Magic Street Page 0,85

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

"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.

I won't let them be like my mother, forgetting everything, or my father, denying everything. I will wake them up.

The trouble with all this grim determination was that Word wasn't much of a speaker. He knew it, too. Growing up in Baldwin Hills as the son of a fine-spoken English professor and poet, Word spoke English too fluently and clearly to be credible on the street. He sounded like a foreigner here - but not foreign enough for anyone to take him for Jamaican or a highly educated British black.

As one little boy said it when Word asked him where the unlocked entrance to City Haven might be,

"You sound like a white man." To which Word could only smile