When I got up to throw away my coffee cup, Daria walked sleepily over to the table and crawled into her grandmother’s lap like a child half her age. The old woman or possibly the rider ran long, thin fingers over the girl’s back and shoulders, soothing her even as the debate raged on. I thought I saw tears in the young girl’s eyes. They should have been a warning.
“We can try it,” Dr. Inondé said. “The only danger is to you.”
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Um, sorry,” I said. “I was just over there. I missed that part. What danger?”
“I have some connection to the wards we put up,” Chogyi Jake said. “By using my mind as a focus point and Legba’s power channeled through me, we believe I can inhabit the original work and undo them.”
“Check,” I said. “And the danger part would be?”
“It leaves me open for a time,” Chogyi Jake said. “It is possible that in that period one of the loa or a different rider could take up residence in my body.”
“And what would we do about that?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake’s smile could have meant anything.
“It’s very unlikely to happen,” he said.
“Lock him in a refrigerator until we get Ex back,” Aubrey said.
“That sounds bad,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be good,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “I understand that the stakes are high. But the chances are good. It’s a risk worth taking. Safer, for example, than going to the safe house.”
The room quieted. I was the only one standing, and all the others were looking at me as if waiting for something. As if it was my call.
Which meant it was. If I said hell no, I wasn’t putting Chogyi Jake in harm’s way, it would have been off. If I gave the thumbs-up, then it would move forward, and the consequences would be at least partly mine to carry. It seemed unfair at first, but I’d been the one who paid Chogyi Jake’s bills. I was the one who’d entered into a pact with a voodoo demon. There was a pretty good argument to be made that I was the boss, and it made me wish I’d understood the mechanics of the thing better.
“It’s the right thing?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake shrugged.
“It is what it is,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Amelie Glapion put Daria down and reached for the metal cane that she once nearly killed me with. Sabine said she’d gather the others, Mfume walked to the back with a clear purpose in mind, and Chogyi Jake and Dr. Inondé started moving the table back against an empty wall. Aubrey walked to my side, his arms crossed. We hadn’t had time to talk, just the two of us, since I’d delivered the verbal smackdown on the boardwalk by the river. Four hours earlier. It seemed like four days.
His brow was furrowed, his lips pressed thin. I put my hand on his arm and he looked up at me like he’d just noticed I was there.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Like a mouse in a snake pit,” he said. “Jumpy as hell.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.”
“I don’t know how they do it. Mfume. Amelie Glapion. They had those things in their bodies with them for years. I had to go through it for, what? Six hours?”
“I think it’s different for everyone,” I said. “How they come to it. What the rider is, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That too. I mean… I look at Sabine. Specifically Sabine. And… I don’t know. It messes with my definitions.”
I looked over. The girl was back now, helping the drummers set up on the floor next to the cots. She was younger than any of them, but she acted like their natural superior, telling each where to sit, which way to face, which drum to hold.
“She’s a black sixteen-year-old girl in a city with no functioning infrastructure to speak of,” Aubrey said. “She’s got no parents. Her grandmother has had at least one stroke, and maybe several. She’s got a little sister to take care of.”
“And a demon growing inside her,” I said.
“But that’s the thing,” Aubrey said. “That’s what she has going for her. Without being heir apparent to the whole voodoo queen thing, she’d be totally screwed. You look at her situation on paper and you’d think here’s a girl who’s going to wind up as a prostitute or homeless or something really bad. But she won’t. She’ll wind up the voodoo queen of New Orleans. Her life is going to be better because of that thing in her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Sabine turned, looking past us, and waved at another of the cultists, her hand fluttering like a bird. The man trotted to her, his head bent at a deferential angle.
“Mutualism,” Aubrey said in a tone that meant Who’d have guessed it?
“Meaning?”
“Legba’s not a parasite,” he said. “Not technically. A parasite is either detrimental to its host or functionally neutral. Usually detrimental, if only because it’s diverting energy resources. But if it’s actually doing the host good, that’s not parasitism anymore. That’s part of a mutualistic relationship. There are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants, and the plants provide energy to the bacteria. Either one would fail without the other.”
The eldest drummer tapped a wide-mouthed pottery drum, a low, dry sound filling the room. He nodded to Sabine.
“I don’t know whether that makes me happy or creeps me out,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, either that means Sabine’s got a really nice rider and more power to her, or else the world is so fucked up that the best she can hope for is demonic possession.”
Aubrey took a deep breath, letting the exhalation filter slowly through his mouth and nose.
“Guess it’s how you look at it,” he said.
Amelie Glapion returned to the room. A young man at her side carried a bag of corn meal, and together they went to the cardinal directions, the man pouring out the bright yellow meal in shapes, figures, and ideograms of inhuman languages while Amelie and Legba within her intoned words and phrases that seemed to echo in a space larger than the room we were in.
As they progressed, the drummers took up the rhythm of the chant. Amelie Glapion moved from one veve to the next, taking small objects from her pockets—a crow’s foot curled against itself in death, a sprig of rosemary, a cheap one-shot whiskey bottle, a handkerchief smudged with lipstick and something else. Her head began to bob and weave in its unpleasant serpentine pattern, and the air around us thickened with invisible things. I could feel the riders gathering, pressing at the film between the real, physical world and the abstract nation behind and beside us. Aubrey felt it too, and his hand sought mine out.
Chogyi Jake stepped in from the back, naked, his head bowed. Someone had drawn symbols on his skin in bright paints. I recognized the fleur-de-lis on his shoulder, the searcher’s X on his breast, but there were at least a dozen others I didn’t know. He showed no discomfort at his nudity, but walked to Amelie Glapion, knelt before her with his eyes closed, and raised his palms to her. One of the cultist women yelled and began to sway. Others joined her.
“Kisa sa a ye?” Legba shouted, Amelie’s mouth widening more than the merely human would allow. “Kisa sa a ye!”
Mfume, across the room, sat cross-legged. A map was open on the floor before him, and he was passing his hands over it like he was feeling heat radiating from it. The dancing cultists shouted and whooped to the pulsing rhythm of the drums. Against my will almost, I found my body swaying too. My eyes closed almost without me, and I stepped out into the ceremony, drawing Aubrey along behind me.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what it meant, but the heat of the bodies before us, the pressure of Next Door, the danger and the lush, complex rhythm, the smell of fire and flesh, made it all feel right. One of the male cultists no older than I was had taken off his clothes, his dark skin shining with sweat. His erection seemed strangely comforting and familiar. It was a reminder that even among these spirits, we were first and foremost human; our animal nature made us part of this world, the physical, immediate, concrete. I heard myself shout, felt the rumble of the air in my throat.