Darker Angels

It was that there was so much to look at. To catalog and discover. But that wasn’t it either. Even as I tried out possible answers, I knew I was dancing around something. At the heart of it, the issue was more difficult and more painful.

My hands ached. Without realizing it, I had bunched them into fists so tight my knuckles were white. Chogyi Jake still hadn’t broken the silence.

Silence which shouldn’t have been there. The fountain, the wild brass band, the street noise. All of it was gone. My head jerked up. The lobby was perfectly still. Chogyi Jake’s mouth was half open, caught in the middle of his thought. His eyes were empty as a stuffed bear’s. The water from the fountain hung in the air like a thousand glass beads. Outside the window, a pigeon was suspended behind the glass in mid-flap.

A tiny sound-no more than the click of dry lips parting-rang out like a shot. I whirled.

The black woman I’d seen walking across the street stood at the foot of the stairs, leaning against her cane, regarding me sourly. She wore an old dress of brightly colored cotton, flowers blooming on her in red and green and orange. She’d taken off her hat, and gray hair framed her face like a storm cloud. Her lips had the lopsided softness of a stroke victim, but her eyes were bright with rage. When she spoke, her voice had the depth of a church bell and the threat of a power saw. It wasn’t the voice of a human being. It was one of them. A rider.

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

THREE

The last time I’d been in swinging distance of a rider, it tried to throw me off a skyscraper. The adrenaline hit my bloodstream as the first word left the thing’s mouth. My body leaped even before I knew I was going to do it, streaming through the unnaturally still air toward the thing in the woman’s flesh. I think I screamed. The paralyzed lips opened in what might have been a sneer, and the bright metal of the tripod cane knocked me against the wall like I was a softball.

My head rang. Blood tickled the nape of my neck. The woman was chanting something now, her head bobbing from side to side in a way that was both avian and serpentine. Something brown and gray dangled at the end of her thin hand. The air around me began to writhe. I’d felt this once before; the barriers between Next Door and our world growing thin. The things that lived on the wrong side were coming up toward me to feed. I gathered my will the way Ex and Chogyi had taught me, drawing myself up from the base of my spine, through my heart and throat and out, projecting my qi in a shout.

“Stop!”

The woman staggered, her chant losing its rhythm. The things pressing against reality fell back a little. I moved forward, wary of the reach of her cane. Around us, the world was still as statues. The woman bared her teeth. A vein bulged in her neck, straining with effort. The floor seemed to vibrate against my shoes. The woman raised her fists. Her left hand-the one not holding the cane-was limp, barely able to close.

“I will kill you,” she spat. “No sun gonna set on me.”

“Bite me,” I said.

She screamed, and a play of light came from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. It shimmered like sunlight reflected off the surface of a pool; fire and water made one. Mirrors and crystal chandeliers caught the light, shattered it and made it sharp. Something washed over me, and I staggered. My head was full of cotton, and the blood on the back of my neck burned my skin. Something deep in my belly flipped like a fish on the bottom of a boat. I fell to my knees and retched.

“I am not broken,” the thing said. “God himself cut His knuckles against me, but I am not broken. You nothing but a mongrel bitch, coming around here.”

I launched myself at her again, my shoulder low. She hadn’t expected it, and the cane whistled by my ear, cracking the marble floor where it struck. My shoulder took her in the knees and we tumbled together. She smelled like overheated motor oil, like fish and paprika, like rage. I had my hands around her snakeskin dry throat. She clawed at me, and I felt blood on my arm now too.

Her eyes fluttered and began to close. I was killing her. She was dying. I eased my grip a little, giving her a sip of air. Instead of breathing in, her body shifted under its skin. Bones cracked like a splitting rock as her jaw unhinged, her lower teeth and tongue hanging down almost to her collarbone, and a huge serpent slid out of her skin.

I jumped back, tripping over the bent cane. The snake was easily twelve feet long, thick as a weight-lifter’s leg, and its scales glowed from within. The woman’s skin lay abandoned on the floor behind it, black and ashen within the mocking brightness of its dress. The serpent turned black eyes toward me then flicked its head a degree to my left, its attention drawn by Chogyi Jake still motionless at the edge of the frozen fountain.

“Legba,” I said, not sure what I meant by it.

The snake turned back to me, powerful curves forming in its flesh as it gathered itself to strike. The fish in my belly flopped again, banging against my spine. I shook my head once. No.

We were as still as the world around us, statues in a field of statues. I felt my body steeling itself for violence, and the small place in my head where consciousness retreated at times like this noted that either I was about to die or the thing across the lobby was. Even money.

The shriek didn’t come from either of us. Grating, wordless, wet, the sound smelled like raw meat and pain. The shining serpent hissed, turned back upon itself, and sped into the fallen skin. The old woman was just beginning to stand when something flashed through the door. I had the impression of knives and pale skin and something soft and organic colored a red so deep it verged on purple.

