“Exactly,” Karen said. “He felt the excitement. The pleasure. He had all the release that a normal human killer has. By the time he understood what was really happening, it was too late. He was crazy.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “He figured it out? He knew?”
“He did,” Karen said. “It’s how I knew that it wasn’t over. Even after we caught him, we’d only caught the body. The horse. When it left his body, Mfume told me everything. He begged me to find it for him.”
“To kill it,” I said.
“To bring it back to him,” Karen said. “By the time it was over, he was in love with it.”
“Okay, huge ick factor,” I said.
“I’ve been tracking this thing for the last decade, one city to another,” Karen said. “Six months ago, it finally came back home to the land of voodoo. Something happened within the loa that either lifted its exile or made it impossible to enforce.”
“Something about the hurricane,” I said, thinking of Eric’s ruined house and the devastation that surrounded it. The strange X mark on the door. The ring like a dirty bathtub that marked the buildings we’d seen driving in. High water.
“Possibly,” Karen said, soberly.
“How did it find Jayné,” Ex asked. “She’s very difficult to locate magically. This thing must have an angle.”
“At a guess?” Karen said. “The same way I found it. The little sister. You have to understand that the loa have been building voodoo cults in New Orleans for centuries. Things have happened here. Powerful, unnatural things. It’s changed the nature of space. The world’s thin here.
“There’s a girl. Daria Glapion. She has the Sight. Call it limited precognitive ability. Sometimes people know things that there’s no particular reason they should know. She told me that her sister was going to be the rider’s next victim. Eaten by a snake was what she called it, but I knew what that meant. Maybe better than she did.”
“And she spilled the beans about us,” Ex said.
“Again, possibly without knowing what she meant,” Karen said. “The rider is in her grandmother. Amelie Glapion, self-styled voodoo queen of New Orleans. Glapion has been heading one of the local voodoo cults for years. Her family has a history with the loa. When the rider came back, it took her. It was something I suspected, but it’s hard to prove. Until I managed to meet the little girl, I wasn’t sure.”
Karen looked angry. More than angry. Her eyes had a focused, controlled hatred. I remembered how the snake had fled when Karen came to my rescue. Seeing her now, I thought the thing hadn’t run fast enough, and if it wasn’t still fleeing, it was only from ignorance. That thought sparked another in a little cascade of mental dominoes.
“Hey,” I said. “How did you know where to find us?”
“I called her,” Aubrey said, sounding something between defensive and surprised. “That was the plan wasn’t it? We settled in, then we called Karen.”
Her contact number had been on the report, it was true. And I’d had the lawyers cc all the guys. I’d assumed that I would be the one to make contact, since I was the one with Eric’s cell phone. It wasn’t anything I’d explicitly said. It wasn’t even something I’d really thought about, and yet something about it unnerved me. Something about Aubrey choosing this moment to take initiative with one of our plans. With seeing those pictures of Karen and being moved to call her.
Karen’s perfect blue eyes flickered between me and Aubrey, reading the subtext like it was written in foot-tall flaming letters.
“I should have confirmed with you,” Karen said to me. “It was thoughtless of me.”
“No,” I said, waving it away with a laugh. “No, Aubrey’s right. That was absolutely the plan. I just didn’t know we’d done it.” I picked up another crawfish and snapped its head free. “It’s cool.”
“Good that he did,” Ex said, maybe a little more sharply than was strictly needed. “If Karen hadn’t arrived in time to intervene, things could have gotten ugly.”
I felt the urge to defend myself, but I wasn’t quite sure what from. I wanted to say that I’d been holding my own against the rider. That it was just fine with me that someone else had called Karen and told her where we were. Without telling me. I didn’t have a problem with any of it. Chogyi Jake coughed once, then folded his hands on the table. His sweet, enigmatic smile could have meant anything.
“There’s more than enough room for ugly still to come,” Karen said. “Glapion knows we’re here. We don’t have a lot of time if we’re going to do what we need to do.”
