ruins.
“It’s better now,” Karen said softly. “Not fixed, better. And not Charity. That’s… that’s never coming back. But the city is better than it was right after.”
“I can’t believe that,” Aubrey said.
“No,” Karen said. “What you can’t believe is how bad it really was. Come on, kids. Let’s suit up.”
We turned back to the minivan. Karen had known where to get the things we needed. The right props and clothes were as important to what we were doing here as the ritual unguents and incense that Chogyi Jake and Ex were using back at the house were to their work. Only instead of looking like weird occult freaks in the suburbs, we looked like weird ninja wannabes in the city. I pulled black surgical scrubs over my jeans, a soft black wind-breaker over my T-shirt. Karen stuffed her pale hair into a tight black cap.
“They’ve been meeting here almost since it was abandoned,” Karen said as she strapped leather-sheathed knives to her forearms and plucked the sleeves of her windbreaker over them. “Amelie’s always in attendance.”
“And the girl with the Sight?” Aubrey said. “She’s here too?”
“Sometimes,” Karen said.
I tested the little blue LED flashlight, then stuffed it in my pocket.
“So if she tipped them off, we could be going into a huge building filled with crazed, armed rider cultists,” I said.
“It’s a risk,” Karen said with a grin. “Come on. Who wants to live forever, right?”
She walked away fast. Aubrey and I trotted to catch up.
“Me,” I said low enough I didn’t think either of them would hear. “I would very
Aubrey turned his head and chuckled, but neither of us stopped.
Karen led us down a side street, walking with her hands loose at her sides and a bounce in her step. When she ducked in close to the building itself, the motion was perfectly graceful and natural. Aubrey and I followed. Karen helped us through an empty window frame, then slid through herself without making a sound louder than breathing. I felt like a kitten on its first mouse hunt.
The hallways were darker than night. The emergency lights had died years before. I took out my little flashlight, and the hall lit up in dim monochrome blue. Graffiti sprawled along the walls and debris covered the floor; old plastic chairs, bits of desiccated shrubbery, a wide, clear plastic box that reminded me of the incubators they kept premature babies alive in. The stink of mold was overpowering. Karen slunk along the passage like a cat, her hands out before her, fingertips touching each obstacle, and then moving on. Aubrey and I followed as best we could. I felt the adrenaline seeping into my blood even before we heard the drums.
The bass carried through first, a throb so low it almost wasn’t sound. Like the building had a heartbeat. Karen grinned and picked up the pace. Aubrey and I struggled to keep up. Higher tones started to join the beat-bells, tambourines, bongos. At the corner of two wide hallways, Karen lifted her hand and pointed to the flashlight. I turned it off. Far away on our left, a dim light danced, red and gold and flickering like flames. I saw Karen’s silhouette as she moved toward it. When she reached a pair of double doors with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in fading red, she gestured to the thin gap between them with her chin. I snuck over and peeked through.
The cultists had taken over what might have been an emergency room or some kind of intensive-care ward. There was room for twenty or thirty beds, though the space had been cleared of them. A curved desk squatted in the middle of the room like an altar. Ruined curtains hung like cobwebs from rusting metal tracks. On the far side of the room, half a dozen men drummed, their eyes a perfect, pupilless white.
The light wasn’t fire, but a collection of orange and red lamps. The flickering came from twenty or thirty dancing bodies. Men and women. Old, young. Mostly black or brown skinned, but I saw at least one woman as pale as me. All of them were naked.
They writhed and leaped and called out. If there were words, I didn’t catch them. My vestigial fear of being discovered eased. These people wouldn’t have noticed if I’d led a riot squad through the door. I felt Karen lean over me, squinting through the same crack. She tapped my shoulder and pointed to the far corner of the space.
Between the bodies, I caught a glimpse of what she meant. The old woman from the hotel- Amelie, Legba, whatever we were calling her- walked through the crowd toward the altar. She wore a thin, shifting gown that might have been white, but glowed gold in the light. And behind her was a girl no more than sixteen years old in a matching outfit. The girl’s face was as serene as her grandmother’s, her skin darker, her hair in shining plaits. She was stunning. I touched Karen’s arm and nodded. I saw her.
Sabine Glapion. The girl we were supposed to abduct. The girl we were trying to save.
Legba rose to the desktop, but I didn’t see quite how she got there. Her head was moving to the lush rhythm of the drums, but awkwardly. She shouted and raised her hands. Her left arm was noticeably thinner than her right, and rose more slowly. The drums quieted, but did not cease. The dancers stood in place, swaying. Their faces were ecstatic and empty.
“Children!” the old woman said. “My children, we are set upon! We are attacked!
