M.L.N. HANOVER - Unclean Spirits

“I don’t think we can assume she got away,” I said. “If she’s not with us, we have to act like Karen

got her. Hoping for the best isn’t really an option here.”

“Call him again,” Aubrey said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”

I didn’t fight him on it, but I didn’t expect anything to come of it. I dug through my pack, pulled out the cell phone, and pulled Ex’s entry out of the contacts list. As I listened to the phone ring, the shower water stopped. By the time Ex’s recorded voice said he was away from his phone and to leave a message, Chogyi Jake stepped out of the bathroom wearing a fresh pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

“Any word?” he asked, and I shook my head.

“Okay,” Aubrey said. “Let’s take stock here. We don’t know where Sabine is—”

“So we have to assume Karen’s taken her,” I said.

“Right,” Aubrey said. “So Karen’s taken her. Mfume and Inondé are MIA. Ex isn’t answering his phone.”

“Does she know we broke the wards?” I asked. Chogyi Jake’s brow furrowed for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If she didn’t specifically check, she might not. And unless she’s been listening to the message we left for Ex, she may not know we’ve come back at all.”

“Oh, I never told him we were coming back,” I said. “I never told him Karen was possessed. I just said he should call us.”

“In that case,” Chogyi Jake said, sitting on the

bed beside Daria, “I can’t see how she’d know we’re here.”

“Okay, so we’ve got something in the plus column,” I said. “What else?”

“We probably know where she is,” Aubrey said. “And if we can find Mfume, we can be sure.”

“If her intention is to pull the rider out of Sabine, that will take Ex some time,” Chogyi Jake said. “Two hours. Perhaps three.”

“Giving us maybe an hour to figure out whatever we’re doing, and then do it,” I said. “I don’t think we’re in the plus column anymore, guys.”

The sense of despair was seeping in at the sides like ink soaking a sheet of paper. The last time I’d faced Carrefour, it had almost killed me and I still hadn’t recovered. Aubrey had been on the edge of freaking at least twice already, not to mention his wounds from exorcising Marinette. Chogyi Jake had been the focus of a ceremony already. We were tired, and we were hurt, and we were going to go to the safe house and confront Karen Black and the thing inside her. I didn’t like our chances.

Daria shifted. She looked empty. Shell-shocked.

“Hey,” I said gently. She turned to me. “How’re you holding up, kiddo?”

“You can’t take it on,” she said. “You should call for help.”

“I would,” I said with a sense of growing loneliness. “I don’t have anyone to call.”

Daria’s expression became quizzical.

“I do. I’ve got lots of people,” she said and started ticking off fingers with each name. “Aunt Corrie and Uncle Bo. Aunt Sherrie. BP and Omar.”

“Wait, who?” I said.

“Legba’s community,” Chogyi Jake said, his voice chagrined. “The ones that aren’t being treated for smoke inhalation.”

“They’re going to know what happened by now,” Daria said. “Somebody would have called somebody as soon as they got out from the fire. They’re probably just trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“How many people were in your grandma’s . . . group?” I asked.

“A hundred,” Daria said without pausing. “It’s always a hundred. Ten tens give it power and strength. Grandma said we needed that.”

“And you can get ahold of them?”

Daria held out her hand. She couldn’t have been more than twelve, and I had the feeling she was more in control of the situation than I was. I gave her the phone. Her small fingers traced a number. I heard the distant ringing as she held the phone to her ear. Then a click, and a woman’s voice.

“Auntie Sherrie? I’m with someone you need to talk to. She’s going to help Sabine, so be gentle with her, okay?”

Without waiting for a reply, Daria held out the

telephone. Her expression was eerily mature and more than a little pitying.

“You really need to find out who you are,” she said.

I put the phone to my ear.

“Hi,” I said.

“Who is this?” a woman’s voice asked. I could hear the fear and the anger, but something else too. Something protective and fierce.

“My name’s Jayné,” I said. “I’m a friend. Kind of. We don’t have time to get into that part. What’s important is Carrefour killed Amelie Glapion and abducted Sabine.”

The woman on the other end said something obscene.

“I know where they are,” I said. “Get as many people as you can and meet me at Jackson Square in half an hour.”

“I’ll be there,” the woman said, equal parts promise and threat. She dropped the connection. I put the phone back in my pack with a sense of unreality.

“Well?” Aubrey asked.

“Daria’s right. Put it in the plus column,” I said. “We’ve got a cult.”

TWENTY-TWO

Something happened when I was ten or eleven years old that, maybe because it didn’t have to do with leaving home or supernatural beasties or who that cute guy in French was, I hadn’t thought of in years. The Conroys were a family that went to our church. The father was a big, bluff man with thinning blond hair and a bright red face, his wife was short and about as wide as she was tall, and their three boys were named—I’m not making this up—Huey, Dewey, and Louis. Pronounced Lewis. We weren’t close to them. We didn’t go to the same schools, our dads didn’t work together, our mothers

didn’t hang out. They were just some other people who went to the same place we did on Sunday, listened to the same sermons, milled around at the same picnics and ice cream socials and so on.

And then their house burned down, and they came to live with us for a month.

My clearest memories of that time involved waiting in the hallway for one of the boys to finish with the bathroom and the smell of the cabbage and sausage casserole that Mrs. Conroy made as a thankyou dinner. When my brothers and I talked about it, it was always in the context of, “Holy shit, do you remember when those people invaded our house?” After they left, we didn’t stay in touch. The only thing we’d ever had in common was our church.

Until that night in the dark, bleak hours of the morning, a cold fog rising from the ground in Jackson Square like a thousand cheap Halloween ghosts, I hadn’t thought about how amazing that really was. The Conroys had been nothing to us, and we’d let them come into our home, sleep in our living room, borrow our robes and slippers, and watch our TV with us just because we were all part of the same group and they were in trouble.

The thirty men and women standing in Jackson Square, waiting for me and Daria would have stood out in my church like blood on a wedding dress. Never mind that there were no blacks at my church; there also weren’t men with decorative scars on

their necks or women who looked like they could chew through two-by-fours on the strength of rage alone. But something was the same, a sense of belonging together, of unspoken loyalty, of real community that filled me with a nostalgic longing.

There was also the impression that they’d happily beat an outsider to death with a pipe and sink the body in a swamp. There was less nostalgia with that one.

The whole time she’d been with us, Daria had been quiet. As soon as we saw the cult waiting for us, Daria ran to a thick-shouldered woman, wrapped her thin arms around the woman’s belly, and started crying. Her sobs were low and violent, and I felt inexplicably responsible for them.