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.
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.'