We turned toward her like sunflowers on a bright day. Even me.
“The victim is going to be Glapion’s other granddaughter. Not Daria, but Sabine,” Karen said. “We can take it as given that Sabine isn’t going to accept the idea that her loving grandmother is about to become a soulless killer.”
“How do we address that?” Ex asked, and I was a little disturbed by the we until Karen smiled. I was being paranoid and territorial and weird. I was tired. None of this was her fault.
“Normally, I’m a strong advocate of people’s freedoms and right to self-determination,” Karen said. “This is an exception.”
“We kidnap Sabine,” Chogyi Jake said.
“We do,” Karen said. “And when she’s safe, we get the grandmother, extract the rider, and kill it.”
FOUR
“We need to know where the girl’s going to be,” Ex said. “When, where. What kind of protection. Does Grandma Glapion have guards on the girl.”
“And a van,” Aubrey said. “Something like Chogyi Jake’s old clunker. No windows. That’ll be important, right?”
Karen held up her hand, palm out. The smile at the corner of her mouth deepened slightly.
“We can’t just go snatch the girl off the street tonight,” she said.
“The more time we take—” Ex began.
“The more prepared we are when it happens,” Karen said. “Let’s say we do the thing right now. Go get the girl, throw her in the back of a rental. Great. Now we’ve got an angry teenage girl in the car. What exactly do you plan to do with her? And keep in mind, we’re actually committing a felony when we do that. The police aren’t going to take ‘we’re protecting her from her demon-ridden family’ as a serious defense.”
“And,” Chogyi Jake said slowly, thinking through the words as he said them, “it isn’t as though the rider is without resources. It found Jayné even before she knew where she was going to be.”
“The Sight isn’t encyclopedic,” Karen said. “Daria doesn’t see everything, and what she does see, she often won’t understand. But yes, we can assume that Glapion will foresee at least some of our plans.”
Aubrey leaned forward, brow furrowed. Ex frowned and crossed his arms.
“We need a safe house,” I said. “Someplace we can keep her. And we’ll want to put wards on it. Like what Eric had on the house in Denver. Something to make us hard to find. Chogyi Jake? You were the one who kept those going. Do you think you could do it again?”
There was a moment’s pause. Overhead, a bird rattled and took wing. Chogyi Jake nodded.
“It would take time,” he said. “And there is a wooden chest in the London townhouse that would be… very useful.”
“Okay. So magical stuff from London and a place to use it. Check. Karen? Did you have a place in mind for the safe house?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I was torn between having something here in or very close to New Orleans and taking Sabine entirely out of the picture.”
“Okay,” I said, “tell me about that. What are the issues?”
The sly smile bloomed into laughter.
“You are Eric’s family, aren’t you?” she said. “All right. On the one hand, this is Glapion’s territory. She knows the city, and the rider has power here. On the other hand, if we send Sabine out of the city, someone has to go to guard her. Also… well, I didn’t work many kidnapping cases, but the common wisdom at Quantico was tha
t most of the abductees that escape do it when they’re in transit. There are a lot of variables in moving people around, especially when they don’t want to be moved.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Okay, so that’s job one.”
“And transportation,” Ex said. “Aubrey’s right. We need something to move the girl in once we have her. Unless we’re taking the kid on the bus.”
“Do we have a good way to put wards on a van?” I asked.
“I’ll look into it,” Chogyi Jake said.
“All right,” I said. “How about this. Chogyi gets in touch with the property manager in London and gets whatever we need shipped out here. Karen? You’ve been local. Can you and Ex arrange the transportation?”
“Sure,” Karen said. I had the feeling that her amusement was tempered with respect, and the idea warmed me a little. The truth was I was showing off, taking charge like I was the Godfather. It wasn’t how I usually operated.
“If I’m buying something off the lot, I’ll need the Darth Vader card,” Ex said, meaning my American Express Black.
