“Hey,” I said.
He yelped, whirled, and then scooped me u—p in a bear hug that made me yelp right back.
“Ribs! Watch the ribs!”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry. But you’re out. You got out. Daria, she collapsed. I mean, I think she’s okay now, but I had to carry her out. I saw you going after Amelie, and then I didn’t see you go past, so I thought you were still… I thought…”
“Guess that was kind of dangerous,” I said. I felt disconnected. Like the world was still at one remove, and I was still moving through the crossroads. “I didn’t really think about it.”
“What about Amelie?”
“She didn’t make it,” I said. “She’s gone.”
Aubrey didn’t answer. At the far end of the street, a fire truck arrived, its lights flashing and its siren clearing the path of onlookers. Another police cruiser was behind it, then two, then five and an ambulance. The city of New Orleans had arrived at the crisis. They were on it. I crossed my arms and watched, unable to offer anything but moral support. Slowly, like I was waking from a dream, human concerns started to occur to me.
“Chogyi Jake,” I said. “He was…”
“He’s down there with the others.”
I looked where he pointed. Down the block, a small cluster of people had set up a kind of ad-hoc relief station. Two people lay on the sidewalk, three others standing or squatting beside them. Chogyi Jake was sitting on the curb, someone’s jacket wrapping his hips. Daria Glapion stood beside him looking back at us. Even from half a block down, the fire reflected in her eyes.
“Come on,” I said.
The police, reinforced by the newly arrived squad cars, pushed the crowd further back and the firefighters rushed in. Chogyi Jake looked up at me and smiled wearily.
“Not the evening we had in mind,” he said.
“No joke,” I said and sat down beside the girl.
Daria didn’t turn toward me. Her eyes were fixed on the pyre, tears flowing down her stark, impassive cheeks. I sat with her in silence for a minute. The firefighters pulled a long hose that looked like canvas up to the fire. With shouts and hand signals, the water started, spraying out into the flames. The smoke thickened.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The little girl nodded.
“I would have saved her if I could,” I said. “But your grandmother was already gone when I got to her.”
“I know,” Daria said.
The matter-of-fact tone of voice together with the pain in her eyes, the bravery of her composure, was heartbreaking. I wanted to put my arm around the girl, to scoop her up and hold her and let her cry, but her dignity seemed to forbid it. Here was a child not even in high school. She had seen her city assaulted, had lost her mother, her brother, now her grandmother, and all she had left in the world was a sister who…
A sister.
“Where’s Sabine?” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “Who’s got Sabine?”
“I couldn’t find her,” Aubrey said, shaking his head. “She was already gone.”
Chogyi Jake and Daria turned to me in silence.
“Well, fuck,” I said.
“SHE MAY be with Mfume. Or Inondé, wherever he is,” Aubrey said. “We don’t know for certain that Karen got her.”
I’d rented us a room in the same hotel we’d stayed at when we had first come to New Orleans. Chogyi Jake was in the bathroom, showering off the last of the voodoo markings from his skin. Daria was sitting on the crisp, white linen sheets looking out the open French doors to the patio and the darkened courtyard beyond it. Aubrey couldn’t stop moving, pacing, rapping his knuckles on the walls and tables as he passed them, and I was sitting in a deep, cream-colored oversized chair. My hair smelled like smoke.
“I don’t think we can assume she got away,” I said. “If she’s not with us, we have to act like Karen got her. Hoping for the best isn’t really an option here.”
“Call him again,” Aubrey said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”
I didn’t fight him on it, but I didn’t expect anything to come of it. I dug through my pack, pulled out the cell phone, and pulled Ex’s entry out of the contacts list. As I listened to the phone ring, the shower water stopped. By the time Ex’s recorded voice said he was away from his phone and to leave a message, Chogyi Jake stepped out of the bathroom wearing a fresh pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Any word?” he asked, and I shook my head.
