you got? And Dr. David Mackelwhite doesn’t pull them in.”
The rain hadn’t slackened. Tiny streaks of silver and gray darted out of the sky and crashed onto the pavement like suicides. I walked under the awnings, as far from the street as I could manage, and my jeans were still getting wet. I thought about what I’d learned, if I had learned anything.
I knew that Amelie Glapion was possessed by a rider. That was firsthand knowledge, and I didn’t have to trust anybody about anything. So that was the center to work from. Amelie was running a rider cult, and her granddaughter Sabine was attending rituals. I knew her other granddaughter Daria had the ability to see things that were true, but that she didn’t necessarily understand herself. Again, that was direct evidence.
At one remove, I knew that the rider had been cast into exile, killed a bunch of people including Karen’s old partner, and was now making its way back home. I knew Amelie Glapion had suffered a stroke at the same time New Orleans was wrecked by the hurricane. She had been a woman of serious importance in the community, but she was weaker now, and the community scattered.
I reached an intersection, ducked out from beneath the awning, and ran. The rain was hard, but warmer than I’d expected. My shirt and hair were soaked by even that short time. I double-checked my laptop carrier, but it was closed tight. Still, probably best to keep as dry as I could.
I turned down the street. A neon sign announced LARRY FLYNT’S BARELY LEGAL, white lightbulbs dancing above it. The pictures in the window showed airbrushed girls younger, I assumed, than I was. A woman in a bright yellow raincoat came out, lit a cigarette, and looked at me. She was wearing half a display counter worth of makeup, but underneath it, she looked tired. I smiled, and she nodded back. I had heard somewhere that the sex shows were the first businesses on Bourbon Street to reopen. At the time, it had been said in an approving voice, but I couldn’t remember whose. I kept walking.
Nothing I’d heard conflicted with Karen’s story. But if I were Legba, would I really choose Amelie Glapion for my victim? Someone that high in the community would be a coup, certainly, but I couldn’t see why the rider would try to surround itself with people who were aware of riders and how they worked. If Karen was to be trusted, the local
Maybe there was a reason. Maybe it made sense, if you looked at it from the right perspective. Eric would have known, could have put all the points in a line and seen what it all meant and what would happen next. But he was gone, and I was here.
And, much as I hated it, I did have someone I could ask. Karen had evaded my questions and played weird power games and all that, it was true. But if I wasn’t seduced or cowed, I could insist that we talk about it. I’d present my questions in simple, clear words, and I’d just keep leaning until I had an answer. Then afterward, I could find a way to fact-check it.
I had just about resolved to head back to the safe house when I realized where, only half aware, I’d been heading all this time. I’d been walking and thinking, aiming for the dry spots and holding tight to awnings, and some part of me had known where it was headed. The Voodoo Heart Temple was right in front of me, its windows dark, its grisly sign swinging in the storm wind. I didn’t see anyone inside, but I stepped out into the street, rain sluicing down me, and looked up. There, on the third floor, lights were burning. An apartment above the temple.
I needed to go. I needed to walk away right then and go to the hotel and get in my car and leave New Orleans. I tried to turn, but my body didn’t move. I felt the cold distance come over me, the sense of being an observer in my own body. Something was wrong, and I knew it.
A voice, nothing more than a change in the tone of the raindrops. Three girls were coming along the street toward me, laughing and prodding each other. The one nearest the wall might have been Chinese or Vietnamese, I couldn’t tell at that distance. The tall girl in the middle was black, gangly and awkward; a girl who hadn’t quite grown into her body yet. The third-the one walking closest to the storm-was as graceful and beautiful now as she had been when I’d seen her in the flickering hell of Charity. Sabine Glapion.
And there, in the shadows of the doorway just before them, something moved. The raindrops paused, hanging in the air like crystal. The roar of the storm became silence. The two girls at Sabine’s side froze in mid-stride, and Sabine alone went on for half a step.
I dropped my pack and my laptop in the street.
“Sabine!” I screamed.
The thing that boiled out of the shadows shrieked; a wet, angry sound full of rage and hatred. Sabine turned and sprinted away, the dark thing surging after her, and me after it. The beast knocked the frozen girls aside with long, knifelike claws. Sabine ran into the suspended rain, her passage carving a tunnel through the falling water. I drew the psychic energy of my qi up from my belly through my chest, pressing the living force out my throat as I shouted.
“Face me!”
The thing hesitated, its great, inhuman head craning back to look at me. It had been human once, I thought. I could see the places where the rider hadn’t transformed the flesh past all recognition. The blunt, black incisors, the dagger-long fangs were set in a jaw that belonged to a human being. The weirdly expressionless eyes had been a human’s once. A man’s, a woman’s, or a baby’s; there was no way to tell. I leaped, my right foot sawing through the unnaturally still air. The impact jarred me like I’d hit a concrete wall, but the thing fell back a step.
Before I caught my balance, it attacked. I tried to block, and its claws bit into my arm. A closed fist swung up into my ribs like a car wreck. Something painful snapped. My own hand shot out, the heel of my palm against the thing’s face.
