"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."

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