“Okay,” Aubrey said. “Let’s take stock here. We don’t know where Sabine is—”
“So we have to assume Karen’s taken her,” I said.
“Right,” Aubrey said. “So Karen’s taken her. Mfume and Inondé are MIA. Ex isn’t answering his phone.”
“Does she know we broke the wards?” I asked. Chogyi Jake’s brow furrowed for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If she didn’t specifically check, she might not. And unless she’s been listening to the message we left for Ex, she may not know we’ve come back at all.”
“Oh, I never told him we were coming back,” I said. “I never told him Karen was possessed. I just said he should call us.”
“In that case,” Chogyi Jake said, sitting on the bed beside Daria, “I can’t see how she’d know we’re here.”
“Okay, so we’ve got something in the plus column,” I said. “What else?”
“We probably know where she is,” Aubrey said. “And if we can find Mfume, we can be sure.”
“If her intention is to pull the rider out of Sabine, that will take Ex some time,” Chogyi Jake said. “Two hours. Perhaps three.”
“Giving us maybe an hour to figure out whatever we’re doing, and then do it,” I said. “I don’t think we’re in the plus column anymore, guys.”
The sense of despair was seeping in at the sides like ink soaking a sheet of paper. The last time I’d faced Carrefour, it had almost killed me and I still hadn’t recovered. Aubrey had been on the edge of freaking at least twice already, not to mention his wounds from exorcising Marinette. Chogyi Jake had been the focus of a ceremony already. We were tired, and we were hurt, and we were going to go to the safe house and confront Karen Black and the thing inside her. I didn’t like our chances.
Daria shifted. She looked empty. Shell-shocked.
“Hey,” I said gently. She turned to me. “How’re you holding up, kiddo?”
“You can’t take it on,” she said. “You should call for help.”
“I would,” I said with a sense of growing loneliness. “I don’t have anyone to call.”
Daria’s expression became quizzical.
“I do. I’ve got lots of people,” she said and started ticking off fingers with each name. “Aunt Corrie and Uncle Bo. Aunt Sherrie. BP and Omar.”
“Wait, who?” I said.
“Legba’s community,” Chogyi Jake said, his voice chagrined. “The ones that aren’t being treated for smoke inhalation.”
“They’re going to know what happened by now,” Daria said. “Somebody would have called somebody as soon as they got out from the fire. They’re probably just trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“How many people were in your grandma’s… group?” I asked.
“A hundred,” Daria said without pausing. “It’s always a hundred. Ten tens give it power and strength. Grandma said we needed that.”
“And you can get ahold of them?”
Daria held out her hand. She couldn’t have been more than twelve, and I had the feeling she was more in control of the situation than I was. I gave her the phone. Her small fingers traced a number. I heard the distant ringing as she held the phone to her ear. Then a click, and a woman’s voice.
“Auntie Sherrie? I’m with someone you need to talk to. She’s going to help Sabine, so be gentle with her, okay?”
Without waiting for a reply, Daria held out the telephone. Her expression was eerily mature and more than a little pitying.
“You really
need to find out who you are,” she said.
I put the phone to my ear.
“Hi,” I said.
“Who is this?” a woman’s voice asked. I could hear the fear and the anger, but something else too. Something protective and fierce.
“My name’s Jayné,” I said. “I’m a friend. Kind of. We don’t have time to get into that part. What’s important is Carrefour killed Amelie Glapion and abducted Sabine.”
The woman on the other end said something obscene.
“I know where they are,” I said. “Get as many people as you can and meet me at Jackson Square in half an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” the woman said, equal parts promise and threat. She dropped the connection. I put the phone back in my pack with a sense of unreality.
“Well?” Aubrey asked.
“Daria’s right. Put it in the plus column,” I said. “We’ve got a cult.”
