My thumb made its double tap against my knee, paused, tapped again. I realized I’d been playing along with my heartbeat, and I knew what I’d been trying to tell myself.
“You know,” I said. “There’s someplace else we could try.”
THE VOODOO Heart Temple was at the edge of the French Quarter. If we hadn’t known to look for it, it would have been easy to miss. The street was filled with the small, desperate shops that live off the scraps of real attractions. The three-story buildings shadowed the street without cooling it. Together with the awnings over the sidewalk, the faded sign would have been easy to miss. It was in the shape of a real heart-fist-shaped and muscular with yellow deposits of fat-pierced by two long spikes. The windows were dim, but not dark. The door stood open.
“Well, there’s certainly enough room for an apartment above it,” Karen said, idling on the street. “At a guess, there’s probably an entrance in the alley behind it too.”
“All right,” I said. “How about if you take the car around to see what the back looks like. I’ll hang here and window shop until you get back. If anyone comes in or out, I can play all clueless white tourist.”
“Don’t go in,” she said.
I gave her my best
“Tell your fortune?”
I’d noticed the black girl sitting on the sidewalk. Her skin was the color of dark chocolate, her hair in beautiful braids, her clothes grubby and worn. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. When she smiled, she looked like raw mischief.
“Five dollars for a question,” she said. “Fifteen for a whole reading.”
I glanced up. Given where the girl was sitting, I could easily be at her side with a good view of the Voodoo Heart Temple. It would save me pretending to look through windows of closed stores, or loitering obtrusively. Besides which, the idea of a kid making up fortunes like it was a lemonade stand tickled me. I sat beside her, fished through my backpack, and came up with a ten.
“What’ll this get me?” I asked.
The girl narrowed her eyes, considering the bill like a doctor with an interesting patient at a clinic.
“Short reading,” she said.
“Done.”
She plucked the ten from my hand, pushed it deep in her pocket, and visibly composed herself. Her expression was so serious, and so clearly an imitation of the buskers and tarot readers of Jackson Square, that I couldn’t keep from smiling. The girl opened her eyes, took my right hand, and considered it. Her grip was soft as moleskin.
“You a very powerful person,” she said. “But you don’t know it. You think you do, but you don’t. You worried about your heart-will you find a man, and all like that- but you don’t need to worry. He’ll be along when the time’s right.”
“Good to know,” I said. She looked up at me, annoyed at the interruption. Something shifted behind the window of the Voodoo Heart Temple. Someone passing by the curtains, I thought.
“You don’t trust yourself,” the girl said, “but you ought to. You know more than you think. You have hard times ahead, but if you pay attention and find your real power, you’ll make it through better than when you started.”
The door of the temple shifted. I looked down at my palm, but trained my attention on my peripheral vision. I didn’t want to stare, but also I had to know when to glance up.
“And this is important, so you listen,” the girl said.
“Okay,” I said.
“It wasn’t your mama’s fault. She loves you, and she loves your daddy. She had a worm inside her when it happened, so you be gentle with her.”
Adrenaline flooded me, cold and fast and electric. The girl was looking up at me through her eyelashes.
“Daria! You get back here right now!”
The girl and I looked across the street. Sabine Glapion stood on the far sidewalk, her hands on her hips, her face bent with impatience.
“I’ve got to go,” the girl said, dropping my hand. “You remember what I said, now.”
“I will,” I managed as she skipped across to her sister.
TWELVE
I checked Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake out of the hotel as soon as we could get there. Karen and I took their stuff and piled it in the back of the rental, then drove like hell to the safe house. No cultist-driven deathmobiles pursued us. Mystical beasts failed to rise from the lake to swallow us. The only change was a strong wind that kicked up, stippling the water with small, angry waves and pushing the minivan to the left. I didn’t even start to calm down until we reached the safe house.
I’d sat there, on the street corner, with Daria Glapion. The girl with the Sight had held my hand, told my fortune, and Legba hadn’t come out to kill me. I felt like a bullet had buzzed past my ear, and it left me a little nauseated. Karen, on the other hand, was equal parts glee and banked violence. She paced through the living room like a tiger in a cage, her blue eyes bright. Chogyi Jake, Ex, Aubrey, and I all sat on the couch or the floor. Behind her, the picture window blazed with the red and gray of sunset. The wind complained and threatened, and the trees bent and shifted like they were nervous.
