“Check,” I said. “And the danger part would be?”
“It leaves me open for a time,” Chogyi Jake said. “It is possible that in that period one of the loa or a different rider could take up residence in my body.”
“And what would we do about that?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake’s smile could have meant anything.
“It’s very unlikely to happen,” he said.
“Lock him in a refrigerator until we get Ex back,” Aubrey said.
“That sounds bad,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be good,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “I understand that the stakes are high. But the chances are good. It’s a risk worth taking. Safer, for example, than going to the safe house.”
The room quieted. I was the only one standing, and all the others were looking at me as if waiting for something. As if it was my call.
Which meant it was. If I said hell no, I wasn’t putting Chogyi Jake in harm’s way, it would have been off. If I gave the thumbs-up, then it would move forward, and the consequences would be at least partly mine to carry. It seemed unfair at first, but I’d been the one who paid Chogyi Jake’s bills. I was the one who’d entered into a pact with a voodoo demon. There was a pretty good argument to be made that I was the boss, and it made me wish I’d understood the mechanics of the thing better.
“It’s the right thing?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake shrugged.
“It is what it is,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Amelie Glapion put Daria down and reached for the metal cane that she once nearly killed me with. Sabine said she’d gather the others, Mfume walked to the back with a clear purpose in mind, and Chogyi Jake and Dr. Inondé started moving the table back against an empty wall. Aubrey walked to my side, his arms crossed. We hadn’t had time to talk, just the two of us, since I’d delivered the verbal smackdown on the boardwalk by the river. Four hours earlier. It seemed like four days.
His brow was furrowed, his lips pressed thin. I put my hand on his arm and he looked up at me like he’d just noticed I was there.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Like a mouse in a snake pit,” he said. “Jumpy as hell.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.”
“I don’t know how they do it. Mfume. Amelie Glapion. They had those things in their bodies with them for years. I had to go through it for, what? Six hours?”
“I think it’s different for everyone,” I said. “How they come to it. What the rider is, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That too. I mean… I look at Sabine. Specifically Sabine. And… I don’t know. It messes with my definitions.”
I looked over. The girl was back now, helping the drummers set up on the floor next to the cots. She was younger than any of them, but she acted like their natural superior, telling each where to sit, which way to face, which drum to hold.
“She’s a black sixteen-year-old girl in a city with no functioning infrastructure to speak of,” Aubrey said. “She’s got no parents. Her grandmother has had at least one stroke, and maybe several. She’s got a little sister to take care of.”
“And a demon growing inside her,” I said.
“But that’s the thing,” Aubrey said. “That’s what she has going for her. Without being heir apparent to the whole voodoo queen thing, she’d be totally screwed. You look at her situation on paper and you’d think here’s a girl who’s going to wind up as a prostitute or homeless or something really bad. But she won’t. She’ll wind up the voodoo queen of New Orleans. Her life is going to be better because of that thing in her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Sabine turned, looking past us, and waved at another of the cultists, her hand fluttering like a bird. The man trotted to her, his head bent at a deferential angle.
“Mutualism,” Aubrey said in a tone that meant Who’d have guessed it?
“Meaning?”
“Legba’s not a parasite,” he said. “Not technically. A parasite is either detrimental to its host or functionally neutral. Usually detrimental, if only because it’s diverting energy resources. But if it’s actually doing the host good, that’s not parasitism anymore. That’s part of a mutualistic relationship. There are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants, and the plants provide energy to the bacteria. Either one would fail without the other.”
The eldest drummer tapped a wide-mouthed pottery drum, a low, dry sound filling the room. He nodded to Sabine.
“I don’t know whether that makes me happy or creeps me out,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, either that means Sabine’s got a really nice rider and more power to her, or else the world is so fucked up that the best she can hope for is demonic possession.”
Aubrey took a deep breath, letting the exhalation filter slowly through his mouth and nose.
“Guess it’s how you look at it,” he said.
Amelie Glapion returned to the room. A young man at her side carried a bag of corn meal, and together they went to the cardinal directions, the man pouring out the bright yellow meal in shapes, figures, and ideograms of inhuman languages while Amelie and Legba within her intoned words and phrases that seemed to echo in a space larger than the room we were in.
As they progressed, the drummers took up the rhythm of the chant. Amelie Glapion moved from one veve to the next, taking small objects from her pockets—a crow’s foot curled against itself in death, a sprig of rosemary, a cheap one-shot whiskey bottle, a handkerchief smudged with lipstick and something else. Her head began to bob and weave in its unpleasant serpentine pattern, and the air around us thickened with invisible things. I could feel the riders gathering, pressing at the film between the real, physical world and the abstract nation behind and beside us. Aubrey felt it too, and his hand sought mine out.
Chogyi Jake stepped in from the back, naked, his head bowed. Someone had drawn symbols on his skin in bright paints. I recognized the fleur-de-lis on his shoulder, the searcher’s X on his breast, but there were at least a dozen others I didn’t know. He showed no discomfort at his nudity, but walked to Amelie Glapion, knelt before her with his eyes closed, and raised his palms to her. One of the cultist women yelled and began to sway. Others joined her.
