Darker Angels

From the back of the house, I heard something banging. A hammer against wood. In the distance, a car alarm blared and went silent.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for that. Aubrey and Ex. Hell. Just tell me that you don’t have a thing for me too.”

Chogyi’s silence dropped a charge of adrenaline into my blood. He looked away, his customary smile replaced by a grimace of embarrassment.

“Chogyi?” I said.

“I have…” he began, faltered, then tried again. “I am not perfectly comfortable with this. It isn’t you personally, but… I don’t find Caucasian women attractive.”

For the space of three heartbeats, we were silent.

“I don’t think of myself as a racist,” he said defensively, “it’s just that with white women, that little frisson is never there.”

My laughter brought Aubrey back into the kitchen. His confusion, looking back and forth between me and Chogyi Jake, also struck me as comic, and set me off again. Chogyi Jake was blushing, but maintained a dignified countenance until I could get myself under control.

It felt good to laugh. It felt good to relax and to have slept and to be with friends instead of pushing and pushing and pushing to run some race I didn’t even know how long it was. It felt safe.

I didn’t realize until that moment how long it had been since I’d felt safe.

“Is everything okay?” Aubrey asked as my hilarity faded into mere giggles.

“Just fine,” I said. “Perfect.”

That night, we ordered pizza and found a movie rental joint with a good selection of old science fiction. The microwave in the kitchen didn’t work, so we got a new one and some popcorn. Chogyi Jake was right. We were all wounded, and we were tired-worn so thin, I felt like you could see through us. I dedicated the evening to just hanging out, being relaxed, recovering. Chogyi Jake and Aubrey sat on a living room couch of old lady floral-and-lace. I lounged on the floor, my back against Aubrey’s shins. I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so we’d gotten that and Young Frankenstein as a Teri Garr double feature. A light rain was falling against the windows, Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle were singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and my mind had a pleasant, unfocused hum.

It would have been perfect, except that I kept feeling that we were missing someone. Part of my mind expected Ex to come in or call out from the other room. The guilt at having lost my temper with him was growing, and I caught myself wondering where he was and whether he’d come back if I asked him. I wondered if I wanted him to.

He was probably fine. I figured that he’d gone back to New Orleans and Karen Black. I didn’t know if it was more comforting or sad to imagine the two of them together. On the one hand, I believed Chogyi Jake when he said they didn’t really love each other. But even without that romantic spark, there was something to be said for companionship. Just being with your friends. I didn’t want to think of Ex without that. Nor, despite the sore spot that her dressing-down had left, did I wish a life of solitude on Karen.

It was hard just then-with my popcorn and my movies and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake-to imagine that I’d ever wanted to be like her. Yes, she was competent and powerful and certain, but she’d lost so much along the way. Her career. Her parents, killed in that fire. Her partner, murdered by the rider. All her friends from the FBI thinking she was nuts. When I thought about it, she was one of the most isolated people I’d ever known.

The most isolated.

Fuck.

I sat up sharply, a dozen small things that had haunted the back of my mind falling into place. Amelie Glapion’s voice asking me what I was doing in her city. Marie Laveau passing the mantle of voodoo queen down to her daughter. Marinette’s buzzsaw-in-meat voice saying, You have no place here. Aubrey calling my own mother’s scandal family business. Mfume and the rider that attacked Sabine. Parasitic wasps. Different riders with the same powers, the same ecological niches.

“Jayne?” Aubrey said.

“The movie,” I said. “Turn it off.”

SIXTEEN

The screen was empty gray. Night had turned the windows of the house into dark mirrors. Some brave, early spring cricket sang defiance at the world, as likely to attract a predator as a mate. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake sat on the couch together, the bowl of popcorn forgotten between them.

“Okay,” I said, pacing the floor, my mind bouncing around like a monkey behind my eyes. “So here’s the thing. I think we’ve been wrong the whole time.”

“About what, exactly,” Chogyi Jake asked. From anyone else, it would have felt like an attack. In his voice, it was just an opportunity to be a little more exact. I took a deep breath and tried to put the whirling cloud in my mind into a straight line.

“It doesn’t all fit together, does it?” I said. “We’re looking for this rider that got voted off the island, but we’re seeing this old lady who’s been leading a voodoo cult in the same place for years.”

“But we know she’s a rider,” Aubrey said. “She tried to kill you.”

“Legba tried to kill me,” I half-agreed. “But Legba doesn’t make sense as the exiled rider. Amelie Glapion’s been doing the whole voodoo queen thing for years, and her family’s been at it for generations, right? I mean Amelie was grooming her daughter to take over, and now Sabine.”

