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  "Why, it's that nice boy I gave a ride to school," said Yolanda.

  Mack grinned. "I didn't know you knew each other."

  "Step away from the door," said Ceese.

  He was pointing his gun at her.

  "Is that loaded?" she said.

  "Mack, go home. Now. Get out of here."

  "Are you crazy?" asked Mack. "She wasn't doing anything."

  "I wasn't doing anything," said Yolanda.

  "You called him here," said Ceese. "You made him come."

  "She did not," said Mack.

  "I'm just an unforgettable woman, Mr. Cop," said Yolanda.

  "I came to tell her about how they planning to sue her," said Mack. "I think that's wrong."

  "Get the hell out of here, Mack," said Ceese intensely. "She's got you under her control."

  But Mack was rooted to the spot. "Ceese, you lost your mind?"

  "I guess he's the jealous type," said Yolanda. "And we haven't even dated yet."

  "I know you," Ceese said to her.

  "That line might work in bars, but not in my living room."

  "Well, what can I say? I'm kind of memorable, and you just ain't." Yolanda grinned. "What I do that makes you want to shoot me?"

  "I was twelve. I was holding a baby."

  "No sir, doesn't stir a memory," said Yolanda. "Besides which, if you was twelve then, I must have been about nine."

  "You were exactly the age you are now," said Ceese.

  "Then it wasn't me."

  "You couldn't make me do it then," said Ceese. "So you come back to do it yourself?"

  "Do what?" asked Mack.

  "Kill you," said Ceese.

  Yolanda laughed.

  "She can't kill me," said Mack.

  "Why not?" asked Ceese.

  "I'm her hero."

  Mack said the words with such simplicity and truth that it made Ceese lower his weapon a little.

  "You are?" asked Yolanda. "I always wanted one."

  "Your dream," said Mack. "When the flying slug—the dragon, whatever it is—when it comes to kill you, I'm the one who fights it."

  "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "And here I thought it was just my dog."

  Mack looked disappointed. "You have a dog?"

  She shook her head. "Always meant to get one though."

  "What are you talking about?" asked Ceese.

  "Ceese, you know I see dreams," said Mack. "But I was in her dream."

  "Mack, she tried to make me kill you. When you were a baby. The day I found you. She stood there and looked at me and all I wanted to do was kill you."

  "I don't know why," said Ceese. "I just know that it took all the strength I had to keep from doing it. And I'm not going to let her kill you now."

  Yolanda laughed. "You poor stupid sumbitch, don't you get it yet?"

  And with those words, Ceese felt an overwhelming need to turn and point the gun at Mack.

  "God help me," whispered Ceese. But he knew with all his heart that he was going to kill Mack.

  The person he loved best in all the world. There was his finger on the trigger. The gun pointed straight at Mack's heart.

  "God doesn't sweat the small stuff," said Yolanda. "He ain't going to interfere."

  "Like you'd know," said Ceese. He was sweating from the effort of not pulling the trigger.

  "Ceese, please put down that gun," said Mack.

  "Just get out of here," Ceese said between clenched teeth.

  "Yolanda," said Mack. "Let go of him. Please."

  "He the one with the gun," said Yolanda.

  "Titania," said Mack, in a louder voice. "Let him go."

  She laughed. "You silly boy, do you think I ever told Will Shakespeare my real name?"

  "Mab," said Mack. "Don't do this to him."

  "Those things are dangerous. You never know where they'll be pointing when they go off."

  "He couldn't have hurt you," said Mack. "Your soul is in a glass jar in a clearing with a panther watching over it."

  When the compulsion left Ceese it felt like somebody removed a wall he'd been leaning against.

  He stumbled and fell to one knee.

  "Bend yo' knee, bow yo' head," said Yolanda. "Tote that barge until yo' dead."

  "Mack," whispered Ceese. "I'm sorry."

  "Why don't you boys just both sit down on the couch and tell me why you come to see me,

  'stead of messing around with guns and shit."

  Ceese wanted to plunge out that front door and run home. Or farther. As far as he could go to get the sense of helplessness off him. It clung to him like the stink of skunk.