“Too showy,” I said. “We don’t really want to be memorable. You guys scout it out. If it’s cheap enough to do out of petty cash, just grab it. If we need something new, I’ll have the lawyers make the purchase through a shell corporation.”
“Right,” Ex said. “I’ll need a way to go shopping in the first place. Should we take the rental?”
“I’ll drive,” Karen said. “I know a chop shop that sells a lot of gray-market cars.”
I nodded, gratified that Karen was going along with my plan.
“Aubrey and I can hit the real estate sites, do some driving, see what we can find for a safe house.”
I pulled my cell phone out of my pack and checked the time. Three thirty, local. In Athens, it was pushing midnight. I felt fine at the moment, but experience suggested that I had maybe four more hours before jet lag kicked in. After that, I’d have about three working neurons, max.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “How about we do what we can between now and seven o’clock. Then meet back at the hotel, compare notes?”
Aubrey raised his hand like a kid in a classroom.
“You were attacked by a very powerful rider a little over an hour ago,” he said. “Are you sure we should scatter out in all directions?”
I hesitated. The rational, thoughtful part of my mind saw the point, and I had to admit it was a good one. But it also took apart everything I’d just proposed. I was not going to be humiliated in front of Karen.
“I think we can handle ourselves,” I said.
“I agree,” Karen said. “If a captain’s highest aim was to preserve his ship, he’d keep it in port forever.”
Ex looked across the table at Karen like he’d just seen her for the first time. I felt an uneasy warmth in my chest that might have been pride or fear or something made from both.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”
Back at the hotel, I called the lawyer while Aubrey got online and poked through real estate websites advertising rentals and houses for sale. The best balance of seclusion and proximity we found was a place in Pearl River, about forty-five minutes away. I printed up directions and tossed Aubrey the keys to the minivan. Twenty minutes later, we were on I-10, passing the Irish Bayou Lagoon and heading out over the wide, empty water of Lake Pontchartrain.
I leaned against the window, the vibration of the engine and the road feeling a lot like being in an airplane. I could feel the first soft breezes of jet lag wafting through my mind. My body felt heavy and slightly ill. Outside, a real wind was kicking up tiny whitecap waves.
This was the same water that had swamped the Lakeview house. It looked calm now, silty and greenish in the cool of the coming evening. Hundreds of pilings and wide sections of concrete showed where the damaged southbound bridge was being rebuilt. I wondered if this might be part of the mystery of violence; the way something could look so calm and peaceful, right up until it didn’t.
In my hazy state of mind, the thought seemed bigger than this particular water, this particular bridge. I felt like it applied everywhere. A little old lady with a tripod cane who puked out a needle-toothed demon. A favorite uncle who, on his death, turned out to be more than I’d ever known. A simple, physical attraction to a good-looking man with what my mother would have called a kind mouth that turned into a night of sex, a mass of guilt, and a set of divorce papers that I still hadn’t told Aubrey about.
I must have sighed, because Aubrey looked over at me, concerned.
“Hey,” he said. “You doing all right over there?”
“I was just thinking about what Karen said,” I lied. “The whole thing with the rider taking over people’s minds. About how Mfume loved it by the end. I just don’t get that.”
“There’s a fair amount of precedent,” Aubrey said. “Not in vertebrates, particularly. But wasps, caterpillars…”
“Ooh,” I said, curling up in the seat. “I love it when you talk geeky.”
I didn’t usually flirt with Aubrey. I didn’t usually flirt with anyone. It was the exhaustion, I told myself. And the adrenaline crash from the rider’s ambush. It wasn’t because I thought Karen Black was smarter and sexier and more competent than I was. Flirting with Aubrey because I didn’t measure up to her would have been juvenile and stupid, and I would never do anything like that.
Yeah, whatever.
Still, Aubrey laughed a little, smiled a little, ran his hand through his hair like he was suddenly self-conscious about how he looked.