“Kisa sa a ye?” Legba shouted, Amelie’s mouth widening more than the merely human would allow. “Kisa sa a ye!”
Mfume, across the room, sat cross-legged. A map was open on the floor before him, and he was passing his hands over it like he was feeling heat radiating from it. The dancing cultists shouted and whooped to the pulsing rhythm of the drums. Against my will almost, I found my body swaying too. My eyes closed almost without me, and I stepped out into the ceremony, drawing Aubrey along behind me.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what it meant, but the heat of the bodies before us, the pressure of Next Door, the danger and the lush, complex rhythm, the smell of fire and flesh, made it all feel right. One of the male cultists no older than I was had taken off his clothes, his dark skin shining with sweat. His erection seemed strangely comforting and familiar. It was a reminder that even among these spirits, we were first and foremost human; our animal nature made us part of this world, the physical, immediate, concrete. I heard myself shout, felt the rumble of the air in my throat.
The world became a dance, not bodies, not spirits, but the relationships between the two. Like an optical illusion, I was not my body or my mind, but the space defined by them. I tore free of my own shirt, delighting in the feel of air against my skin. Lust and hunger. Pain, sorrow, and joy. They were the tether of humanity that held me from spinning out into another world, and I honored them, fed them, and trusted them completely to hold me and to pull me back.
Like the report of a handgun, Amelie Glapion clapped her hands. The drums stopped, the dance stopped, and I stumbled, sitting on the floor. My head was spinning and I felt flushed and energized and a little nauseated.
Chogyi Jake wasn’t more than three feet in front of me, bracing himself with both hands like a man almost too drunk to crawl.
“Did it work?” I managed, and he nodded carefully.
Above us, Amelie Glapion sagged, leaning on her cane. Her face looked drawn. I felt almost unstuck from my body, like I’d just gone through a marathon of sex and liquor. I couldn’t imagine how she felt. But a moment later, the half of her face that was still alive, smiled.
“I am never getting tired of that,” she said low in her throat, and Mfume shouted.
“I have her,” he said. His eyes were still closed. His fingers pressed onto the map like a blind man reading braille. I stood unsteadily, scrabbling at my cast-off shirt. Aubrey appeared at my side, and we navigated across the room.
The map was of New Orleans, but marked with ley lines in black and red and yellow. I saw the yawning darkness of Lake Pontchartrain, the snakecurve of the Mississippi. The gridwork of streets between the two like a crystal growing between the curves.
“Where is she?” I asked, pulling on my clothes. I was hoarse.
Mfume opened his eyes and knelt close to the paper. I could see his fingers trembling.
“She’s… in the street,” he said. “She’s here. She’s outside right now.”
We were silent for a moment, and then with a roar like a lion, Amelie Glapion strode out toward the front room. I saw the glow of streetlight squeezing past the gray-painted glass as she opened the connecting door.
The explosion lit her in silhouette, a darkness standing against the sun.
TWENTY-ONE
I grew up in the ’90s. All I knew about explosions came from the action films that my older brother Jay used to watch when my parents left him in charge. They were great big Jerry Bruckheimer things that billowed smoke and fire like a grand, implacable tide shot from three different angles. This explosion wasn’t like that at all. It was sudden, sharp, louder than anything I’d ever heard, and over before I understood that something was happening.
I didn’t black out or lose consciousness, but time seemed to skip. I found myself running forward, toward the empty doorway and the haze of smoke and the leaping light of flames without knowing what exactly I thought I was doing. I stumbled on something and fell forward. The floor was hot under my palms. The air smelled like acid. Someone behind me was screaming. With a sense of profound detachment, I noticed that my arm was bleeding where Carrefour had cut me. I forced myself to stop, to look at where I was and what I was doing despite my body’s impulse to blindly react.
Amelie Glapion had been thrown backward into the room, which was a very good thing, because the street-facing storefront of the building appeared to be on fire. Six or eight of the cultists were skittering around the back. One woman had collapsed and was being carried; one of the drummers had her heels and Chogyi Jake—still naked and marked with voodoo symbols—her shoulders. Aubrey stood open-mouthed in the center of the room, balanced between the impulse to act and raw shock. I knew how he felt. The cornmeal veve were being scattered by running feet, blurring like chalk marks in a rainstorm.
“Jayné!” Aubrey shouted.
“I’m fine,” I yelled back. “Find the girls! Get out!”
He hesitated.
“Go!” I shouted.
Something in the street cracked, and I saw a brief yellow-white light in the darkness at the far side of the deeper orange fire. Muzzle flash, I thought. She’s shooting at us.
“Stay down!” I shouted. I could feel the vibration in my throat, but my voice seemed to come from half a block away. “Everyone take cover!”
I couldn’t tell if they heard me. Amelie Glapion moved, her arm rising up slowly, like a strand of seaweed waving in a light current. I started toward her, and a strong hand grabbed my arm, turning me. Mfume’s eyes were wide, his skin ashen. He had the crumpled map of the city in his other hand.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.” His voice was only the bass notes. Like a stadium concert pressed into a fraction of a second, the blast had blown out my hearing.
