Mob Rules (26 page)

“Sorry about that,” I said to the elf, who stood there staring dumbly at his broken sword. Then I shot him in the head.

As necessary as it may be, witty banter in the midst of battle is never the most efficient angle to take in a fight. While I was commiserating with the sidhe warrior, one of the remaining three drew a silver hunting horn from her pack and lifted it to her lips. I cursed and was just able to aim and fire Ned before the sidhe sounded the horn. The shot took the elf in the chest and she crumpled without a sound.

Honey's sword was out and she was dueling two of the sidhe. They looked like they were trying to swat a fly with machetes. I couldn't get a clean shot with Ned. The elves lunged at Honey, and her blade flashed, slicing open a slender throat. She spun in midair and planted her sword in the other sidhe's eye. The piskie flicked emerald juice from her blade as the bodies fell.

“Domino, follow me.” Honey flew into a nearby building and I followed her up three flights of stairs to the roof. The piskie flew to the edge and looked back at me.

“I saw it when I flew up here at the start of the fight,” she said. I came up beside her and looked out over the city. Our vantage wasn't that high and we were encircled by the pale mist. But I could see what I needed to. We hadn't been unlucky appearing in the middle of the fairies, because they were everywhere. Some of the sidhe were camped, but others marched along the streets in columns that trailed into the mist.

A fey army was mobilizing in South Central L.A.

“We have to go, right now,” I said when we made it back to the field headquarters in Crenshaw. I briefed my team on what I had seen while they gathered the weapons and arcane paraphernalia they'd need for the attack on the gate.

“We stumbled on an encampment a mile from the factory,” I said. “They're all over Hawthorne. It seems like the whole Seelie Court is encamped in the city.”

Honey disagreed. “The Court is vast. It's a nation, Domino. What we saw is just an army.”

“The point is, Oberon has moved an army into position around the gate. Rashan seems to think he won't send them through all at once, but he's obviously ready to send some of them. That gate is going to open soon, and we don't have time to wait for more tags.”

“We will make do,” Amy said. She already had her shit together, and she sat quietly, preparing herself.

We piled into Frank Seville's Hummer, and I rode shotgun while he drove. Literally—I'd grabbed the Mossberg out of the trunk of the Lincoln before we left. The weapon might come in handy if the juice ran low during the fight.

We'd done everything we could to keep a lid on it, but civilization was coming undone in Crenshaw, and things grew steadily worse as we drove through Inglewood toward Hawthorne. The orange glow of fires dotted the skyline in every direction, and the only people on the streets were looters and thugs.

Honey and I went to work on the other members of the strike team, putting glamours on them that would offer at least some protection from fairy magic. I was hoping it would be an unnecessary precaution. If we destroyed the gate quickly maybe we wouldn't even see a fairy, let alone have to fight one. I wasn't willing to bet on it, though. And I didn't want to think about what would happen to my team if they went up against the sidhe completely unprotected.

At Centinela and La Brea, a line of burned-out cars had been towed into position across the street, forming a makeshift roadblock. I was willing to bet we'd find more just like them blocking all of the major arteries into Hawthorne.

Seville stopped and began backing up, and then the Hummer was rammed from behind by a massive green waste management truck. We were thrown forward and smashed into the roadblock, just as a rocket-propelled grenade detonated against our left front fender and tore away most of the Hummer's front end. The airbags deployed as the ambushers unloaded on the mortally wounded vehicle.

I threw up both my physical and magical shields as I battled the front and side airbags. I couldn't see anything, and all I could hear was the cacophony of combat spells and automatic weapons fire tearing the SUV apart. My defensive shields wouldn't last long, and if we couldn't get clear of the ambush, we were going to die.

I've mentioned before that I can't fly, and this is true. I can
use my telekinesis spell on myself, or, say, a vehicle I'm in, but I'd discovered soon after learning the spell that this isn't the same as flying. The telekinesis spell is simple force magic, and what control it offers is a little crude. It's great for tossing vampires around, and it serves as the basis of my levitation spell, but it's not so great for flying.

Given the circumstances, I realized crude was better than dead. “All movements go too far,” I said, and hit the twisted wreckage of the Hummer with the telekinesis spell. I picked up the truck and threw it about fifty yards down the street, beyond the roadblock and the kill zone. It hit the street with a hellish crash, rolled a few times and smashed through the metal and glass facade of a dollar store. We finally came to rest upside down. I hung from my seat belt and looked over at Seville.

