Advance Praise for CAMERON HALEY

“Mob Rules is exciting and fresh, with a complex and conflicted heroine who grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. This book will make you fall in love with urban fantasy all over again!”

—Diana Rowland, author of Mark of the Demon

“Mob Rules is an exciting, gritty urban fantasy that stands out in a crowd. Very original, with a compelling plot and an intricately developed fantasy world that on the surface looks very much like our own.”

—Jenna Black, author of The Devil’s Due

“Gangsters and vampires, ghosts and sorcerers, and the mean streets of L.A. Add to the mix a woman who can definitely take care of herself, a plot full of twists and some clever magic, and you’ve got Mob Rules. And a whole lot of fun.”

—John Levitt, author of the Dog Days series

Stay tuned for more Domino Riley in Harvest Moon an anthology also featuring New York Times bestselling authors Mercedes Lackey and Michelle Sagara.

THE BURNING MAN WAS AN ANGLO,

tall, black hair slicked back, dark eyes glittering at me under narrow eyebrows. He gestured to the remaining chair and I sat down.

“Welcome, Miss Riley,” he said, and offered his hand. I leaned up out of my chair and reached across the desk to shake it. It started burning and I let go. The flames just licked at him at first, then they caught and began to devour his fine old suit.

“Pay no attention to the special effects, Miss Riley. I assure you it’s quite beyond my control. A bit of a nuisance, really.” The fire had eaten away his clothes and was working on his flesh, blackening it and peeling it away from his bones. I forced myself to watch. I gave a little nod to let him know it didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother him.

“Tell us what we can do for you, Miss Riley.”

“I need a gun. I heard you were the man to see.”

Mob Rules

Book One: The Underworld Cycle

Cameron Haley

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Mashenka

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Acknowledgments

One

Jamal James had been skinned and crucified on the home-built bondage rack in his living room.

I knew what to expect before I walked into his one-bedroom dump in Crenshaw. Phone calls had been made, orders had been issued and I was prepared for what I’d find. I told myself the thing on the rack was just a corpse, and the part of me made on the street believed it. The rest of me ran inside and locked the doors.

Anton Shevakov waddled up next to me, rubbing his hands nervously. “Domino, damn, I’m glad you’re here. I sit on couch for hour staring at this fucking fillet.” A lot of Russian gangsters used their accents to sound hard, but Anton whined enough to dull the effect.

“A fillet is boneless,” I said. “Jamal is skinless.”

Anton looked from me to the corpse. “Anyway, I’m just glad you’re here. It is lonely time for me sitting with him.” He sighed and shook his head. “We were going to get the doughnuts.”

Anton was fat. He’d come to L.A. from Moscow in 1992 and hadn’t stopped eating since. The guys in the outfit called him Heavy Chevy. I wasn’t one of the guys, so I called him Anton.

I looked at the body. It was naked, of course—really naked—but a piece of paper was covering the groin. I looked closer. It was a magazine.

“Anton, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is stapled to his body.”

“Just cover,” Anton said, motioning to the coverless magazine on the coffee table. “Jesus, Domino, I’m tired of looking at dick.”

“Well, take the damn thing off. I need to see Jamal like you found him.”

He moved to the body and paused to consider. Then he shrugged and jerked the magazine cover from the body, returning it to the coffee table. I approached the bondage rack and examined the corpse more closely.

From the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet, Jamal’s body was just muscle and bone. Not much fat—he’d been in excellent shape, lean and sculpted like an NBA small forward. Railroad spikes had been driven through his wrists and ankles into the thick wooden beams of the bondage rack. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see. No blood. No empty birthday suit lying around.

“You search the apartment?”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“Any juice?”

“I didn’t find the unusual magic, but Domino, it’s not strong point.” Like most low-level soldiers in the outfit, Anton’s strong point was mostly blowing things up. Even in that, his talent was modest. If something went down, he was usually better off with a gun. “What are you going to do?”

“Object reading. See if I can pick up anything from the stiff, the room.” I shrugged. “I’ll look for residual juice, just to be sure.”

“So you think it was hit?”

“Magic is about the only way you could peel a guy like this and not leave any blood. There’s an old Mongolian ritual—you hang a guy upside down by his toes and make an incision like this…” I traced a line across the top of one shoulder, around my head and across the top of my other shoulder. “You open the top of him like that, hocus-pocus, and he just slides out of his skin like a greased hand from a glove.”

“Jesus,” Anton swore and crossed himself. “And the guy is alive when you take his skin?”

“Yeah, depending on how good you are and how hard you want to work at it, you could keep him alive awhile.”

Anton looked at the corpse and shuddered. “But why do Jamal like this? To squeeze him?”

“I don’t see why. Jamal didn’t have much juice to squeeze. The ritual would burn more than you could get out of him.”

Jamal had been good at what he did, but he didn’t have the kind of magic that would make someone think about stealing it. Still, you didn’t see a ritual execution like this very often. When you did, the guy usually got squeezed. If you just needed him dead, a bullet in the ear was a lot less trouble.

“Anyway,” I said, “that’s what I’m here to find out. First, tell me what happened.”

Anton spread his hands helplessly. “I was to go with Jamal to shooting gallery in the Jungle. He needs to check tags, make sure they still put out. I go just in case.”

Jamal had been a tagger, a graffiti artist who used his craft to tap into the juice—the magical charge—of various places like buildings, freeway overpasses and buses. Anywhere he could lay down his tags and where there was juice to tap.

The derelict hotel in Baldwin Village where junkies went to shoot up was a well-known juice box. The place reeked of pain, hunger, desperation and despair. It was bad mojo, but it was still mojo. Jamal’s tags were the straw in the juice box. Shanar Rashan, the boss of our outfit, had his lips on the straw.

Like every boss of every outfit in the world’s major cities, Shanar Rashan was a powerful sorcerer, probably the strongest in Southern California. The LAPD thought he was Turkish. He was actually Sumerian. Rashan had been in L.A. for almost eighty years, building his organization, expanding his territory and his control of the city’s juice, though he’d used many names in that time. The investigations into his activities always seemed to hit the wall. The detectives and task forces inevitably lost interest and stuck the file in the back of a drawer before moving on to something else. Rashan had become more an urban legend than a wanted criminal.

When I drifted into the outfit as a teenager, Rashan noticed me. Unofficially adopted me, became my mentor. I already knew a lot of craft. I’d picked up a bit from my mother, a lot more from the street. But I was raw, unpolished. Rashan taught me discipline, control, finesse. When I was twenty-seven years old, he made me his youngest lieutenant. For the past eight years, I’d been his go-to girl.

And that’s why I caught the last phone call when the body of an executed gangbanger turned up. One of my gangbangers. One of Rashan’s soldiers.

“So I come here,” Anton continued, “knock on door, no answer, and so on and so on. I have key and I don’t want to stand in heat all day, so I unlock door and go in. I find Jamal hanging with no fucking skin. After I look around, make sure no one is here, I call Rafael.”

The outfit didn’t really have a rigid chain of command, but it did have a pecking order. It was based on how much juice you had and how close to the boss you were. Rafael Chavez sat a little higher in that pecking order than street-level soldiers like Anton and Jamal, a little lower than me. He’d been two phone calls from Rashan, and Rashan had thrown it to me.

“How do you know it’s Jamal?” I asked.

“Who else would it be?” That kind of limited imagination was one reason Anton would always be a low-level soldier. He didn’t have the head to be anything more. He didn’t have the juice. He never would.

You can’t get a good ID on a guy when he’s been skinned, but Anton was probably right. My instincts told me it was Jamal hanging there. Most of him anyway. If it wasn’t, I’d find out soon enough.

Witch sight involves staring at something long enough for your eyeballs to dry out. It’s like looking at one of those optical illusions. You look at the pattern, then you look through it, past it, and pretty soon there’s a picture of Jesus.

The only thing supernatural about magic is that most people don’t believe in it, don’t even notice it’s all around them. It’s as natural, as much a part of the world, as electricity. A rare few can see magic if they know how to look.

I stood by the door of the apartment and looked. I looked into the room, all the way in, past light, and color, and contrast and shape. I looked behind the visible to the magic that flowed beneath.

I looked first at the bondage rack. I saw the natural juice of the wood, no longer flowing, just pooling in the lumber and slowly evaporating. I saw the juice that soaked into the rack from the pleasure and pain of those who had occupied it.

I didn’t think Jamal had really been into the BDSM scene. Most likely he’d been using the rack and its associated activities as a tool. He’d been trying to tap more juice, learn to harness and control it. He’d wanted to get stronger, and he’d been working out. The bondage rack was his magical Bowflex.

There was quite a lot of juice in the rack, but none of it smelled like the murder. If this had been a ritual execution, the wood should have been dripping with the black magic of the spell used to kill Jamal. If I could have gotten a taste of that juice, I could have identified the ritual. Because magic is personal, I might have been able to identify the sorcerer who performed it. Failing that, I might have been able to use the juice to recreate the murder, just as Jamal had experienced it. It wouldn’t have been pleasant, but I might have gotten a look at the killer, might have been able to learn something useful from the details of the ritual.

But I didn’t get any of that, because the juice just wasn’t there. The rack had been cleaned. Scrubbed. On the surface, what I got was mostly the pain and terror of the victim. I also got the brute fact of his death, which stained the wood like mildew on bathroom tile. Deeper still I found only the old juice that had soaked all the way into the wood and the natural juice that had been there since it was a sapling.

I found enough juice in the corpse to confirm that it was Jamal, but I didn’t find nearly enough of it. A person’s magic clung to the body after death, evaporating at a measured rate until there was nothing left. This was especially true with sorcerers. If you knew how old a sorcerer’s corpse was, you could get a pretty accurate idea of how powerful he’d been by how much juice was left in the body. In the old days, graves and tombs were even violated to get at the juice trapped in the moldering corpses of powerful sorcerers.

Jamal hadn’t been a powerful sorcerer, but even a civilian’s corpse would have more juice than remained in the kid’s body. The skinless corpse was like a desiccated husk, sucked almost dry of the magic that had made Jamal a valuable if limited member of our outfit. He had been squeezed.

Whoever had done the ritual was good. It was complex magic, and most sorcerers—guys like Jamal and Anton—didn’t have the craft for it. But the really impressive part was the way the killer had scrubbed away the magic after the deed was done. It isn’t easy to clean up magic with magic. It would have been simpler just to obscure it, contaminate it—stir in enough random juice that you couldn’t get anything useful from it. Instead the murderer had wiped away every magical trace of the ritual spell that killed my guy.

I let my gaze pan around the small living room, and my luck turned. The carpet in front of the bondage rack was stained with black juice. I knelt by the stain and touched it. It was roughly circular, about two feet in diameter, cold to the touch, damp and sticky.

I dug my fingers into the stained carpet and reached out for the juice, tapping it, allowing it to flow into me. I leaned down and tasted it.

The juice began to resolve itself into a pattern in the part of my mind or soul that makes me a sorcerer. The black stain had been left by a small rectangular box. I didn’t get any sense of exact dimensions—it just doesn’t work that way—but it was about the size of a normal cookie jar, maybe a little smaller. From the taste and texture of the juice, it was probably made of clay or ceramic. It was very old and somewhat crudely formed. I could see symbols, like hieroglyphs, carved into its sides, though I had no sense of their meaning.

Mixed in with the box’s juice, I tasted faint notes of living human magic. Most of it was very old, and there was no way I could identify it. Some of that juice was fresher, though. It was Jamal’s.

I stood up and caught myself rubbing my hands on my jeans, as if it could somehow rid me of the black juice that had soaked into my skin. I let my gaze slip back to the mundane world.

“You find anything?” Anton asked.

“I’m not sure. The killer cleaned up after himself. It’s definitely Jamal, and I think he was squeezed. I might have a line on the murder weapon.”

“What do you do next?”

I thought about it a moment and shrugged. “I’m leaving. I can try to contact Jamal, but I’m not going to do it here.”

