down to his feet.
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