Darker Angels

It was an apology, and it was meant for me.

I didn’t know what to say. I’d known that Aubrey was in trouble since the second I’d seen him turn toward me, there in the ruins of Charity. He’d told me that he was messed up by it; he’d said the words and I’d agreed. It wasn’t the same as seeing him fold. When I’d fallen into Uncle Eric’s strange, occult world, Aubrey had been the one I called for help. He needed help now, and I didn’t know what to say.

So I faked it.

“Tough shit,” I said. “I know you think you’re weak, but I don’t. I think you’re strong. You’re scared? Yeah, welcome to the club. I’ve been doing everything at three times the sane pace for months because I’m scared. I hid your divorce papers since Denver because I was scared.”

“You hid his divorce papers?” Chogyi Jake said, but I barreled on.

“Ex freaking out and ditching us wasn’t exactly a statement of his confidence and heroism. He’s scared. Chogyi just told you he’s been scared so long he’s gotten used to it. I’ll bet you everything I’ve got that Eric spent half his life working through adrenaline rushes. We’re all freaked out. We’re all scared. You don’t get to bail on me just because of that.”

Aubrey took a step back, trying to pull his hand out of mine, but I held tighter. I was screwing it up. I was saying the wrong things. All I could hope for was to make his shame at being frightened worse than the fear itself.

“If you walk away on this one, I swear to God, you’ll walk away on the next one too,” I said. “And the one after that. And then you’re done, right? Then Marinette wins.”

“Jesus Christ, Jayne,” Aubrey said. His voice was shaking. “You don’t know how hard this is.”

“I don’t care how hard it is. You can do it,” I said.

Aubrey opened his mouth, but no words came out. Instead, he took a long, shuddering breath. In the dim light, his eyes glimmered with tears, but he set his shoulders. Chogyi smiled, watching us both. I didn’t know if he was judging Aubrey or me or both. Or neither.

“Damn,” Aubrey said. “Just… damn. Don’t treat me with kid gloves or anything.”

I moved close and put my arms around him. It was easy to forget how big he was-wide through the shoulders and ribs, solid, reassuringly male. I hoped I hadn’t just screwed him up worse.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have been gentle. That was shitty of me, wasn’t it?”

He took a breath before speaking. I figured that meant yes, but he’d let me slide.

“Eric told me that if I kept at it, there’d be something like this,” he said. “A crisis point. There’s nothing you said that he wouldn’t have.”

“The divorce papers thing?”

Aubrey laughed. It sounded pained.

“Okay, maybe not that part,” he said. “But he’d have kicked my ass. You even sounded like him there at the end. I just… I didn’t mean to…”

I put my head against his shoulders, and he wrapped his arms around me, squeezing until my cracked ribs screamed with pain. I gritted my teeth and took it. I had it coming. People walked past us. The river murmured to itself, water hushing against the pilings. The soft sound of a city-traffic and birdsong, barking dogs and pounding radios, sirens and voices and the bells of the cathedral-washed past us.

“Um,” Chogyi Jake said. “Jayne?”

I looked up.

Bracketing us on the promenade, a dozen people stood, staring at us. Most of them were black, but a couple were white or Asian. Their expressions were the blank of soldiers ready for a fight. I pushed Aubrey back and stepped toward them. In the glow of the street lamps, the faces looked cold. I knew them. That man had been one of the drummers at Charity Hospital. The woman across from him had danced naked, calling the riders down into her body. And staring at us with deep, dark eyes, Sabine Glapion stood near the back of the crowd.

Struggling up the steps behind them, Dr. Inonde held Amelie Glapion’s elbow. The old woman’s head shifted from side to side like a serpent testing the air. And behind them, the deep black skin and graying hair of Joseph Mfume. The handful of tourists peering out over the darkening water took a look at the scene and scattered. My heart was thumping behind my ribs like it was trying to get out. All of the smartass shit I’d just said to Aubrey about fear drained out of my mind like it had never been there. I just wanted to get the hell out.

Amelie Glapion reached the back of the crowd, her cult parting before her. Dr. Inonde met my eyes and nodded with something like apology. I wondered what our chances would be if we all leaped into the river. It didn’t look like it was going that fast, but I remembered something about still-looking waters sucking people down.

“Okay,” I said softly enough that only Aubrey and Chogyi Jake could hear me, “this might have been an oops.”

Amelie came forward, leaning on her cane. Her drooping face was ashen and sour. The air around her seemed to crackle with power that her body alone couldn’t begin to justify. Her eyes shifted from me to Aubrey, from Aubrey to Chogyi Jake, from Chogyi Jake back to me with the intensity of a predator sizing up prey.