Anton’s eyes widened. Even guys who had been around the game a while got a little creeped out by necromancy. “Tell him I’m sorry about it, Domino. Tell him I wish I got here sooner.” Anton crossed himself again. “Tell him goodbye.”

“Well, I’ll try to get Jamal to talk to me. Probably I won’t be able to say anything to him at all. If I do, I’ll tell him for you.”

As touching as Anton’s request might have been, I knew his real motivation wasn’t just the bonds of friendship. He and Jamal hadn’t been that close. He was mostly worried that Jamal would blame him and stick around to haunt his ass.

Anton gestured at the corpse. “What about…?”

“Get rid of it. Clean the place. It’s dark and this is Crenshaw. Shouldn’t be much trouble.”

It wouldn’t be real messy, either, given the complete lack of blood. I took one last look at the skinned corpse hanging on the rack, and I was still glad I didn’t have to do it.

“And Anton,” I added, “put the word out. Tell everyone to stay sharp.”

In the underworld, you never find just one skinned and crucified corpse.

I can speak with the dead. It comes up in my business. Gangsters with interesting stories to tell are often deceased. Jamal’s corpse didn’t have much to say, but his shade might. Once you’ve killed a guy it’s not easy to keep him from talking. It’s not a foolproof spell—sometimes the dead don’t want to talk—but I had decent odds to contact Jamal. He hadn’t been dead long, and I didn’t expect him to be happy about getting murdered.

Most spellcraft is just will and power. You tap into a source of juice and manipulate it using a pattern you’ve learned. The spell is the pattern, a kind of cookie-cutter template you channel the juice through so it does what you want it to. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. You have to be able to create and sustain a complex, multidimensional mental and spiritual pattern, and you have to be able to tap and channel enough juice to produce the result you want.

Most people don’t have the will or the power. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Still, the words of the spell can be just about anything you can memorize. It doesn’t have to be some cryptic verse in a dead language. You don’t have to invoke the four corners or the forces of earth, air and fire, or any of that stuff. You just want something that makes sense to you, something that will help you stabilize the pattern and flow the juice.

I know dozens of spells, and each one is associated with a famous quotation I’ve memorized. Other sorcerers use nursery rhymes or hip-hop lyrics, dead languages, invoking the saints, or pagan mumbo-jumbo. Whatever works.

To contact Jamal in the Beyond, I needed some real craft, a spell backed by an easily repeated ritual. Again, the traditionalists use black candles, séances, Ouija boards, that kind of thing.

I use FriendTrace.com.

I sat down at my desk and brought up the Web browser on my laptop, then typed “Jamal” into the search box on the site. I tapped the ley line running under my condo and said, “In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” Then I hit the search button and released the spell.

My laptop went crazy. Random windows opened and closed faster than I could follow, like pop-ups at a porn site. A disharmonic, cacophonous squall blared from the speakers. The screen went black and the sound died. Without the juice, you just get personal ads.

A few seconds passed and a Web page flared to life on the screen. It was one of those slick Flash sites, and I had to stop myself from clicking the Skip Intro option.

Grainy, distorted, black-and-white images appeared, one after the other. A noose dangling from the twisted branch of a dead tree on a barren field. The indistinct silhouette of a man standing in a backlit doorway. An extreme close-up of a fly feeding on raw flesh. A blood vessel bursting. Jamal’s face pressed against the LCD, his mouth open in a silent scream.

The laptop speakers crackled, hissed, and I heard a voice.

“Domino,” it whispered, the word stretching out like a dying man’s last breath. It was Jamal’s voice.

“I hear you, Jamal. Tell me who did this to you. Tell me who killed you.” The dead usually weren’t in the mood for small talk, so you might as well get to the point.

Instead of an answer, the frozen image of Jamal’s face was replaced by the Blue Screen of Death as my computer crashed. I shut it down, counted to ten and rebooted.

I tried again, but I wasn’t optimistic. A mundane crash wouldn’t exactly have been a freak occurrence, but in this case, I knew I’d lost whatever connection I’d had to Jamal. It was so tenuous, I couldn’t even be sure I’d really had a connection. It could have been an echo, a psychic afterimage. After three more crashes, I decided to give it a rest.

My effort to contact Jamal had been a form of divination, the difference being that the spell had to reach all the way into the Beyond. I can use a similar ritual to do other kinds of divinations—say, running a check on an ancient magic jar whose juice I’d tasted.

For that, I use Wikipedia.

I brought up the browser again and typed “magic jar” in the site’s search box. I conjured up that magical image of the artifact I’d absorbed from the juice in Jamal’s apartment and powered up my divination.

The title of the entry was Soul Jar, and it featured a digital reproduction of an old lithograph. In the photo, a black woman who looked to be about a hundred and twenty years old sat behind a simple wooden table. Her withered hands clutched the clay jar resting on the table in front of her. Four other figures, all black men of various ages, stood behind her. The caption read, “Voodoo Queen Veronique Saint-Germaine, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1849. Saint-Germaine was the soul jar’s last known owner.”

I’m pretty good at this stuff. I quickly read through the rest of the entry.

This item is one example of a class of artifacts known as soul jars. Crafted in Egypt during the Old Kingdom period (c. 2650 to 2150 BCE), the artifacts were designed to contain the ka of the exalted dead.

“Ka” was hyperlinked, so I clicked on it and skimmed the new screen that popped up.

While ka is commonly translated as “soul,” to the ancient Egyptians it more properly represented a person’s magical essence.

I closed the pop-up and went back to the main entry.

This soul jar was crafted for Pharaoh Bakare (c. 2500 BCE), who desired that the priests of his inner circle would continue to lend him their power in the afterlife. The priests were ritually executed at the pharaoh’s funeral ceremony. Their magical power was contained within the soul jar and their bodies were mummified. The mummies and the soul jar were entombed with the dead king.

Like many artifacts, Bakare’s soul jar faded from history for many hundreds of years. It reappeared when a French knight returning from Crusade brought it back to Europe from the Holy Land. It disappeared again, only to emerge in Haiti, and later in New Orleans, in the possession of Veronique Saint-Germaine.

The voodoo queen was murdered in 1854, the apparent victim of infighting within the occult underground of antebellum New Orleans. The current whereabouts of Bakare’s soul jar are unknown.

I shut down the computer as the spell faded and leaned back in my chair. I had a pretty good idea of the soul jar’s current whereabouts. I also knew the identity of its current owner. I recognized one of the men in the photo of Saint-Germaine—a gangster called Papa Danwe. I didn’t know him, but I knew of him and I’d seen him a couple times. He apparently hadn’t changed much in the last century and a half.

Papa Danwe had come to L.A. in the early 1900s, by way of New Orleans, Haiti and some coastal sandpit in West Africa. I’d heard his first racket had been trading slaves and ivory to French pirates for guns. His outfit was much smaller than Rashan’s and we’d never had any trouble before.

It seemed we had trouble now.

Ninety-nine percent of my job is pretty simple. I’m a fixer, a problem-solver. I make sure the outfit is operating as it should. When it isn’t, I step in and make the necessary adjustments. I have no day-to-day routine, no ongoing managerial responsibilities. It’s a nice gig.

This looked like a one-percenter. In the outfit, shit flows uphill but it doesn’t flow all the way to the top. It stops with me. Rashan is at the top of the hill, and he never even gets a little on his shoes.

I grabbed a glass and a bottle of wine from the kitchen and curled up on the couch. Most of the problems I have to solve are pretty simple. There’s a body, get rid of it. Someone’s skimming juice, make so they don’t do it anymore. The cops are working too hard, pay them or put the hoodoo on them so they leave us alone. Action, reaction. Most problems have easy solutions.

This wasn’t one of those problems. Jamal had been executed by another outfit. It had been an act of war.

Ordinarily, if a rival gangster hit one of our guys, I’d hit him and make sure his boss got the message. Problem solved. I wouldn’t enjoy it, probably, but I’d do it because that’s the way this thing of ours works.

That wasn’t going to be a quick fix this time. Even with all the juice and testosterone on the street, L.A.’s underworld is surprisingly peaceful. There’s violence, but most of it happens within the outfits, not between them. There’s competition, but overt confrontation is rare. No one wants a war.

I was pretty sure Papa Danwe was responsible for Jamal’s murder, but I couldn’t prove it. My divination spell allowed me to build a pretty strong circumstantial case against the sorcerer. But as powerful as magic is, it also has its limitations. By its very nature, magic is ephemeral, intangible and subjective. My divination might be enough for me, but it wouldn’t count as hard evidence to anyone else. Even among sorcerers, “Wikipedia told me so” isn’t a compelling enough reason to touch off a gangland war.

I didn’t plan on taking Papa Danwe to court, but we would need the support of at least some of the other L.A. outfits if we wanted to make a move against him. We wouldn’t need their help, but we would at least need them to stand aside. There were a dozen major outfits in Greater Los Angeles, and plenty of smaller ones, but only a few really had a stake in South Central. Those were the ones that mattered, and they’d be the hardest to convince.

It was also unlikely that Papa Danwe had done the hit himself. It wasn’t his style. He’d have a henchman to do the dirty work, though it would have to be someone pretty good.

And finally, while I could connect Papa Danwe to the soul jar, and I could connect the soul jar to Jamal’s murder, I didn’t have even the glimmer of a clue about motive.

I’m not a detective. Most gangsters have it in them to do a murder, but it’s a rare thing if one of them is clever about it. Elaborate plots and cunning schemes are for normal people. A gangster usually kills a guy because someone else told him to and he thinks he’s covered. Mistakes get made—gangsters are prone to them—and that’s where I step in. There isn’t a mystery to solve, just an error to be corrected.

Most of what I knew about detective work came from cop shows and buddy movies. Look for clues. Develop a theory and find a suspect you like. Spend time with the family of your partner, who happens to be only a couple weeks from retirement.

Despite my lack of investigative experience, I wanted the killing to make some sense. It didn’t. Why would Papa Danwe be making a move against our outfit? If he was, why did he do it by hitting a guy like Jamal? The kid just didn’t merit the attention. Why squeeze him? He didn’t have the juice to make it worthwhile. And why leave him hanging in his apartment? If Papa Danwe was sending a message, we weren’t speaking the same language.

If I wanted to answer the “Why Jamal?” question, I needed to connect the kid and Papa Danwe. Maybe Jamal crossed him somehow. Maybe he’d even been working for Papa Danwe on the side and the relationship went sideways. Unless Jamal was a random victim, which seemed unlikely, there would have to be a connection. It sounded like a plan.

I stared at the vintage movie posters hanging on the living-room wall. I stared at the wall. I turned on the TV and turned it off. I had a couple more glasses of wine and fell asleep on the couch.

That night, I dreamed that Jamal was on the balcony outside my condo, trying to jimmy the French doors with a crowbar.

Two

When he wasn’t tagging or tying someone up in his apartment, Jamal could usually be found on a playground in Crenshaw, shooting hoops with his homeboys. I parked on the street by the court and went in through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence.

There were seven guys playing full-court, all of them young black males. The oldest might have been twenty-five. A few girlfriends and hangers-on lounged courtside on the cracked concrete. They leaned against the fence and watched the game. They passed a blunt around and smoked. The court and both backboards were decorated with tags Jamal had put down.

The game stopped as soon as my car pulled up, and everyone was watching me as I stepped through the fence. The guy holding the ball walked toward me. He was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-pound horse named Marcus. He’d come off the bench on a full-ride at UCLA for two years. He would have started his junior year at power forward, but he got collared for dealing crack and lost his scholarship.

“Yo, Domino,” he called. “We need a skin.”

It was going around. “You’ve got four skins and three shirts, Marcus.”

“Nah, D, Shawan gonna go shirts.” He nodded to one of the brothers. The kid jogged over to his gym bag and dropped a tank top over his head.

I was always a skin. Watching a five-foot-seven Mexican-Irish girl in her thirties trying to play ball with these guys wasn’t enough entertainment. Jamal’s boys always needed me to go shirtless. I’d learned a somewhat embarrassing lesson the first time this happened, so I was wearing a sports bra.