The black woman turned, and her jaw still had the great snake’s needle teeth, her eyes still flat black. The blur spun past her, and I saw the impact on her body without ever seeing the blow. I rolled forward, scissoring my legs against hers, and the black woman stumbled.

I didn’t see her elbow twisting around until it hit my temple and the world went distant and dim. The snake-toothed mouth came down lightning fast, flashing toward my bared throat, but something pushed it aside. An impact like two trucks crashing head-on. The black woman went sprawling, then raised her twisted hands, shouted once, and was gone.

Sound returned, trombone and clarinet blaring with something like joy. In the fountain, water crashed and splattered. I heard Chogyi Jake say something like… I would need to understand… um. An unfamiliar arm was around my shoulders, strong and gentle. The scent of musk and hyacinth washed over me. My hair tugged a little at the back as I sat up, the blood adhering to the marble floor.

She was beautiful. The brightness in her blue eyes, the careless grace of her hair, the amusement that waited in the wings behind her smile. She wore a low-cut white lace blouse and black leather pants. No one looks good in leather pants, but she did.

“You must be Jayne,” she said. “I’m Karen Black.”

THE PRODUCTION number that followed would have been comic if I hadn’t ached from head to foot. The marble floor was broken where the rider had struck it, and Karen, thinking on her feet, had pointed to it as the thing that had tripped me. The concierge fluttered around me, hotel functionaries bringing wet cloth and hot tea, offering to call a doctor and fearing I’d call a lawyer.

Chogyi Jake knew better, having seen the flicker of lost time, but no one else questioned our version of events. By the time Aubrey and Ex came down, deep in conversation, the little gash on my head had stopped bleeding and the hotel management had dropped down from hyperventilating to concerned. Everyone got introduced around, but I had the strong impression that Karen was waiting to talk until we were someplace less public.

My first impulse was to go back to one of our rooms, but with all five of us, it seemed like a tight squeeze. Instead, Karen led us out of the hotel and into the French Quarter. I could tell the others-Ex especially-were bursting with questions. Anytime we got close to the subject of riders or magic, she steered us away.

We walked down Chartres toward Jackson Square, which was, Karen said, the center of the tourist trade. The streets were narrower than I’d imagined, and the balconies over the sidewalks made the buildings seem to lean across toward one another, as if they were greeting each other without including us. In the middle of a block, Karen steered us into a dark corridor with ancient wooden stairs clinging to one wall. We turned into the shadows under the stairway, walked down another shadowy corridor with ivy growing up the stucco on the right, and came out into a wide brick courtyard. Tables and chairs of wrought-iron filigree were scattered under wide, shady trees, and a white man in a soft linen shirt and pressed khakis appeared seemingly from the foliage itself to guide us to a table.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Karen said as we took our metal seats. “I’ve used this place before. They’re very good about leaving you alone when you want to talk. And the crawfish here are excellent.”

“Good to know,” Ex said through clenched teeth. “Now would someone tell me what the hell happened back there? Jayne tripped?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“It found her,” Karen said. “The rider I’ve been tracking down. It tried a preemptive strike.”

“Okay, hold on,” Aubrey said. “What exactly is this thing?”

“Have you ever heard of loa?” she asked.

“Afro-Caribbean gods,” Chogyi Jake said. “Voodoo spirits.”

“And a kind of rider,” Karen said. “The sphere of influence between Haiti, Cuba, and the southern coast of the United States is practically alive with them. I’ve tracked eight hundred cases of people being ridden by loa since I started paying attention.”

“Eight hundred?” Ex said.

“They aren’t all confirmed, but yes. That’s the ballpark. By which I mean eight hundred in the past ten years.”

Karen raised her hand, waving linen-shirt guy over. While the idea of that many riders sank in, she ordered three plates of crawfish and drinks for all of us. The man nodded and vanished. Around us, ferns and tree limbs bobbed gently in a soft breeze.

“Usually, they stick together,” she said. “There’s something about them that other riders don’t seem to like. The one I found in Portland had come from Port-au- Prince. If it hadn’t gotten so far out of its home territory, I might not have put it together.”

“What was it doing in Portland?” Aubrey asked at the same time I said, “How did it find us?”

Karen smiled and leaned forward. The neck of her blouse gaped a little, showing the curve of her breasts. Ex cleared his throat and looked away but she didn’t take notice.

“Just because the loa tend to stick together doesn’t make them a great big happy family,” she said. “There are struggles within the population. They form alliances with each other, they disrupt each other, they fight for power. For horses.”

“Horses meaning host bodies,” Aubrey said.

“Meaning victims,” Karen said. “The one I found had lost some kind of internal power struggle. It had been cast out.”

“Voodoo politics,” I said. “Sounds like high school. The unpopular demon has to go sit at a different lunch table.”