all to him.
'But now you are questioning your theory?' Rashan asked.
I nodded. 'Mr. Clean speculated that a spirit might be using the rituals to prepare a host, Adan, to move in permanently. He admitted it was just speculation, but I took it and ran with it.'
'And now?'
'There's a connection between the victims that doesn't fit with that angle. You trained them all. You don't train many guys, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I don't like that connection, and I don't see what difference it would make to a spirit.'
Rashan leaned back in his chair and looked at me for a long time. 'Do you have a new theory?' he asked finally.
'Maybe,' I said. 'It's the Papa Danwe angle. I don't have any proof-I don't think I'll ever have any proof with this thing. But it fits. You've got three sorcerers who all received training from you. One is a tagger, one is a warder and one is a designer.'
Rashan nodded. 'Go on.'
'We know that there's no point in squeezing these guys-unless you need their unique arcane talent. Well, what do they all have in common? They all learned their craft from you.'
'And so what would squeezing them accomplish, in this case?'
'It'd be like getting inside your head, wouldn't it? I thought about this all the way over here. Jamal was a tagger. He created arcane symbols that tapped and rerouted juice. Jimmy Lee was a warder, a specialist in defensive magic. And Rick Macy was a theorist, a systems guy.
'When Jimmy Lee first turned up dead, I thought it was someone going after our defenses. At the time, it didn't make any sense because he wasn't doing anything important. But he was working your magic, boss. It didn't matter that he wasn't doing anything important-it wasn't what he was doing, it was how he was doing it. If I could get inside your head and figure out how you did that kind of magic, I'll bet I could reverse-engineer your personal defenses. I'll bet I'd know enough about your wards and protections to take them down.'
Rashan arched his eyebrows. 'You would, yes. Anyone else would still be missing a piece of the puzzle.'
I frowned and shook my head. 'I don't get that.'
'You would have all the knowledge you needed-the craft, just as you say. But as you've learned, Dominica, magic isn't a science. It isn't engineering, even though sorcerers such as Mr. Macy try to approach it that way. Sorcery is an art. There is a practical aspect, technique, certainly, which the killer could have gotten from the three victims. But there are a thousand different ways a sorcerer can approach any given magical task. That's why magic is fundamentally a creative endeavor.'
'So the missing piece is creativity?'
Rashan nodded. 'The missing piece is style.'
I stared at him and swallowed hard. 'That's what I learned from you. I already had the nuts and bolts. You showed me how to bring it all together.' I thought back to those days, when Rashan had trained me. It had been… intimate. Not sexually, not exactly, but it had some of the same vibe to it. In a very real sense, Rashan had shared his juice with me.
'I'm afraid so. And more to the point, you're the only one with whom I've shared this most intimate aspect of my art. In other words, I suspect you're next, Dominica.'
'I think I would have been next anyway,' I said. Maybe I should have been shocked or angry, but I wasn't. Mostly I felt like I should have seen it earlier.
Rashan continued. 'So Papa Danwe isn't after territory, at least not directly-he wants to take a shot at me. He knows he has no hope of succeeding with my magical defenses in place. The question is, why bring this spirit into it? Why bring my son into it?'
'Before we get to that, I need to ask you a question.' I looked up at him and he nodded. 'What's it all about?'
'I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific, Dominica.'
'All of it. The juice, the outfit-everything. I've been thinking about it since Jamal's body first turned up. It doesn't make any sense.'
'Why not?'
'There's too much juice. All the things we're into. We have Jamal's tags and others like them pumping juice from crack houses. We have gambling and prostitution rackets that are just cover for numerology and sex magic rituals. We're on the verge of war with Papa Danwe, and half of South Central is drowning in juice. Even without all of the outfit's operations, there's more juice running through this city than anyone could ever use.
'That's one reason it doesn't make any sense that Papa Danwe is trying to move on you. What would be the point? To get more juice? Everyone already has more than they know what to do with. I asked Case, and he said there's never been a war in the forty years he's been with the outfit. There's no real conflict between the outfits because there's nothing scarce for them to fight over.'
Rashan nodded and smiled. 'It wasn't always so, you understand. I came to L.A. in the twenties with the bootleggers. It was a different time. There was a lot less juice and a lot more violence.'
'But now there's plenty of juice.'
'Yes. Every year, every day, it gets stronger. I take it you realize there is far more magic in the world today than there used to be.'
'Yeah, I guess I knew things had been a little dry for a few hundred years.'
'Indeed. Some will try to tell you the Enlightenment was responsible for the decline of magic. This reverses cause and effect and ignores what was happening in the rest of the world, beyond the borders of Western Europe. Magic was already fading and men simply turned their attention to other pursuits.'
'But now it's coming back.'
'Yes. It isn't the first time this has happened. Magic is rather like global temperature. It follows a cycle, it waxes and wanes. Humans can influence the cycle, even catastrophically, but there isn't any ultimate cause of it. It's just the way it is.'
'So magic is on the rise again and that's why we have more juice than we can ever use.'
Rashan shook his head. 'That's why we have more juice than we can use today. You asked what this is all about. Simply put, it's preparation for what's coming.'
'A war,' I said.
'Yes. And other instabilities, before it comes to that.'
'What kind of instabilities?'
'The kind you get when six billion human beings wake up to a world of magic, the unreal made real, things they can't possibly understand.'
I had a sudden vision of the Four Horsemen riding through the streets of L.A. It would be like riot weather in Inglewood, but on an apocalyptic scale.
'And then war,' I said. 'Who is the enemy?'
'Monsters, of course. Things that can't exist in this world without magic, things human beings haven't had to face in hundreds or thousands of years. Things they don't even remember.'
'So we're the good guys?'
Rashan laughed softly and shook his head. 'Our interests coincide with those of the rest of humanity, at least insofar as this is concerned. We're all threatened by what is to come. But we share their interests only by virtue of knowledge they do not possess, and there is an inescapable arrogance and elitism in that. We certainly can't expect them to thank us for it. They will see us as secretive criminals with powers that are forever beyond their reach, criminals who play by their own rules. That is how they have always viewed sorcerers. To them, we will be no different from the monsters.'
'But we aren't monsters. We're human, too.'
'Are we? In the biological sense, certainly. But we aren't part of their community. We exist at the margins of their society, and they're right-we don't play by their rules. The truth is, Dominica, whether we are or not we don't think of ourselves as merely human and we certainly don't act like it.'
'Speak for yourself,' I said angrily. 'I'm not six thousand years old. I'm still human.'
'Really? Tell me something, Dominica, when was the last time you considered the effects of your magic on other people?'
