“Yes, okay. You’re very clever,” I said, a little more peevishly than I’d meant to. “I’m just feeling out of my depth again. Some more. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a great idea.”
“Even if this woman needs our help?”
“She doesn’t, though. She needs Eric’s help. He was better than I am.”
“Ah,” Chogyi Jake said, nodding. It wouldn’t have killed him to disagree.
I knotted my fingers together and looked out through the wide glass window at the narrow street of the French Quarter. Two men in desert-camouflage fatigues walked together, one leaning close to say something in the other man’s ear. An older black woman with a wide straw hat and a
shining aluminum tripod cane made her careful way across traffic. A girl no more than sixteen with café-au-lait skin and hair in glistening black cornrows sped by on a racing bike, a parrot perched uneasily on her shoulder.
“You read the report on Black?” I asked, and Chogyi Jake nodded silently, not getting in the way of my words. “She’s the real thing. Seriously, even without riders and magic and all the rest, she’s a professional. Been doing all this for years. She’s trained and experienced. And I’m still faking it. She double majored. I didn’t even pick a degree program.”
“And yet you were able to take on the Invisible College,” Chogyi Jake said as if we were discussing someone else. “Eric wasn’t able to accomplish that.”
“I know, but it’s just that . . . I’m tired. I don’t even know why I feel so wrung out.”
“We have been traveling constantly for months, working eight- and ten-hour days at a task so overwhelmingly large that even that effort hasn’t brought us anywhere near completion,” he said.
“Well. Okay, when you put it like that.”
“Consider that there may be something more going on within you,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You have chosen the pace we’ve worked at. You’ve chosen to come here. And you’ve
said that we’ll take a rest when this is resolved, but that isn’t the first time you’ve made that decision.”
“What do you mean?”
The front doors swung open, a brief gust of city air cutting through the climate-controlled cool of the lobby. Chogyi Jake counted off fingers as he spoke.
“After Denver, you planned to wait for Ex and Aubrey to close up shop. Aubrey had a career at the university he needed time to step away from. Ex had his own affairs. Instead you went ahead and let them catch up later. In Santa Fe, you talked about taking a week off, but changed your mind when we found the copy of the Antikythera mechanism.”
“It could have been dangerous,” I said. “I didn’t know that—”
He lifted a third finger, cutting me off.
“We arrived in London with the intention to take stock, and then rest for a few days, but those days never came. Instead, it was Athens, and now here. You’re exhausted because you’re exhausting yourself.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I shouldn’t be doing that. It’s just . . .”
“I didn’t say that you shouldn’t. I only pointed out that you are. In order to make that kind of judgment . . .”
I sat forward, looking at my hands while his sentence hung in the silence. I knew what he meant. He
couldn’t judge what was driving me until he knew what it was. And even I didn’t know that. Now that he pointed it out, I could see the pattern, one decision after the next, always pushing a little harder, a little faster. Covering ground.
It was that there was so much to look at. To catalog and discover. But that wasn’t it either. Even as I tried out possible answers, I knew I was dancing around something. At the heart of it, the issue was more difficult and more painful.
My hands ached. Without realizing it, I had bunched them into fists so tight my knuckles were white. Chogyi Jake still hadn’t broken the silence.
Silence which shouldn’t have been there. The fountain, the wild brass band, the street noise. All of it was gone. My head jerked up. The lobby was perfectly still. Chogyi Jake’s mouth was half open, caught in the middle of his thought. His eyes were empty as a stuffed bear’s. The water from the fountain hung in the air like a thousand glass beads. Outside the window, a pigeon was suspended behind the glass in mid-flap.
A tiny sound—no more than the click of dry lips parting—rang out like a shot. I whirled.
The black woman I’d seen walking across the street stood at the foot of the stairs, leaning against her cane, regarding me sourly. She wore an old dress of brightly colored cotton, flowers blooming on her in red and green and orange. She’d taken off
her hat, and gray hair framed her face like a storm cloud. Her lips had the lopsided softness of a stroke victim, but her eyes were bright with rage. When she spoke, her voice had the depth of a church bell and the threat of a power saw. It wasn’t the voice of a human being. It was one of them. A rider.
“What the hell you think you doing in my city?”
THREE
The last time I’d been in swinging distance of a rider, it tried to throw me off a skyscraper. The adrenaline hit my bloodstream as the first word left the thing’s mouth. My body leaped even before I knew I was going to do it, streaming through the unnaturally still air toward the thing in the woman’s flesh. I think I screamed. The paralyzed lips opened in what might have been a sneer, and the bright metal of the tripod cane knocked me against the wall like I was a softball.
My head rang. Blood tickled the nape of my neck. The woman was chanting something now, her head
bobbing from side to side in a way that was both avian and serpentine. Something brown and gray dangled at the end of her thin hand. The air around me began to writhe. I’d felt this once before; the barriers between Next Door and our world growing thin. The things that lived on the wrong side were coming up toward me to feed. I gathered my will the way Ex and Chogyi had taught me, drawing myself up from the base of my spine, through my heart and throat and out, projecting my qi in a shout.
“Stop!”
The woman staggered, her chant losing its rhythm. The things pressing against reality fell back a little. I moved forward, wary of the reach of her cane. Around us, the world was still as statues. The woman bared her teeth. A vein bulged in her neck, straining with effort. The floor seemed to vibrate against my shoes. The woman raised her fists. Her left hand—the one not holding the cane—was limp, barely able to close.
“I will kill you,” she spat. “No sun gonna set on me.”
“Bite me,” I said.
She screamed, and a play of light came from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. It shimmered like sunlight reflected off the surface of a pool; fire and water made one. Mirrors and crystal chandeliers caught the light, shattered it and made it sharp. Something washed over me, and I staggered. My
head was full of cotton, and the blood on the back of my neck burned my skin. Something deep in my belly flipped like a fish on the bottom of a boat. I fell to my knees and retched.
“I am not broken,” the thing said. “God himself cut His knuckles against me, but I am not broken. You nothing but a mongrel bitch, coming around here.”
I launched myself at her again, my shoulder low. She hadn’t expected it, and the cane whistled by my ear, cracking the marble floor where it struck. My shoulder took her in the knees and we tumbled together. She smelled like overheated motor oil, like fish and paprika, like rage. I had my hands around her snakeskin dry throat. She clawed at me, and I felt blood on my arm now too.
Her eyes fluttered and began to close. I was killing her. She was dying. I eased my grip a little, giving her a sip of air. Instead of breathing in, her body shifted under its skin. Bones cracked like a splitting rock as her jaw unhinged, her lower teeth and tongue hanging down almost to her collarbone, and a huge serpent slid out of her skin.
I jumped back, tripping over the bent cane. The snake was easily twelve feet long, thick as a weight-lifter’s leg, and its scales glowed from within. The woman’s skin lay abandoned on the floor behind it, black and ashen within the mocking brightness of its dress. The serpent turned black eyes toward me
then flicked its head a degree to my left, its attention drawn by Chogyi Jake still motionless at the edge of the frozen fountain.
“Legba,” I said, not sure what I meant by it.
The snake turned back to me, powerful curves forming in its flesh as it gathered itself to strike. The fish in my belly flopped again, banging against my spine. I shook my head once. No.