I stripped to the waist and handed my jacket and shirt to Marcus’s girlfriend, a young twentysomething with an elaborately styled weave and gold fingernails. She smiled and folded them neatly in her lap. I passed her the shoulder holster with the forty-five and she tucked it under my jacket.

“Don’t take Marcus money, Domino,” she whispered. “We got rent.”

“Yo, D, you been workin’ out?” Marcus asked, laughing and elbowing the kid named Shawan. “You lookin’ ripped, girl!”

“My people weren’t bred to pick cotton.” Casual sexism and racism were social etiquette in Crenshaw. I hear it makes some people uncomfortable.

“Nah, that’s right. Your peeps bred skinny to crawl under the fence.” Everyone laughed.

“I’m only half-Mexican,” I said, and gave up the straight line. “My dad was Irish.”

“Someone get this skinny bitch a potato,” said Shawan. The game was delayed another couple minutes so he could be congratulated for his wit with chest-bumps and fist-pounds.

“Okay, Shawan, I got you. Bitch.” I’d been cheating on the playground since kindergarten. This time, I only used enough juice to make sure Shawan didn’t score and to throw down a two-handed jam in his face on an alley-oop from our point guard. Skins still lost, and I coughed up my twenty so Marcus could make his rent. After the game, I joined them along the fence for Red Bull and weed.

“So what you doing, D?” asked Marcus. “You come down here just to give your money to us poor black folks?”

“Yeah, Marcus, I don’t pay taxes and I was worried your welfare check might bounce.”

“Fuck that, D. I got a job.”

Marcus, like most of the guys on the court, was a part-time criminal. No juice, no serious gang affiliation and no real connection with our thing. They were the handymen of Crenshaw’s ghetto economy. If a small-time rock-slinger turned up dead or incarcerated and his boss needed someone to fill in, he’d have a ready labor pool waiting at the playground.

“Actually, I was just wondering if you knew what Jamal has been up to.”

“You ain’t seen him, neither, huh?” said Marcus. “Word is he got a new ho.” Marcus’s girlfriend scowled and drove an elbow into his ribs.

“Sorry, baby,” he said.

“You know who she is?”

“Nah, girl, like I said, we ain’t even seen the brother. The woman, you know, that’s just what he said she said and whatnot.”

“Any new friends, besides the woman, I mean?”

Heads shook.

“Maybe you’ve seen some new faces hanging around. Maybe some guys in Papa Danwe’s outfit.”

“Nah, D, Papa Danwe got most of Inglewood and Watts, but he don’t got Crenshaw. Everyone know Crenshaw belong to the Turk.”

Rashan was known as the Turk on the street, at least by those who didn’t know him well. The outfit’s turf is shaped like a crescent, running from Santa Monica around the southern edge of downtown, up through East L.A. and reaching into Pasadena. Rashan controlled Crenshaw, but there was only a nebulous border separating his territory from Papa Danwe’s turf.

“All right, you give me a call if you hear anything else.” Nods all around.

“Jamal in some kinda trouble, D?” Marcus asked.

“I think y’all might need to recruit another player,” I said. “Jamal won’t be going skins anytime soon.”

I left Crenshaw and drove back to civilization. I took Santa Monica Boulevard into Beverly Hills. I’ve always liked Beverly Hills. The outfits exist by virtue of the fact that most people don’t pay any attention to what’s going on around them. It’s charming. No other place has reached Beverly Hills’s level of clueless perfection, with the possible exception of Vegas.

A vampire can walk down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping and pausing for the occasional snack, and no one will even notice as long as he’s wearing the right suit. A sorcerer would have to turn a demon loose in Gucci to attract attention.

The art opening was like any other of its kind. When I walked in, the gallery was bustling with the young, rich and fashionable in-crowd. This was L.A., though, so everyone had two out of three working—they were all faking the third.

I was there to meet an associate, a connected probation officer on the outfit’s payroll. His name was Tommy Barrow and he was twenty-nine years old. He used his secondary income, drug connections and gangster stories to circulate with the art-opening crowd and chase women who were out of his league.

I spotted him standing by an abstract painting in animated conversation with a salon blonde. Her swimsuit-model body and pouting lips advertised one of the many nearby clinics.

“Hi, Tommy,” I said. “Who’s your friend?” The blonde wore a diamond-and-ruby pendant that nestled in her prodigious cleavage. A red arrow painted on her chest wouldn’t have drawn more attention to her neckline.

“Sandy, this is Domino, a friend of ours,” Tommy said, his voice low and conspiratorial.

Sandy’s tastefully decorated face brightened and the pouty lips stretched into a sunny smile. “Oh, so you work for Tommy in, you know, the business?”

I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged apologetically. “Not exactly,” I said. “You could say we answer to the same boss.”

“Oh, I see,” Sandy said. “Can I ask what you do, or would you have to kill me?” She giggled, bringing a delicate and bejeweled hand to her mouth but making sure I could still see her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. In the outfit, I didn’t get any real sexism from the guys and I didn’t deal with cattiness from the girls. I had juice, and that’s all that mattered on the street. I only ran into that kind of shit from civilians.

I laughed, turning from her to Tommy, and then back to her. I put the smile away. “I wouldn’t have to.”

She stopped in midgiggle, and I could almost hear the little wheels in her head turning as she tried to figure out if I was joking or not.

Tommy laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. “That’s a good one, Domino! Sandy, why don’t you run along so we can talk business?”

Sandy lit up again and the smile reappeared. “Oh, okay!” she bubbled. “It was nice to meet you, Domino.” She bounced away and I turned my attention to the painting on the wall, some kind of abstract brown swirl on a yellow background.

“Looks like shit.”

“It is,” Tommy said, following my gaze to the painting. “Dog, I think.”

I looked closer. It was. The artist had lacquered it to the canvas.

“Let’s go outside for a smoke.”

Tommy nodded, grinning. “Those things will kill you, Domino.”

I have a purification spell that rules that out, but I didn’t mention it. It’s the kind of thing that pisses people off. They don’t really mind if you smoke as long as it kills you. Out on the sidewalk, I drew a Camel and lit up.

Tommy immediately began scanning the area for attractive female pedestrians. “So what can I do for you, Domino?”

“Jamal is dead,” I said. Tommy’s gaze immediately snapped back to me. I wouldn’t be able to keep the murder a secret, and Tommy would need to know eventually.

“When? How?” Tommy asked. His store-bought tan had lost a little color.

“Last night. Probably a hit.”

“Jesus. Who did it?”

“Hard to say. Jamal isn’t talking.”

“How did he die? Where did you find him?” Tommy was fishing for all the details that would allow him to spin a good insider report to impress his friends.

“Skinned and crucified in his apartment, magical ritual. Squeezed.”

Tommy let out a low whistle. “Damn. Hell of a way to go.”

“Yeah, Tommy, not the best.”

“So what do you want from me? You want me to call it in?”

“No, just report him AWOL the next time he comes up on your schedule. I don’t need a police investigation, even if it is half-assed.”

Tommy nodded.

“What I really need is information. I already ran Jamal’s homeboys through the paces. They don’t know much.”

“Okay,” Tommy said, thinking hard. “Like what? I was his PO. It was my job to keep him out of Chino. I guess I knew Jamal about as well as anyone.” For once, I didn’t think Tommy was exaggerating, at least not much. A probation officer was the closest most outfit guys ever came to a confessional. Jamal probably told Tommy Barrow things he’d never tell his friends or family.

“I need to know if he was up to anything unusual. Maybe he had something going on the side, maybe he made a new enemy.”

Tommy shook his head. “Far as I know, Jamal was a stand-up guy. The outfit was his life, and he wouldn’t try to run something under the radar. He thought he had a future with the outfit…and more to the point, he didn’t think he had a future without it.”

That fit with what I knew about the kid. He was smarter than most, and ambitious. It wasn’t exactly helping me connect him to Papa Danwe, though.

“Any new habits? New friends?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, after a moment biting his lip. “He was hanging out at the Cannibal Club. He had this thing he was trying with bondage and that kind of stuff, to work on his craft. He said it was a good place to find girls who were into that.”

The Cannibal Club was a nightspot in Hollywood that was popular with the black leather and porcelain fangs crowd. It was hard to picture Jamal there, and once you did it was a funny picture. Hollywood wasn’t Papa Danwe’s turf—none of the outfits controlled it. Still, maybe Papa Danwe had something working at the club. Maybe Jamal had gotten in the way.

“What about family?” I asked. It bothered me that I hadn’t thought about it before. Jamal had been a person before he’d been a corpse and a problem for me to solve.

Tommy shook his head. “You know the story. Father split, mother OD’d when Jamal was fifteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “You got anything else?”

“I don’t think so, Domino. If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

“Do that. Have fun with Sandy. You make a great couple.” I guess I can be a little catty, too, sometimes. I flipped my cigarette into the street, drawing a contemptuous sniff from a middle-aged woman in a white dress, saucer-size sunglasses and a ridiculous hat. I smiled at her and tapped a little juice, vaporizing the butt where it lay on the asphalt. She didn’t even notice.

About eleven o’clock that night, I left my condo and drove into Hollywood. It was a Saturday night, and as usual, traffic was a bitch. Fortunately I have a spell that allows me to weave through even the worst snarls with a little lane-jockeying.

Technically, the incantation I think of as the traffic spell is chaos magic—the old school would call it a luck spell. It’s one of my favorites. It’s subtle, and practical and complex enough that most sorcerers can’t manage it. In simple terms, it isolates and adjusts probability lines such that you just happen to find an open route through even the heaviest traffic. I surfed the probability waves through the Hollywood night and found the club on Sunset Boulevard.

I pulled up out front and spun my parking spell, muttering the words of the incantation. “Any place worth its salt has a parking problem.” I eased my car into a spot right by the door of the club just as a yellow Honda tuner pulled out. What luck.

There was a line of pasty, black-clad kids winding around the block, but sorcerers don’t wait in lines any more than we settle for lousy parking or sit in traffic jams. I walked up to the bouncer and smiled.

“I’m on the list,” I said. I wasn’t. I didn’t even know if there was a list. The bouncer’s meaty, clean-shaven head didn’t even budge as he checked me out from behind his wraparound sunglasses.

I reached out and touched the juice, channeling it through my imagination and rearranging it according to the pattern I’d learned.

“I have with me two gods,” I said. “Persuasion and Compulsion.” I released the magic and let it wash over him. Behind the sunglasses, the bouncer blinked.

“Oh,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass, “you’re on the list.”

I met the chorus of protests from the waiting kids with a smile and a little shrug. “I’m on the list,” I said.

Metal detector, pat down, cover charge and then I was inside and heading to the nearest bar.

The Cannibal Club was black decor, chain-link fencing, head-splitting techno-industrial you can dance to, blacklight and the smell of sweat and patchouli. It was teenagers and twentysomethings in black leather, black rubber, black nylon, black vinyl and black velvet. It was body piercings and tattoos, black hair dye and white clown makeup. Flat-panel monitors offered a live feed of the writhing, thrashing, swaying bodies on the dance floor. An electronic ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screens announced that sunrise was at 5:41 a.m.

I went to the bar and ordered a beer. I used a little juice, or I’d have stood there for hours without attracting a bartender’s attention. I took a lengthy pull from the longneck and scanned the club. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. I guess I was hoping to spot one of Papa Danwe’s guys hanging around, looking suspicious. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, but then it was dark as the Beyond and everyone was dressed like the Crow.

After a few minutes of fruitless squinting into the strobe-pierced gloom, I relaxed and tried my witch sight. A few of the kids in the club had a little juice. That was normal for a place like the Cannibal Club. None of them had the kind of juice to be my killer. I sensed stronger magic in the VIP area that ran along one side of the dance floor, but I didn’t have a clear view from where I was standing by the bar. I dropped the sight and headed that way.

The guy holding court in the semicircular booth was a prince among the pretenders. His glossy hair flowed to his shoulders and draped his white collar in black silk. He’d elected not to conceal the natural beauty of his caramel skin in the hideous clown makeup that seemed mandatory for most of the club-goers, male and female alike. His dark eyes were at once soulful and boyish, and the combination made my knees a little weak.

