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