She was rubbing her hands together in delight. I’d always thought that was a figure of speech. Ex looked serious, but an echo of Karen’s smile haunted the corners of his mouth, her pleasure reflecting off him like sunlight off the moon in a reminder of their relationship. It bothered me that it bothered me.
“We should still try to draw the girl out,” Ex said. “Legba is going to have wards on the apartment just
the way we do. Only since it’s a rider, they’re likely to be . . . unpleasant.”
“Good point,” Karen said. “We need a way to get her out of the building. Something that she can’t ignore. Fire, maybe.”
Chogyi Jake squinted and frowned. A particularly loud gust of wind rattled the back door. I didn’t know I intended to speak until I did it.
“I think we should warn her.”
Karen frowned.
“Who?” she said.
“Sabine. If she’s in danger, she should know. If she understands what’s going on, she can help us. Work with us.”
“Why would she do that?” Ex said. “Some stranger off the street comes in and tells her not to trust her own grandmother?”
I hesitated, trying to focus my thoughts.
“Sabine must have seen the changes in her. I mean that’s the point, isn’t it? Legba was exiled, and now, after the hurricane, it’s back. Amelie must have changed. The way she acts. The things she can do. Legba can’t have been in her for more than two and a half years, I mean at the outside. And probably not as long as that, or Sabine would be dead by now, right?”
“I don’t think we can assume that Sabine will have noticed a difference,” Karen said.
“And Daria,” I said, momentum carrying me
over Karen’s objection. “I mean she’s got this weird precognitive thing going on. She can’t be on Legba’s side either. Doesn’t it make sense to try to get both of them, Sabine and Daria, on our side?”
“That isn’t how this works,” Karen said. “We don’t tip our hand. We don’t warn them. Once Sabine is locked up safe, we can—”
“And what about Daria?” I said. “If Legba kills off the people closest to the horse, you know, isolates it? Then why wouldn’t Daria be in just as much trouble as Sabine?”
“Jayné,” Ex said. Two familiar syllables, but they hit like a slap. “Karen has been tracking this rider for years. She’s the expert. If she says this is how the thing behaves, we can safely assume that it’s how the thing behaves.”
“I was just asking,” I said.
“You’re right to ask,” Karen said. “It’s just that we can’t reinvent the wheel here. We don’t have time.”
“I don’t know,” Aubrey began.
“Trust me,” Karen said. “I know what I’m doing. If we can get Sabine away and safe, Legba will go crazy looking for her. It will overextend. That’s when we can take it.”
Karen laid out the plan, rough though it was. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake would watch the Voodoo Heart Temple, take notes, and build a profile of Sabine’s actions. Ex and Karen and I would finish the work on the cargo van. We had magical wards on
it, but we still needed to black out the windows and install handcuffs in the back to keep Sabine under control until we could get her to the prison shed out back. All through the conversation, Karen found opportunity and reason to touch Ex—leaning over a diagram of traffic in the French Quarter, her hand on his shoulder; sitting beside him on the couch, their thighs pressed together.
I got up and quietly walked out the back door. Night had fallen, but the wind hadn’t died down. It drove last autumn’s leaves across the grass and pushed my hair into my mouth. It played the trees like some huge, organic reed instrument; a saxophone playing free jazz until my ears wanted to bleed. I walked around the shed, pretending to look for places that Sabine might escape.
I wanted Aubrey to come out, to find me. To tell me I wasn’t being stupid, that there was something worth thinking about in my questions. I told myself that my hurt feelings were just jet lag paranoia.
A year before, I hadn’t even known that riders existed. Karen was seasoned and experienced; an expert. The expert. If she didn’t think my objections were worth considering, maybe I was being stupid, and was just too stupid to know it.
I’d gotten just about to the point of leaving Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake to work with Karen while I went off to some kind of home for the mentally deficient when I heard the footsteps on the path. For a
half second, I thought it was Aubrey. Another footfall, like a word in a familiar voice, told me otherwise.
“You walked out,” Chogyi Jake said over the sound of the wind. “You’re angry.”
“Yeah, well . . .” I said.
Chogyi Jake nodded, squinting up into the darkness. Clouds scudded across the sky, glowing a dull orange from the city lights. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t either. His presence by my side felt like an affront at first. Who was he to come out and disturb my solitude? I didn’t come breathe down his neck while he was meditating. Was it so much to ask for a little time for myself? And then, slowly, painfully, chagrin. He was just standing there. It wasn’t like he was the one telling me I didn’t know what I was doing. And then gratitude. I took a deep breath, letting it seep slowly out my nose. It was a relaxation technique Chogyi Jake had taught me. I should probably have been doing it more often.
I was about to suggest we head back in and get this abduction on the road when he spoke.
“I don’t like her,” he said.
“What?”
“Karen,” he said. “I don’t like her.”
“Ex does,” I said.
“Ex has had different experiences than I have,” Chogyi Jake said. “I think there’s weather coming. We should check the forecast.”
“Why don’t you like Karen?”
Chogyi Jake crossed his arms. He was wearing sand-colored slacks and a buff shirt lighter than his skin. The stubble on his scalp was in real danger of becoming hair, and I noticed a sprinkling of white at his temples that surprised me. I’d never thought about his age.
“When I was first learning to embrace and accept my own anxiety and suffering,” he said, speaking very slowly, as if thinking each word twice before he said it, “I didn’t do a very good job.”
“The drugs,” I said. This was only the second time he’d ever mentioned his career as heroin user, but the first time had made an impression on me. He nodded. A gust of wind brought the smell of the lake and diesel smoke.
“Something happens when you’re a junkie,” he said. “You never really come back from it. You . . . try to pass for a normal person. If you’re good, you can fool people. Some people. But not another junkie.”
“You aren’t a junkie,” I said, meaning it as comfort or reassurance. As a way to say he was my friend and I didn’t care what he’d done.
Chogyi Jake grinned like I’d given him a puppy.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “That’s the point. And so is Karen. I don’t think it was drugs in her case, but there was something. All the things she does to try to seem normal? All the games she plays? I’ve seen them before. I’ve done them.”
“Like?”
“She is always slightly more approachable and friendly than anyone else in the room. She acts like you’re intimates when you’re in private, and disrespects you in public,” Chogyi Jake said. “She found the man in the group most open to being seduced, and she seduced him. She’s trying too hard.”
“I don’t see it,” I said. “I don’t see her acting all that different from me.”