I laughed a little, and in the mirrors, I saw Chogyi Jake, his eyes closed, smile too. I loved him just then. Not like a man, but just as himself. And Aubrey too. And even Ex, asshole that he sometimes was. It was the moment of clarity that put all the rest of it in perspective.
“I shouldn’t have let him split up the family,” I said. “I should never have put up with that.”
Aubrey glanced a question at me, then looked back at the road.
“Ex,” I said. “Fucking Ex. Well, and Carrefour. I should never have let them split us up. I mean this thing that we’re doing? This is not the sign that I did things right.”
“But we have to do it,” Aubrey said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Because of Ex.”
“Would you turn away otherwise?” Chogyi Jake asked. He sounded deep and calm as a temple bell. “If Ex had been with us in Savannah, and you had the same epiphany, would you have turned away?”
“Yes,” I said. “Oh hell yes. You wouldn’t have gotten me back here for anything.”
“Interesting,” Chogyi Jake said.
“It’s not that I don’t like Sabine,” I said. “She’s nice. She’s out of her league, and I totally respect that. But there are a lot of nice people in trouble out there, you know? I’m not even keeping this one from being possessed.”
“And Legba?” Chogyi Jake said.
His tone of voice carried volumes. Legba, the shining serpent that made its way through the blood of Marie Laveau down through the generations. The rider that would keep Sabine and Daria from only being orphaned black girls in a dangerous, broken city. The demon that would not leave New Orleans even in the face of the city’s inundation. Legba the mutualist, the builder of community.
And so, by implication, Carrefour who had raped and slaughtered Mfume’s fiancée and Karen Black’s partner and parents. Carrefour who had lied to me, seduced me as much as it had Ex. Carrefour who had bombed Amelie Glapion and whoever else had happened to be in the street at the time. Carrefour, the serial killer. The exile.
Did I really think there was no difference between the two? Or was it just that the difference wouldn’t have been big enough to justify the risk of coming back?
I wondered what Eric would have done. I didn’t know anything about his relationship with Karen Black except what she’d told me. There might not have been the consultations she’d told me about. The favors owed and paid. All I knew for certain was that he’d had her number in his cell phone, and that when she called, she’d assumed he would know what she was talking about.
“I think I preferred the muttering obscenities,” Aubrey said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking.”
“Yeah, I got that from the way I could hear the gears grinding in your head.”
“Maybe I would have come back. For Sabine,” I said, and we ran out of lake. We’d reached Pearl River.
The road to the safe house was empty, and we took it very slowly, turning our headlights off. The cars behind us—eight of them—followed our lead. We glided through the night in the glow of running lights, slow as a funeral. If we actually drove up to the house, they’d hear us for sure. I didn’t know if it made more sense to try sneaking up on Karen and Ex or going for the full frontal assault. Except I really did want Ex to live through it, and Karen too if I could manage it. All-out assaults tended, I guessed, to have more of a body count. I weighed my options and a shadow detached itself from the trees and loped toward the car.
Aubrey yelped, but before he could gun the engine or turn the car to attack, Joseph Mfume’s long face was framed in the window, his finger turning a fast circle that meant we should roll down the window. When Aubrey did it, the thick, unconditioned air smelled like swamp and sweat.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Waiting for you,” Mfume said and looked back at the other cars. “And them as well, I take it.”
“I got some reinforcements,” I said. “She’s really here then?”
“Yes,” Mfume said. “I followed it from the house. Amelie? She’s…”
“Gone,” I said. “And Legba with her.”
Behind us a car door opened and closed, and then another. The cult preparing for battle. Mfume’s goofy smile looked strained and nervous.
“They have been in the shed for some time,” he said. “We have to hurry.”
“I know,” I said, then to Aubrey, “just park it here. We’ll walk in.”
“You have a plan?” Mfume said.
“That would be generous,” I said as I got out.
“I’ve got a bunch of general intentions and thirty or so people with cheap handguns and machetes.”
“More effective than intention alone, I suppose,” Mfume said.
