Honey laughed, but there was no humor in it. 'Of course he does! He intends that you die, and when you do, you'll serve him until your debt is paid off.'
'After I'm dead? He never said anything about that.'
'That's because-'
'I didn't ask,' I finished. 'Well, this is good to know.'
'You don't seem all that mad about it.'
'I guess I'm not surprised. I can't really call myself his master and then pretend I didn't know what it meant.' Mostly I was thinking about Rashan. He hadn't told me any of this, and he must have known. I could only think of one motivation for that. He'd wanted me to figure it out on my own, and if I didn't, I'd have been an acceptable casualty. I wasn't really surprised by that, either. I'd always known I didn't work for a saint.
'Well, I'd be pissed,' Honey said. 'Mr. Clean sent you into the Between knowing you wouldn't be able to handle what you found there. The only reason he even told you about me is that it indebted you to him further.'
'Yeah, nice play. So tell me what you can do for Adan. You have magic that can protect him?'
Honey nodded. 'I'm basically a spirit, too, you know. Not like the one that's possessing Adan, but still a spirit. Predators like that are common where I come from, and we have ways to protect ourselves from them. If we didn't, there wouldn't be any of us left.'
'So what can you do?'
'I can make you a potion. It won't be much, like a thimbleful. You can put it in Adan's food or drink. He won't even have to know about it.'
'Will it drive the spirit out or whatever?'
'No, it will only make it harder for the spirit to possess him. Ordinarily it would make it hard enough that the spirit would be better off looking for a different host. But this spirit has a lot invested in Adan already, so I'm not sure it will want to start all over.'
'But it will buy me some time.'
'Yes. It should make the possessions less frequent, and if we're lucky it will prevent the spirit from possessing Adan for a long enough period of time to complete another ritual. At least for a few days.'
'That's good enough. It should give me enough time for you to train me in the kung-fu magic so I can destroy the spirit in the Between.'
'I think so,' Honey agreed.
'What's it going to cost me, Honey?' I looked at her, hard.
'I'll do it as a favor, no strings attached,' she said.
'Why?'
'Because I like you. Because I want to be here, in Arcadia. I belong here, Domino. My people weren't born of this world, but we long for it. We made ourselves its first children, spirits of tree and stone and brook.'
'You must hate what we've done to the place.'
'Cities are good, too,' she said, laughing. 'It's the magic of this world that we crave, and there's magic in the streets as well as in the groves and the hills. I want to dwell in this world again, and if I'm going to do that, I need your friendship more than I need to nickel and dime you for favors.'
I laughed. 'If friendship is all you want, you've got it, Honey. I'm not in a good spot, but I don't even want to think about where I'd be if it weren't for your help.'
'Good. Then come take a shower with me.'
'I, uh…I'm not sure we-'
'I'm still kidding,' she said, giggling. 'I know humans have strange ideas about such things. I can wait.' She winked at me and I blushed. 'Go boil some water in a large pot-one of the copper ones I used for the healing salve. I'll get some things from the garden.'
I boiled water and watched Honey brew the potion. It wasn't like any magic I did, and by the time she was finished I was nodding off in my chair. I'd been awake for a long stretch, and even without the events at Adan's loft and the junkyard, I'd have been exhausted. As it was, I barely managed to stumble into my room and collapse on the bed before I was out. Ten I woke up at about five in the afternoon. I had a hangover from my overindulgence at the salvage yard, and I used a spell to nuke a burrito and get the juice flowing. The hair of the dog smoothed out the throbbing in my temples and steadied my hands, but the burrito didn't do much for my stomach.
I spent some time with my head in the toilet and took a shower. By the time I was dressed, I felt just about good enough to go back to bed.
Instead, I called Adan. I had a small glass vial loaded with the potion, and I needed to hook up with him long enough to deliver the goods. I was thinking dinner, since I didn't have much to show for the burrito and it would give me the best chance to dose him.
'Not dinner,' Adan said when I made my suggestion. 'I don't want us to get predictable.'
I rolled my eyes. This thing was complicated enough without having to worry about rules of dating etiquette. I mentally ran through other options that would involve the ingestion of food or drink. 'We could go to a club, do some dancing, have a few drinks.'
'I've had enough of nightclubs for a while. How about the Commerce?'
'Poker?'
'Yeah, they have decent no-limit games.'
'You play poker?'
'Sure. Everybody with too much money and no job plays poker these days…people like me and Ben Affleck.'
'Okay, that sounds fun. Do we have an angle?' All the big poker rooms in town have spotters with a little talent whose only job is to make sure people like me aren't juicing the games. We could still cheat the old-fashioned way, though, playing partners and working the rest of the table as a team.
Adan laughed. 'I'm dating a thug. We're just playing for fun, Domino.' Cheating is fun, but I was secretly relieved. I'd be better off playing it straight. I'd be able to sit next to Adan, and it would make it a hell of a lot easier to slip him the potion.
'All right, sounds good. Pick me up at eight.'
'You pick me up. I tend to drink a little when I play cards. And bring plenty of money-I'm pretty good.'
'You shouldn't have told me that. You might have been able to hustle me.'
'Now I've got you thinking about it. You're doomed.'
'True. See you at eight.'
'Later.'
The Commerce Casino opened in 1983, about ten miles from downtown L.A. just off the Santa Ana Freeway. It had expanded a couple times, and now it was the largest card room in California. I've heard it's the largest in the world.
It's also one of the largest juice boxes in town. With over two hundred tables and all the cards and chips and probabilities dancing twenty-four hours a day, it's like a numerological ritual the size of an amusement park. Rashan didn't have a piece of it, though. If anyone was tapping it, they were much bigger fish than the L.A. outfits.
The City of Commerce itself isn't much to look at, and the casino sticks out like the proverbial twenty-dollar necklace on a two-dollar whore. It's supposed to be Vegas glitzy, I guess, but doesn't get all the way there. There are cheap red lights running up to the entrance to let you know you're on the right track. A garish statue in the lobby that might be a female sphinx is about the only thing suggestive of a theme.
I surrendered my car to the valet and looked at him long enough to make sure he'd be nice to it. We went in, and the floor manager I knew got us adjoining seats at a no-limit table with a four-hundred-dollar buy-in. I had an idea to show off a little, but he seemed to know Adan better than he knew me. He seemed to like him better, too.
I'm a decent player, even when I can't cheat. I'd been playing since I was a kid, so I'd seen enough hands to feel comfortable with most of the situations that come up. In most of those games I was using enough juice to know what the other players were holding, but even without the juice, I can usually tell if a guy is strong or weak, and I can usually figure out what he thinks I'm playing.
In this game, I just wanted to loosen up the table and make sure Adan was having fun. I ordered drinks and kept them coming often enough to set a fast pace.