“Okay,” she said. “This is perfect. We know where the girl’s hiding. Daria didn’t identify Jayne, so we still have the element of surprise. We have the safe house ready. We can have Sabine in hand by the end of the week. Aubrey? Chogyi Jake? I’m going to need you two watching the temple and the streets around it. We need to know Sabine’s routine. Where she goes, who she talks to. Everything. If she’s holed up in the apartment over the shop, we’ll need to know that. Amelie might be going in and out too. She has responsibilities to her congregation.”
She was rubbing her hands together in delight. I’d always thought that was a figure of speech. Ex looked serious, but an echo of Karen’s smile haunted the corners of his mouth, her pleasure reflecting off him like sunlight off the moon in a reminder of their relationship. It bothered me that it bothered me.
“We should still try to draw the girl out,” Ex said. “Legba is going to have wards on the apartment just the way we do. Only since it’s a rider, they’re likely to be… unpleasant.”
“Good point,” Karen said. “We need a way to get her out of the building. Something that she can’t ignore. Fire, maybe.”
Chogyi Jake squinted and frowned. A particularly loud gust of wind rattled the back door. I didn’t know I intended to speak until I did it.
“I think we should warn her.”
Karen frowned.
“Who?” she said.
“Sabine. If she’s in danger, she should know. If she understands what’s going on, she can help us. Work with us.”
“Why would she do that?” Ex said. “Some stranger off the street comes in and tells her not to trust her own grandmother?”
I hesitated, trying to focus my thoughts.
“Sabine must have seen the changes in her. I mean that’s the point, isn’t it? Legba was exiled, and now, after the hurricane, it’s back. Amelie must have changed. The way she acts. The things she can do. Legba can’t have been in her for more than two and a half years, I mean at the outside. And probably not as long as that, or Sabine would be dead by now, right?”
“I don’t think we can assume that Sabine will have noticed a difference,” Karen said.
“And Daria,” I said, momentum carrying me over Karen’s objection. “I mean she’s got this weird precognitive thing going on. She can’t be on Legba’s side either. Doesn’t it make sense to try to get both of them, Sabine and Daria, on our side?”
“That isn’t how this works,” Karen said. “We don’t tip our hand. We don’t warn them. Once Sabine is locked up safe, we can-”
“And what about Daria?” I said. “If Legba kills off the people closest to the horse, you know, isolates it? Then why wouldn’t Daria be in just as much trouble as Sabine?”
“Jayne,” Ex said. Two familiar syllables, but they hit like a slap. “Karen has been tracking this rider for years. She’s the expert. If she says this is how the thing behaves, we can safely assume that it’s how the thing behaves.”
“I was just asking,” I said.
“You’re right to ask,” Karen said. “It’s just that we can’t reinvent the wheel here. We don’t have time.”
“I don’t know,” Aubrey began.
“Trust me,” Karen said. “I know what I’m doing. If we can get Sabine away and safe, Legba will go crazy looking for her. It will overextend. That’s when we can take it.”
Karen laid out the plan, rough though it was. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake would watch the Voodoo Heart Temple, take notes, and build a profile of Sabine’s actions. Ex and Karen and I would finish the work on the cargo van. We had magical wards on it, but we still needed to black out the windows and install handcuffs in the back to keep Sabine under control until we could get her to the prison shed out back. All through the conversation, Karen found opportunity and reason to touch Ex-leaning over a diagram of traffic in the French Quarter, her hand on his shoulder; sitting beside him on the couch, their thighs pressed together.
I got up and quietly walked out the back door. Night had fallen, but the wind hadn’t died down. It drove last autumn’s leaves across the grass and pushed my hair into my mouth. It played the trees like some huge, organic reed instrument; a saxophone playing free jazz until my ears wanted to bleed. I walked around the shed, pretending to look for places that Sabine might escape.
