Darker Angels

Marinette’s.

“There is no place for you here, brother.”

Carrefour spun. Aubrey took two steps forward, and the transformation was complete. The burned flesh, the skeletal thinness, the vicious eyes. But there was something of Aubrey in it too. Marinette’s gaze flickered to me and turned back to Carrefour, more angry than before. Man and rider weren’t in conflict this time. They had both come to kick some ass, and I found I had the energy left in me for a grin. In the dark air above me, Legba shifted its silver coils, a thousand colors dancing on its scales like a sheen of oil on water.

“Marinette,” Carrefour said, its hands out before it, the knifelike claws now pleading. “Please, my love, do not stand with them against me. We are Petro, you and I.”

“Your love?” Marinette said. The contempt in its voice would have peeled paint. “Radha, Petro, Ghede. What does tribe matter here? I am loa. What are you?”

“I will not be stopped,” Carrefour said, but it wasn’t a threat. If anything, the rider’s landslide of a voice sounded sorrowful.

“You will,” Marinette said, and Carrefour leaped at her. With a cry like joy, Marinette met its charge, and the impact made the ground shudder. Marinette was thin, but solid as stone. Carrefour didn’t treat her gently. It swung its knives, kicked, bit. Marinette blocked the blows with her forearms-with Aubrey’s forearms-and Carrefour’s claws skittered off them, shredding the sleeves of Aubrey’s shirt, but doing no other damage that I could see. On the other hand, I couldn’t see that Marinette was doing more than holding Carrefour at bay. It was like watching lions fight. Huge beasts, filled with almost unimaginable violence, inhuman and strong and awful.

A movement caught my eye. One of the cultists- Omar, I thought-bent his arm, pressed his hand against the ground, rose up. Then a woman on the other side of me. And another. Changes were taking them as well as they stood witness to the battle. I saw Aunt Sherrie, but she had also become a horribly scarred woman with a baby in one arm and a wicked knife in the other. One of the men whose name I hadn’t known had a wide, jolly face, a tuxedo, and a clay pipe that he was smoking with the bowl turned down. Ex moved, crossed his arms, frowned. His skin was whiter than snow and glittered in light I couldn’t see. A fleur-de-lis was on his skin like a tattoo made from light.

As the transformations came, something in me grew very still, like a mouse trying not to be noticed by a gathering of cats. I had felt riders pressing at the fabric of the world, had felt them trying to force their way into my own flesh. I had never felt the raw power that stood around me.

And slowly, Carrefour became aware of it too. Its battle with Marinette became sloppier, more distracted. Marinette pressed its advantage, but it seemed to me it was more proving a point than trying to win. Carrefour broke off, backing away from the thing in Aubrey’s flesh. The man with the upside-down pipe shook his head in disgust.

“My brothers!” Carrefour said. “My brothers, I have returned. Rise up! Rise up with me!”

None of the loa moved. The expression on the thing’s face had gone from glee and killing rage to a mixture of sadness and fear, and I understood what I was seeing.

Carrefour had been sent out, away from its people, away from its family. It had been lost and alone in just the way it had isolated the men and women it rode. And here were its family, its friends, its community arrived together to cast it out again. I almost felt sorry for it.

But not quite.

“You broke faith. You took the part of the Graveyard Child against us,” a woman’s voice rolled in from my left. “And we cast you away. Now you return as our enemy once more.”

“No,” Carrefour cried. “No, I have come home.”

“You have killed Legba’s queen and sought the slaughter of the spirit itself,” the woman’s voice went on. “We condemn you, Carrefour. You have no place among us.”

“Gran Maitre!” Carrefour cried, but the words that followed were lost. The roar wasn’t sound or vibration, it wasn’t the rush of a waterfall or of flame. The unleashed will of the riders filled the crossroads, a maelstrom that tore like winds and pounded like a ship broken free of its mooring slamming itself against the dock. For a moment, I was lifted up on it, carried out of myself by just the backsplash from it. Magic spilled though the cracks between seconds, lit the individual atoms, screamed joy and vengeance and something more primal than either.

And then, from the center of the storm, silence. Or no, not silence, because I could hear the distant chirping of crickets. The battle between the loa might still be going on, but it had moved out of the crossroads, out of the world. Out of the thin sphere of human influence.

