“By this time, Carrefour was manifesting within my flesh whenever it saw fit. Angry, I would grow bigger. Wider. I split my pants and shredded my shirts. My hands would sprout knives. And it walked in the crossroads. I could stop the world. Go where I wanted. Take what I pleased. When I found that we could do that, Carrefour and I, I thought that we would never be stopped. But it was reluctant to use that power.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I think it was afraid of being found by others like itself,” Mfume said. “The crossroads is the natural habitat of riders, and Carrefour was always very aware of being in exile, away from its home. Unsafe. And it was that hesitance that saved me.
“I don’t know precisely how they found me out, but I can’t imagine it was that difficult. I was past concerning myself with hiding evidence or trying to behave unsuspiciously. One morning, I rose, showered, dressed, and stepped out of my door into a trap. Half a dozen people surrounded me, guns drawn, screaming that I should lay down on the ground. I could feel Carrefour’s surprise, its anger. It was preparing to step into the crossroads, and to all of those good people it would have seemed that I had simply vanished. But Karen acted on instinct. She dove for me, wrestled me to the ground. And in the struggle, I bit her. I tasted her blood, and Carrefour took its opportunity. Between one breath and the next, it was gone.”
“When Karen talked about the rider,” Chogyi Jake said. “She said that even once it had moved to a new host, its former victim was loyal to it. That you loved it.”
“Of course I did,” Mfume said. “It had been the only thing that could bring me peace. For years, it had insulated me from the worst of my pain, my guilt, my horror. And then I was left not just alone, but empty. Hollow. Carrefour was a dark and terrible God, but it was mine. And God had abandoned me.
“At the trial, I saw it. She testified, and I saw it in her eyes, looking out at me as it once had from the mirror over my sink. I cried out. I begged,” Mfume said, then chuckled. “The judge told me that if I wanted to get an insanity plea, I would need to become a much better actor. She had, I think, very little sympathy for my situation.”
“And so jail,” I said.
“Just so,” he said. “I was sent to the state penitentiary. I was monitored throughout the day and night. I could not eat except when I was told. I could not walk for exercise except when I was told. I had no clothes of my own. No books of my own. My family would not speak to me. They were ashamed and frightened. Of course they were. What else could they have felt? Alone, abandoned, imprisoned, crushed by grief and guilt and horror, I also came to understand that I felt more free than I had in years. Even in the nights when I woke weeping and calling for Carrefour to return to me, I was slowly, painfully, becoming myself again.
“I had once aspired to become a lawyer, and so I knew how to study. I read widely on spirits and possession. Most of what I found was useless, but now and then, there would be something that spoke to my experience. You can’t imagine how strange it felt to find references to Legba and the loa and to confirm all the things I had imagined at the time to be my own private ravings. I came to understand what I had been, and what had been done to me. I came to see that what had happened to those women had not been my doing. That I was not a monster.”
“But Karen,” Aubrey said. “She had it now.”
“Yes,” Mfume said. “The penal system has very few avenues for the prisoners to keep tabs on the police, but I did what I could. I heard about it when Karen left the FBI, and I sent her letters. I begged her to see me. When she did not, I wrote to her partner, Michael Davis. I thought it was a hopeless attempt, but he came. He spoke to me.
“He had seen the changes in her. The anger, the sense of having been betrayed. When he had first met her, she had been the consummate professional, her personal life kept at home. Since apprehending me, those boundaries had begun to break down. She had become sexually aggressive in ways that alienated her from her colleagues. He saw her manipulating the people around her to no clear end. Every time he reached out to her, he had been refused or redirected. When I told him what had happened, he didn’t want to believe me. But two months later, he returned. I don’t know what had happened, but he knew that Karen was no longer herself.”
“And then she killed him,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she burned her parents to death too.”
“Yes, I heard of that,” Mfume said. “There was very little I could do. I was a convict. A serial killer in jail without hope of parole. I was on record saying that I had been possessed by a demon. I was like the Groucho Marx joke. I wouldn’t trust anyone idiotic enough to find me credible. And so… I escaped.”
“Okay, you could expand on that a little,” I said. “You just said, Wait, this sucks, and walked out?”
“At my prison, there was a meditation group. An outreach to help people within the system become well. I joined it at first because I wanted to find some purely psychological peace. But as I coordinated my reading on the loa, my practice with the group, and my experiences being ridden by Carrefour, I found a way to walk in the crossroads.”
“You taught yourself magic?” Aubrey said.
“There is a certain amount of spare time in prison,” Mfume said. “And I was better prepared than most. I used what I learned. And one day, yes. I walked out. Since then I have been hunting Carrefour, but it has Karen now, and she is a very clever, very resourceful woman. When I learned that the hurricane had injured Carrefour’s enemies, I felt certain that the rider couldn’t resist. I came here, made contact with Legba, and offered my services in exchange for its aid.”
He spread his hands to show the world before us, the dark streets glittering with lights, the black sky glowing.
“Okay,” I said. “But how come I was able to get involved when it tried to kill Sabine?”
“You have also lived in the crossroads,” he said. “Learned how to step between the moments.”
“Yeah, only no. I really haven’t,” I said. “Seriously, I didn’t know about any of this a year ago.”
“Her uncle put some protections on her,” Aubrey said.
Mfume looked from one of us to the other and shook his head.
“I know of no protections that would do what you describe, but my knowledge is… opportunistic. I am no master of this art.”
“What does Carrefour want?” Chogyi Jake said.
“I didn’t know its agenda until I came here,” Mfume said. “Not precisely. I knew it hated Legba above all other loa, but not why. I knew it sought to return to its place. Having spoken to Amelie and her granddaughters, I believe I understand now, but you must take everything I say on this for what it is: my best guess.”
“Consider the caveat emptored,” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“Legba is also a master of the crossroads. It controls the path by which loa pass into human bodies, and it is the gatekeeper between the loa and all other riders. It has terrible power, but it is also weak in some ways. It is more involved with humanity than other loa. It is connected to the world in a way the others—even Carrefour—are not. Each person Legba enters into, it never leaves. It dies with them.”
“That’s a shitty design,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Aubrey said. His voice was stronger than I’d expected. Less shaken. “It’s normal. Pretty much any terminal or chronic disease works the same way. When a tuberculosis patient dies, all the bacteria in their lungs go with them. The point is to get daughter organisms out before that happens. To spread.”
“And so,” Chogyi Jake said, “Sabine.”
“Sabine,” Mfume agreed.
“But Legba’s still in Amelie,” I said. “Sabine’s not being ridden yet, right?”