“It’s okay,” I shouted. “I’ll risk it.”
A different thought struck me.
“You have to go,” I shouted. “You have to get out of here. Now!”
“We can all go,” he said. “I have to—”
“No! You have to get out. The cops are going to come. They’re going to be here. If they find out you’re alive, you’re heading back to prison.”
Mfume rocked back like I’d slapped him. He’d forgotten that he was an escaped serial killer. He looked around the carnage and panic, and his expression was anguished.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Just go!”
“I will stay close,” Mfume said. “I will find you.”
“It’s a date. Now run!”
He stepped back, hesitated, and then turned, running toward the back of the place. I wondered what escape routes he could find. I didn’t think there was an alleyway behind the building, but there might have been a connecting passage or a way up to the roof.
I couldn’t worry about it. Another volley of gunfire came from the street, then the screeching of tires probably about a hundred times louder than my abused eardrums could register. I crept forward. The fire in the front room was getting bigger. I couldn’t see the darkness of the street on the other side, so I assumed that if Karen was still out there she couldn’t see me. The doorway was bright, the flames dancing wildly. The heat came off it like an assault. I scuttled forward, grabbed Amelie’s blouse at the shoulder, and hauled her back. Above us, the ceiling was almost lost in a roiling white smoke. A voice I didn’t recognize shouted somewhere to my left. I heard glass breaking from up the stairs and hoped it had been intentional.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, then looked down at the woman I was carrying and knew that it wasn’t.
Flying glass had stripped the skin from her cheeks, revealing deep red tissue and white cheekbone. Her throat was bloody. Her hands hung in the air, laboring under their own weight. Her legs where they had lain nearest the fire were blistered. A sweet smell like cooking pork cut through the smoke, and I tried not to retch.
“I’ll get you out,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“There is no need,” Legba said. Unlike every other sound, its voice was perfectly clear. “The woman is gone.”
“But—” I began, then didn’t know where to go. But she can’t die. But she was just here a minute ago. But I still need her. I didn’t know if I was weeping from the smoke or something else.
“Carrefour is a clever, deceitful beast,” Legba said. “I had believed that we were safe. That there would be time. More time.”
The woman’s dead body, still animated by the power of its rider, shifted and rose unsteadily until it sat before me. The roar of the fire in the next room was like a waterfall. The dead lips smiled at me, exposing a hundred needle-sharp teeth.
“I have fallen,” it said. “There is no longer any hope for this one. It is in my child’s hands now, but she is weak. Young.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I absolutely get that.”
“The pact you took with me is broken with my death,” it said, “and I cannot bring myself to beg.”
“Hey, don’t. I mean, you don’t need to beg or anything. I said I’d stand up, and I’ll do it.”
The eyes were black, the woman’s flesh losing its own form, shaped more and more by the thing still alive within her. Alive, but fading. I glanced around, and we were the only two left. The others had gotten out. The three empty cots against the wall were barely above the lowering smoke. The heat of the fire was like a hand pressing against my cheek. The undead voodoo queen of New Orleans considered me.
“We have not been allies,” it said.
“I’m not saying I’d marry you,” I said. “It’s just… I’ll look out for the kids. I’ll do what I can.”
It looked out toward the street. I coughed. I was getting a little light-
headed.
“First the flood and now the fire,” Legba said, as if laughing at some private joke. “Go, then. Leave me. Save my city.”
I should have run. I should have been running the whole time.
“I will,” I said.
Legba took my hand, and I could feel its strength failing. Without knowing I intended to, I leaned forward, cupping the dead woman’s skull in my palm, pressing her forehead to mine. Something seemed to pass between us—not magic, not spirit, but understanding. And grief.
“Go,” the rider said. “I will clear your way.”
And the world stopped.
Silence rushed in where the roar of flames had been. The roiling smoke stilled. Amelie Glapion’s body nodded toward the front room, and I rose. The air seemed to tingle, but the heat wasn’t unbearable. I walked toward the front room and its ongoing conflagration. Bright flames hung in the air, still as stone but glowing. I brushed one with my hand like I was petting a cat, and it felt like velvet.
The street came more clearly into view with each step. The blackened shell of a car lay on its side in the middle of the pavement. Men and women were crowded on the sidewalk across the street, and down far enough that the heat of the flames was bearable. Two policemen stood like temple guards, keeping the crowd back.
I wondered how long it had taken—five minutes? ten?—to go from the sense of power and freedom and safety of Legba’s ward-breaking dance to this. I caught a glimpse of Aubrey near one clump of people, his arm raised to shield his eyes. He didn’t react as I came near, not even to breathe.
I turned back toward the fire.
“Okay,” I said, my voice no louder than a conversation between friends. “Thanks. I’m clear now.”
A breath later, the world turned back on. The roar of the fire, the distant sirens, the assaulting smell of burning wood and spent explosives. I felt a tug at the back of my mind, like a kid yanking on her mother’s sleeve, and I knew that Legba—the Legba that had lived in Amelie Glapion—was gone. Aubrey shifted to the side, squinting into the fire.
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