“Not knew knew,” Daria said. “Just normal knew. I was right though, wasn’t I.”
“You were,” I said, and the little girl grinned in triumph.
The crowd began to thin, Amelie’s congregation going about the business of setting watch, getting food, or whatever the business of the rider required. There were only three cots. They couldn’t all be sleeping here. One of the drummers caught my eye and looked away nervously. I wondered what I seemed like to them. Early twenties college dropout with too much money in the company of a couple slightly older men. Put that way, it didn’t sound like an uncommon sight.
On the other hand, when Marinette had taken Aubrey, I’d beaten one of their gods in single combat, so maybe that would be a little intimidating.
“Let me get you something,” Sabine said. “Do you need something to eat? Drinks?”
“I’d take a Coke,” I said. I needed to eat—we hadn’t had anything but airplane food since breakfast—but my gut was still unsettled from the pact. Aubrey shook his head, and Chogyi Jake asked for
green tea, if there was any to be had. Sabine, her little sister in tow, went off, playing the hostess because her mother was dead, her grandmother was dying, and there was no one else to do it. Chogyi Jake watched her, smiling.
“Well,” Aubrey said, his voice an almost-perfect imitation of not-panicked. “The place isn’t too bad. As lion’s dens go.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it worked, right?”
“I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “What exactly did we agree to?”
“Not kill each other until Carrefour’s cooked,” I said. “At least I think that’s right.”
“More precisely,” Chogyi Jake said, “you agreed not to act against Legba or its coterie, and it agreed not to kill you. I believe it could still imprison you or inflict injuries that weren’t actually mortal. That doesn’t seem to be its immediate intention, though.”
“Great,” Aubrey said. “And we’re covered in all that too, right?”
Chogyi Jake tilted his head.
“I think that depends on whether ‘we will not slaughter you’ was you-singular or you-plural,” he said. “On the up side, if we aren’t covered by the protection, we aren’t bound by the restrictions either.”
“Right. Good to know,” Aubrey said, and I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The tension and fear and strange energy of the rider made me giddy. Chogyi
Jake and Aubrey looked at me, which only made it worse. It wasn’t funny, except it was.
“A little slack here,” I said, wiping away small tears of hilarity. “It was my first pact with demons, okay?”
One of the cultists cleared her throat in a low, but distinct signal. Quietly, the groups of people started to file out. On her cot, Amelie Glapion lay with her eyes closed, hands folded, her breath regular and deep. At rest, she looked ancient; her eyes sunken, her cheeks collapsed.
I’d never known my mother’s mother, but Grandma Heller had died when I was twelve. We had all gone to the funeral, even Curt who’d still been in kindergarten. My memories of the trip were vague, half-recalled and half-imagined, but the image of the old woman in her coffin—hair pulled gently back, lips in a secretive smile—remained. In her death, she’d looked more alive than Amelie Glapion did now.
Sabine returned, an actual glass bottle of soda in one hand and a paper cup steaming and smelling like tea in the other.
“I couldn’t find green, but I got some normal kind,” she said softly as she handed the cup to Chogyi and the soda to me. “I’m sorry about Maman. She needs a lot of rest these days. She usually only naps like this for a few minutes. She doesn’t mean any disrespect.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s fine. But maybe we should . . . you know, go someplace?”
Sabine nodded sharply, her gaze jumping to her grandmother and back to us. Her brow furrowed, and a soft, familiar accent came from behind us to rescue her.
“Let me take them,” Joseph Mfume said. “There is a conversation that we should have anyway, and now is as good a time as any.”
“Thank you,” Sabine said. “I should find Daria. She’s like to sneak out to the street and start telling people’s signs if no one stops her.”
“Off you go, then,” Mfume said with a mock solemnity. “You need not care for these three. I will see to them.”
He led us through a smaller archway to a thin staircase lit by a single bare bulb. Single file, we went up the steep wooden steps, down a short hallway, and out through warped French doors to the balcony overlooking the street. The night air was muggy but cool. The sky glowed with the city’s reflected light, but not so much that the stars couldn’t fight their way through. Mfume took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.
“Forgive me. It’s a terrible habit, but it’s my own,” he said as he took one out. He lit it with a kitchen match drawn along the iron rail. In the sulfur flare, he looked older than I remembered him. Careworn. He had tattoos on the backs of his hands. I hadn’t
noticed that before. He breathed out a cloud of gray and smiled at me. “I’m pleased to see you again, and looking so well. I was worried about you.”
“Some cracked ribs, a few staples to hold my arm together,” I said. “Good as new. These are my friends. Chogyi Jake. Aubrey.”
“Thank you,” Aubrey said as he shook the killer’s hand. “You didn’t have to take Jayné to the hospital like that. I want to say how much I appreciate that you did.”
“It was nothing,” Mfume said, gesturing with his cigarette, the smoke leaving a faint contrail in the air. “It was the least I could do.”
“She doesn’t look good,” I said. “Amelie. Or Legba. Whatever. She doesn’t look good.”
“She isn’t,” Mfume said. “And it’s getting worse. She has less energy. She’s confused more often. I’m no doctor, but I think she has had another stroke. At least one. Perhaps several.”
“She is bound up with the city, isn’t she?” Chogyi Jake said.
“I don’t know,” Mfume said. “She might be. The first stroke and the hurricane coming at the same moment seems too poetic to be simply chance, but . . . other people suffered as well. Suffered worse. And she isn’t as young as she once was. There may be no reason to assign a spiritual significance to it.”
“Did you know her daughter?” I asked. “Sabine’s mother. The one that died.”
“No,” Mfume said. “No, I didn’t come here until after all of that.”
“You came for Carrefour,” Aubrey said.
“In a sense,” Mfume said and took a drag from his cigarette. The ember glowed in the darkness like a fire on the horizon. His hooded eyes and long face considered each of us in turn.
“I suppose,” he said, “it would be simplest if I began at the start of things.”
NINETEEN
“I grew up in Haiti, one of the fortunate few,” he said. “I was well educated. I never wanted for food. It marked me as a child of great privilege. The poverty in Port-au-Prince is unlike even the worst desperation in the States, and the countryside makes the city look like the promised land. I knew nothing of riders or voudoun. It was superstition. Something for the servants and the beggars on the streets. My family was Catholic, and I grew up within the church and the protective light of Christ Jesus.
“That didn’t go so well as I might have hoped.
“I was twenty-four when Carrefour took me. I
had been accepted to law school in the States. My family was very proud. There was a girl I had been seeing, beneath my station, but very beautiful. I went one night to say my good-byes to her, and she took the news of my good fortune poorly. We fought, and . . . she bit me. Hard enough to draw blood.
“I hid the injury, and thought nothing of it. Three days later, she came to my family’s house, weeping and demanding that I return something to her, but she could not say what precisely I was supposed to have taken. I know now, but at the time I thought she’d gone mad. We sent her away, and I went on with my preparations.
“I left Haiti on my sister’s eighteenth birthday, and I have never gone back.