The others were spilling out into the midnightblack street. The dome lights flickered on and off like a huge, understated Christmas tree. One car alarm chirped, and angry voices followed it. I felt some sympathy for whoever had made the mistake. We were all improvising here.
They gathered close, but I could see their eyes turning toward the gently curving drive that would lead to the safe house. I could feel them drawn toward it like moths toward flame; their queen was in danger, and they strained at the leash of my own tentative authority. I couldn’t hold them back any longer.
“Okay,” I said, my voice a stage whisper. “They’re going to be in the shed out back…”
“We gonna need three groups,” Aunt Sherrie said. “Omar, you take your crew and head around the left side through the trees, and don’t go fast. You go too fast, you make noise like that goddamn car alarm.”
“Sorry about that,” a voice said from the gloom.
“Don’t be sorry, just get your boys together,” Sherrie said. “Elijah? You take Nick and Majora and any two others you like and secure the house. Anybody in there, you just keep right on going all the way around until you hook up with Omar, but if it’s empty, you get in and hold it. Deny this bitch her fallback position, you understand?”
“Yes, Aunt Sherrie,” a man with a voice like a landslide said.
“All right, then. The rest of y’all come with me. That means you too, Miss Thing,” Sherrie said, looking at me. “We’re the ones going to bell the cat, and I am not doing that job by myself. Omar, I’m going to give you five minutes to get in position. If we have to fall back, Carrefour’s going to get drawn out, and you be ready to come in behind it. Now all you remember we’re trying not to kill the preacher or the horse. Preacher, you just hold him down or shoot him in the knee. Whatever. The horse… well, do what you can.”
“Um,” I said, blinking.
“Two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq,” Sherrie said. “I do not fuck around.”
I had the almost genetic impulse to say sir, yes sir, but I sat on it. Mfume stepped forward.
“I will take the rider,” he said. “Don’t kill her unless I have fallen.”
Sherrie cocked her head, then shrugged.
“You heard the man. Be careful with Carrefour until it kills this one. Then do what you have to do. Now let’s go.”
Half the cultists seemed to dissolve into the gray, moonlit mist, the others waiting to follow Sherrie’s lead. She smiled at me with wide, white, tombstone teeth.
“This is your party,” she said. “You go on ahead, we’ll follow you.”
Meaning, I understood, that if anyone was going to get shot from a distance, it was going to be me. I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly and nodded. Chogyi Jake and Aubrey came to my side, and then Mfume joined them. Five minutes, she’d said. They lasted forever and no time at all. Sherrie looked from her wristwatch to the drive, pointed at me, pointed at it. My throat was thick with fear and my blood felt like it was vibrating in its vessels.
I walked down the side of the path, the knee-high grass muffling my footsteps more than the gravel would have. The safe house slowly came into view, its windows glowing in the fog. No one confronted us but the Virgin Mary, looking more
like a tombstone than ever. The shed was still hidden by the angle of our approach.
Aubrey trotted up to walk at my side, Chogyi Jake and Mfume followed close. Aubrey took my hand.
“I’ve got to stop getting us into situations like this,” I said softly. “I’m seriously going to get someone killed.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You really are.”
TWENTY-THREE
We made our way around the corner of the house. The white cargo van squatted at the back door, its windows black. I had the sense that it was watching us, though there was no one in it. The fog-wet grass soaked my shoes and the cuffs of my pants as I walked, cold and clammy and grasping. My shirt and hair were getting damp, and Aubrey’s hand in mine was the only warmth I felt.
The thick air also muffled sound so that even the handful of crickets seemed to be singing from miles away. The prison that we’d made from our shed was a looming darkness punctuated by intense points of brilliant white light-the line around the doorway, the slats of the tin vent. I squeezed Aubrey’s hand one last time and let it go. Hunching close to the ground, I moved forward until the dark, mist-soaked wood was almost close enough to touch. The voices got louder as I approached like someone turning up the volume knob. Ex, his voice hoarse, in a shouted litany. The higher, weeping voice of Sabine.