“Holy shit,” someone said from the darkness. The blasphemy had more sense of real awe than anything I’d ever heard in a church. “Oh holy shit.”

And then another voice cut through the darkness, high and thin as a violin bowing a single, plaintive note.

“Where am I?” Karen Black said. “Where am I?”

She was standing naked in the fog, her pale hair plastered to her head and neck. Her ice-blue eyes were wide and frightened. Blood was running freely from her shoulder where Mfume’s hooked chain had ripped the flesh, and from a dozen other shallow cuts. The red tendrils of it made me think of a dragonfly’s wing.

“Karen,” I said, levering myself up to squatting. My head swam. Sabine Glapion appeared at my side, free of her chains, and helped me stand. I felt eighteen kinds of damaged, but seeing Karen look at me, seeing her recognize me, seeing her remember was the worst thing that had happened all night.

“No,” she said, as if asking me for something. Begging.

I let Sabine walk me forward two exquisitely painful steps. Karen shook her head slowly, the blood draining from her already pale face.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Karen?”

Ex was behind her, a jacket open in his hands ready to cover her nakedness. Karen jumped away from him like she’d been stung. Ex tried to smile in reassurance, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He didn’t understand yet that the Karen he’d known was gone, but he suspected. I raised my hand, prepared to wave him back. Karen’s voice stopped me.

“I know you,” she said.

“Yes,” Ex said, holding out the jacket.

“We were lovers.”

Ex took a deep breath, maybe at the past tense she used, maybe at something else.

“Yes,” he said. “We were.”

“Kill me,” she said.

I winced. Ex tried again to give her the jacket and she wrenched it out of his hands and threw it into the darkness.

“Kill me,” she said, her voice stronger. “Kill me. You have to kill me!”

“It’s okay,” Ex said. “It’s over. It’s going to be all right.”

Karen was plucking unconsciously at her arms, trying to pull the skin off without knowing what she meant by it or why. Her eyes were distant, lost in years of memory that she was seeing with only her own mind for the very first time. Her eyes squeezed closed and she let out a keening wail. Ex looked to me and back at her, as helpless as I was.

“Karen,” Mfume said. “Stop this.”

He limped out from the fog. One arm still hung limp and dead at his side. He was covered in his own blood. I didn’t see any pain in his face, only a hard, insistent compassion. Karen tilted her head, disbelieving.

“You?” she said.

“Me,” he said gravely. “Also me. Everything Carrefour did to you, it also did to me. I know what is happening to you now, what it means to be free of it. It is the gift you once gave me.”

Aubrey came to my side, helping Sabine support me. I was getting a little light-headed.

“You don’t know,” Karen said. “You can’t. I laughed. I killed them, and while they died, I laughed. They were my parents.”

“You were forced to laugh,” Mfume said as he slowly, painfully pulled off his own overcoat. “It wasn’t your true feeling. It wasn’t real. This. Now. These feelings are real.”

“I killed them. Oh God, and I killed Michael.”

“You did,” Mfume said, kneeling beside her and draping the dark, bloody coat over her bare shoulders. “Only it wasn’t you. It was the demon that had taken your body and your will. You have done none of this.”

“Kill me,” Karen said. “Please kill me. You don’t understand. If you don’t, I’ll want it. I’ll want it back.”

“You will. And then, later, you won’t. I have been through all of this, and I can guide you through it too. Stay with me,” Mfume said. “If you cannot find peace, I will kill you myself.”

The tears streaming down her cheeks looked like gratitude.

“Promise me,” she said.

“I promise you,” Mfume said.

Karen reached up to him, and he leaned carefully forward, putting his arm around her, cradling her. Her arms lifted up around him, white against the black of his skin and the deep, uncompromising red of his blood-soaked shirt. The rest of us stood silently around them as Karen Black sobbed.

TWENTY-FIVE

How does anyone put a world back together? How does anyone begin again? When everything changes-changes for the better, changes for the worse, a little of both-it isn’t just the world that’s called into question. It’s you too. Who you are, and what that means.

The eight of us sat at the same table Karen had brought us to the first day in New Orleans. The same waiters brought us three huge platters of bright red crawfish. The breeze that stirred the palm fronds was warm, the light pressing down through the hazy late spring sky was probably going to sunburn my nose. If I hadn’t been