The dancers shouted something with one voice, but I couldn’t make out the word. When the old woman spoke again, her voice was a low growl, her hands stretched before her like claws.
“We are weak, my children. Weak! But we shall be
The crowd shouted again, and the the old woman clenched her fists. Sabine was behind her, almost directly across from me, swaying in the same oceanic flow as the dancers. As her grandmother’s claws clenched into fists, her eyes fluttered closed.
The air around me flashed with something that wasn’t sound or heat, but something of both. For the space of a heartbeat, I saw the serpent where Amelie Glapion stood, its black eyes glowing in the lights, its skin shining like sunset on the ocean. I was backing away from the door even before I knew I intended to, but I was too late.
I had felt the abstract, other-reality of the Pleroma-what Aubrey called Next Door-come close to me before. I had seen things, felt things. Now, like I had been hit with a brick, the two worlds fused. I saw things all around me, bodiless and aware and hungry.
Something pressed at my belly, looking for a way in. A powerful rush of heat blazed in my spine, pushing the rider back, keeping my flesh my own. Karen staggered, her mouth gaping open like she’d been gut-punched. The shouting beyond the closed double doors changed to screaming, and the drumbeats stopped.
“We have to go,” Karen said. “We have to get out.”
I nodded, turned, and stumbled into the darkness. Karen was at my side. I didn’t realize Aubrey hadn’t followed us until we had gone twenty, maybe thirty feet. I could see him standing by the double doors, ruddy light flickering on his face. The shrieking rose in a crescendo. “Aubrey!” I shouted. “Come on!”
Aubrey turned. In the dim light filtering through the crack between doors, I saw his eyes. I saw him see me, and the slow, feral grin that came afterward. Things moved in the shadows behind him like smoke, and the fear hit me like stepping into a freezer.
He was being ridden.
SEVEN
“Jayne!” Karen called from the darkness behind me. The thing in Aubrey’s body howled and leaped forward, vanishing as it left the thin strip of light. I tried to backpedal, but the hallway was thick with debris that caught at my ankles. Without the flashlight, I might as well have been blind. I hunched, hands out before me, and braced myself for impact. It wasn’t enough.
Something hit me hard across the chest, and I fell back. The ancient linoleum flooring was gritty and slick, like sand and motor oil. I heard the rider step close.
“Aubrey! Fight it,” I yelled, and his foot slammed down into my ribs. I thought I heard something crack. My breath went out of me, and a terrible calm came in. I swung my arm up, closed fist driving hard into Aubrey’s crotch. He doubled over with a groan, and my legs swept out. I felt them hit the backs of his knees, heard him fall.
The rider cried out words I didn’t recognize, but the tone of its voice was enough; rage and pain and fear. I rose to my fingertips and the balls of my feet, knees bent and ready to spring. It was like I had been pushed to a small, observing part of myself while my body took on the fight. I closed my eyes, the raw spiritual energy of my qi bringing my ears, my nose, my skin to a terrible sensitivity. The shadows brushed against me like small, dry hands. I could smell something sweet and fatty, like burning pork.
“You are mine, little girl,” the rider said. Its voice was inhuman; feminine and raw and powerful. My head shifted a degree, homing in on the sound. “I will taste your soul. Your blood will spill from my mouth.
Something washed over me. Its will, its power. The greatest magic a human being can summon is nothing compared to what riders command, and at its word, the quiet, observing part of me started bouncing around the interior of my skull, screeching like a monkey. My body remained still as stone.
It shifted its weight, and I jumped. The flesh I slammed into wasn’t like Aubrey’s. It was thin as a starving woman but solid. My shoulder took it in the belly, and we both fell down. Skeletal hands wrapped around my throat, but I shifted, pushed, and got on top of the writhing, killing thing.
“Who are you?” it shrieked. My fist buried itself deep in the gristle of its throat.
The momentary hesitation was all it needed. With a shout, it arched, throwing me into the air. In the black, I didn’t know where the wall was until I hit it. My head rang and brightness filled my peripheral vision. I fell to the floor. My feet slipped under me as I tried to stand. Something-fists, foot, club- hit me in the right kidney, and I went down again.
Red light flooded the hallway. The double doors had opened, and naked men and women were running silently into the hallway toward us. I saw Amelie Glapion- Legba-limping in the middle of the crowd, her paralyzed face lit with rage. I turned to what had been Aubrey.
His flesh had been turned to the rider’s will. His shirt had ripped in the fight, exposing a shrunken chest, ribs black and red as a burn victim. Small, flaccid breasts hung, black nipples pointing to the ground. The face was still partly his. The angle of its jaw was familiar, the shape of the eyes. It was also a woman’s death’s-head grin. The rider shifted its gaze to the coming cultists, and rose an inch, as if preparing for an attack from them too.
