The instant I broke the ward I was hit with a true seeing spell that dropped my wallflower, and an alarm bell began to sound. It tolled like Notre Dame at noon on Sunday.

I froze in place, looking about as stupid as a cartoon character who just followed his nemesis over the edge of a cliff. There was a long second in which nothing moved and there was no sound but the tolling of the alarm bell.

Then a dozen gangbangers unloaded on me.

I was just a little faster. I hit my jump spell and leaped to the tower, grabbing onto the superstructure about twenty feet above the ground. The hail of bullets and offensive magic turned the factory floor where I'd been standing into a smoking crater in the concrete. If the tower had been protected by a second barrier ward, I'd have continued with the cartoon theme, slamming into it and sliding to the ground.

There was no barrier, though, and I started climbing as soon as I landed in the gridwork. The gunfire and spellslinging ended abruptly when I made the tower. The gangbangers were well trained and disciplined, and their instructions were probably pretty simple. "Shoot intruders. Don't shoot the tower."

I climbed quickly, and I was about halfway up the tower when the first group of thugs started climbing up behind me. I didn't have the same concerns for the tower, so I paused long enough to lob a force spell down at them. It was hard to find the juice, even for the simple spell. I had to reach all the way down below the building and pull the juice from the ley line, before it was drawn up into the ring.

The force spell knocked all three of the gangbangers off the tower. They didn't fall far enough to suffer proper injuries, but no one rushed forward to take their place. I grinned and kept climbing.

When I finally got to the factory ceiling, I discovered metal spikes like lightning rods extending from the tower, and I thought my image of the Tesla machine hadn't been far off. I squeezed between two of the spikes and continued climbing through the hole in the factory roof.

Once outside the building, I kept right on climbing. I could have run across the roof to the edge of the building, and from there made my escape, but I wanted to see what was at the top of the tower.

I climbed another twenty feet and arrived at a circular platform ringing the tower that allowed me a more secure perch. Like the ring below, it was made of silver, and there were arcane runes and glyphs engraved in its surface. They were the old-school equivalent of the graffiti tags and served much the same purpose.

A silver bezel was anchored into the center of the platform, and a crystal about the size of a beach ball was set into the bezel. When I looked closer, I could see that the crystal wasn't actually set in anything-it was suspended in midair. The bezel was charged with enough juice to keep the crystal in place, but the crystal itself was dormant. It didn't take a theoretical genius to figure out that the crystal would be charged by the juice coursing through the ring below. The juice would arc into the lightning rods extending from the tower, flow up into the bezel and be drawn into the crystal. Then something bad would happen.

It also didn't take a genius to recognize God's own magic wand. The tower was clearly an arcane weapon of some kind. It was a weapon that could draw a hell of a lot of juice, not just from the magic contained in the ring but from the ley line and the graffiti network that fed it.

I had a few options, and my first choice was to knock the whole tower down. The problem with that option was that I couldn't reach enough juice. My second choice was to circumcise it. I didn't know much about magic wands, but the big crystal on the tip had to be pretty important.

I do a better job of learning from mistakes than the average cartoon character, so I took a good look at the contraption with my witch sight before blasting it. There was plenty of juice in the bezel, but I could get a good enough sense of its pattern to be sure it was just holding the crystal in place. No ward. I shrugged, placed my right palm against the cool surface of the crystal and blasted it.

The ward that wasn't there turned my spell around, punched me in the chest and sent me hurtling into the blue California sky.

This sounds bad, but there was an upside. The ward hit me hard enough that I cleared the fence and the barrier around the site completely. In fact, by the time gravity started to bend my trajectory into the ground, I was a good two or three blocks away from the factory and the gangbangers who wanted to kill me.

Even the downside, so to speak, wasn't as bad as it might have been. I can't fly, but I can levitate, and I could use the spell to at least take some of the crash out of my landing. Unfortunately I was tumbling through the air having just been hit by some fairly painful combat magic, and I couldn't pull enough juice out of Papa Danwe's turf to properly execute the levitation spell.

This being Southern California, I might have hoped for a swimming pool or at least a fucking palm tree to land in. Instead I got a gravel parking lot. My half-assed levitation spell was enough to get my feet right side down. I hit the gravel, stumbled, fell, tumbled a few times and then skidded across the parking lot to slam into the brick wall of a body shop.

I lay there for a few moments, squinting into the sun and waiting for the pain to hit. It didn't take long. I couldn't tell if anything was broken, because my whole body hurt. My hands, knees and back were torn, and the abrasions had picked up most of the gravel from the parking lot. I'd managed to skid along on my face for a stretch, and my chin, nose and forehead were bleeding. Despite the haze of pain, I was able to focus well enough to confirm that my nose wasn't in the usual position. All of these new injuries were neatly layered over the ones I received from the ghost dogs the night before.

I forced myself up and started making my way back to my car. I might have lain there and died, but there were a lot of factors arguing against it. I needed to warn Rashan about the big-ass magic wand, and anyway, Papa Danwe's boys would probably find me before I managed to die. But there was something else that really got me up and moving.

I had a date with Adan that night. Six The first thing I did when I returned to my condo was grab the bottle of aspirin out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I don't need a spell to treat pain. If I flow enough juice, I can numb myself into oblivion. But the injuries I'd sustained in the last couple days were serious enough that I needed a little more than pain relief. The aspirin was a useful prop and I had a spell that would, in principle, fix everything from broken bones to a critical appendix.

Sadly, I really suck at healing magic. Sorcery is funny that way. Even when you have all the pieces to the puzzle, sometimes you just can't seem to bring them all together. I could handle other spells just fine, ones that on the surface would seem to be closely related, like the purification spell that let me suck down Camels without regard for the Surgeon General's warning. That spell wasn't real healing magic, though. It was equal parts destruction and protection mojo, designed to vaporize the bad stuff and shield healthy tissue from harm. If I actually got cancer, it'd be about as much use as acupuncture. Probably less.

So I gave the aspirin spell a shot, but my expectations were low. I stripped off my clothes and chased a handful of Bayer with a glass of wine.

"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full," I said. The spell, as it came together, looked more like a tangle than a pattern, and the more juice I poured into it the uglier it got. I put my glass on the edge of the sink and examined myself in the mirror. My nose looked a little straighter and most of my cuts and scrapes were no longer bleeding. The pain had subsided to a dull, full-body throb, but that might have just been the juice. By my standards, the spell was a rousing success, but I still looked like hell. I topped it off with a purification spell to nuke any infections that might want to set up shop and called it good.