Darker Angels

I didn’t remember when. A trickle of blood ran down my collarbone. Karen screamed. Someone cursed.

“Jayne?”

Aubrey was at my side. He looked worried.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Don’t hug me.”

He knelt, his hand fluttering between my arm and shoulder, uncertain how to help and unable to keep from trying. I thought it was sweet.

“We have to get Sabine out and get Karen in there,” I said. “Ex has to get Carrefour out.”

“I know,” Aubrey said. “I know. Don’t move. You’re hurt.”

“Yeah. Clear on that. But I’ll still be hurt later, and we need to fix Karen now.”

“We’ve got it,” Aubrey said. “We’re taking care of it.”

I let my eyes close. The sound of the tussle was like a television in the next room. Karen’s voice was high, shrill, and animalistic. Other voices-Aunt Sherrie, Omar, other men, other women-competed with it yelling instructions or threats or shouting in triumph. Mfume exhorting them not to kill. I thought I heard Sabine wailing behind it all. I lay down, my head resting against cool grass. I felt like the ground itself was lifting me up.

“Mfume?” I said.

“His arm’s pretty messed up,” Aubrey said. “He won’t stop, though. We tried to make him.”

He’s a big boy, I almost said, but it seemed like a lot of effort. I made do with a long, stuttering sigh. Running footsteps came toward me, familiar as a known voice clearing its throat. I opened my eyes to Ex.

“What the hell is going on?” he said. “They’re killing Karen.”

“They won’t kill her. I don’t think they’ll even hurt her if they can help it,” I said. “But we need to drive the rider out of her body.”

“What rider?” he said. “She was fine yesterday. She’s fine. When did she get possessed?”

There were tears in his eyes. Of course there were. In the rush and fear for him, I’d never taken a minute to think how this would look from his perspective. How it would feel. He’d been this woman’s lover. He’d shared her bed and her body, he’d gone to her when I pushed him away, and it had all been a lie. Carrefour had used Karen, and Karen had used Ex. If he’d been prone to taking inappropriate responsibility for the safety of people around him before now, this one was going to send him through the roof.

“I can explain everything,” I said. “But… Ex, I am so, so sorry.”

I levered myself up. The blood from the cut on my neck had soaked the parts of my shirt that the fog and dew hadn’t. Ex shook his head once, and then stopped.

Everything stopped.

Aubrey went still, and the fighters in the dogpile. The thickening mist froze where it was, and the distant crickets fell silent. With a howl like meat tearing, Carrefour rose up, scattering Amelie’s congregation like leaves.

Karen was gone. The rider’s body had broadened and thickened, splitting the seams of canvas shirt and pants. Its fish-pale skin was veined in black, and claws like knives clicked at its fingertips. I scrambled to my feet. A flash of motion to my right was Joseph Mfume pulling a length of silver chain from his pocket with his good hand, his shotgunned arm limp and blood-soaked at his side. Carrefour looked from one of us to the other, and its broad, inhuman face broke into a parody of a grin. I said something obscene.

It had taken us to the crossroads, the natural environment of riders, the place where the Venn diagram of reality and hell overlapped. We weren’t thirty to one. It was just me and Mfume, neither of us whole, against an engine of rage and death, and suddenly I didn’t like our odds.

Carrefour raised its bladed hands and bounded toward me.

TWENTY-FOUR

I fell back, scampering toward the cargo van, thinking I could get it between me and the rider as cover. Carrefour loped forward, lashing at me as I ducked. The windshield shattered. Safety glass pattered down on me like hail. I spun around, my arms out like I was on a highwire and keeping my balance. One blow, and Carrefour had destroyed the windshield and peeled back a swath of metal from the van’s hood. A second swing rocked the van with a low boom. Carrefour lurched around the corner of the van to face me.

Not every trace of Karen had vanished. I could see the echo of her impish smile, something familiar in the angle of the thing’s shoulders and the way it moved its arms. Traces of the woman still remained in the beast, and if anything that made it worse. Carrefour blinked bloody eyes and shrieked. I saw the blow coming, and I stepped under it. I sank my fist into the mottled flesh where its solar plexus would have been if it were human, and I heard its breath hiss out, felt the heat of its body pressing against mine. The energy of its qi, the raw will of its consciousness, writhed against me and I felt a heat blooming in my own belly, rising to press back. I shouted, and it growled, set its feet into the soft ground, and pushed. I tried to shift away, but it got a shoulder against my chest and leaned in. Its weight pressed the air out of my lungs, the door of the van behind me bent in an inch and then another. My broken ribs flared with a pain that put stars in my peripheral vision. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t lever myself out. I got an arm free to box its ears, but the blow was weak, ineffective, doomed.

I started to pass out.

Something bright hissed above my head, and Carrefour screamed. The sound seemed distant. The weight lifted and I slumped to the ground. I watched the rider’s wide legs stagger backward, my mind urging my body to function, to rise, to run. Mfume’s voice was calling out, passionate and angry, in a language I didn’t know. I rose to my knees, sank back, then forced myself up again.