  So he found himself sitting on the shaggy white couch, Mack beside him, his gun still lying on the floor where he'd dropped it.

  "I came to warn you," said Mack. "About the neighbors. They plan to use the law on you. Cause your house's deed got a clause in it—"

  "Sandy Claus?" asked Yolanda brightly.

  "Anyway, that's cause I didn't know who you were. Till you made him point the gun at me. Then I knew."

  "You knew less than you think," said Yolanda. She turned to Ceese. "And you, did you come to kill me?"

  "I had to know if it was you. The same one."

  "You're very strong," said Yolanda. "Twice now, you told me no. Nobody tells me no."

  "You can't kill Mack Street," said Ceese.

  "Oh, you silly boy," she said. "That was then, this is now. I don't want him dead now. Back then he was still new, just a little wad of evil that my husband squirted out into the world. I was cleaning up. Only you wouldn't do it, Cecil Tucker. And now Mack's grown up into something else. Not just a changeling anymore."

  "What's going on?" asked Mack. "Why did I suddenly dream your dream?"

  "Because I came into your neighborhood," said Yolanda. "Because I needed a hero. Because nobody around here can wish for anything without it showing up in your dreams."

  "Why?"

  "Because you the Keeper of Dreams," said Yolanda. "You the Guardian of Wishes. Deep desire, it flows to you. From the moment you popped out of that chimney up there, all the desires around you, they got channeled. They flowed. Right to you, into you, all the power of all the wishing of your whole neighborhood."

  "Why?" demanded Mack again.

  "So he can worm his way back into the world."

  "Who?" asked Ceese.

  "My husband," said Yolanda. "The one Will Shakespeare knew as Oberon. Or as he likes to think of himself, the Master of the Universe." She laughed bitterly. "He was cruel, my husband. Not like Puck—not just playful. He was tired of flirting with the human race, he said. He was going to make an end of you and start over with some other kind of creature. One that wouldn't keep fighting him. And I didn't want to. I like humans. And Puck, he doesn't so much like you as like playing with you, but I was able to persuade him to help me."

  "Bind the old devil deep inside the earth," said Yolanda. "It took the two of us and a great circle of fairies. We danced on Stonehenge and I called out his name. Because he told me his name, you see."

  "What is it?" Mack quickly asked.

  "Don't even ask that," said Yolanda. "That's his desire, talking through you. If you say his true name, then he can come out. You're his key, don't you see? All the power of these hundreds of humans is stored up in you, except whatever got bled off to grant their foolish wishes. You've been strong for him, I can see it. You've been keeping it in, not letting any of it out for a long time. But now he wants it out, and he'll have it. If he could get you to say his name, then it would be easier. He could rise up out of the earth himself and no one could stop him then. He'd be like in the ancient days when our kind first came to earth and we all had the shape he's never given up. The first thing he'd do, Mack Street, is swallow you whole, so all that stored-up power was inside him."

  "And you're here to stop him?" asked Ceese.

  "I'm not here," she said. "That's what Mack understands and you don't. I'm trapped in a jar in a clearing, guarded by a panth
er, and so is Puck. When we bound Oberon, when he was writhing on the ground in the middle of the henge, when he was sinking down into the earth and it was swallowing him up to hold him captive so he couldn't destroy the human race, he still had his power over Puck.

  Once a slave to the king of the fairies, then you're never really free. He can't be trusted, poor Puck, because he's bound by my husband's will. So at the last moment, the old worm tore the light out of us and put it in two jars and hung them like lanterns in a faraway place where he thought we'd never find it."

  She sighed. "It took us all these years. Nearly four hundred years. And yet we couldn't get to where he held us captive. Because we could only control bodies in this world. Until you were born, Mack, if you want to call it that, all we could do was petty magicks. Bending humans to our will. Puck didn't mind—it amused him—but I was tired of using castoff bodies and it didn't amuse me to torment the others who still had a firm grip on theirs. We hung around here, but we went our separate ways.