TWENTY-TWO
Something happened when I was ten or eleven years old that, maybe because it didn’t have to do with leaving home or supernatural beasties or who that cute guy in French was, I hadn’t thought of in years. The Conroys were a family that went to our church. The father was a big, bluff man with thinning blond hair and a bright red face, his wife was short and about as wide as she was tall, and their three boys were named—I’m not making this up—Huey, Dewey, and Louis. Pronounced Lewis. We weren’t close to them. We didn’t go to the same schools, our dads didn’t work together, our mothers didn’t hang out. They were just some other people who went to the same place we did on Sunday, listened to the same sermons, milled around at the same picnics and ice cream socials and so on.
And then their house burned down, and they came to live with us for a month.
My clearest memories of that time involved waiting in the hallway for one of the boys to finish with the bathroom and the smell of the cabbage and sausage casserole that Mrs. Conroy made as a thankyou dinner. When my brothers and I talked about it, it was always in the context of, “Holy shit, do you remember when those people invaded our house?” After they left, we didn’t stay in touch. The only thing we’d ever had in common was our church.
Until that night in the dark, bleak hours of the morning, a cold fog rising from the ground in Jackson Square like a thousand cheap Halloween ghosts, I hadn’t thought about how amazing that really was. The Conroys had been nothing to us, and we’d let them come into our home, sleep in our living room, borrow our robes and slippers, and watch our TV with us just because we were all part of the same group and they were in trouble.
The thirty men and women standing in Jackson Square, waiting for me and Daria would have stood out in my church like blood on a wedding dress. Never mind that there were no blacks at my church; there also weren’t men with decorative scars on their necks or women who looked like they could chew through two-by-fours on the strength of rage alone. But something was the same, a sense of belonging together, of unspoken loyalty, of real community that filled me with a nostalgic longing.
There was also the impression that they’d happily beat an outsider to death with a pipe and sink the body in a swamp. There was less nostalgia with that one.
The whole time she’d been with us, Daria had been quiet. As soon as we saw the cult waiting for us, Daria ran to a thick-shouldered woman, wrapped her thin arms around the woman’s belly, and started crying. Her sobs were low and violent, and I felt inexplicably responsible for them.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Jayné.”
“You’re the one came and screwed up the ceremony at Charity,” one man said. He looked familiar. Now that I was close, and they were all around me, there were several who looked like I’d seen them before dancing in the belly of the dead hospital. There were more, though, that were new to me. I didn’t see anyone who’d been in the fire, who’d witnessed the pact I’d taken with Legba. That was kind of too bad.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t really understand the situation. I screwed up a lot of things.”
“It’s not her fault,” Daria said. “Carrefour lied to her. Soon as she saw what was happening, she came to Gramma for help.”
“Seems like that didn’t work out too well either,” the thick-shouldered woman said.
“Treat her with respect,” a man’s voice came ringing from the gloom. “Amelie accepted her.”
Dr. Inondé loomed up out of the fog. He wasn’t a particularly imposing sight. The damp had soaked his shirt and hair, sticking both to him in unflattering ways. He nodded to me and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake, then went and knelt beside Daria and murmured something that the girl nodded back to. When he stood, he looked tired but determined.
“Look,” he said. “I was there. Carita Lohman was too, you can call her. Or Tommy Condoné. Or Harold Jackson’s son. We were all there. If it wasn’t for this girl and her friends, Carrefour would have been able to do a lot worse than it did.”
“Did bad enough, seems like,” a thin, angry-looking man said.
“Okay, look,” I said. “I know where Carrefour took Sabine. I can take you there, but… I need a promise.”
“Who the hell are you to make demands of us?” the thick-shouldered woman said.
“Sherrie!” Daria snapped, standing back a step from the woman and wagging a finger at her like a mother scolding a child. “I told you to be gentle with her. So be gentle.”
It was a ridiculous sight. Daria was small and slight and young; a girl play-acting at being adult. Sherrie looked like she’d be at home in a street fight. But when Daria spoke, Sherrie looked abashed.