I’d been in the outfit most of my life, so I’d run into Adan Rashan on more than one occasion. I’d always thought he was attractive. Cute, even as an awkward teenager when his father had first introduced us. That night in the club, I thought he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I don’t have a spell to counteract the intoxicating effect of a truly gorgeous man. If I did, I probably wouldn’t use it anyway. Even if it means I one day get sucker-punched by some seductive creature of the night, I say to hell with it. Some risks are worth taking.

So, yeah, Adan was hot. The Goth posse that flanked him in the booth was pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd, from where I was standing. One long-haired pale face sitting next to Adan stared at me menacingly. He leaned over and whispered something without breaking eye contact with me, and then he sneered. I hated him already.

I went back to the bar, juiced the bartender again and had her send over a couple bottles of Cristal. A waitress delivered the champagne, pointing in my direction. I raised my bottle and smiled, wishing I’d ordered something classier than a beer. Adan recognized me and returned the smile, then waved me over. The Gothtard next to him scowled, which I liked.

The VIP area was roped off, and I gave the bouncer the same Jedi mind trick that got me in the club. I handed him my empty before making my way over to Adan’s table.

He stood as I approached. He was wearing a tailored black suit, the ivory shirt unbuttoned at the collar just enough to be interesting. The rich fabric draped his slender frame like…well, like an expensive suit on a young male body that’s just about perfect.

“Domino,” he said, “thanks for the champagne.” He leaned across the corner of the table—and across Gothtard—to give me a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek. He smelled like musk, and apples and cinnamon—and like sweat and patchouli, but that was just the fucking club.

“Hi, Adan,” I said. “You’re welcome. I’ll send the bill to your father.”

He laughed, and it echoed around the table, though the posse probably had no idea what I was talking about. Gothtard didn’t laugh. He just stared at me and brooded dangerously.

“I’ve never seen you here before,” Adan said. “Do you come here often?” Then, laughing, “Jesus, I can’t believe I just said that.”

I’d planned to play the tough girl and outbrood Gothtard, but I found myself laughing, too, because Adan’s dark eyes sparkled and because he had the tiniest little dimples in an otherwise classically sculpted face.

He introduced the posse—Edward, Louis, Armand, Elvira, Wednesday Addams, yada yada yada. I nodded, smiled and then politely ignored them.

Adan sat back down and turned to Gothtard. “Manfred, can you pour the champagne?” The intensity of his brooding deepened momentarily, but he slid out of the booth to do the honors.

“Thanks, Fred,” I said, and took his seat beside Adan.

“It is Manfred,” he growled. He had a cute little German accent, probably affected. I nodded absently and turned to Adan.

“Anyway, no, this is my first time here,” I said. Fred handed him the first glass of Cristal, and he passed it to me. Fred scowled and I smiled.

“And what do you think of the Cannibal Club?” he asked. He took the next glass from Fred and nodded politely.

“It’s growing on me.”

Adan grinned, flashing those dimples again, and we touched glasses. “So what brings you here?”

I waited until Fred finished pouring the champagne and wedged himself in at the other end of the booth, and then I stood up. “I want to dance.”

“That works,” Adan said and laughed. I could feel Fred brooding as we made our way to the dance floor.

I know gangsters who use their magic to dance. I even know the spell. It’s actually a variant of a nonlethal compulsion that neutralizes an opponent, with the secondary benefit of making him look goofy. You cast the spell on yourself, relax your body, and with the help of a little juice, you literally let the music move you.

That’s just weak. Using magic for parking spots and prompt bar service is one thing, and I’ll admit to using my purification magic in ways that will keep me away from cosmetic surgeons indefinitely. But I draw the line at using it for sexy dancing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just cheating. Maybe it’s nothing more than a different brand of vanity, but whatever sexiness I’ve got is all-natural, baby. Mostly.

In fairness to the weak-ass sorcerers who use the spell, club dancing does present a bit of a dilemma. If you really have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll look like an idiot. But if you try too hard, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard, and you’ll still look like an idiot. The key is to look like you have no idea what you’re doing, but sexy just comes naturally to you.

Out on the floor, I did my best to still my body, mind and soul and settle into this Zenlike state of nondancing dancing sexiness. I probably looked like an idiot. Mostly, I just held on to Adan and hoped no one would notice me.

As I moved against my boss’s son, I reviewed what I’d learned so far. First, the Goths in Adan’s posse were all normal humans, unremarkable but for their poor fashion sense. All except Fred, who was the genuine article. Judging by how much black juice was oozing from his undead hide, he had to be at least five hundred years old.

Adan, of course, was the source of the magic I’d picked up from the bar. Not him, exactly, but his accessories. The small gold hoop in his left ear, the star pendant hanging from a slender chain around his neck, a ring, his Rolex—all of it radiated first-class juice, mostly protective magic, and I recognized it immediately as his father’s.

As for Adan himself, well, the parts of his incredible body I could feel were lean, toned and hard, and I could feel most of them. Other than that, there wasn’t much to talk about. He had a little juice, about what you’d expect from a young man. He wasn’t a sorcerer.

After about ten minutes of dancing, I dropped a sound-dampening spell around us. The music faded into the background. Adan’s eyes widened and he smiled. “Are you trying to impress me, Domino?”

“Of course,” I said. “Adan, you know Fred is a vampire, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I met him here at the club. He’s never tried to, you know, fang me or anything.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A few months. Really, he’s nothing to worry about. He’s a little weird, I guess, but you know, he’s just a guy at the club.”

What did that mean? He’s just a guy at the club as in I don’t swing that way and he’s not any competition for you? Or, he likes me and promised not to drain my blood until my heart stops?

“Okay,” I said finally. “You’re a big boy…I guess you can choose your own friends.”

Adan laughed. Dimples were brandished disarmingly.

“So you like this Goth, emo, industrial scene—whatever they’re calling it now?” I asked. “It doesn’t really seem like your style.”

He shrugged. “It’s okay. I go to other clubs, too. I feel like a loser if I hang around Dad’s strip clubs too much.” Touché.

“Adan, I heard one of our guys had started coming here, kid named Jamal. You ever see him?”

Adan nodded. “He started coming in about a month ago. I hang out with him sometimes. Manfred doesn’t like him, but Manfred doesn’t really like anyone. Anyway, Jamal seems pretty cool.”

“Who else did he hang out with? Did you ever see him with anyone that looked, I don’t know, out of place?”

Adan’s brow furrowed. “He leaves with women sometimes, I guess. A lot of gangsters hang out here, so Jamal didn’t stick out as much as you’d think.”

“Really? This is a gangster hangout?”

“Yeah, mostly Papa Danwe’s guys. You know him?”

This detective stuff was easy. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“A lot of them hang out here. They all seem to know Manfred—at least the big guy does.”

“The big guy? Do you know his name?”

Adan shook his head. “I don’t know him, but I think he’s like a captain or whatever. Like you, I guess. He comes in here the most, sometimes by himself and sometimes with others. Anyway, he’s black and just a really big dude.”

There was one gangster in Papa Danwe’s outfit who matched that description pretty well. Terrence Cole, one of Papa Danwe’s lieutenants. He was the kind of guy who made a lasting impression.

“Did you ever see Jamal talking to this guy—or any of Papa Danwe’s boys?”

“No, other than the girls and when he was hanging out with me, Jamal mostly kept to himself.”

I guess that would have been too easy. “Okay. Thanks, Adan, this is really helpful.”

“Why are you asking? Is Jamal in some kind of trouble?”

I decided not to tell him, at least not yet. If his father wanted him to know about outfit business, he could tell Adan himself. He’d eventually hear about it anyway. I changed the subject.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I groaned inwardly. It had been the first thing that came to mind.

“No. I did in college, but it didn’t work out. It’s hard to find someone, you know?”

I nodded.

“What about you?” Adan asked. “Boyfriend? Is there a Mr. Domino?”

I smiled and shook my head. “The only guys I meet are gangsters. It’s hard to find someone to bring home to Momma.”

He laughed, tilting his head back so the strobes danced in his liquid-brown eyes. “Does your mom know what you do?”

“Yeah, she’s always known. She’s just glad I have a job.”

“She probably worries about you. You’re her baby girl. This line of work, it’s gotta freak her out.”

I shrugged. I didn’t tell him my mom was a fortune-teller, a good one. Mom probably knew more about my life and my future than I wanted to think. Then again, maybe not—the fortune-telling game is notoriously unreliable, even for Mom.

I’d probably learned as much as I was going to, and really, that was more than I expected. I’d found a connection between Jamal and Papa Danwe’s outfit. Maybe Jamal was doing business with Papa Danwe. Maybe the kid had unknowingly picked up one of Terrence Cole’s girlfriends and tied her to the bondage rack in his apartment. I could see Jamal getting himself squeezed for something like that.

And then there was the Vampire Fred. I couldn’t probe his mind as I could a normal human’s, probably because his brain was as dead as the rest of him. But I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him lurking around my boss’s son. I didn’t know exactly what Jamal had been up to in the club, but I didn’t like the apparent coincidence of an unaligned supernatural creature hanging out in the place—hanging out with Papa Danwe’s guys. I was itching to connect Fred to the murder in some way.

Mostly, though, I didn’t want the undead piece of shit with Adan. Maybe it wasn’t any of my business, but I thought his father would want me to step up. Okay, maybe I had ulterior motives. Maybe it was some maternal, protective part of me screaming to get involved. Or maybe it was the romantically challenged part. I was sure it was what the maverick in the cop shows would do, so it had that going for it.

“Do you think your friends would mind if we got out of here?” I asked. I’d planned to wait until the end of the song to make my move, but I think the same damn song had been playing since I walked into the club.

Adan’s arms tightened around me and he breathed in my ear. “I don’t think I care what they think, Domino.”

We left the club without returning to the table. Fred, of course, was leaning against my car when we got outside. My vintage 1965 Lincoln Continental convertible with the original Arctic White paint. The vampire gave me the Look—the usual vamp shtick that would make a mortal woman his willing slave or whatever. To me he just looked like a really pale and very gay fashion model.

“Scratch the paint and I’ll shove a stake far enough up your ass to pick the blood clots out of your teeth.” I smiled and tucked my arm inside Adan’s. “Fred,” I added.

I’d like to say Fred sensed my great power and backed down. I’d like to say he recognized the more dangerous predator and submitted to the law of the jungle. But he didn’t. Fred made a move.

There aren’t a lot of vampires in L.A. They don’t like gathering in large numbers—too much competition for food. But when it comes to vampires, popular culture is so full of shit I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll mention just two things in passing.

First, humans haven’t believed in monsters for a long time, but in the twenty-first century, we’ve taken it one step further. We’ve rehabilitated the bastards. These days, vampires aren’t really monsters; they’re just tragically hip antiheroes with unusual diets. They sip daintily from cherished and willing blood donors and pine away for their lost humanity.

Well, vampirism isn’t a disease. It’s not a virus, or a genetic disorder or any other ridiculous pseudoscientific rationalization. Vampirism is blood magic. It’s a necromantic shortcut to immortality and a limited range of superpowers. Vampires are just ex-human sociopaths who lacked the juice to become real sorcerers.

Second, in the supernatural food chain of the underworld, vampires are pussies.

The instant Fred leaned away from my car, I triggered the repulsion spell stored in the silver gangster ring on my right pinkie. The ring was a preloaded talisman, allowing me to cast the spell with only the barest concentration and no witty quotation.

So when the Vampire Fred launched himself at me with catlike speed and preternatural fury, the repulsion spell met him halfway and used his own kinetic energy—plus a little extra—to throw him over my Lincoln, across the street and into the storefront of an overpriced flower shop.

“This’ll just take a second,” I said to Adan, and then I went after Fred.

By the time I crossed the street, the vampire was standing up and brushing flower petals and broken glass from his suit. He saw me approach and dropped into a predatory crouch, fangs bared and ready for battle.