The world felt thin, changed, unstable as driving on ice. Whatever rituals Ex was doing to cast Legba out of Sabine’s body had brought the Pleroma or Next Door or whatever we called it close enough to feel, and it made my skin crawl.
Someone came up on my left. Mfume, and then a moment later, Chogyi Jake and Aunt Sherrie. This was it. The big moment. We would gather all the cultists together, kick in the door and hope for the best. I steeled myself, but my hands were tapping busily at my knees, like my body was trying to get my attention. I had Chogyi Jake and Aubrey, Mfume and Aunt Sherrie, and at least a dozen of Legba’s congregation. I was pretty sure, if it came to it, we could rush in and take them by force. A few cultists would probably die. Maybe Ex. Probably Karen.
So I had to try the other way first. I motioned Aubrey and Chogyi Jake to stop, then I waved Mfume and Aunt Sherrie closer.
“Get everyone around the shed,” I whispered. “Not in line of sight, but close by, okay?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Sherrie said.
“I’m going in,” I said. “I’ll get the others out if I can. Just stay clear until I give the high sign.”
Sherrie didn’t seem to like the idea, but she nodded.
“Your funeral,” she said, and I stepped up to the shed door and knocked.
“Ex! Karen! It’s Jayné! We need to talk!”
I waited for a hail of gunfire, but all I got was a stream of invective from inside the shed. I heard men and women scattering in the thick, wet darkness and held myself steady. When the door swung open, the light was blinding.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Karen said, and for the first time I recognized the deepness and power in her voice as a rider. Carrefour was speaking through her, and the mask was beginning to slip.
“I need to talk to Ex,” I said.
“Jayné?” he said from within. He’d stopped his chanting, but Sabine’s keening cry didn’t falter.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry for the shitty timing. But… I tried calling your cell phone.”
“I lost it,” he said.
Yeah, I just bet you did, I thought.
My eyes were adjusting. Karen was more than a movement within the brightness, and Ex had come to her side. The shed was lit by four halogen work lamps, hissing and hot as a furnace, and the gloom around us seemed deeper by contrast. Ex looked exhausted. His skin had a gray undertone, and his hair hung in his eyes, limp and greasy. His clothes looked like he’d slept in them. He held a crucifix in one hand and a book bound in black leather in the other.
Karen, on the other hand, almost glowed. Her eyes were bright as a fever, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, with only one stray lock to soften her face. She was wearing what looked like military surplus gear-thick canvas pants and jacket over a ribbed white T-shirt. There was something inhuman in the way she held herself. Carrefour was so close to winning that it could taste the victory, only here I was interrupting the party. Once the young Legba was plucked out of Sabine’s body, Carrefour could turn on us all, but until then it had to keep the masquerade going.
I smiled as if I meant it and walked up like I assumed they’d let me pass. Karen almost held her ground, then with a growl like a dog ready to bite, she took a step back, and I went in.
The shed had seemed bigger when it was empty, but it was still a wide, high space. The halogen lamps burned in three corners, fed by bright-orange extension cords. A matte black shotgun lay against the wall like a presentiment of doom. The dirt floor was covered now with symbols in paint and earth like Amelie Glapion’s cornmeal veves. The designs seemed to move in my peripheral vision, and they filled me with a deep unease. In the center of the floor, a black iron ring stuck out of the newly poured concrete. Sabine was chained to it, bright steel links going to manacles at her wrists and a tight leather collar at the throat.
Her clothes, ripped and bloody, were the ones she’d worn at the ceremony, the ones I had seen her in only hours before. They were almost unrecognizable. Her eyes were puffy and closed, and she rocked back and forth on the ground, whispering to herself. Louvri le pót. Legba. Legba. Louvri. Please, please, Legba louvri le pót. I wanted to sweep over to her, to wrap my arms around her and comfort her and tell her it was going to be all right, even though I thought it probably wasn’t.
How had I ever believed this was a good idea?
