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."