Still about twenty feet away, I casually extended my hand, palm up, toward the Vampire Fred. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said. That’s Cicero—sometimes I bust out the Latin. The force spell hit Fred in the sternum and knocked him through the back of the flower shop into the skin-care clinic on the other side of the drywall.

This time, Fred was a little slower getting up. It’s another myth of popular culture that vampires are fucking bulletproof. They’re tougher than humans and they heal quickly when they’re fed, but their bones still break when you hit them hard enough. Fred’s left shoulder was dislocated and his right leg was twisted at an unnatural angle.

“All movements go too far,” I said, picking him up with the telekinesis spell and flipping him back through the flower shop and out into the street. There was the screech of rubber against pavement and a double thump as the Vampire Fred was run over by a Mercedes before he could crawl out of the way. Oops.

I made my way back through the trashed flower shop, pausing to pick out a red rose for Adan. The Benz was stopped but the driver wasn’t getting out of the car. Fred was struggling to peel himself off the asphalt. I guess five hundred years of owning mortals had made him a little stubborn.

“A great flame follows a little spark,” I said, and a grapefruit-size sphere of fusion fire appeared, spinning like a miniature sun above my upturned hand. I let Fred get a good look at it.

“You might want to stay down, Fred, so I don’t have to cook your pasty ass.”

Fred’s jaw clenched, whether in pain or frustration I wasn’t sure. I could see the pride and survival instinct, both honed over centuries, warring in his eyes. He looked at me. He looked at the fire. Survival won.

Like I said, vampires are pussies.

“Here’s the way it is, Fred. Out of respect for your friendship with Mr. Rashan,” I said, turning and smiling at Adan, “I’m going to let you walk away. But Fred, if you fuck with me again, you’re going to burn. Clear?”

The Vampire Fred gritted his pointy teeth, and then he nodded.

“Groovy,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

Without a word, Fred pulled himself up and hobbled off down the street. Even with a busted wheel, the vampire limped faster than the human eye could follow.

I pulled in juice and dropped a confusion spell over the street, just enough hoodoo to render any witnesses or inconvenient security cameras useless to a police investigation. I looked in the direction the vampire had fled, then turned back to the crowd of stunned onlookers and shrugged.

“He wasn’t on the list.”

Three

Adan was annoyed. We were cruising down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the beach, and he was pressed against the passenger door and glaring at me.

“You didn’t have to kick his ass like that in front of everyone.”

“He started it,” I said. “I wasn’t going to touch him as long as he didn’t scratch my car.”

“You sound like a ten-year-old, Domino.”

“Well, what should I have done? He’s a vampire. You want me to go back and let him take a bite out of me?”

“No, of course not. And I know he’s a vampire, but he’s been cool to me. Besides, you provoked him.”

I shrugged. That was true. I tried a different angle.

“He’s cool? You know the magic is in the killing, right? Every human is topped off with ten pints, give or take, but all that’s just foreplay. It’s the mouthful that stops the heart that keeps him going.”

“I know. I just said he’s been cool to me.” He shook his head and snorted. “Anyway, you’re a gangster. Where do you get off judging him?”

I scowled. “Yeah, I’m a gangster—in your father’s employ, I might add—but that doesn’t make me a homicidal undead monster. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember the last time I killed a guy and drank his blood.”

“No, you just kill guys and have some stooge bury the bodies.”

Ouch. That was going to leave a mark. “I don’t kill anyone. Usually. And never civilians. If you choose to get in the game, you know the rules and you know the risks. It’s not murder when you have to kill an enemy soldier.”

Adan laughed. “Oh, yeah, the standard gangster code of situational ethics. That bullshit’s an insult to real soldiers.”

“That…is probably true. Anyway, it’s just a fucking metaphor. Excuse my language.”

“Actually,” Adan said, “I think it’s a fucking analogy.”

I glared at him and he laughed. I shook my head, chuckling, and just like that the tension was borne away by the wind whipping through the open convertible.

I wasn’t sure why I was arguing with this guy, anyway. His last name was Rashan. He knew the score. The truth was, Adan had pushed one of my buttons. Growing up, I’d always thought I’d end up using my magic for the Forces of Good. Maybe work a quiet job by day and kick evil ass by night, like Batman or the Ghostbusters. Long before I hooked up with the outfit, I’d seen enough of the world to know how things really work.

Adan was right. I clung to that gangster code because it was just about all I had to distinguish myself from psychopathic freaks like the Vampire Fred. I hadn’t killed often, but I had killed. I hadn’t killed innocents, but I’d taken husbands, and fathers, and brothers and sons. Even some sisters. To stay sane, I tried to convince myself they were bad guys, just like me, and they got what they deserved.

And still, late at night and usually when I was drunk, I’d type their names into that search box on my laptop and reach out to them in the Beyond. They never answered, but I knew they were waiting for me out there in the dark.

Adan noticed my uncharacteristically angsty mood and laid a hand on my arm. “I’ve had this argument a thousand times with my dad,” he said. “You know what he says? He says the difference between a strong man and a weak man is that the strong man will do anything, even kill, to remain strong…the weak man will do anything, even die, to remain weak. He says that a man who is both strong and good will kill to remain strong, and will hate himself for it.”

I looked at Adan, and a little smile teased his infinitely kissable lips. That’s about when things started to get really complicated. I knew my little stunt with Fred would have ended my chances with most of the guys I’d met. Not because they felt sorry for Fred or disapproved of violence or anything like that, but because they would have felt threatened and humiliated by it.

The bottom line was that I’d worked over the vampire because I’d wanted to protect Adan. And he didn’t seem to mind. The reason for his enlightened attitude was obvious—he knew the outfit. He knew the life. He knew that in the underworld it wasn’t about girl power versus machismo or any of that shit. It was about the juice. I had it and he didn’t. Adan accepted that. He maybe didn’t like it, exactly, but he was man enough to deal with it. For a girl like me, Adan was a miracle.

By the time we got to the beach, I’d forgotten why I went to the club. Sitting with Adan on the sand, listening to the sound of the waves and the wind, I forgot about Jamal altogether.

We were sitting quietly together when I heard laughter drifting across the water. The moon was out, and I could see there were no late-night surfers or swimmers out there.

I nudged Adan. “Watch,” I said. I scooped up a handful of juice that washed ashore with the tide and spun a spell of true seeing. Golden, sparkling light cascaded out over the waves. The light revealed figures frolicking in the surf, male and female, their skin so pale it was almost translucent in the moonlight.

“Oh, my God. What are they?” Adan whispered.

“Ocean spirits. Mermaids—merpeople—or something like it. When I was a kid, I used to come down here all the time just to try to catch a glimpse of them. They’re more common now than they used to be. I don’t know why. Sometimes I’d go months without seeing one.”

The creatures noticed us and froze, suspended in the water like seaweed bobbing in the tide. Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone. I dropped the spell and the light faded.

“Domino, that was amazing. I had no idea,” Adan said, moving closer to me. I shivered, shamelessly, and he wrapped an arm around me and pulled me against his body.

“There’s a whole world out there most people never even see,” I said. “Some of it is beautiful.” Most of it just wants to eat you. I decided to keep that part to myself.

“I want to see you again, Domino.”

“I’d like that.”

“What about my father?”

“Yeah, I’ll have to see him again, too.”

Adan laughed. “No, I mean, he probably wouldn’t approve.”

I smiled. “I’m sure of it. He probably wants you to find a nice professional girl, like a doctor or lawyer or something.”

“No, he hates lawyers.”

“Well, whatever fathers want for their sons these days, I’m pretty sure a gangster isn’t what he has in mind. If you’re planning to get involved in the outfit, it could get really complicated.”

Adan didn’t respond and I looked over at him. He was staring down at his feet, tracing abstract designs in the sand with his fingertips.

“Did I say something wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nah, it’s okay. It’s just…I can’t ever be part of the outfit.” He looked up at me, and I thought I saw real pain in his eyes. “I don’t have it, Domino. I’m not a sorcerer.”

I already knew that, and I felt stupid for being so careless with my words. I’d known he didn’t have any real juice the moment I saw him in the club. I’d thought about what that meant for me, but I really hadn’t thought about what it would mean for him.

“Damn, I’m sorry. I thought maybe, you know, considering who your father is—”

“It’s cool. It just doesn’t work that way. Dad says the gift or whatever isn’t genetic. He has over thirty living children. None of them have it. He keeps trying because he wants an heir, in case something happens to him. I’m his latest disappointment.” Adan laughed and shook his head. “Ah, man, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Dad would kill me.”

I squeezed his arm and smiled. “I won’t tell on you.”

He laughed. “Thanks,” he said, “and I won’t tell him you forced me to reveal his secret shame.”

I tried to laugh, but really, that shit wasn’t funny. It was definitely the kind of thing Rashan wouldn’t want anyone to know. I felt like I had a good relationship with my boss, but I couldn’t read him, didn’t really know him. I couldn’t even guess what he’d do if he knew I’d found out about something like this.

“Yeah, let’s just pretend you didn’t tell me that,” I said. “The fewer of your father’s secrets I know, the better.”

Adan nodded. “Yeah, I’m sorry I told you. I just…I guess I feel like I can talk to you. Maybe it’s lame, but it gets lonely, you know? I can’t be a part of my father’s life, but I never really feel at home in the normal world, either, because of what I know.”

I understood how he felt. I’d had that same feeling of being an outcast until his father found me and brought me into the outfit. For Adan, it was worse. He would always be an outsider in both worlds. That was real loneliness. I could even see how he’d reach out to someone like the Vampire Fred—anyone or anything that would accept him.

“Maybe it’s a bad idea, Adan, but I still want to see you.”

He smiled. “Me, too. It’ll be our secret. Dinner tomorrow night?”

“Okay,” I said, “I want pizza.”

“I’m impressed,” he said. “On a first date, women usually restrict themselves to salads they never actually eat.”

Okay, I use magic to cheat with dieting, too. “I have a fast metabolism,” I said.

“Sounds great—I love pizza. Pick you up at seven?”

I nodded and smiled.

“Give me your cell phone. I’ll give you my number and you can call me tomorrow, give me directions.”

I handed him my cell and he punched in his number and gave it back to me. I checked the display, and he’d given me both his home and cell numbers. My dating game was a little rusty, but that seemed like a good sign.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll call you. I’d better get going. Did you drive tonight or catch a ride with someone?”

“I drove,” he said. “You can just drop me at the club.” I did, and I waited there until he got in his car and drove away.

I’d never been a romantic. I didn’t believe in love at first sight, soul mates, star-crossed romance or any of that stuff. I didn’t believe that Adan and I were destined to fall in love, get married and live happily ever after. Judging by past experience, he was more likely to screw up my life, make me miserable and hop in bed with an exotic dancer just when I was finally getting used to him.

I grew up in the barrio, fatherless and poor. My life was violent and brutal, and I’d long ago stopped pretending there was anything more to it than getting ahead and getting out alive. Despite that, it wasn’t a hard life. With magic, I could have just about anything I wanted. The only thing I couldn’t change with a little juice was myself. I couldn’t change how I felt, and I couldn’t change what I believed. And the worst thing about not believing was that I always knew what I’d lost or what I’d never had.

I was a gangster, and I’d done things for which even God couldn’t forgive me. But I was still human. I was still a woman. I wanted to believe in that fairy-tale love that little girls dream about, and I hated that I couldn’t. The cruelest joke of the underworld was that so many parts of fairy tales were true, but not the ones that really mattered.

Adan made me want to believe. He made me want to believe all those wonderful, impossible things, and that he could somehow make them come true. He made me want all those things with him.

Sorcery is just will and power. So is believing.

Later that night, I tried to contact Jamal again. This time, when the same Flash intro came up, I kept pumping juice into the spell from the ley line below my building in an effort to stabilize the pattern. The squall from the speakers intensified until I was sure it was loud enough to raise the dead, or at least wake my neighbors. My computer slowed to a crawl and the screen flickered dangerously, but the system didn’t crash.