“I thought that was what makes her a good target for Legba,” Aubrey said. “That she’s…”

“What? Powerful? Prepared? Surrounded by people who know how to deal with riders?” I said. “That’s my point. If I’m the exiled rider, she’s the last person I’d want to possess.”

“Maybe her cult wasn’t really dealing with riders. Maybe they were just a religious thing. Fakes,” Aubrey said. I could hear in his voice that he was struggling to follow me.

“They knew enough to open the way for Marinette. Dr. Inonde said they were the real deal,” I said. “I think Legba’s been in Amelie Glapion the whole time, and probably her mother before her. Legba isn’t the exile. Legba’s been in New Orleans the whole time, going from mother to daughter down through the generations, just like with Marie Laveau. Like a family business.”

“Then what’s Karen been chasing?” Aubrey said.

“You remember what Karen said about riders being mistaken for each other?” I said, finding the words as I went. “About there being another rider that can do that stop-time thing that Legba did?”

“The one that had the same ecological niche,” Aubrey said, nodding. “Like the wolves and hunting cats.”

“Carrefour,” Chogyi Jake said. “Its name was Carrefour.”

“And the Freddy Krueger on steroids thing that went after Sabine didn’t look anything like the snake monster that came out of Amelie,” I said.

“Different riders,” Aubrey said. “You think there’s two different riders.”

“So Carrefour-not Legba-gets kicked out of Haiti,” I said, waving my hands to illustrate each point, “and it rides Mfume up to Oregon. Only Mfume gets caught. He’s stuck in prison, so it… I don’t know. Shifts. It moves into someone powerful enough to be useful. And then it starts isolating the new horse, right? It kills her partner. It kills her parents.”

“Her parents?” Aubrey said. “You mean you think Karen…”

Chogyi Jake made a small, satisfied sound in the back of his throat and smiled thinly. There was no particular pleasure in the expression.

“The hurricane injured Legba badly,” Chogyi Jake said. “Amelie Glapion suffered a stroke. The intended heir died, leaving Sabine to be promoted whether she was prepared for it or not.”

“Vulnerable,” I said. “It left them vulnerable. Carrefour found out, and it figured this was its chance to come back.”

“The wolves start dying out, and the hunting cats come in,” Aubrey said, starting to follow my logic.

“And so Karen comes to New Orleans,” I said. “Maybe it takes her a while. Maybe she doesn’t know it’s happened or exactly who Legba’s riding. There’s a bunch of people who say they’re voodoo queens or houngans or whatever. Maybe Carrefour needs to figure out who the right target is.”

“Or who would get the new daughter organism,” Aubrey said. “With Amelie’s daughter dead in the storm, Karen-Carrefour-would have to find out who was going to be the next host.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But it turns out even the riders who used to be part of Carrefour’s team-the Petro loa like Marinette-have closed ranks against it.”

“Marinette,” Aubrey said, then paused. He seemed lost in himself, but only for a moment. “She hated Karen. She hated Karen more than she hated Legba.”

“And right after the exorcism, I asked Karen about trying to recruit the local riders. She shot me down because she knew everyone was against us,” I said, still pacing. “Carrefour didn’t have any local allies. And Carrefour had kept Karen isolated, so there wasn’t anyone she could bring in.”

“Except the hired guns. Meaning Eric. Meaning us,” Aubrey said.

She’d kept me off balance. She’d taken me out to the club instead of leaving me to my research. She’d dismissed me every time I’d questioned her. She’d seduced Ex. And when I started doing things on my own and asking too many questions, she’d told me to leave.

I’d been a chump.

“It answers everything,” Aubrey said.

“Well. Not everything,” Chogyi Jake said, “but it-”

I held up my hands, palms out. My fingers were trembling. My blood felt slightly electric.

“Okay, hold on. Before we get too freaked out, let’s just… look at it. I mean, maybe I’m wrong,” I said. “When I went missing, who was with Karen?”

Chogyi Jake and Aubrey glanced at each other. I couldn’t stop talking.

“I’d just said how we ought to warn Sabine, Karen said no we shouldn’t, and then I went AWOL, right?” I said. “If Carrefour is riding Karen, it might think I was running off to spill the beans. It freaks out and decides to go after Sabine right then. But that can’t be true if one of you guys was with Karen the whole time. If she has an alibi for the time when I was getting my ass kicked, then I’m wrong.

“So was she with someone when it happened?”