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 Jayné 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.
“You are Eric’s family, aren’t you?” she said. “All right. On the one hand, this is Glapion’s territory. She knows the city, and the rider has power here. On the other hand, if we send Sabine out of the city, someone has to go to guard her. Also… well, I didn’t work many kidnapping cases, but the common wisdom at Quantico was that most of the abductees that escape do it when they’re in transit. There are a lot of variables in moving people around, especially when they don’t want to be moved.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Okay, so that’s job one.”
“And transportation,” Ex said. “Aubrey’s right. We need something to move the girl in once we have her. Unless we’re taking the kid on the bus.”
“Do we have a good way to put wards on a van?” I asked.
“I’ll look into it,” Chogyi Jake said.
“All right,” I said. “How about this. Chogyi gets in touch with the property manager in London and gets whatever we need shipped out here. Karen? You’ve been local. Can you and Ex arrange the transportation?”
“Sure,” Karen said. I had the feeling that her amusement was tempered with respect, and the idea warmed me a little. The truth was I was showing off, taking charge like I was the Godfather. It wasn’t how I usually operated.
“If I’m buying something off the lot, I’ll need the Darth Vader card,” Ex said, meaning my American Express Black.
“Too showy,” I said. “We don’t really want to be memorable. You guys scout it out. If it’s cheap enough to do out of petty cash, just grab it. If we need something new, I’ll have the lawyers make the purchase through a shell corporation.”
“Right,” Ex said. “I’ll need a way to go shopping in the first place. Should we take the rental?”
“I’ll drive,” Karen said. “I know a chop shop that sells a lot of gray-market cars.”
I nodded, gratified that Karen was going along with my plan.
“Aubrey and I can hit the real estate sites, do some driving, see what we can find for a safe house.”
I pulled my cell phone out of my pack and checked the time. Three thirty, local. In Athens, it was pushing midnight. I felt fine at the moment, but experience suggested that I had maybe four more hours before jet lag kicked in. After that, I’d have about three working neurons, max.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “How about we do what we can between now and seven o’clock. Then meet back at the hotel, compare notes?”
Aubrey raised his hand like a kid in a classroom.
“You were attacked by a very powerful rider a little over an hour ago,” he said. “Are you sure we should scatter out in all directions?”
I hesitated. The rational, thoughtful part of my mind saw the point, and I had to admit it was a good one. But it also took apart everything I’d just proposed. I was not going to be humiliated in front of Karen.