M. Hanover - Darker Angels

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.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m Jayné.”

“You’re the one came and screwed up the ceremony at Charity,” one man said. He looked familiar. Now that I was close, and they were all around me, there were several who looked like I’d seen them before dancing in the belly of the dead hospital. There were more, though, that were new to me. I didn’t see anyone who’d been in the fire, who’d witnessed the pact I’d taken with Legba. That was kind of too bad.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t really understand the situation. I screwed up a lot of things.”

“It’s not her fault,” Daria said. “Carrefour lied to her. Soon as she saw what was happening, she came to Gramma for help.”

“Seems like that didn’t work out too well either,” the thick-shouldered woman said.

“Treat her with respect,” a man’s voice came ringing from the gloom. “Amelie accepted her.”

Dr. Inondé loomed up out of the fog. He wasn’t a particularly imposing sight. The damp had soaked his shirt and hair, sticking both to him in unflattering ways. He nodded to me and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake, then went and knelt beside Daria and murmured something that the girl nodded back to. When he stood, he looked tired but determined.

“Look,” he said. “I was there. Carita Lohman was too, you can call her. Or Tommy Condoné. Or Harold Jackson’s son. We were all there. If it wasn’t for this girl and her friends, Carrefour would have been able to do a lot worse than it did.”

“Did bad enough, seems like,” a thin, angry-looking man said.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I know where Carrefour took Sabine. I can take you there, but… I need a promise.”

“Who the hell are you to make demands of us?” the thick-shouldered woman said.

“Sherrie!” Daria snapped, standing back a step from the woman and wagging a finger at her like a mother scolding a child. “I told you to be gentle with her. So be gentle.”

It was a ridiculous sight. Daria was small and slight and young; a girl play-acting at being adult. Sherrie looked like she’d be at home in a street fight. But when Daria spoke, Sherrie looked abashed.

“I’m not trying to hold things up,” I said. “It’s just that we aren’t all going into this with the same exact agenda, and I don’t want things to get weird. The exorcist that Carrefour’s using doesn’t know he’s working for a rider. He thinks he’s saving Sabine. So when we get in there, don’t hurt him. He’s not the bad guy.”

There was a silent motion in the group. I couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad one. I felt like I was standing on the high-dive board, looking down at an empty pool. But I had to keep going.

“And,” I said, “the horse? The one Carrefour’s riding? Her name’s Karen. She didn’t pick any of this either.”

The voice of the crowd was easier to interpret this time, low and unhappy. Angry. I felt Aubrey and Chogyi Jake step in toward me, closing ranks. Dr. Inondé looked embarrassed on my behalf.

“You want to go into a fight but just don’t hurt anybody,” Sherrie said.

“I just want to try and do the right thing,” I said. “We have to do what we have to do, but if there’s a chance… if there’s a way to keep Karen alive, we should. This isn’t her fault.”

“And if we don’t promise, you’re going to let Legba be cast down and Sabine die,” Sherrie said.

“No. If you won’t, then we’ll try to stop Carrefour without you,” I said. “It’s just not as likely that it’ll go well.”

“Then I guess we promise,” Sherrie said, raising an eyebrow.

A police car driving past the square slowed but didn’t turn on its flashing lights. It wasn’t every night someone set off a car bomb in the French Quarter. Thirty angry-looking people standing around Jackson Square at two in the morning was only going make the authorities jumpier. I didn’t think taking everyone back to my hotel was going to work either.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I’ve got a car over at my hotel like five minutes from here. The place Carrefour took Sabine is out in Pearl River, but it’s a little hard to find. Can you guys grab your cars and follow me out?”

“We’ll be there,” Sherrie said.

“I’m coming too,” Daria said.

I said, “No, you aren’t,” at the same moment Sherrie said, “Like hell you are.”

“She’s my sister,” Daria said to both of us. “You can’t keep me from coming.”

“Sweetheart,” Sherrie said. “Your grandma would come back from the dead to kick my ass if I took her baby granddaughter into a fight. And if you believe I can’t keep you from coming, you don’t know me as well as you think.”

“I’ll take care of her,” Dr. Inondé said. “We’ll stay at the shop. Doris likes her.”

“Doris doesn’t like anything,” Daria said, outraged. “She’s a snake .”

I nodded to Sherrie, then Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and I all started back toward the hotel. I noticed I was breathing hard; adrenaline burning off through my lungs.

“How long have we got?” I asked.

“If the rider in Sabine is as intractable as Marinette,” Chogyi Jake said. “An hour. Maybe less.”

“If we’re too late, I think those people may kill us,” Aubrey said.

“I had that feeling too,” I said.

The drive out to the safe house had never seemed longer. Fog pressed in at the car windows, the murmur of the tires against the pavement hissing like a constant, breathless voice just too low to comprehend, and behind us, a string of headlights. The rider cult, following close. With each mile we covered, my stomach knotted more tightly until I was skating along the edge of nausea.

I was pretty sure that somewhere along the line I’d intended to be careful, to plan, to think things through rather than rushing headlong into unknown danger. And here we were, Aubrey leaning over the steering wheel as he broke the speed limits, Chogyi Jake in the backseat in deep meditation that I recognized as a preparation for battle, and me sitting powerless in the passenger’s seat squinting ahead at the darkness or backward into the light. I didn’t know what we would find at the safe house. The new Legba might already be eaten, Sabine and Ex already dead. Or Carrefour might be waiting for us. Karen could be in the trees with a sniper rifle, prepared to pick us off as we drove up the street.