“What’s going on,” Karen said. “Why are you here?”
“We got back this morning. I needed to see Ex,” I said.
“He doesn’t answer to you anymore,” Karen said, moving to him in a fair imitation of protectiveness. She took his hand, and he let her. The confusion in his expression hurt to see.
“You fired me,” he said, which wasn’t exactly the same as Karen’s statement.
“Yeah, I know. Look, could I just talk to you for a minute? Alone?” I gestured toward the door. If I could get him outside and out of the line of fire…
“No,” Karen said. “We’re in the middle of a ritual cleansing. Every minute we let it rest, the rider gets its control back over the girl. We have to get her free.”
I nodded and smiled as ingratiatingly as I could. It was a doomed effort, but I tried.
“It’ll only be—”
“What’s going on here?” Karen said. Her eyes swept the door and walls like she could see through them. “Where have you been? What do you want?”
“It’s okay,” Ex said. “I can handle this.”
She turned on him faster than a human could, a hand pressed to his sternum.
“Don’t you fucking move,” she said. “Something’s wrong here. Are you alone? Did you bring someone here?”
“Aubrey and Chogyi Jake are outside,” I said, nodding to the door. Karen lifted her head, sniffing the air like an animal. Ex stepped back from her, crossing his arms and frowning.
“I’d love to talk,” he said, “but I can’t.”
Sabine’s litany trailed away into a low keening. She looked up, her eyes no more than slits, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
“Jayné?” she said.
The silence that followed was like a thunderclap. The fear tasted like pennies and tinfoil.
“How,” Karen said, her voice low and dangerous, “does it know your name?”
“You’ve got the wrong rider,” I said. “Ex, get outside now.”
Before he could move, Karen dove, scooped up the shotgun, and whirled. The barrel was pointing at my head, and it was big as a tunnel. And then Ex was between us, shielding me with his body.
“Karen!” Ex shouted. “Stop it! What are you—”
“She’s with them,” Karen said. “She’s been taken over by t
hem. Don’t you get it?”
Ex looked at me, fear and pain in his eyes, and I knew he thought it was true. He had walked away from me, and I had gone and gotten myself possessed by a rider, and it was his fault for not protecting me. Months of living in close quarters made every nuance of his expression legible as a book, and I felt a surge of desperate impatience with him.
“Ex, you need to get out of here right now,” I said. “Karen lied to us. She’s possessed. She has been from the beginning. It’s called Carrefour, and it’s the exiled rider. The thing in Sabine never left New Orleans.”
“But the girl’s possessed,” Ex said. “I know she is.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But it’s not as bad as you think.”
“Move aside, Ex,” Karen said. “She used to be Jayné, but she’s the enemy now.”
“I can save her,” Ex said. “I got the thing out of Aubrey, I can get it out of her too.”
He believed her. He thought I had a rider. Karen chambered a round, and Sabine screamed. I tried to step around Ex, but he shifted, staying between me and the gun. Some flying insect found its way into the furnace flame of the lamps and popped as it died.
“You can’t kill her,” Ex said.
“Oh,” Mfume said from the doorway, “I think she can. The beast within her is quite capable of murder.”
Karen turned, her face going pale as bone. Mfume didn’t flinch when the shotgun pointed at him; he raised his chin in defiance. I had never been so glad to see someone ignore my instructions.
“You can fight it, Karen,” he said. “I believe in you. I know that you can fight it.”
The blast of the shotgun was deafening. One of the halogen lamps burst in long, streaming flames. The doorway where Mfume had been was empty, and I couldn’t tell if he’d dodged the blast or been knocked back by it.
Karen screamed, a sound filled with rage and violence and joy. And like I had turned a switch, my body moved into action. I pushed Ex out of the way gently as lowering a baby into a crib, then hammered out one leg into the shotgun. Karen staggered back, trying to turn the gun toward me, and I kicked it again. I felt the mechanism buckle under my foot, and Karen slammed into the wall like a cannon shot, the wall actually cracking like something out of a cartoon.
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