The shriek didn’t come from either of us. Grating, wordless, wet, the sound smelled like raw meat and pain. The shining serpent hissed, turned back upon itself, and sped into the fallen skin. The old woman was just beginning to stand when something flashed through the door. I had the impression of knives and pale skin and something soft and organic colored a red so deep it verged on purple.
The black woman turned, and her jaw still had the great snake’s needle teeth, her eyes still flat black. The blur spun past her, and I saw the impact on her body without ever seeing the blow. I rolled forward, scissoring my legs against hers, and the black woman stumbled.
I didn’t see her elbow twisting around until it
hit my temple and the world went distant and dim. The snake-toothed mouth came down lightning fast, flashing toward my bared throat, but something pushed it aside. An impact like two trucks crashing head-on. The black woman went sprawling, then raised her twisted hands, shouted once, and was gone.
Sound returned, trombone and clarinet blaring with something like joy. In the fountain, water crashed and splattered. I heard Chogyi Jake say something like . . . I would need to understand . . . um. An unfamiliar arm was around my shoulders, strong and gentle. The scent of musk and hyacinth washed over me. My hair tugged a little at the back as I sat up, the blood adhering to the marble floor.
She was beautiful. The brightness in her blue eyes, the careless grace of her hair, the amusement that waited in the wings behind her smile. She wore a low-cut white lace blouse and black leather pants. No one looks good in leather pants, but she did.
“You must be Jayné,” she said. “I’m Karen Black.”
THE PRODUCTION number that followed would have been comic if I hadn’t ached from head to foot. The marble floor was broken where the rider had struck it, and Karen, thinking on her feet, had pointed to it as the thing that had tripped me. The concierge fluttered around me, hotel functionaries
bringing wet cloth and hot tea, offering to call a doctor and fearing I’d call a lawyer.
Chogyi Jake knew better, having seen the flicker of lost time, but no one else questioned our version of events. By the time Aubrey and Ex came down, deep in conversation, the little gash on my head had stopped bleeding and the hotel management had dropped down from hyperventilating to concerned. Everyone got introduced around, but I had the strong impression that Karen was waiting to talk until we were someplace less public.
My first impulse was to go back to one of our rooms, but with all five of us, it seemed like a tight squeeze. Instead, Karen led us out of the hotel and into the French Quarter. I could tell the others—Ex especially—were bursting with questions. Anytime we got close to the subject of riders or magic, she steered us away.
We walked down Chartres toward Jackson Square, which was, Karen said, the center of the tourist trade. The streets were narrower than I’d imagined, and the balconies over the sidewalks made the buildings seem to lean across toward one another, as if they were greeting each other without including us. In the middle of a block, Karen steered us into a dark corridor with ancient wooden stairs clinging to one wall. We turned into the shadows under the stairway, walked down another shadowy corridor with ivy growing up the stucco on the right,
and came out into a wide brick courtyard. Tables and chairs of wrought-iron filigree were scattered under wide, shady trees, and a white man in a soft linen shirt and pressed khakis appeared seemingly from the foliage itself to guide us to a table.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Karen said as we took our metal seats. “I’ve used this place before. They’re very good about leaving you alone when you want to talk. And the crawfish here are excellent.”
“Good to know,” Ex said through clenched teeth. “Now would someone tell me what the hell happened back there? Jayné tripped?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“It found her,” Karen said. “The rider I’ve been tracking down. It tried a preemptive strike.”
“Okay, hold on,” Aubrey said. “What exactly is this thing?”
“Have you ever heard of loa?” she asked.
“Afro-Caribbean gods,” Chogyi Jake said. “Voodoo spirits.”
“And a kind of rider,” Karen said. “The sphere of influence between Haiti, Cuba, and the southern coast of the United States is practically alive with them. I’ve tracked eight hundred cases of people being ridden by loa since I started paying attention.”
“Eight hundred?” Ex said.
“They aren’t all confirmed, but yes. That’s the ballpark. By which I mean eight hundred in the past ten years.”
Karen raised her hand, waving linen-shirt guy over. While the idea of that many riders sank in, she ordered three plates of crawfish and drinks for all of us. The man nodded and vanished. Around us, ferns and tree limbs bobbed gently in a soft breeze.
“Usually, they stick together,” she said. “There’s something about them that other riders don’t seem to like. The one I found in Portland had come from Port-au-Prince. If it hadn’t gotten so far out of its home territory, I might not have put it together.”
“What was it doing in Portland?” Aubrey asked at the same time I said, “How did it find us?”
Karen smiled and leaned forward. The neck of her blouse gaped a little, showing the curve of her breasts. Ex cleared his throat and looked away but she didn’t take notice.
“Just because the loa tend to stick together doesn’t make them a great big happy family,” she said. “There are struggles within the population. They form alliances with each other, they disrupt each other, they fight for power. For horses.”
“Horses meaning host bodies,” Aubrey said.
“Meaning victims,” Karen said. “The one I found had lost some kind of internal power struggle. It had been cast out.”
“Voodoo politics,” I said. “Sounds like high school. The unpopular demon has to go sit at a different lunch table.”
“More like gangs fighting over turf,” Karen said.
“They might shoot each other to control some particular street corner, but if an outsider comes into the city, they’ll all band together against it. Even with the internal struggles, there’s a protection that comes from being part of the community. Exile strips them of it.”
“So the loser rode Joseph Mfume out to Portland,” Ex said.
“Where it tried to establish territory of its own,” Karen said with a nod.
“What can you tell us about how this particular rider behaves?” Aubrey asked, shifting forward in his seat.
Before Karen could answer, the waiter returned, a second man trailing behind him. They carried three wagon-wheel large platters that, when they put them on the table, almost didn’t leave room for the drinks. At least a hundred tiny red bodies were curled in each one along with small bowls of red sauce and melted butter. Karen scooped one up, pulled off the tail and sucked at the remaining body chitin. A slow smile spread across her lips as she dropped the empty crustacean back on the plate and started stripping the shell from the tail meat.
“You just don’t get these in Boston,” she said. “Lobster, yes. Clams. Crab. But there’s nothing like Louisiana crawfish.”
I picked one up. Its dead eyes reminded me of the shining snake’s.
“Pinch the tail off and suck the head,” Karen said with a smile.
Well, if she could do it . . .
The hard red shell pressed against my lips, and something hot and salty slid into my mouth. I was prepared to gag, but it tasted good. I considered the small red crustacean skull with pleased surprise.
“You were asking about the rider,” Karen said to Aubrey, making the statement an apology. “It’s a subtle form. It doesn’t kill the horse or displace its soul, just lives in the back of his head and changes him. In this case, it changes him into a serial killer.”
“To what end?” Chogyi Jake asked, picking up a crawfish of his own.
“Don’t eat that one,” Karen said. “If the tails aren’t curled, it means they were already dead when they went in the boiler. To what end . . . I think it’s a way to enforce isolation. Mfume started with his fiancée, for example. It eliminates the people who are nearest to it. Kills the people the horse loves.”
“In order to protect itself from being discovered,” Aubrey said.
“Or to break the spirit of the person being ridden,” Ex said. “If it doesn’t displace the original personality, then Mfume was there. He was watching himself rape and slaughter his lover, and didn’t know it wasn’t him doing it.”
“Exactly,” Karen said. “He felt the excitement. The pleasure. He had all the release that a normal human
killer has. By the time he understood what was really happening, it was too late. He was crazy.”