look. And if she’s not there, maybe Ex would be, and we could get him back too.”
“Ex?” Amelie Glapion said.
“My friend who’s sleeping with her,” I said. “The one we came back for. He’s another problem. He used to be a priest, and he knows how to pull a rider out of the host body.”
“So Ex like in exorcist,” Amelie Glapion said. “You’re telling me this bitch got a warded house and a working exorcist out of you?”
“And a van,” I said. “A warded van so she can move around without being seen.”
“And you got what?”
I felt myself blushing a little.
“She told me some stories about my uncle. And there was a favor or two she was going to owe me.”
“Owe you,” Amelie said.
“Yeah.”
“Owe you like not actually do for you, but maybe someplace down the line.”
“Like that.”
The old woman shook her head in disgust.
“Either this bitch really is that good or you’ve got to get a whole lot smarter,” she said.
“Little of both,” I admitted.
“But the safe house,” Aubrey said. “I know going out there’s a risk, but-”
Chogyi Jake leaned forward, his fingertips tapping the tabletop like raindrops. His expression was focused inward, the way it did when he was thinking through a particularly knotty problem.
“It may not be a risk we have to take,” he said. “I put the wards on the house and the van both. Ex and Aubrey here both helped, but I was central to all of them. If I can be used as a focus, perhaps we can break them through me.”
“What exactly did you do with them?” Dr. Inonde asked, and the conversation sailed over my head like a kite. Medial foci, ekagratva, veve, and primal aether bounced across the room with occasional pauses for translation and clarification. It was like Amelie Glapion, Chogyi Jake, Aubrey, and Dr. Inonde had turned into occult economists; I didn’t know what they were saying, and I was fairly certain anything I said was only going to make me look dumb. Instead I finished my coffee and leaned back in my chair.
There was a certain joy in disengaging from a conversation. It let me see all the things going on at the edges of the talk. The way Sabine leaned in whenever her grandmother spoke, as if she was trying to drink in each word. The way Amelie Glapion’s eyes darkened when the rider within her stirred and took interest. Mfume’s poker face, built in prison to give nothing away. The angle of Dr. Inonde’s head as he leaned forward, drawing something on a napkin for Chogyi Jake to look at. Mfume and Aubrey started up a side conversation about the geography around the safe house. Sabine said something about Soleil Noir and got shushed. Daria, on her cot, stirred, sat up, stretched.
When I got up to throw away my coffee cup, Daria walked sleepily over to the table and crawled into her grandmother’s lap like a child half her age. The old woman or possibly the rider ran long, thin fingers over the girl’s back and shoulders, soothing her even as the debate raged on. I thought I saw tears in the young girl’s eyes. They should have been a warning.
“We can try it,” Dr. Inonde said. “The only danger is to you.”
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Um, sorry,” I said. “I was just over there. I missed that part. What danger?”
“I have some connection to the wards we put up,” Chogyi Jake said. “By using my mind as a focus point and Legba’s power channeled through me, we believe I can inhabit the original work and undo them.”
“Check,” I said. “And the danger part would be?”
“It leaves me open for a time,” Chogyi Jake said. “It is possible that in that period one of the
“And what would we do about that?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake’s smile could have meant anything.
“It’s very unlikely to happen,” he said.
“Lock him in a refrigerator until we get Ex back,” Aubrey said.
“That sounds bad,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be good,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “I understand that the stakes are high. But the chances are good. It’s a risk worth taking. Safer, for example, than going to the safe house.”
The room quieted. I was the only one standing, and all the others were looking at me as if waiting for something. As if it was my call.
Which meant it was. If I said hell no, I wasn’t putting Chogyi Jake in harm’s way, it would have been off. If I gave the thumbs-up, then it would move forward, and the consequences would be at least partly mine to carry. It seemed unfair at first, but I’d been the one who paid Chogyi Jake’s bills. I was the one who’d entered into a pact with a voodoo demon. There was a pretty good argument to be made that I was the boss, and it made me wish I’d understood the mechanics of the thing better.
“It’s the right thing?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake shrugged.
“It is what it is,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Amelie Glapion put Daria down and reached for the metal cane that she once nearly killed me with. Sabine said she’d gather the others, Mfume walked to the back with a clear purpose in mind, and Chogyi Jake and Dr. Inonde started moving the table back against an empty wall. Aubrey walked to my side, his arms crossed. We hadn’t had time to talk, just the two of us, since I’d delivered the verbal smackdown on the boardwalk by the river. Four hours earlier. It seemed like four days.
His brow was furrowed, his lips pressed thin. I put my hand on his arm and he looked up at me like he’d just noticed I was there.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Like a mouse in a snake pit,” he said. “Jumpy as hell.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.”
“I don’t know how they do it. Mfume. Amelie Glapion. They had those things in their bodies with them for years. I had to go through it for, what? Six hours?”
“I think it’s different for everyone,” I said. “How they come to it. What the rider is, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That too. I mean… I look at Sabine. Specifically Sabine. And… I don’t know. It messes with my definitions.”
I looked over. The girl was back now, helping the drummers set up on the floor next to the cots. She was younger than any of them, but she acted like their natural superior, telling each where to sit, which way to face, which drum to hold.
“She’s a black sixteen-year-old girl in a city with no functioning infrastructure to speak of,” Aubrey said. “She’s got no parents. Her grandmother has had at least one stroke, and maybe several. She’s got a little sister to take care of.”
“And a demon growing inside her,” I said.
“But that’s the thing,” Aubrey said. “That’s what she has going
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Sabine turned, looking past us, and waved at another of the cultists, her hand fluttering like a bird. The man trotted to her, his head bent at a deferential angle.
“Mutualism,” Aubrey said in a tone that meant
“Meaning?”
“Legba’s not a parasite,” he said. “Not technically. A parasite is either detrimental to its host or functionally neutral. Usually detrimental, if only because it’s diverting energy resources. But if it’s actually doing the host good, that’s not parasitism anymore. That’s part of a mutualistic relationship. There are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants, and the plants provide energy to the bacteria. Either one would fail without the other.”
The eldest drummer tapped a wide-mouthed pottery drum, a low, dry sound filling the room. He nodded to Sabine.
“I don’t know whether that makes me happy or creeps me out,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, either that means Sabine’s got a really nice rider and more power to her, or else the world is so fucked up that the best she can hope for is demonic possession.”
Aubrey took a deep breath, letting the exhalation filter slowly through his mouth and nose.
“Guess it’s how you look at it,” he said.
Amelie Glapion returned to the room. A young man at her side carried a bag of corn meal, and together they went to the cardinal directions, the man pouring out the bright yellow meal in shapes, figures, and ideograms of inhuman languages while Amelie and Legba within her intoned words and phrases that seemed to echo in a space larger than the room we were in.
As they progressed, the drummers took up the rhythm of the chant. Amelie Glapion moved from one veve to the next, taking small objects from her pockets-a crow’s foot curled against itself in death, a sprig of rosemary, a cheap one-shot whiskey bottle, a handkerchief smudged with lipstick and something else. Her head began to bob and weave in its unpleasant serpentine pattern, and the air around us thickened with invisible things. I could feel the riders gathering, pressing at the film between the real, physical world and the abstract nation behind and beside us. Aubrey felt it too, and his hand sought mine out.
Chogyi Jake stepped in from the back, naked, his head bowed. Someone had drawn symbols on his skin in bright paints. I recognized the fleur-delis on his shoulder, the searcher’s X on his breast, but there were at least a dozen others I didn’t know. He showed no discomfort at his nudity, but walked to Amelie Glapion, knelt before