Mfume’s chain had buried itself deep in the flesh of Carrefour’s back, and Mfume stood in the space between house and shed, straining with his one good arm to pull the thing back. Dark blood seeped down the rider’s side and it swung its arm wide, its claws raking the metal of the chain but not quite able to grasp it.

Carrefour opened its mouth.

“Joseph!” it howled, its voice deep and masculine and terrible. “Joseph, my love! Stop this. We are so near, so near-”

“There is no we!” Mfume yelled. “I am my own, and you will release her. Release the woman and go!”

It was a nice thought, but I was pretty sure negotiation wasn’t going to work. I gathered myself as Carrefour twisted around to face Mfume. It was as good a chance as any. I ran forward, kicking at its knee. It was like slamming my foot into a rock, but Carrefour stumbled. Mfume shifted to the side, the chain pulling at a slightly different angle. I sidestepped and hammered my foot down on the rider’s heel. Carrefour screamed, and it sounded like real pain this time.

For a few seconds, I thought we might win.

Carrefour whipped around, the silver hook in its flesh making a terrible wet sound as it tore free. I saw Mfume stagger and something hit me, lifted me. For an eternal, breathless moment, I was in the air, my arms and legs flailing for anything to grab onto, to find purchase. The ground rose up and hit me like a truck.

Mfume was screaming. I rolled to my side. I didn’t think I could stand up, but I could pull myself. If I could crawl into the dark behind the shed, maybe it would ignore me. Maybe it would forget me, give me time to recover. Carrefour bellowed, and I felt the ground beneath me tremble. I dug my fingers into the wet ground and pulled. The grass was cool against my palms.

We couldn’t beat it. Not the two of us now, not the whole damned mob of us before. And it had no hesitation in killing us. It was practiced. We were dead.

Sabine’s voice came to me like a song being sung in a different room. The words were the same, Legba louvri le pot, but there was a depth to them, a seriousness. Worse, a pain. I shifted myself toward the small prison house, the light, the sound of her desperate voice.

Sabine sat on the floor, chains slack on her wrists and neck. Her back was hunched, her face running with sweat as she strained internally. I couldn’t help thinking of childbirth. Her eyes were the clear, shining black of river stones. She had too many teeth.

“Louvri mwen, Legba,” she said. “Louvri le pot.”

I pulled myself toward her. Something loud happened outside, sudden and terrible as a cannon. I ignored it. I crawled closer to the girl. The air around her shifted and swirled like water stirred by a thousand writhing tadpoles. I closed my eyes and gathered my qi. I pictured the energy rising through my spine, out my arm, and arcing between my fingertips with a golden light. I held out my hand, and I felt Sabine touch me.

Her flesh was burning hot and sweat-slick. Her fingers clenched mine until my knuckles ached, and I felt something within her pulling at me like a riptide. I wanted to fight it, to pull myself back into myself, but instinct said that withholding now was surrendering to Carrefour. I pressed what little of myself I could focus out, into the girl, feeding the rider within her.

And then she let me go. I rolled onto my back, staring toward the ceiling as in the corner of my vision, Sabine Glapion opened her mouth wide, and then wider. Her jawbone cracked, and the serpent flowed out of her. Sabine’s clothing and skin fell to the floor in discarded coils.

The scales shone silver in the bright halogen glow, and the needle-teeth were white as ivory. It wasn’t the Legba that had come from Amelie Glapion. This snake was thinner, faster, and brighter. Something about it reminded me of the awkwardness of adolescence, though its motion was perfectly graceful. It turned to me, and I knew that if it lunged for my neck, I wouldn’t be able to protect myself. The broad head turned to the darkness and the mist. A black tongue flickered.

“Carrefour!” Legba called, its voice a clatter and a hiss. “You have trespassed!”

The serpent swam through the air like an eel in a drowned city. I forced myself up to sitting and did my best to follow.

Carrefour stood in the pathway between shed and house holding Mfume by his neck in one thick, monstrous hand. The others-Aubrey and Ex, the cultists of Amelie Glapion’s congregation-stood still as statues as Carrefour let his once and present victim slide to the ground. I wanted to move forward, to help, but I barely had the strength to keep my eyes open. I wondered almost idly how much granting my will to help Legba’s birth had cost me.

“Legba,” Carrefour said. “Petit Legba. You are born in time to die. The shortest life. Come to me, Legba the brief.”

I propped myself against the doorframe. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t fight. Carrefour strode across the night-dark, fog-shrouded space, and I didn’t doubt for a second that this new Legba was just as screwed as I was.

The serpent spoke.

“Louvri,” it said, and I knew what it meant. Open.

I caught my breath. Behind Carrefour, Aubrey lifted his head. The motion was slow, like something happening underwater. Aubrey turned. His face looked wrong; thinner, sharper. He stepped forward, and his shirt and pants hung loose on his body. He was skeletal, and when he spoke, it wasn’t with his own voice. It was