“There was an example they talked about a lot when I was in grad school,” he said. “Glyptapanteles. It’s a family of wasps that parasitize moths. Well, caterpillars.”
“A wasp as a parasite for a caterpillar?” I said. “How do you fit a wasp inside a caterpillar?”
The far shore of the lake was just coming into view. We had almost passed over the water.
“You don’t,” he said. “The wasps lay eggs in the caterpillar. When the eggs hatch, the larvae live off the host’s body. They eat it, but they don’t kill it. Eventually, they pop out and pupate.”
“Pupate,” I said. “Meaning turn into grown-up wasps, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “While they’re doing that, they’re vulnerable. There are a lot of predators who could just come along and eat them, so there’s a lot of evolutionary pressure to keep that from happening. Some wasps, the pupae are cryptic and well hidden. Some of them the larvae get in a really hard-to-reach place before they pupate. Glyptapanteles stay right by the caterpillar they came out of. And the whole time that they’re turning into wasps, the caterpillar guards them. Anything comes along and tries to eat the pupae, it knocks them away.”
“So do they leave a larva behind or something?”
“No,” he said. “They all leave. It’s not like they’re still in there driving the caterpillar’s body.”
“Then why does it do that?” I asked.
“It’s been changed,” Aubrey said with a shrug. “We don’t know how yet. When you get down to that level of behavior modification, you might just as well say that the caterpillar loves the wasps. It’s not like there’s a better way to put it.”
We passed back onto dry land. The lake faded away behind us in the trees. The sun was off to our left, growing red and heavy in the last few degrees until sunset. Aubrey was a silhouette, the shadows of the roadside trees stuttering like an old movie with its sprockets slipping. I had the uncomfortable sense that I’d done something wrong. I’d sort of been coming on to Aubrey—something I’d tried not to do in these last few months—and the end result was a view of love and parasites that actually left me feeling a little queasy. Normally, Aubrey’s biology talks were pretty interesting. That one had felt pointed.
Love is when something’s gotten into you, changed who you are, and made you into something not quite whole and entirely self-destructive. My mind kept turning the idea one way and another, lik
e a jigsaw puzzle piece that wouldn’t quite fit.
Jet lag, I told myself. Exhaustion and paranoia.
The sun was still up, though only barely, when we turned off the highway and into Pearl River. The streets were almost rural. The trees that lined the roads were thick, and had the haphazard feel of landscape more than landscaping. We twisted down a couple roads, Aubrey squinting against the reddening sunlight while I tried to pick house numbers off the roadside mailboxes.
The place from the Realtor’s site was on three acres, and set well back from the road, almost into the woods. We pulled up the long drive. A wide grassy area too feral to be called a lawn. Towering trees, six or seven stories high with wide branches greening with the promise of spring but still bare of leaves. A three-bedroom home, two and a half baths, two-car garage, den, dining room, large shed in the rear yard staring out into the growing twilight, dark windows like unfriendly eyes. A small stone statue of the Virgin Mary lurked near the front door, ivy growing up the side. In context, it looked like a gravestone.
Aubrey stopped the minivan and killed the engine. The quiet wasn’t perfect, but it was deeper than I’d expected in a place that was still officially a city. We got out of the minivan. A firefly ignited, floated up in the gloom, and vanished.
“No neighbors to speak of,” Aubrey said. “At least not in line of sight.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go look at that shed in the back.”
The shed was bigger than my old dorm room. It was painted red as a rough echo of the barn it almost resembled. There were no windows, but a small, dark vent near the top was choked by a bird’s nest. I walked up to it and put my hand on it. Metal siding, but with something more solid under it.
“Would make a decent little prison,” Aubrey said.
“I’m always impressed by how much fighting evil feels like committing crime,” I said. “But you’re right. It’s… well, if it’s not perfect, it’s as close as we’re going to get on short notice.”
“You can afford the place?” he asked. I didn’t answer. He knew as well as I did that I could afford the whole subdivision.
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