“That'll buff right out, Frank.”

“Fuck it, Domino. I've got GEICO.”

We piled out of the truck and staggered into the street, looking back toward the roadblock. Papa Danwe's gangbangers had left the buildings, rooftops and alleyways to either side and were strung out in a line, scrambling down the street toward us. There were at least a couple dozen thugs in the little mob, and they never had a chance.

All six of us, plus Honey, unleashed our nastiest combat spells on them simultaneously. This probably would have been the most impressive magical performance I'd ever seen, except it all happened at once and I didn't really see anything. Magic lit up the street in rapid-fire flashes, and a sound like heaven falling to earth crashed around us. There was a lot of smoke, and when it cleared, the gangbangers were gone. Most of the buildings and storefronts were gone, too. What was left looked like the streets of Dresden after an Allied bombing run.

We all stood there for a moment and looked at our handiwork. A brick fell loose from a demolished building and clattered down a pile of rubble into the street. A shard of glass dropped from a shattered window and smashed against the still-smoking sidewalk. Then all was silent, but for a lone dog barking somewhere in the night.

We covered the rest of the distance to the old factory on foot. We followed the path marked by the friendly graffiti our taggers had put down. There were three more ambushes before we reached the factory. They all ended like the first had, and a lot more quickly. I couldn't be sure because there weren't any bodies to count, but we must have trimmed the size of Papa Danwe's outfit by at least a hundred.

So I wasn't surprised when we arrived and I saw the factory grounds were only lightly guarded, about like they'd been on my first visit. The ward surrounding the site had been reinforced. The magic was much stronger, and a lot more complex. Papa Danwe had probably come down and done it himself, after my little incursion.

The team remained out of sight of the guards and split up. Honey and I stayed out front, along with Ilya Zunin and Sonny Kim. Ismail Akeem took the north side, Amy Chen the east, and Frank Seville the south. When everyone was in place, we all hit the ward's anchor points with chaos magic. It went down within seconds, and the alarm bell began to toll.

Sonny Kim chanted something in Korean, and a cyclone tore through the gangbangers positioned around the building. A few had time to get off a single spell or fire their weapons wildly before they were borne away by the wind, as if a giant had reached down and brushed them aside. We were joined by the other three as we walked across the lot to the factory.

As we approached the building, Zunin flung out one arm
and the tattoos inked into his skin burned red. The force spell hit the brick wall like a cruise missile and punched a hole in it large enough to drive a school bus through. The back-blast from the spell blew out all the windows on the west side of the building, and tiny, winking shards of glass showered down on us like rain.

Papa Danwe was waiting for us inside with his own posse of hard-hitting gangsters positioned around the gate machinery in a semicircle. There were a lot more of them than us, enough that I didn't have time to count them all. The Haitian stepped forward when we appeared out of the choking clouds of brick dust and smoke.

He was old and impossibly thin, like a skeleton draped in papery black skin. His eyes were as pale gray as Rashan's. He was stooped, his bony shoulders hunched forward, and his shriveled right hand clutched the silver pommel of a walking stick. A necklace of human finger bones rattled on his chest as he hobbled toward us. I waited for him to get within twenty feet, and then I brought the Mossberg down from my shoulder and leveled it in his general direction.

“That's far enough, old man.”

The Haitian squinted at me, as if he wasn't sure what he was seeing. “Where is your master, girl? It is time we finish this.” His voice was a dry rasp. Not as bad as Akeem, but still pretty damn hard to understand.

“He couldn't make it. It's amateur night at the strip club, and he's the judge.”

“He too craven to face me, yes?” Papa Danwe laughed. It was more of an insane giggle, really.

I wasn't going to mention why Rashan hadn't made the trip. The vibe I was getting from Papa Danwe led me to believe he should have sat this one out, too. For all I knew, he'd
been spinning spells as long as Rashan, and he was clearly on speaking terms with crazy.

“Anything he can do, the six of us can do almost as well.”

“Seven,” Honey corrected.

“Seven,” I said. “Sorry, Honey.”

Papa Danwe scowled. “None of you is welcome here. This is my ground. Go now, or I kill you here.”

I just shook my head. Everyone knew the game, and the stakes. Why couldn't we just get an early start on killing each other? Why did we have to talk about it first? Probably because bad guys have limited educations and even worse social skills. They just don't know how to act. Once the Haitian started jawing, though, I felt like I at least had to hear him out. Maybe he actually had something to say. Maybe he wanted to back down, if I gave him a chance.

