Darker Angels

“More like gangs fighting over turf,” Karen said. “They might shoot each other to control some particular street corner, but if an outsider comes into the city, they’ll all band together against it. Even with the internal struggles, there’s a protection that comes from being part of the community. Exile strips them of it.”

“So the loser rode Joseph Mfume out to Portland,” Ex said.

“Where it tried to establish territory of its own,” Karen said with a nod.

“What can you tell us about how this particular rider behaves?” Aubrey asked, shifting forward in his seat.

Before Karen could answer, the waiter returned, a second man trailing behind him. They carried three wagon-wheel large platters that, when they put them on the table, almost didn’t leave room for the drinks. At least a hundred tiny red bodies were curled in each one along with small bowls of red sauce and melted butter. Karen scooped one up, pulled off the tail and sucked at the remaining body chitin. A slow smile spread across her lips as she dropped the empty crustacean back on the plate and started stripping the shell from the tail meat.

“You just don’t get these in Boston,” she said. “Lobster, yes. Clams. Crab. But there’s nothing like Louisiana crawfish.”

I picked one up. Its dead eyes reminded me of the shining snake’s.

“Pinch the tail off and suck the head,” Karen said with a smile.

Well, if she could do it…

The hard red shell pressed against my lips, and something hot and salty slid into my mouth. I was prepared to gag, but it tasted good. I considered the small red crustacean skull with pleased surprise.

“You were asking about the rider,” Karen said to Aubrey, making the statement an apology. “It’s a subtle form. It doesn’t kill the horse or displace its soul, just lives in the back of his head and changes him. In this case, it changes him into a serial killer.”

“To what end?” Chogyi Jake asked, picking up a crawfish of his own.

“Don’t eat that one,” Karen said. “If the tails aren’t curled, it means they were already dead when they went in the boiler. To what end… I think it’s a way to enforce isolation. Mfume started with his fiancee, for example. It eliminates the people who are nearest to it. Kills the people the horse loves.”

“In order to protect itself from being discovered,” Aubrey said.

“Or to break the spirit of the person being ridden,” Ex said. “If it doesn’t displace the original personality, then Mfume was there. He was watching himself rape and slaughter his lover, and didn’t know it wasn’t him doing it.”

“Exactly,” Karen said. “He felt the excitement. The pleasure. He had all the release that a normal human killer has. By the time he understood what was really happening, it was too late. He was crazy.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He figured it out? He knew?”

“He did,” Karen said. “It’s how I knew that it wasn’t over. Even after we caught him, we’d only caught the body. The horse. When it left his body, Mfume told me everything. He begged me to find it for him.”

“To kill it,” I said.

“To bring it back to him,” Karen said. “By the time it was over, he was in love with it.”

“Okay, huge ick factor,” I said.

“I’ve been tracking this thing for the last decade, one city to another,” Karen said. “Six months ago, it finally came back home to the land of voodoo. Something happened within the loa that either lifted its exile or made it impossible to enforce.”

“Something about the hurricane,” I said, thinking of Eric’s ruined house and the devastation that surrounded it. The strange X mark on the door. The ring like a dirty bathtub that marked the buildings we’d seen driving in. High water.

“Possibly,” Karen said, soberly.

“How did it find Jayne,” Ex asked. “She’s very difficult to locate magically. This thing must have an angle.”

“At a guess?” Karen said. “The same way I found it. The little sister. You have to understand that the loa have been building voodoo cults in New Orleans for centuries. Things have happened here. Powerful, unnatural things. It’s changed the nature of space. The world’s thin here.

“There’s a girl. Daria Glapion. She has the Sight. Call it limited precognitive ability. Sometimes people know things that there’s no particular reason they should know. She told me that her sister was going to be the rider’s next victim. Eaten by a snake was what she called it, but I knew what that meant. Maybe better than she did.”

“And she spilled the beans about us,” Ex said.

“Again, possibly without knowing what she meant,” Karen said. “The rider is in her grandmother. Amelie Glapion, self-styled voodoo queen of New Orleans. Glapion has been heading one of the local voodoo cults for years. Her family has a history with the loa. When the rider came back, it took her. It was something I suspected, but it’s hard to prove. Until I managed to meet the little girl, I wasn’t sure.”

Karen looked angry. More than angry. Her eyes had a focused, controlled hatred. I remembered how the snake had fled when Karen came to my rescue. Seeing her now, I thought the thing hadn’t run fast enough, and if it wasn’t still fleeing, it was only from ignorance. That thought sparked another in a little cascade of mental dominoes.

