"I cast the stones, and then I pour this liquid over them. It is made from the leaves of the alamo tree, boiled in water. This will dispel evil. Then I say an invocation to Chang& kabio, kabio, site, and anoint them with rooster's blood."
"Okay . . . and what will this do?"
"It will tell me if any manifestation of Chango is here. Just watch and wait."
Decker hunkered down beside her. She pulled the stopper out of the bottle of blood and sprayed it across the stones like a priest spraying holy water. "Kabio, kabio, sile," she repeated. "Kabio, kabio, sile."
They waited for over a minute. The thunder rumbled again, and this time it echoed through the cellar as if it had come from somewhere below the ground, rather than the sky.
"I guess he's not here after all," Decker said.
"Wait. This always takes a little time."
Another minute passed, but then Decker heard a faint sizzling sound. He sniffed, and he could not only smell damp, and dried-out herbs, but a burned smell, like meat stock burning on the side of a cooking pot. He shone his flashlight on the thunderstones and saw that the rooster blood was drying up and bubbling, and giving off smoke. The thunderstones themselves had turned gray, and one or two of them were beginning to glow red-hot.
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"Changó is here," Queen Aché said, emphatically. "You're sure about that?"
"Look for yourself. Look at the stones."
One by one, the stones turned to scarlet, and Decker could feel the heat they were giving off, the same dry heat as a sauna. "Chango's power is attracted to this ebbó. He is showing us that he is close by."
"Yes, but where?"
"You won't be able to see him, but I will. I will call on Yemayá to help me against my enemies, and to give me strength."
With that, she reached into her satchel again and brought .4 out a plastic bag, neatly folded and tied with blue tape. She untied the tape and opened the bag, revealing a small silvery-scaled fish. She took out yet another bottle and poured a thin, sticky liquid over the fish. "Sugarcane syrup," she explained. Then she dropped seven shiny pennies onto it.
"Yenya orisha obinrin dudukueke re maye avaya mi re oyu . . ." she sang, closing her eyes and swaying her head from side to side.
Hicks looked at Decker uneasily. "I hope we're not getting ourselves into something we can't get out of." "Like I said, sport, we don't have any choice."
Hicks's cell phone rang again, but when he took it out to answer it, Decker said, "Leave it. It's only Cab getting close to boiling point."
" . . lojun oyina ni reta gbogbo okin nibe iwo ni re elewo nitosi re omo teiba modupue iya mi."
Queen Aché stopped swaying and opened her eyes. She arched her head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then she said, flatly, "Yemayá is with me."
Decker looked at her, and then took off his glasses and looked at her even more closely, because there was no question at all that something had possessed her. It was difficult
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to pin down exactly what it was. But she seemed to radiate an extraordinary energy, and when he took a step closer to her he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising up, as if he were standing close to an electrical transformer. She turned to look at him, and although she was still Queen Aché, with that high forehead and those erotically drooping eyelids and those full, slightly parted lips, there was another face within her face, a face that was calm and stony-eyed and infinitely old.
Decker realized that, at secondhand, he was looking at the face of an orisha, a goddess from the earliest days of African civilization, a creator of dynasties and magic. He had been frightened before. His nightmares about the Battle of the Wilderness had frightened him. But nothing had ever frightened him like this: the realization that there was a world in which the dead could live forever, and that men could walk through walls, and that none of the laws of possibility meant anything at all.
He was suddenly reminded of Eduard Munch's painting of The Scream—the utter terror of finding out that life has no boundaries whatever.
"What now?" he asked Queen Aché.
"We find out where your So-Scary Man is concealing himself."
She picked up the apples one by one and placed them on the hot thunderstones. They sizzled and blistered, and gave off a thick, caramel-smelling smoke.
"Lead me now to Changó," Queen Ache said. "Lead me through the paths of Changó Ogodo, Alufina Crueco, Alafia, Larde, Obakoso, Ochongo, and Ogomo Oni. Lead me through all his various disguises: Saint Barbara and Saint Marcos de Leon and Saint Expeditus."
Up until now, the smoke had been billowing upward, but as Queen Ache continued her chanting it began to drift to‑
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ward the opposite side of the cellars. It coiled its way past the stalagmite dwarfs, and then it seemed to disappear into the darkness, as if somebody were pulling a long gray chiffon scarf through a keyhole.
"He's there. Chango can't resist the smell of apples."
Decker unholstered his gun, but Queen Aché laid her hand on top of his. "You must understand that you cannot kill Chango. You can only kill Major Shroud."
"He'll do, for starters."
"But you cannot kill Major Shroud while Changó still possesses him."
"So how can we stop him?"
"In Santeria, we believe that everybody has an eleda. It means their head, or their mind, but it also means their guardian angel. In Major Shroud's case, his guardian angel is Changó. While Changó is alert, he will protect Major Shroud against any attack. But eledas can grow hungry, and need feeding and entertainment. If you invoke Chango, and give him a plaza, an offering of fruit and candy, and light some candles for him, he should be distracted long enough for you to kill Major Shroud."
She dug farther into her satchel and pulled out another cotton bag, tied with red and white string. "I brought apples, and bananas, and herbs, too. Rompe zaraguey and bledo punzó."
"And candles?"
"Of course." She produced three church candles, tied together with red ribbon.
Decker took the bag and the candles and pushed them into his pockets. "You're not really doing this because I threatened to shoot you, are you?"
Queen Aché gave him a strange smile, and he was sure that he could see Yemaya smiling, too, behind the mask of Queen Aché's face.
"When there is no man who can stand up against you,
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Lieutenant, what is left? You have to test your strength against the gods."
"Haven't you ever—"
"Relied on anyone? Yes. Once. But one morning we both woke up and knew that I had grown stronger than him, and so he packed his bag and left without saying a single word."
"Do you know how much I hate you for what you did?"
"No, Lieutenant, I don't. I never loved anybody as much as that."
Hicks was shining his flashlight in the far corner of the cellars, where the smoke was hurrying away; "There's an opening here, Lieutenant. Part of the wall's collapsed."
Decker came over to join him. Just past the dwarfish stalagmites was a narrow alcove, and most of the brickwork at the back of it had fallen inward. It looked like the wall in which the drunken Fortunato had been bricked up alive, in Edgar Allan Poe's story The Cask of Amontillado. "For God's sake, Montresor!"
When he probed his flashlight into the back of the alcove, Decker could see that it led to a cavity between the station walls. The cavity was only a little more than two feet wide, but in between the walls the rubble had fallen to form a kind of staircase, leading down. The smoke was steadily sliding in the same direction.