  Until we felt it. The surge of power. The darkness like a sudden blast of licorice. Of anise. We knew he had found a passageway that let him push something of himself out into the world. Puck found the way to you first—of course he would, he's still bound to Oberon and such binding works both ways, Oberon can't stir without Puck feeling it. I'm bound, too, but only as a wife. So you were already born when I arrived. Born and put in that shopping bag and taken back to the spout through which the old worm reaches into this world."

  "There's no way that Mack is something evil," said Ceese, finally making some sense of what she was saying.

  "Is a hammer a good carpenter or a bad one?" asked Yolanda. "The answer is, it's no carpenter at all, and the good or bad of the hammer depends on how the carpenter uses it."

  "He's a tool when Oberon says he is. He'll have the use of him when he wants."

  "He's the worm in your dream," Mack said. "The slug with wings. The one I fight."

  "I don't know how twisted up that dream gets, but Mack, when you go to the worm, it's not to fight him. It's to be swallowed. It's to bring the power of these people into him. Nourish him. Make him mighty again."

  "No way," said Mack. "I won't do it."

  "You're not like Ceese here. I think maybe Ceese could tell him no. But you could no more deny him than your finger could refuse to pick your nose. May not like the work, but it can't say no."

  "You saying Mack's not really human?" Ceese asked.

  "Mack is what he is. Once you turn magic loose in the world, it becomes what it becomes. I don't know how reliable a tool he'll be. And you can count on this—Oberon hasn't been waiting all this time just to have everything depend on a changeling who's been under the daily influence of a human as strong as you, Cecil Tucker."

  "So what does that mean?" asked Mack. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "You're not supposed to do anything," said Ceese. "Do you think you can trust this woman?

  She's out for herself."

  "Well, of course I am," said Yolanda. "But it so happens that what I want—to keep Oberon penned up in hell, or whatever you want to call it—will make life a lot better for you mortals.

  Especially the ones in this neighborhood, who have already been collected."

  "Collected?" asked Ceese.

  "Mack here has been collecting them all for years," said Yolanda.

  Mack looked stunned. "I have?"

  "Every dream you saw that came from someone else, you've got their will tied up in yours. What do you think Oberon will be eating, when he swallows you? You're nothing—you're just a piece of him. It's what you collected for him that counts. He's been working through you ever since you were born."

  Mack leapt to his feet. "I haven't been. I've been cutting out of those dreams. After what it did to Deacon Landry and Tamika Brown and... I been getting out of those dreams."

  "You've been stopping up those dreams," said Yolanda cheerfully. "Like putting a cork in them.

  Penning them in. Putting the genie into the bottle. All those deep and powerful desires, all the wishes of their heart, locked up inside you, ready for Oberon to start using all that magic."

  "It's all locked up in a jar in the woods," said Yolanda.

  "And Puck's in the other lantern. How come he can do things?"

  "All we have is enough power to influence the desires of mortals. Puck's using your power, not his own. And only because he wants him to." She laughed, but it was a sad laugh. "If I could ever get free of that jar, you'd see what power is. After all, I beat him once. My servants and I."

  "So where are they now?"

  "Weak," she said. "Lost. Alone. And mostly still in England. They have to hide. I draw power from them, they draw power from me. Be glad, though—his servants are also weakened. Like Puck."

  "So Puck is an enemy," said Mack.

  "Puck is... Puck. He loves me. I thought you knew that much. He loves me, but he's Oberon's slave. So he can only help me obliquely. Sideways. He can't actually disobey anything Oberon thought to command him to do. That's why he couldn't tell you flat out who I am, or even who he is."

  "I thought he was just a lying snake."

  "Well, he is. But he's a lying snake who loves me, and a lying snake who would rather have his power trapped in a jar in a clearing in the woods of Fairyland than have Oberon raging through the world, sending him on cruel errands—especially errands to torment me."

  "And I'm Oberon's slave, too," said Mack.

  "Well, no," said Yolanda. "You're part of him. More like Oberon's goiter. But a cute one."

  Ceese could see how this devastated Mack—especially the way Yolanda seemed not even to notice how hurtful her words were. Or maybe she just didn't care about humans' feelings. "Mack, you don't have to believe this."