I poured more juice into the spell and the noise finally died down, to be replaced by sporadic bursts of white noise. In the intervals between the bursts, I heard voices. There were a lot of them and it was disturbing, like a party that had turned ugly. The cacophony of voices was punctuated by panicked shouts, terrified screams and despairing wails. It reminded me of live video footage I’d seen of a crowded Jerusalem restaurant in the aftermath of a suicide attack.

There was no foreground or background to the noise—all of the voices were just mixed in together. Occasionally, though, one of the voices was isolated enough that I could make out the words. Most of it made no sense to me—names I didn’t recognize, languages I didn’t understand, mundane phrases so removed from context they had no meaning. The voices were garbled, warped, but a few did make sense, and that was worse.

“I can’t find my leg,” a voice whispered.

“I’m dead now.”

“They took my mommy.” A little girl’s voice.

“I want to go, I want to go, I want to go, I want to…”

“I know who you are.” The voice sounded like an old woman. She sounded pissed.

“Help me, Domino. Please, D.”

“Jamal?”

“Help me, D…help me.”

I channeled more juice into the spell, straining until I thought my eyes would pop. I kept feeding the spell, but the juice kept backing up, into me, like blood in a junkie’s syringe. It was so cold it burned.

“Jamal, I’m trying. Talk to me. Just keep talking to me.”

“I can’t…I can’t get back, D. I can’t get back. It’s just dark…ain’t nothing here, Domino…ain’t nothing but the dark.”

“I know, Jamal. Keep trying. I’m here. Keep talking.”

“Domino? Are you there, D? Please don’t leave. Domino, please don’t leave me here.” He was crying, but his voice was growing fainter.

“Jamal, keep talking. I’m here.” I ground my teeth and reached for more juice, but I had so much of the backwash in me I couldn’t push it through and I felt like I was drowning. “Fuck!”

I tried again to force more juice into the spell, but now it was washing back into me faster than I could tap it from the line.

“Jamal! I’m still here. Come back.”

Silence, then a few short bursts of static. Then nothing. I’d lost him.

I shut down the computer and went to the kitchen for a beer. I was buzzing from all the juice I’d flowed. I was also shivering and choking on that grave-cold backwash I sucked down. I collapsed on the sofa and drained the beer.

Whatever was happening with Jamal wasn’t right. Contacting the dead was never a sure thing—if they didn’t want to talk to you, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Jamal obviously wanted to talk, but I couldn’t reach him. Why? The backwash I was eating when I tried to feed the spell—why?

The only explanation was that someone was fighting me. Pushing back at me. While I was flowing juice into the spell, someone was pumping it back into me. Someone stronger than I was.

Someone like Papa Danwe. It might have been Terrence Cole, I supposed, but I doubted the Haitian had a sidekick with enough juice to shut me down like that. It had to be Papa Danwe.

I felt pretty sure after this experience that FriendTrace wasn’t going to get it done. I maybe could have kept flowing juice into the spell a little longer, but I knew the backwash from the Beyond would have killed me before I was able to establish a stable connection with Jamal.

Still, the fact that Papa Danwe was blocking my efforts at communication made me even more determined to succeed. I needed to talk to Jamal. He obviously had something important to say, something the Haitian didn’t want me to find out.

Well, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed. That’s not a spell formula, just a saying that came to mind. If I couldn’t reach Jamal in the Beyond, maybe I could bring him to me.

It was a little after two in the morning, and I still had time. I went down to the garage and put my toolbox and several cans of spray paint in the trunk of my car. Then I drove to Crenshaw, back to Jamal’s apartment.

When I got to his door, I juiced the lock and let myself in. Anton had removed the corpse as ordered. The small apartment was empty and quiet. I set the toolbox on the floor beside the bondage rack and went to work.

The rack was really just two fitted timbers bolted together to form an X. I unbolted and separated them, laying them on the floor side by side. I closed up the toolbox and ran it down to the car, then returned for the first of the timbers. The beams were heavy, but I was able to get them down to the car, one at a time, using a little juice. With the top of the convertible down, they fit in the backseat, more or less. It was something to cling to the next time some prick in a Prius smirked at my vintage Motown gas-guzzler.

I went back to the apartment and stuffed some things from Jamal’s closet into a duffel bag. On the way out, I grabbed the stapler Anton had used with the magazine cover to protect Jamal’s modesty. I went down to my car and drove to the playground where I’d talked to his crew.

There was no one on the playground at that hour, even in Crenshaw. The security lights had likely been broken within hours of being installed, and the concrete was lit only by a feeble moon and the ambient orange glow of the sleeping city.

I hauled the timbers out to midcourt and reassembled the bondage rack. I’d packed some of Jamal’s clothes in the duffel bag, and I took them out and stapled them to the rack. There was a Lakers jersey, jeans and a pair of Nikes. Next, I went to work with the spray paint.

The tags Jamal had laid down all over the playground were designed to tap the juice of the place. There was a fair amount of it, and Jamal had done good work. I’d be able to get plenty of power, and best of all, in a way it would be Jamal’s juice I was flowing. I just needed to hook up his tags to the ritual I was building.

I used the spray paint to lay down a circle around the bondage rack. When the circle was complete, I grabbed a detailer out of the toolbox and began stenciling symbols into the painted line of the circle and the wood of the bondage rack. Ordinarily I’m not really into symbol work, but in this case I was just copying Jamal’s tags, in miniature. When I was finished, I scrounged up some broken boards and garbage and built a fire in front of the rack. Once the fire was blazing, I stripped off my clothes and started dancing naked around the circle.

It was a little pagan, more than a little ridiculous, and not the way I usually roll, but sometimes the oldest magic requires the oldest methods. The fire and the nude dancing would attract spirits. Jamal’s tags, the rack and the clothes stapled to it would ensure that the ritual called more loudly to Jamal than to anything else out there in the Beyond.

If the summoning ritual was successful, Jamal’s shade would be pulled out of the Beyond to fill his clothes and be bound to the rack. Once bound, I was pretty sure I could hold him there long enough to find out who killed him, and why. Even Papa Danwe wouldn’t be able to stop me. At least, not before I got what I needed.

I started chanting as I danced naked around the summoning circle. For hard-core necromantic work, you can’t beat Lovecraft. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die,” I chanted, over and over. I chanted quietly. If anyone saw me doing this shit, I’d never live it down.

I tapped Jamal’s tags and started flowing juice into the ritual. The symbols stenciled into the paint and the wood began to glow orange, matching the dancing light of the fire. The juice flowed around the circle and into the rack, then punched through into the Beyond.

It started to pull. A cold wind blew in from nowhere, and Jamal’s shirt and pants began to swell, filling out. A hazy, insubstantial form began to take shape.

Then a huge dog, like hell’s own mastiff, burst out of the fire and crashed into me. I went down under the weight of the beast and tumbled onto the rough concrete. The surface did cruel things to my naked body, but I barely noticed. I was too busy trying to keep the creature’s massive jaws away from my throat.

The beast loomed over me, pressing me down into the court. Then it lifted its head and howled. The sound sent goose bumps percolating across my bruised and bleeding skin. An answering howl split the night, then another, and another.

“Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly,” I said, spinning a close-combat spell in my mind.

Nothing happened.

“That’s bad,” I said.

My summoning spell was still active. It shouldn’t have been, but it was drawing all the juice I could flow into the circle, into the Beyond. Unless I could flow some juice into a new spell, I’d just be babbling stupid quotations while the dog ate me. I triggered the repulsion spell in my pinkie ring, but I’d drained all the juice from it when I hit the Vampire Fred.

I cursed and struggled, trying to beat the mastiff down with my fists, but it was pinning my arms to the cracked concrete. Its jaws were wide, drool spattered my face, and its breath smelled like the worm-ridden intestinal tract of a moldering corpse. Maybe even worse. I got one arm free and slammed it into the beast’s jaws as it went for my throat again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another of the creatures slouching through the shadows on the other side of the playground.

With my left forearm still in the creature’s mouth, I grabbed an ear with my right hand and pressed my thumb into its eye. I pressed hard, and tried to put a little juice into it. I didn’t have enough to power a spell, but I thought, maybe…

The beast’s eye exploded. Raw magic, pulsing bloodred, sprayed from the wound, spattering the side of my face. I pushed against the creature and it leaped away, howling.

I heard a low growl and turned in time to get my arm up as another creature lunged at me. I was trying for a kind of stiff-arm move, but it probably looked like I was cowering and trying to shield my head from the thing’s gaping jaws. Again, I fought to divert some juice from the summoning spell into the blow.

My arm thrust into the creature’s chest, pushing all the way through it and out its back. The beast’s momentum carried it into me and we went down.

I didn’t have to push this one off of me, because the creature was disintegrating. Writhing, crimson energy burned away its flesh as it howled, and in seconds it was nothing but a smoking grease spot on the court. Tendrils of smoke curled from the concrete and were pulled toward the circle, into the fire, vanishing in the flames. I felt that cold wind on my skin again, and now it seemed to be pulled from every direction at once into the center of my summoning circle.

I raised myself to one knee and looked for the next attacker. The creature I had wounded was circling the battle warily, looking for an opening with its remaining eye and brushing at the other with a massive, taloned paw. The other two beasts were preparing to eat me.

They came at me from opposite directions, crouching low and baring fangs the length of my hand. There was no way I could keep both of them off me. I still couldn’t grab enough juice to spin a spell.

I was screwed.

I had just enough time to fumble my gun out of the shoulder holster and squeeze off a wild shot as the creatures pounced. The shot missed.

The beasts hurtled through the air toward me, and then seemed to stretch out in midflight, their squat, powerful bodies pulled into impossibly elongated shapes. They sailed over my head, yelping in frustration, and incandescent red energy began to devour them as they were pulled into the circle. A moment later, what was left of their bodies vanished into the flames.

I spotted One Eye slouching around the edge of the court, its form rippling and contorting grotesquely as it fought against the pull of the Beyond. I took careful aim and put a bullet in its good eye. Crimson juice sprayed across the concrete and the chain-link fence. The beast seemed to collapse in on itself, and the stuff that flowed into the fire looked more like glowing red plasma than flesh.

In an instant, the wind died, the fire went out and the playground was quiet and still. My connection to the summoning spell was severed, and Jamal’s clothes hung empty and motionless on the bondage rack. It was over, and I’d failed. Again.

I didn’t think I had another summoning spell in me. I also couldn’t see myself driving home with Jamal’s bondage rack in the back of my car. Besides, I was hurt, and scared shitless, and I didn’t want to take the damn thing apart again. I had my juice back, so I spun up a ball of fusion fire and torched the rack. Next, I ran my housecleaning spell over the circle I’d painted on the basketball court. It left a dark smudge on the concrete, but at least all the spooky arcane stuff was obscured. Jamal’s homeboys would have a hell of a mess to clean up before their next pickup game.

I stuffed my toolbox and paint cans in the duffel bag, threw it in the trunk and got the hell out of Dodge. As I drove home, I chain-smoked and tried to make some sense of what had happened.

My summoning spell had worked. I’d reached out into the Beyond and started pulling Jamal’s spirit back into the corporeal world. But somehow, Papa Danwe must have used the ritual as a beacon to sic those ghost dogs on me. They’d used my ritual as a bridge, but they hadn’t been confined to my circle.

This time, I knew it had to be the Haitian. Terrence was probably doing the grunt work, but no way could he spin that kind of juju. Papa Danwe had used my own spell against me, my own juice, and I’d have been puppy chow if the Beyond hadn’t chosen to reclaim its own. I reached two conclusions by the time I got home.

First, even if there had been no formal declaration, my outfit was at war. Second, I was way out of my league.

Four

I was planning to report in to Rashan when I woke up that morning. Or afternoon—it’d been a late night. But Rashan beat me to it. I got a call at a little after eight o’clock summoning me to a meeting at his strip club, the Men’s Room.

Rashan was the smartest person I’d ever known. Maybe the guy was Sumerian, but his English was perfect. No accent, huge vocabulary—he always sounded more like an Ivy League professor than a gangster.