I sighed. “Okay. You and your boys walk away, and we'll take down this gate. There will still be some unfinished business between our outfits, but nothing we can't work out.”

“Who are you to give orders to me, girl?” Papa Danwe spat. “I was a king on a gold and ivory throne when your people were still beating each other with sticks. You cannot dream so darkly to imagine what I will do to you.”

I gave it due consideration. I tried to work it from every conceivable angle. “Yeah, that's what I figured.” I shrugged.
“Vi Victa Vis!”
I shouted, and hurled a lance of kinetic energy at the old man's withered heart. His counterspell swatted it aside with a lazy wave of his left hand.

The plan was for me to handle the wards on the gate machinery, which meant I didn't have time to tangle with Papa Danwe. Fortunately, my team knew the plan, too. Frank Seville shouted something inarticulate and charged the Haitian. He
was flowing all his juice into defensive spells as he barreled at the old man, and the malevolent energy that crashed over him from Papa Danwe's posse lit him up like a fluorescent bulb. He hit the Haitian's shriveled body like a train running down a deer on the tracks, and they tumbled out of sight and out of mind.

I started fighting my way toward the tower. I wasn't entirely sure how the gate apparatus worked, but I was certain I'd been more or less on the money with the Tesla machine theory, when I'd thought it was just a magic cannon. I was convinced the crystal suspended at the top of the tower was the business end, that it was the device that would tear a hole in the world and let the fairies in.

Images of the first few moments of battle were imprinted on my mind. I saw Amy Chen standing her ground, calmly casting spell after spell at the gangsters that tried to bring her down. The phantasmal shapes of serpents, dragons and lions sprung from her outstretched arms and savaged the ranks of her attackers like nerve agents carried on the wind.

Ilya Zunin waded in like a Russian bear, flailing about him with force magic that sliced through flesh and smashed bone. Sonny Kim stayed by his side, spinning protections and defensive spells with impossible precision, carefully deflecting the hostile magic that assaulted Zunin from all sides.

Ismail Akeem danced convulsively in a circle and writhed in pain as he disgorged one spirit after another from his tortured body. The spirits howled and wailed as they descended on their terrified victims and devoured them.

All of this I saw in those first few seconds. After that, the battle dissolved into chaos. There was so much juice coursing through the place and so many mind-twisting spells in the air it was difficult even to think, let alone make sense of what was
happening around me. I would remember the sound. It was like the shriek of ravaged metal and lost souls, and it went on and on and on.

Honey stayed with me. She sang her wind-chime war spells and laid about her with her silver sword. We left a trail of the dead and dying behind us as we fought our way to the tower. I didn't feel like climbing it again, so I spun my levitation spell and fired the Mossberg down at the gangsters who came after us as I rose into the air.

I half expected to find another thug battalion on the roof, but I guess Papa Danwe was running low on guys who had enough juice to make a difference. The roof was deserted. I continued up to the small platform where the crystal sphere was suspended above the silver bezel. I could see the fairy magic warding the device this time, and I knew it would be impervious to both magic and physical attack. I landed on the platform, and Honey and I got to work.

It was a little like I imagined defusing a bomb would be. The warding spells were woven around and through the apparatus like tiny, intricate threads. I reached out with my mind and the changeling's magic and began unweaving the spells thread by thread. The terrible sound of the battle below cut through the roof and set my teeth on edge. The juice rose like heat from a burning building and lifted all the hair on my body like a static charge.

I'm not sure how long we were at it, but after a time we had undone most of the warding spells. As the threads were pulled free from the whole, they fell apart and the juice evaporated into the air. I'd just isolated the few threads that remained when Honey cried out in alarm.

“Domino, below you!” she yelled. I looked. Papa Danwe was rising through the hole in the roof on an unseen wind. His
arms were stretched out to his sides, and he held his walking stick in one hand and Frank Seville's severed head in the other. Frank's head burst into flame, and the Haitian sorcerer hurled it at us. I got my shield up just in time as the fire exploded into us.

Sorcerers' duels are mostly a matter of who can flow more juice and who can spin that juice into combat spells more quickly. If anything, speed is more important than power. With each spell you cast, you have to decide whether to attack or defend, because you can't cast two spells at once. If you can spin attack spells quickly enough, you can force your opponent on the defensive, even if the spells aren't all that strong. All of this has to be done with spontaneous magic, of course—you can't recite quotations quickly enough to spin spells in a duel.