"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.