“Hey,” I said. “How did you know where to find us?”

“I called her,” Aubrey said, sounding something between defensive and surprised. “That was the plan wasn’t it? We settled in, then we called Karen.”

Her contact number had been on the report, it was true. And I’d had the lawyers cc all the guys. I’d assumed that I would be the one to make contact, since I was the one with Eric’s cell phone. It wasn’t anything I’d explicitly said. It wasn’t even something I’d really thought about, and yet something about it unnerved me. Something about Aubrey choosing this moment to take initiative with one of our plans. With seeing those pictures of Karen and being moved to call her.

Karen’s perfect blue eyes flickered between me and Aubrey, reading the subtext like it was written in foot-tall flaming letters.

“I should have confirmed with you,” Karen said to me. “It was thoughtless of me.”

“No,” I said, waving it away with a laugh. “No, Aubrey’s right. That was absolutely the plan. I just didn’t know we’d done it.” I picked up another crawfish and snapped its head free. “It’s cool.”

“Good that he did,” Ex said, maybe a little more sharply than was strictly needed. “If Karen hadn’t arrived in time to intervene, things could have gotten ugly.”

I felt the urge to defend myself, but I wasn’t quite sure what from. I wanted to say that I’d been holding my own against the rider. That it was just fine with me that someone else had called Karen and told her where we were. Without telling me. I didn’t have a problem with any of it. Chogyi Jake coughed once, then folded his hands on the table. His sweet, enigmatic smile could have meant anything.

“There’s more than enough room for ugly still to come,” Karen said. “Glapion knows we’re here. We don’t have a lot of time if we’re going to do what we need to do.”

We turned toward her like sunflowers on a bright day. Even me.

“The victim is going to be Glapion’s other granddaughter. Not Daria, but Sabine,” Karen said. “We can take it as given that Sabine isn’t going to accept the idea that her loving grandmother is about to become a soulless killer.”

“How do we address that?” Ex asked, and I was a little disturbed by the we until Karen smiled. I was being paranoid and territorial and weird. I was tired. None of this was her fault.

“Normally, I’m a strong advocate of people’s freedoms and right to self-determination,” Karen said. “This is an exception.”

“We kidnap Sabine,” Chogyi Jake said.

“We do,” Karen said. “And when she’s safe, we get the grandmother, extract the rider, and kill it.”

FOUR

“We need to know where the girl’s going to be,” Ex said. “When, where. What kind of protection. Does Grandma Glapion have guards on the girl.”

“And a van,” Aubrey said. “Something like Chogyi Jake’s old clunker. No windows. That’ll be important, right?”

Karen held up her hand, palm out. The smile at the corner of her mouth deepened slightly.

“We can’t just go snatch the girl off the street tonight,” she said.

“The more time we take-” Ex began.

“The more prepared we are when it happens,” Karen said. “Let’s say we do the thing right now. Go get the girl, throw her in the back of a rental. Great. Now we’ve got an angry teenage girl in the car. What exactly do you plan to do with her? And keep in mind, we’re actually committing a felony when we do that. The police aren’t going to take ‘we’re protecting her from her demon-ridden family’ as a serious defense.”

“And,” Chogyi Jake said slowly, thinking through the words as he said them, “it isn’t as though the rider is without resources. It found Jayne even before she knew where she was going to be.”

“The Sight isn’t encyclopedic,” Karen said. “Daria doesn’t see everything, and what she does see, she often won’t understand. But yes, we can assume that Glapion will foresee at least some of our plans.”

Aubrey leaned forward, brow furrowed. Ex frowned and crossed his arms.

“We need a safe house,” I said. “Someplace we can keep her. And we’ll want to put wards on it. Like what Eric had on the house in Denver. Something to make us hard to find. Chogyi Jake? You were the one who kept those going. Do you think you could do it again?”

There was a moment’s pause. Overhead, a bird rattled and took wing. Chogyi Jake nodded.

“It would take time,” he said. “And there is a wooden chest in the London townhouse that would be… very useful.”

“Okay. So magical stuff from London and a place to use it. Check. Karen? Did you have a place in mind for the safe house?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I was torn between having something here in or very close to New Orleans and taking Sabine entirely out of the picture.”

“Okay,” I said, “tell me about that. What are the issues?”

The sly smile bloomed into laughter.