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."
"Wait a minute," I said. "He figured it out? He knew?"
"He did," Karen said. "It's how I knew that it wasn't over. Even after we caught him, we'd only caught the body. The horse. When it left his body, Mfume told me everything. He begged me to find it for him."
"To kill it," I said.
"To bring it back to him," Karen said. "By the time it was over, he was in love with it."
"Okay, huge ick factor," I said.
"I've been tracking this thing for the last decade, one city to another," Karen said. "Six months ago, it finally came back home to the land of voodoo. Something happened within the loa that either lifted its exile or made it impossible to enforce."
"Something about the hurricane," I said, thinking of Eric's ruined house and the devastation that surrounded it. The strange X mark on the door. The ring like a dirty bathtub that marked the buildings we'd seen driving in. High water.
"Possibly," Karen said, soberly.
"How did it find Jayné," Ex asked. "She's very difficult to locate magically. This thing must have an angle."
"At a guess?" Karen said. "The same way I found it. The little sister. You have to understand that the loa have been building voodoo cults in New Orleans for centuries. Things have happened here. Powerful, unnatural things. It's changed the nature of space. The world's thin here.
"There's a girl. Daria Glapion. She has the Sight. Call it limited precognitive ability. Sometimes people know things that there's no particular reason they should know. She told me that her sister was going to be the rider's next victim. Eaten by a snake was what she called it, but I knew what that meant. Maybe better than she did."
"And she spilled the beans about us," Ex said.
"Again, possibly without knowing what she meant," Karen said. "The rider is in her grandmother. Amelie Glapion, self-styled voodoo queen of New Orleans. Glapion has been heading one of the local voodoo cults for years. Her family has a history with the loa. When the rider came back, it took her. It was something I suspected, but it's hard to prove. Until I managed to meet the little girl, I wasn't sure."
Karen looked angry. More than angry. Her eyes had a focused, controlled hatred. I remembered how the snake had fled when Karen came to my rescue. Seeing her now, I thought the thing hadn't run fast enough, and if it