I surprised myself by grinning. Its eyes flickered past me, down into the quiet of the suspended street. I could hear its breath, the low growl haunting the back of its throat. Sabine was getting away, and I could see the frustration in its face. A sense of profound peace came through my body, lifting and consoling me. My broken chest and mutilated arm hurt, but the pain didn’t mean the same thing anymore. Even before I moved, I felt the violence spinning up within me like the singing of a choir. This, I thought, was what it must feel like to die.
I dove to the side, hands grasping the pole that held the sidewalk awning, and wrenched from my gut. The wood splintered in my hand, coming away like plucking a blade of grass. I landed in the street, club in hand, one leg back one forward. I felt angelic. I felt beautiful.
The thing turned, and this time the wood caught its claws. I darted in, hammering its shoulder with my fist, then danced back as it howled. The still rain hung around me like a veil. I battered the thing with a flurry of strikes, knee, chest, shoulder, belly. For a moment, I thought I might actually win.
It swung, and I fell for the feint, bringing my club to stop a blow that wasn’t there. Its leg shot out, catching me just above the knee, and I stumbled with the sudden agony.
I saw the killing blow as it came. Knife-sharp claws carving the air, arcing toward my exposed throat. I wasn’t going to be able to block it. I had no leverage to twist aside. I hardly had time to gasp.
But the blow didn’t land. Something bright appeared at the thing’s wrist, and the claws pulled wide, shredding my sleeve as I fell, but not breaking skin. From the black, shining pavement, I looked up.
A man stood in the middle of the sidewalk, a great black coat hanging from his shoulders like the robe of some exotic priest. His black skin shone like he was lit from within, and the close-cut gray of his hair was like a scrim of silver cloud in the night sky. A chain hung from his hand with a vicious hook at one end. The hook that had pulled the creature’s attack aside.
“Not tonight, my friend,” the man said in a Caribbean accent as I struggled back to my feet. His voice was velvet and stone.
The thing turned to him, then to me, then roared in defiance and frustration. I steeled myself for a fresh attack, but my leg wasn’t quite where I thought it was. It didn’t matter. The beast raised its arms, vanished, and the raindrops hammered onto the street. After the unreal silence, the storm was deafening.
I didn’t realize I was collapsing until I was down, the asphalt rough and comfortable against my cheek. I coughed, almost certain that the warmth in my throat wasn’t blood. I rolled to my back, watching the rain fall from the distant clouds down onto my face like a manga cliché.
Sabine Glapion appeared, looming over me. She was soaked, her blouse clinging to her skin, her eyes wide and horror-struck.
You’re in danger, I tried to say. Maybe you noticed. Nothing intelligible came out. Then the black man was kneeling beside me. He had a long, careworn face, and a dark scar ran across one cheek.
“Don’t move,” he said, all concern and soft vowels. “You’re hurt. You need a doctor.”
“Y’think?” I managed, and he smiled a wide, warm, goofy grin. I lay back, darkness crowding the edges of my vision. The last coherent thought I had before I passed out was, Oh shit. That’s Joseph Mfume.
FOURTEEN
In the years before I left home, I went to the emergency room exactly once. Christmas Day, when I was twelve, I had a stomach flu so bad I was getting dehydrated. My father put me in the car, gave me a towel to puke into, and drove me to the ER where they drugged my guts into submission and kept me alive with an IV drip. By the time I got home, my brothers had opened all my presents for me.
Since inheriting Uncle Eric’s money, I’d spent a lot more time in the hospital recovering from wounds of my own and caring for the people who’d been hurt working with me. Swimming back to consciousness, I recognized the dim fluorescent twilight, the smell of antiseptic, the squeak of nurses’ shoes against linoleum. I tried to remember what had happened. A car wreck? No. Someone had stabbed me. Or something.
I tried to sit up and my left side from collarbone to hip lit on fire. I fell back to the bed, gasping. The ceiling above me was all-white acoustical tile. I came a little more awake. My right arm was bandaged. My left knee was swollen to about twice its normal size. I probed my ribs gently through the thin blue hospital gown. My right side felt merely sore and angry. I only tried touching the left side once.
Joseph Mfume. I’d been fighting with something—a rider in its full, unhidden form—and I’d been saved by the serial killer and rapist who’d started the whole messy thing. I remembered Sabine Glapion standing in the unfalling rain of the crossroads between the real world and Next Door. Well, she’d still been alive last time I saw her, so that had to be a good thing. I craned my neck, but there were no clocks. I needed to find out how long I’d been there. I needed to find out where exactly I was, for that matter.
I needed to find Aubrey and Ex and Chogyi Jake. The best I could manage was a nurse call button. After what felt like an hour, I hit it again. A couple hours after that, a nurse came, explained to me that I had hairline fractures in two of my ribs, soft tissue damage to the connective tissue in my knee, and they’d stapled my arm closed where it had been cut. When I asked him who’d brought me in, he didn’t know. When I asked for my stuff, he said he’d try to find it. He pronounced my name “Jane” and I didn’t correct him.
A couple junior cups of fruit juice later, I was feeling almost human. The so-called hairline fractures hurt like hell anytime I moved or laughed or breathed in too deep, but I took comfort in the intellectual knowledge that they only felt shattered. I forced myself to sit up, then slowly, carefully, figured out how I could walk without mind-altering pain. By the time a different nurse appeared with my things, I could see the first, faint light of dawn in the windows.
My clothes were gone, cut off me by the paramedics. My laptop case was rain-soaked, but the interior looked dry enough that it might have escaped harm. The leather backpack I used as a purse was probably trashed. The scraps of paper inside were all waterlogged, and Dr. Inondé’s unpleasant little gris-gris had leaked something gray and filmy over the interior pouch. I checked my cell phone’s side pocket with a sense of dread. What I took for dead was actually just turned off, and when I powered it back up, it seemed fine. I had five messages waiting for me. I sat on the threadbare chair by the window, the hospital gown wrapped tightly around me in an attempt to preserve what was left of my modesty, and called voice mail.
“Jayné,” Aubrey said at about the time I’d been talking with Dr. Inondé. “You hopped out of the house for a few minutes over an hour ago. What’s going on? Call me as soon as you get this.”
Then, more faintly, Ex said, She’s not answering? and before Aubrey could reply, the message ended.
Oops, I thought, my belly tightening with guilt. In addition to getting my ass handed to me, I had probably just put my friends through a night of pure hell.
The next message was a few minutes later.
“Jayné,” Aubrey said. “I’ve just called every Starbucks I can find in the phone book, and you don’t seem to be at any of them. We’re sending out a search team in the van. Call as soon as you get this message.”