Despite all that, he missed some of the nuances of the language that are second nature to a native speaker. When Rashan had chosen a name for the strip club where his office was located, I’d pointed out that, technically, the men’s room was where you put your urinals. I’d suggested the Men’s Club, the Men’s Place…Pussy Galore would have been an improvement.

Rashan wouldn’t budge. He liked the name, and that was the end of the discussion. Most of the clientele probably didn’t notice anyway. For whatever reason, though, the boss’s linguistic blind spot seemed to be at its blindest when it came to naming conventions. I was just glad the outfit didn’t have a name, like a street gang. It would have been embarrassing.

I parked my car in the front row of the lot—I had my own space, so I didn’t have to use the parking spell. Despite the name, the Men’s Room was a nice place. Tasteful, at least by the standards of the pole-dancing industry. The club was closed but a girl was dancing onstage, probably for the boss’s benefit. I made my way to the back stairway and ascended to Rashan’s second-floor office. It had the traditional glass wall looking out over the bar, and I found my boss sitting at a table and watching the main stage with gray, almost colorless eyes.

“She is one of my favorites,” he said, nodding to the dusky-skinned young beauty of pleasantly indeterminate race. “Look at that ass.”

I looked. It was a nice enough ass. “Jesus, boss, you’re old enough to be her long-dead ancestor.”

Rashan laughed and motioned for me to sit down. “You know,” he said, “my people understood the importance of naked dancing girls. It is a sign of this country’s bankrupt culture that you’ve made it into something sleazy.”

“I have nothing against naked dancing girls. Or boys.” My attention drifted to the stage again. “I think it’s the brass poles and disco lights that make it seem sleazy. And maybe the bills tucked in their G-strings. The patrons are a little questionable, the music the girls pick doesn’t help and perhaps—”

“Dominica, tell me what you’ve learned about Jamal,” Rashan interrupted. Rashan always used my real name. I didn’t care for it much.

If you can mentally take a deep breath, I sucked in a cerebral lungful. “It was a hit.”

“Go on,” Rashan said.

“You know about the skinning and crucifixion already. Jamal had been squeezed. The strange thing was, there were no traces of the ritual on him or at the scene. It was like the hitter scrubbed the place when he was done.”

Rashan frowned. “If Jamal was squeezed, it must have been a sorcerer. That suggests another outfit.”

I nodded.

“Tell me what you know about the ritual.”

“That’s what I’m saying, boss, the place was clean.”

“And yet, you were able to learn something.”

It’s hard to play coy with a Sumerian sorcerer. “Yeah,” I said, “the hitter used an artifact in the ritual. It left a mark that wasn’t cleaned up. I was able to get a taste of the juice and find out a little about it.” I told him about the soul jar and what I’d learned about it from my divination spell.

Rashan steepled his fingers and tapped them against his black, neatly trimmed goatee. “Veronique Saint-Germaine. I remember her. She was the strongest sorcerer in the Old South. There were more famous voodoo queens in New Orleans during that period, but only because Saint-Germaine didn’t work the tourists from New York, Boston and Paris.”

“Based on the New Orleans angle and an old photograph I got with my spell, I thought there might be a connection to Papa Danwe.”

“Indeed there is. Papa Danwe was one of Saint-Germaine’s inner circle. He’d come to New Orleans with her from Haiti, after the slave revolt. He murdered her in 1854.”

“Knew she was murdered, didn’t know Papa Danwe did it.”

Rashan shrugged. “It was something everyone knew and no one could prove. Not that anyone would have done anything about it anyway. Survival of the fittest.”

“So I figure, we can put the soul jar at the scene of Jamal’s murder. We can connect Papa Danwe to the jar’s previous owner. He’s got the juice, so he had the means and opportunity.”

“Your theory is tenuous and circumstantial at best,” Rashan said. I started to protest, but he waved me off. “That doesn’t mean you’re not right.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense. Jamal was good at what he did, but his talents were pretty much limited to tagging. I can’t see how he had enough juice that the Haitian would get anything from squeezing him.”

Rashan shook his head. “There are very few instances in which you would squeeze a sorcerer for power. Any sorcerer strong enough to do it wouldn’t gain anything from doing it, just as you suggest. The usual exception is a group of sorcerers or coven that works together to squeeze a more powerful magician and divides the spoils amongst themselves. In any event, there are much easier ways to acquire power.” Rashan gestured expansively at the strip club. The club was a juice box, and like I said before, Rashan’s lips were on the straw.

“Then what’s the point of squeezing a guy? I guess I wouldn’t call it common, exactly, but it does happen. Everyone knows about it.”

“You squeeze a guy not to procure power in the abstract. As you say, Jamal had precious little of that. You squeeze him to steal his specific power, his unique arcane talent and craft. You take another sorcerer’s juice, it isn’t like taking it from a tag or a line. It’s his juice. You squeeze him to make it yours.”

This was all news to me. “So, Jamal was a tagger. You’re saying Papa Danwe squeezed him to steal his way of doing graffiti magic.”

Rashan nodded. “There can be no other explanation.”

“But why? Jamal was good, okay, but he’s not the only tagger in town. It seems like it’d be a lot easier to just recruit a guy, even if he needed a little training. Why take the risk of hitting a connected guy?”

“Two connected guys,” Rashan corrected, “which is why I called you in. Jimmy Lee’s body was found floating in a storm runoff this morning.”

I’d been expecting another body to turn up, but I hadn’t been expecting it so soon. “Damn,” I said. “No skin?” Rashan nodded.

“I don’t know this guy, boss. What was his thing? Another tagger?”

“No. Jimmy Lee was a warder—defensive magic. He designed protections, locks, alarms, minor defensive spells, that kind of thing.”

I arched my eyebrows. “Important stuff?”

Rashan shook his head. “No, in that respect, Jimmy Lee was rather like Jamal. A valuable asset, but not a critical one.”

“It’s a pattern,” I said. “Jamal was a tagger. He tapped and flowed juice on the outfit’s territory. Jimmy Lee was a defensive guy. Put the two together. Papa Danwe is going after our defenses. He’s making a move.”

“It is the beginning of a pattern, Dominica. Tragically I expect there will be more bodies, and with each one, more of the pattern will be revealed.”

“Both of the victims’ names begin with J,” I suggested. “Jamal’s last name is James and Jimmy is short for James.”

Rashan just looked at me.

“Okay, but I’m on the right track, yeah? The first part, I mean. What other reason could there be to hit Jamal and Jimmy Lee, two guys with those specific talents?”

“The problem with your hypothesis is that it overestimates the importance of the deceased. I have a lot of taggers and warders in the outfit. As far as our operational security is concerned, they will not be missed. These were low-level guys. Jamal’s tags weren’t responsible for tapping a significant amount of juice. Jimmy Lee’s wards were not protecting anything of great importance.”

“So it still doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not yet. Truly, it’s not a bad plan, in principle. If you could squeeze assets in critical positions, and if you could move quickly enough that your enemy couldn’t react in time, it’s not a bad way to initiate hostilities against a rival outfit.”

“But that’s not what’s happening here. Papa Danwe is hitting low-level guys. He doesn’t seem to be in any big hurry about it, either. If I were doing it, I’d hit them all at once, or one right after the other, at least. I wouldn’t take my time about it.”

“Just so. Which is why I suggested you have discovered only part of the pattern.”

“Okay, but whatever it is, the fact remains that Papa Danwe has given us time to react. So what’s our play?”

“First, tell me about Jamal. I assume you’ve made an effort to contact him.”

“Yeah, but the Haitian is blocking me.” I told him about my efforts to reach Jamal, and my attempt the night before to summon his ghost from the Beyond.

“If Papa Danwe did, in fact, send those creatures to kill you, perhaps his plan is unfolding more quickly than we imagined.”

“Any idea what they were? You ever know the Haitian to use something like that before?”

Rashan shrugged. “Just about every culture on earth, living or dead, has some kind of ghost dog or hellhound. In the north of England, they were called barghests, or town ghosts, and they were thought to stalk lone travelers at night. They are denizens of the Beyond, and for that reason they are usually associated with death and appear as minions or messengers of the underworld.”

“Well, yeah, I got that much from Wikipedia.”

Rashan arched his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Dominica, I am old but I am not a scholar. If you think it might aid you to know more about them, I encourage you to pursue it.”

“The point is, I haven’t been able to contact Jamal, and it’s pretty obvious Papa Danwe doesn’t want me to. But what’s the point of keeping Jamal quiet if the Haitian has to launch overt attacks against the outfit—against me—to do it?”

“It seems likely that Papa Danwe isn’t aware that you’ve connected him to Jamal’s murder. If he prevents you from contacting Jamal he keeps that connection hidden, from his point of view. And, after all, you have no real evidence that he was responsible for the attack on you.”

“It was him.”

“Have you found any other connections between Jamal and Papa Danwe, besides the murder?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think Jamal was working both sides. If Papa Danwe needed Jamal’s craft for something, maybe he was trying to recruit him. When Jamal wouldn’t go for it, they squeezed him.”

“It fits what little we know, but of course, we don’t know enough. The question remains, for what purpose did Papa Danwe want Jamal?”

“Does it really matter, boss? Papa Danwe hit Jamal and Jimmy Lee. He probably means to squeeze more of our people. He sent those ghost dogs after me. He’s making a move. Shouldn’t we start hitting back?”

“I am loath to launch a war against a rival organization unless it is absolutely necessary. One doesn’t get as old as I am by courting violent conflict impulsively.”

“I get that, boss. I’m not Sonny Corleone. We need a measured response, but we do need to respond.”

“What I am suggesting, Dominica, is that there is precious little to be gained for either Papa Danwe or myself from a war between our organizations.”

“The Haitian obviously thinks he has something to gain.”

“Perhaps. Very well, find out what Papa Danwe is up to. You have my blessing to act directly against his interests and his organization, but make every effort to do so in a proportional way.”

Seeing how the Haitian was responsible for two murders and a magical attack against me, that would give me plenty of leeway.

“I’m on it, boss. What else?”

“We can begin making certain preparations, quietly. For example, if there is to be war, we need to know which of the others will stand with us. We also need to know where we are vulnerable, should Papa Danwe launch an overt attack.”

Rashan got up and went into a back room, returning with a rolled-up parchment. He spread it out on the table. It was a map of Greater Los Angeles and looked hand-painted, almost archaic. Rashan touched an area in South Central and it expanded above the table into a three-dimensional image, like the holograms in sci-fi movies and CNN.

“This is Crenshaw. It is the area where our territory borders most closely with Papa Danwe’s.”

“Which just happens to be where Jamal lived and worked.” A thought occurred to me. “What about Jimmy Lee, also Crenshaw?”

Rashan shook his head. “No. Jimmy Lee lived in Chinatown and did most of his work in East L.A.—your old stomping grounds, Dominica.”

“Well, maybe Papa Danwe is making a move on both Crenshaw and EasLos.” I looked at the map. It was a stretch.

“Perhaps you will find out. However, I think it’s clear that the most likely place for Papa Danwe to attack is here, in Crenshaw.”

“I’ll tell Chavez to beef up the security there. We can put more guys on the street, get some surveillance up.”

“Tell him also to get the taggers working. He can bring in help from other neighborhoods if he needs it. I want all our rackets working at full capacity, and I want enough tags that we can channel the juice anywhere in Crenshaw at a moment’s notice.”

“What about police? The increased activity is going to be obvious to anyone who looks. We don’t need Five-oh getting in the way, taking guys off the street.”

“Leave that to me. I’ll make sure that Vice and the Task Force stay away from Crenshaw. There may be elevated patrol activity, but our people can handle uniforms.”

“We’ll deal with it, boss.”

“Good. I know you’ll be busy, but I’d also like you to make contact with the Russians and the Koreans.” Rashan touched two more locations on the map: one south of Crenshaw and the other northwest, near Santa Monica.

I nodded, looking at the map. We could handle Papa Danwe, but we needed to make sure our flanks were secure. If the Haitian wanted a war, it sounded a lot less insane if he had support from other outfits in the area.