I felt the subtle shift in my body that I’d come to associate with the onset of violence. When Amelie spoke, her voice was Legba’s; deeper than a human throat could fashion, rich with threat and power.

“What the hell you think you doing in my city?”

I wanted to swing forward, to fight my way free, pulling Aubrey and Chogyi Jake along with me. My body almost vibrated with the need to strike, to scream. I forced myself to speak like I was using someone else’s mouth to do it.

“Carrefour tricked me,” I said. “I’ve come to you. I need help.”

These were demons. They were predators: tigers, wolves, sharks. I looked into Amelie Glapion’s eyes, and something else looked back at me. Something inhuman. Someone made a sound that was neither word nor whimper. I risked a glance. Daria Glapion, her face frozen with anxiety, held her sister’s hand.

“Well now,” Amelie said, “that’s more like it.”

The woman turned away, and the moment broke. The air itself seemed to slump back. Aubrey touched my shoulder, and I startled. Around us, the cultists were starting to move. At the head of the stone steps that led down to Jackson Square, Amelie Glapion stopped and turned, looking over her shoulder at us.

“You waiting for something?” she asked. “Come on.”

EIGHTEEN

Someone walking down the street might not have seen anything. An old woman walking pretty well with her cane. A few people accompanying her. A teenager leading a younger girl by the hand. Three touristy-looking types looking unaccountably nervous. A deeply black man with a long face and goofy smile walking by himself. Another group walking in the same direction. A white man in a Hawaiian shirt strolling behind the rest. Apart from everyone moving in the same direction, there was nothing about it that looked different than any other night in the French Quarter.

It felt like being marched to prison.

The Glapions and half their followers before us, Mfume and the other guards behind. I wondered if this was the kind of negotiation Eric had done, and if it was what had gotten him killed. Ahead of us, two of the cultists stepped close and put supporting arms around Amelie Glapion’s waist. Wherever we were going, it had to be close.

We turned down one street, and then another into a side street so narrow, I couldn’t imagine two cars actually passing each other. Thin trees pushed up, bare as sticks and struggling toward the sky. The brick buildings were painted over, pale colors turning to shades of gray in the darkness. The wrought-iron rails of narrow balconies looked thin enough to break between two hands, and the air stank of a backed-up sewer. All the doors we passed were closed, all the windows dark. I had the sense of walking into a tendril of dead city, as if the destruction of the Lower Ninth had cut a blood vessel, and even here where the city hadn’t suffered the flood, its tissue was dying.

Amelie and her entourage stopped at what had once been a storefront, its windows smeared now with gray paint. I was close enough to see Amelie’s eyes close for a moment. When she opened them again, there was a stiff determination in her expression, but no strength. One of the cultists-a woman-fumbled with a key chain, unlocked the door, and stepped aside. Amelie Glapion led the way like the general of a failing army, and the rest of us fell in behind her. Aubrey, beside me, shuddered as we passed the threshold, but that was all.

Inside, we passed through a wide space with dark wooden flooring worn in a pattern that outlined where shelves and pathways had once been, through an ornate archway that numberless coats of paint had muddied, and into something that might once have been an office. A particleboard folding table stood in the center of the room, a tablecloth of yellowed lace stretching across it. Fifteen or twenty lit candles burned at either end, black candles on my right, white on my left; the air was hot from the flame and stank of hot wax and honey. An ancient carved-wood chair sat on the other side of the table like a throne.

Three canvas army cots were against one wall, pillows and sleeping bags on each. The one farthest from me had a stuffed bear, worn from use and affection. As I watched, Daria walked to that last cot, threw herself onto it, and turned to look at us.

It reminded me of the gang warfare scenes from The Godfather and of the safe house I’d bought in Pearl River. Amelie Glapion and her granddaughters had gone to the mattresses, and so had we. Amelie Glapion made her way to the throne, sat carefully in it, and turned her gaze to us like a queen considering the ambassadors of some particularly ill-favored nation. It was theater. It was the appearance of nobility and power, confidence and influence built out of baling wire and bubble gum; the trash and debris of the world transforming itself into something holy. The Church of Something from Nothing, and for a moment, I felt genuinely moved by it.

The rider in her-Legba-spoke again.

“You have come to my city uninvited and unwelcome,” it said with the old woman’s tongue. “You come with the tools of a thief and an assassin, and you conspire with the outcast. For any of these, I would break your flesh and cast you into darkness. But the hollow one tells me you fought in my child’s defense.”

Sabine, behind me, spoke. Her voice was strong and musical.

“She did, Maman Legba. Everything he said was truth.”

Amelie Glapion cast a sour, inhuman glance over my shoulder at her granddaughter, then shrugged.

“For this I grant you indulgence. Now you say you’ve come for my help against the outcast,” the rider said. When it spoke again, the depth and power were less,