It took a step back, hissing. Stilled for a moment, it seemed broad as a truck, thick shoulders of pale skin mottled with deep veins of dark flesh. There were too many joints in its legs. For a moment, the only sound was the slow drip of blood from my arm, then its chest expanded and it let out a sound more like a storm than a shout. I felt the will and power and rage in its voice. It was chaos and war made flesh, and its hatred of me was as deep as a mine shaft. The pain in my ribs was bright and exquisite. I bent my knees, leaned toward it. When it lunged for me again, I moved into the blow, under it, and past the beast, driving an elbow into the place where a kidney might have been in a human. Its shriek had more to do with pain now. It wheeled to face me again.
I surprised myself by grinning. Its eyes flickered past me, down into the quiet of the suspended street. I could hear its breath, the low growl haunting the back of its throat. Sabine was getting away, and I could see the frustration in its face. A sense of profound peace came through my body, lifting and consoling me. My broken chest and mutilated arm hurt, but the pain didn’t mean the same thing anymore. Even before I moved, I felt the violence spinning up within me like the singing of a choir. This, I thought, was what it must feel like to die.
I dove to the side, hands grasping the pole that held the sidewalk awning, and wrenched from my gut. The wood splintered in my hand, coming away like plucking a blade of grass. I landed in the street, club in hand, one leg back one forward. I felt angelic. I felt beautiful.
The thing turned, and this time the wood caught its claws. I darted in, hammering its shoulder with my fist, then danced back as it howled. The still rain hung around me like a veil. I battered the thing with a flurry of strikes, knee, chest, shoulder, belly. For a moment, I thought I might actually win.
It swung, and I fell for the feint, bringing my club to stop a blow that wasn’t there. Its leg shot out, catching me just above the knee, and I stumbled with the sudden agony.
I saw the killing blow as it came. Knife-sharp claws carving the air, arcing toward my exposed throat. I wasn’t going to be able to block it. I had no leverage to twist aside. I hardly had time to gasp.
But the blow didn’t land. Something bright appeared at the thing’s wrist, and the claws pulled wide, shredding my sleeve as I fell, but not breaking skin. From the black, shining pavement, I looked up.
A man stood in the middle of the sidewalk, a great black coat hanging from his shoulders like the robe of some exotic priest. His black skin shone like he was lit from within, and the close-cut gray of his hair was like a scrim of silver cloud in the night sky. A chain hung from his hand with a vicious hook at one end. The hook that had pulled the creature’s attack aside.
“Not tonight, my friend,” the man said in a Caribbean accent as I struggled back to my feet. His voice was velvet and stone.
The thing turned to him, then to me, then roared in defiance and frustration. I steeled myself for a fresh attack, but my leg wasn’t quite where I thought it was. It didn’t matter. The beast raised its arms, vanished, and the raindrops hammered onto the street. After the unreal silence, the storm was deafening.
I didn’t realize I was collapsing until I was down, the asphalt rough and comfortable against my cheek. I coughed, almost certain that the warmth in my throat wasn’t blood. I rolled to my back, watching the rain fall from the distant clouds down onto my face like a manga cliche.
Sabine Glapion appeared, looming over me. She was soaked, her blouse clinging to her skin, her eyes wide and horror-struck.
“Don’t move,” he said, all concern and soft vowels. “You’re hurt. You need a doctor.”
“Y’think?” I managed, and he smiled a wide, warm, goofy grin. I lay back, darkness crowding the edges of my vision. The last coherent thought I had before I passed out was,
FOURTEEN
In the years before I left home, I went to the emergency room exactly once. Christmas Day, when I was twelve, I had a stomach flu so bad I was getting dehydrated. My father put me in the car, gave me a towel to puke into, and drove me to the ER where they drugged my guts into submission and kept me alive with an IV drip. By the time I got home, my brothers had opened all my presents for me.
Since inheriting Uncle Eric’s money, I’d spent a lot more time in the hospital recovering from wounds of my own and caring for the people who’d been hurt working with me. Swimming back to consciousness, I recognized the dim fluorescent twilight, the smell of antiseptic, the squeak of nurses’ shoes against linoleum. I tried to remember what had happened. A car wreck? No. Someone had stabbed me. Or something.
I tried to sit up and my left side from collarbone to hip lit on fire. I fell back to the bed, gasping. The ceiling above me was all-white acoustical tile. I came a little more awake. My right arm was bandaged. My left knee was swollen to about twice its normal size. I probed my ribs gently through the thin blue hospital gown. My right side felt merely sore and angry. I only tried touching the left side once.
Joseph Mfume. I’d been fighting with something-a rider in its full, unhidden form-and I’d been saved by the serial killer and rapist who’d started the whole messy thing. I remembered Sabine Glapion standing in the unfalling rain of the crossroads between the real world and Next Door. Well, she’d still been alive last time I saw her, so that had to be a good thing. I craned my neck, but there were no clocks. I needed to find out how long I’d been there. I needed to find out where exactly I was, for that matter.
I needed to find Aubrey and Ex and Chogyi Jake. The best I could manage was a nurse call button. After what felt like an hour, I hit it again. A couple hours after