“You want me to put out the word for the guys to go to the mattresses?”

“I think not. Everyone will have heard about the killings by now, but I don’t want any special precautions to be taken. Unfortunately, I think we need to leave the bait in the water to draw out our fish.”

Rashan was a pretty nice guy, but whenever I forgot that he was also a cold, calculating, mobbed-up Sumerian sorcerer, he said something like that to remind me.

“Okay,” I said, “what about Lee?”

“The body was removed immediately. Even in L.A., the authorities will eventually notice a corpse floating in a canal. Ringo is down at the bar—he can give you directions if you’d like to investigate the scene.”

“Yeah, but I probably won’t find anything more than I did at Jamal’s apartment.”

“Is there anything else you wish to report?”

I thought about Adan. I could tell Rashan I’d met his son at the club and I wanted to date him. I could tell him about the Vampire Fred. I could tell him Adan had seen some of Papa Danwe’s boys at the club where Jamal had been hanging out. He probably deserved to know.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“Very well, then, Dominica. I will leave you to continue your inquiries.”

The old man turned away. I left him there watching the stage, and my sins of omission chased me from the club.

I drove out to the place where Jimmy Lee’s body was dumped, one of the many concrete runoffs that crisscross Los Angeles County. It was in Hollywood, near the reservoir. It wasn’t outfit territory—most of the tags on the sloping concrete walls were mundane Crips-and-Bloods or Mexican Mafia shit.

I didn’t know exactly where the body had been found, or even if it had been found in the same spot it was dumped, so I just scanned the area with my witch sight. At the bottom of the spillway, tangled in some debris, I spotted a bedspread stained with Jimmy Lee’s juice. I guessed it had been on Jimmy’s bed the night before, and the killer had wrapped his corpse in it.

I waded down into the shallow, stagnant water and inspected the cover. Not all of the juice on the bedspread was Jimmy’s—it was black and it didn’t smell human. I leaned in and tasted it. Mostly it tasted like filthy canal water, but I was able to get a little magic from it.

I got an image of a tall, slender man in dark clothes scrambling down the side of the canal. Jimmy’s corpse was wrapped in the bedspread and slung over the man’s shoulder. The guy didn’t seem to be struggling much under the weight. It was impressive because he was injured, bleeding black juice into the cloth of the bedspread. Maybe one of Jimmy’s wards had gotten a piece of the bastard.

When he got to the bottom, the man flipped the bound corpse into the water and climbed quickly back up to where a pair of headlights marked a waiting car. I had the sense that someone else was standing there, a silhouette by the open driver’s door.

That was all I got. I considered taking the blanket with me, but I didn’t really want to fish it out of the canal, and I didn’t really want to ride around with physical evidence of a homicide in my car. I crab-walked my way up from the canal and returned to my Lincoln.

I hadn’t seen enough to identify anyone—certainly not the figure standing by the car, and not even the guy carrying Jimmy’s body. I knew who the guy was just the same—I recognized the juice. It was the Vampire Fred. Call it a hunch, paranoia or wishful thinking, but I’d known when I saw him at the Cannibal Club that I’d connect him to the murders.

The problem was that he couldn’t actually be the killer. The murderer had definitely been a sorcerer, and a pretty accomplished one. The vampire might be many things, but a sorcerer he was not. I’d known that the first time I saw him. The only juice he had was what he got from sucking blood out of people’s throats.

So the Vampire Fred was an accomplice. The figure standing by the car had probably been Papa Danwe. I was a little surprised the Haitian would take a personal interest in disposing of dead bodies. The figure might have been Terrence Cole, the henchman, but I didn’t think it was large enough.

So why was Papa Danwe using a vampire as an accomplice? Vampires could occasionally be useful as straight muscle, but that’s about it. If the Haitian needed someone to dump dead bodies for him, surely he had plenty of worthy candidates in his own outfit.

Vampires are somewhat resistant to a sorcerer’s subtler magics. I couldn’t probe Fred’s thoughts the way I could if he’d been human. If you knew you were going up against other sorcerers, that would be a pretty strong qualification in an accomplice.

I drove into Chinatown and let myself into Jimmy Lee’s apartment. One of the wards on the front door had been discharged, and I found a little more of Fred’s juice there, staining the wood and the hallway carpet. Jimmy had definitely put up more of a fight than Jamal. Good for him. It occurred to me that the killer hadn’t cleaned up the vampire’s juice. For that matter, he’d missed the stain on the floor of Jamal’s apartment, the one left by the soul jar.

Why? If he was good enough to scrub away all traces of his ritual magic, why not clean up the rest of the mess? I tried to think about it like he would. If I were the killer, all I really cared about was protecting my own identity and the details of my rituals. I didn’t want anyone to find out who I was, and I didn’t want anyone to find out why I’d chosen to squeeze Jamal and Jimmy Lee. Those were the big secrets, and as long as they stayed that way, I was covered.

Papa Danwe had really screwed the pooch when he left the stain from the soul jar, though. I’d been able to use that juice to identify the artifact, and I’d been able to connect the soul jar to the Haitian. This in itself wasn’t hard to believe—gangsters screw up all the time—but it seemed out of character for a cunning son of a bitch like Papa Danwe. Maybe he could only clean up his own magic. That was a lot more than I could do. Maybe he didn’t clean up the juice from the soul jar, or the juice that leaked out of the vampire when the ward popped him, simply because he couldn’t.

It occurred to me that he might have wanted me to find the stain and track the soul jar, but that idea didn’t lead me anywhere useful and I put it away. Clues had been hard to come by, and the soul jar had been the biggest one I got. I wasn’t a detective, but I knew I could paralyze myself if I started to second-guess all my leads.

But why had Papa Danwe left Jamal hanging in his apartment, and then made a feeble attempt to dispose of Jimmy Lee’s body by dumping him in a canal? I felt like I was in a poker game where I was sure I was being outplayed, but I wasn’t sure exactly how or what I should do to escape the trap.

I searched the rest of Jimmy’s apartment, but I didn’t find anything more than I’d found at Jamal’s. Maybe a real investigator would have had more luck, like those forensics experts on TV. Fingerprints, fibers—there could be all kinds of evidence that I had no way to find, and no way to analyze if I did find them. Not for the first time, it occurred to me how limited magic was, especially when dealing with another sorcerer who knew how to cover his tracks and block me at every turn.

I found myself wondering, again, if I was in over my head. Rashan obviously trusted me to handle this situation, but why? I had to admit it really wasn’t magic that was limited—it was me. Rashan could probably step in, get involved and take care of this little problem in the time it would take me to drive back to my condo from Chinatown.

So why didn’t he?

When it came right down to it, what use did Rashan really have for someone like me? I had a habit of looking down on people lower in the organization than me, but the truth was that guys like Jamal and Jimmy Lee at least had a specialty. There was one thing they did better than just about anyone else. They were specialists, and they’d found a niche for themselves.

What was my niche? I was just Rashan’s gofer. It was my job to clean up the messes Rashan couldn’t be bothered with. Okay, fine, I could live with that. Where I grew up, people didn’t count on having any kind of job—or any kind of future—at all. I knew I had it pretty good, and I was grateful for the opportunities Rashan had given me.

I had nothing to complain about, personally, I just had to wonder if I hadn’t outlived my usefulness as far as this situation was concerned. Papa Danwe, or a sorcerer connected to him, had hit two of our guys. For all practical purposes, we were at war. More of my people were probably going to die, and I couldn’t even figure out why they were being killed.

I realized what really bothered me was that their deaths would be on me. It came as something of a surprise. I’d killed before and I’d do it again. I wasn’t one of the good guys and I didn’t pretend to be. At the end of the day, I could live with myself and that’s all that really mattered.

But having someone die, someone close to you, one of your fellow soldiers, because you were too weak or too stupid to stop it…that was a lot worse than killing someone who had it coming. I thought about what Adan had said after our argument about the Vampire Fred.

“The difference between a strong man and a weak man is that the strong man will do anything, even kill, to remain strong,” he had said. “The weak man will do anything, even die, to remain weak.”

Those were the rules of the underworld. Mob rules. Good and bad, right and wrong—those are problems for other people, normal people. Strong or weak? That was the question that mattered for a gangster. Survive. Pick a side and do whatever it takes to win.

That was the crux of all my self-doubt. That was the meat on the bone. I was losing, and I knew it, and every other player in the underworld would know it, too. I was being tested, and I was coming up short. And then where would I be? What would I be? I knew the answer.

I’d be just another victim.

I resolved that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going out like that. I wasn’t afraid of dying—I’d had to make peace with that possibility on the street, before I even hooked up with the outfit. There was really only one thing I was afraid of, and that was being the helpless little girl.

So maybe I was out of my league. Maybe Papa Danwe had more experience, more moves and more juice. Maybe I’d be dead long before I figured out what was going on. If the Haitian was smarter and stronger than me, I was going down, and that’s the way it should be. Welcome to the underworld.

But I didn’t have to make it easy. I could make it hurt.

On the drive home, I got on my cell and started mobilizing for war. I told Rafael Chavez to crank things up to eleven. I wanted Crenshaw buzzing with juice, and that meant putting our criminal operations into overdrive.

There’s really only one source of magic in the world—the world itself, the earth, like the ley line that runs under my condo. That’s why territory is important to the outfits. The more you control, the more and better access you have to the rivers of power flowing through the world.

That power can be amplified by human activity, though, and nothing amps up the juice like hedonistic human activity. The outfit caters to that, cultivates it and takes some off the top of every transaction. Sex, drugs and gambling are the three pillars of the trade and always have been. It’s what we do best, and people can never get enough of it. The rest of the organizational infrastructure, like Jamal’s tags or the juice boxes, is maintained in support of those core rackets.

A sorcerer can’t change the natural supply of magic in the world. She can expand her territory to control more of it, and she can find new and better ways to tap, reroute and harness it, but she can’t fundamentally increase or decrease the quantity of natural juice in the universe. It isn’t physics, but they do share some of the same rules. A sorcerer can control the human-modulated potency and geographical distribution of the juice, but it’s labor intensive and requires organization. That’s why there are outfits. Turning up the juice in Crenshaw was a matter of ramping up the supply of extralegal self-gratification on the street—more sex, more drugs, more gambling. People would do the rest.

All of this would require manpower. The soldiers and gang associates could work overtime, but we’d need to bring in more guys from the other neighborhoods, too. I gave the orders and delegated all the boring managerial shit to Chavez. He promised to get things rolling right away, but cautioned me that it would take time for some of our operations to get up to speed.

“We need this done yesterday, Chavez. What’s the problem?”

“Drugs. After we run through current inventories, our timetable is going to depend on suppliers. Then, you don’t get any juice just putting drugs on the street. It takes a couple days for the extra supply to work its way down. People gotta buy ’em and use ’em, then you get your juice.”

“Okay, Chavez, I see that.” Sometimes I think I should spend more time on the street, overseeing day-to-day operations. Maybe then I wouldn’t sound like an amateur. “Just make it happen as quickly as possible. Overpay for the product and give the shit away if you have to. Just make sure both ends know it’s a temporary arrangement.”

Our tags were the next order of business. The extra juice wouldn’t mean anything unless it was accessible to us and could be channeled wherever we might need it. That’s where graffiti magic came in. Rashan had authorized a major infrastructure project, and we needed taggers on the street expanding the network throughout the city. Anyone who’s been to Crenshaw knows there’s lots of graffiti already, but we didn’t have full coverage and the increased flow of juice through the grid was going to cause bottlenecks and blackouts.

This was an easier problem to solve, and it just reinforced how replaceable Jamal was, and how meaningless his murder seemed as a result. Chavez told me we had twenty-seven taggers working in Crenshaw. He wanted to double that number, bringing in people from the surrounding neighborhoods. That’s a lot of kids with spray cans and some juice. Jamal just wouldn’t have made that big a difference.

“The only trick with the taggers is we need to move ’em out there fast,” Chavez said. “There’s no point turning up the juice if we can’t do anything with it. We need the tags in place before everything else starts jumping.”

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