“I’m not trying to hold things up,” I said. “It’s just that we aren’t all going into this with the same exact agenda, and I don’t want things to get weird. The exorcist that Carrefour’s using doesn’t know he’s working for a rider. He thinks he’s saving Sabine. So when we get in there, don’t hurt him. He’s not the bad guy.”
There was a silent motion in the group. I couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad one. I felt like I was standing on the high-dive board, looking down at an empty pool. But I had to keep going.
“And,” I said, “the horse? The one Carrefour’s riding? Her name’s Karen. She didn’t pick any of this either.”
The voice of the crowd was easier to interpret this time, low and unhappy. Angry. I felt Aubrey and Chogyi Jake step in toward me, closing ranks. Dr. Inondé looked embarrassed on my behalf.
“You want to go into a fight but just don’t hurt anybody,” Sherrie said.
“I just want to try and do the right thing,” I said. “We have to do what we have to do, but if there’s a chance… if there’s a way to keep Karen alive, we should. This isn’t her fault.”
“And if we don’t promise, you’re going to let Legba be cast down and Sabine die,” Sherrie said.
“No. If you won’t, then we’ll try to stop Carrefour without you,” I said. “It’s just not as likely that it’ll go well.”
“Then I guess we promise,” Sherrie said, raising an eyebrow.
A police car driving past the square slowed but didn’t turn on its flashing lights. It wasn’t every night someone set off a car bomb in the French Quarter. Thirty angry-looking people standing around Jackson Square at two in the morning was only going make the authorities jumpier. I didn’t think taking everyone back to my hotel was going to work either.
“Okay, look,” I said. “I’ve got a car over at my hotel like five minutes from here. The place Carrefour took Sabine is out in Pearl River, but it’s a little hard to find. Can you guys grab your cars and follow me out?”
“We’ll be there,” Sherrie said.
“I’m coming too,” Daria said.
I said, “No, you aren’t,” at the same moment Sherrie said, “Like hell you are.”
“She’s my sister,” Daria said to both of us. “You can’t keep me from coming.”
“Sweetheart,” Sherrie said. “Your grandma would come back from the dead to kick my ass if I took her baby
granddaughter into a fight. And if you believe I can’t keep you from coming, you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I’ll take care of her,” Dr. Inondé said. “We’ll stay at the shop. Doris likes her.”
“Doris doesn’t like anything,” Daria said, outraged. “She’s a snake.”
I nodded to Sherrie, then Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and I all started back toward the hotel. I noticed I was breathing hard; adrenaline burning off through my lungs.
“How long have we got?” I asked.
“If the rider in Sabine is as intractable as Marinette,” Chogyi Jake said. “An hour. Maybe less.”
“If we’re too late, I think those people may kill us,” Aubrey said.
“I had that feeling too,” I said.
The drive out to the safe house had never seemed longer. Fog pressed in at the car windows, the murmur of the tires against the pavement hissing like a constant, breathless voice just too low to comprehend, and behind us, a string of headlights. The rider cult, following close. With each mile we covered, my stomach knotted more tightly until I was skating along the edge of nausea.
I was pretty sure that somewhere along the line I’d intended to be careful, to plan, to think things through rather than rushing headlong into unknown danger. And here we were, Aubrey leaning over the steering wheel as he broke the speed limits, Chogyi Jake in the backseat in deep meditation that I recognized as a preparation for battle, and me sitting powerless in the passenger’s seat squinting ahead at the darkness or backward into the light. I didn’t know what we would find at the safe house. The new Legba might already be eaten, Sabine and Ex already dead. Or Carrefour might be waiting for us. Karen could be in the trees with a sniper rifle, prepared to pick us off as we drove up the street.
She might not even be there.
“Jayné?” Aubrey said. “You okay?
“Fine. Why?”
“You keep saying shit shit shit shit under your breath,” he said. “I didn’t figure it was a good sign.”
“Copro-vocal meditation,” Chogyi Jake said from the backseat, his voice calm and amused. “I’m doing the same thing, only on the inside.”
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