  "But it's true," said Mack. "It's what I felt all along. That I never belonged to myself. I thought I belonged—to you, to Miz Smitcher, to the neighborhood. But now I know what I been searching for all these years, all my life—it was him. It was the rest of me. He's the one driving. He's the one carrying me along into the flood."

  "What are you talking about?" asked Ceese.

  "Oh, he'll get used to it," said Yolanda.

  "Used to it? Finding out he isn't even real?"

  "Oh, he's real," said Yolanda. "Real as real can be. Which is why I tried to get you to kill Mack when he was a baby. Only thing I wasn't sure about was—when you didn't kill him, when you resisted me, was it because of your own strength? Or because of Oberon's power stopping you? If it was that worm doing it, then it meant he was watching closer than I thought he could. But now, I'm pretty sure it's just you. I'm pretty sure he's still blind up here. He can sense the power. He can taste the dreams.

  He can find dark and power-craving hearts that are looking for him. But he can't really see. It's like searching for clothes in the back of the closet."

  "That's what I'm here to figure out," said Yolanda.

  "Great," said Mack. "But what am I here for?"

  "For Oberon to use you," she said.

  "So everything would be better if I was dead."

  "That's the thing," said Yolanda. "You're part of him. So you're immortal. Can't kill you. We stuck with you here, Mack Street." She grinned. "But you can call me Yo Yo if you want."

  Mack looked downright grateful. But only for a moment. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped to the ground.

  Ceese was kneeling by him in a moment, supporting his head. "What did you do to him?" he demanded of Yolanda.

  "Haven't you heard a thing I said?" she answered. "All that power stored up inside him—Oberon's using it. The boy'll wake up when it's done."

  Chapter 16

  PREACHER MAN

  It was Word's first day preaching at City Haven, the storefront ministry where Reverend Theodore Lee had taken him on as an assistant pastor. "It's an act of faith, young man," said Rev Theo, as everyone called him. "Not in you, but in God's ability to transform you."

&nbs
p; From what to what? Word wondered. But he smiled and said nothing. He had his college degree, but after trying two divinity schools he was done with education.

  The first one tried to make him an expert in theology while discouraging Word from having any belief in the supernatural. Word could only shake his head at their oh-so-sophisticated religion, because he knew from experience that supernatural things could happen in LA. So why shouldn't he believe they could happen in Palestine two thousand years ago?

  The second one, though, was just as annoyingly off the mark. Full of all kinds of ideology on current political issues, the professors had no idea how good and evil actually worked in the world, and no plan for how to stop evil—not when evil was capable of working dark miracles like the birth of Mack Street from Word's mother's body.

  That's why Word chose City Haven, which sat between two boarded-up storefronts in a failed shopping center in a neighborhood that even the Koreans wouldn't buy up and renovate. The parishioners were mostly women, and mostly elderly women at that. Children were dragged along to church meetings, but few over the age when the gangs started reaching for them. The mothers were worried sick about their children—the fathers who weren't dead, in jail, or unidentified were usually part of the bad influence.

  And yet these were the hopeful women, the Christians who still had faith that God would reach out to them and save their children if they just prayed hard enough for a miracle. Behind them, out there in the deceptively sunny streets of the city, were thousands of women who had no hope, who saw their children headed down dark roads and knew they could not stop them.

  Word felt them out there, the hopeless ones, and thought: I know that there are miracles. Dark ones that I've seen, and bright ones that I hope for. I will find you, I will touch your hearts, I will bring you together in faith to demand that God do something about this mess. And I'll do it because nobody is angrier at evil than I am. Most of the world doesn't really believe it exists. When they say

  "evil" they mean "sick" or "nasty." When I say "evil," I mean power that makes use of human bodies like they were puppets. Evil is the spirits that inhabited the woman who spoke filth to Jesus, and whom Jesus cast out of her and into the bodies of the Gadarene swine. That's the power we need in this world, right now, to cast out the filth-speaking devils and free the children of God to hear his sweet word and redeem their souls from despair.