"The things we did today?" she said. "The safe house, the van, the wards. All of it. It would have taken me weeks."
"Nah," I said. "You could have-"
"I couldn't," she said. "You could. I knew Eric maybe as well as anyone, and I barely knew him at all. I can't imagine how hard it would be stepping into his shoes."
I swallowed. If I hadn't been so desperately tired, I probably wouldn't have teared up.
"You're doing great," she said.
The sense of sloppy gratitude was only matched by the embarrassment that I was quite so easy to read. I wiped my cheek with the back of one hand.
"Thank you," I said. "Really. Thanks."
It seemed like we'd hardly started walking when she angled me up and to the left, and the new hotel opened before us. I stopped at the counter and got my key card. The boys weren't anywhere to be seen. Karen took my hand. At that moment, I felt like I'd known her my whole life. The smile at the corner of her mouth snuck up to her eyes.
"Call me when you wake up?" she said.
"I promise," I said. "But it may be early evening. I'm destroyed."
"Whenever," she said, then swooped in and gave me a quick hug. I watched her walk back out onto the street, and I watched the men she passed watch her too. My body felt like overcooked chicken ready to slough off the bone. I made my way to the elevator, up to my floor, to the room number, and into the great, king-size bed, still thinking about Karen without thinking anything in particular.
If there were any justice in the world, I would have gone off like a light and awoken twenty hours later feeling rested and human again. Instead, I lay on the bed and vibrated. The clock at the bedside told me it wasn't ten o'clock yet. My body said I'd been up all night, and I was officially too tired to sleep.
True to their word, Ex and Karen had brought my stuff to the new hotel. I popped open the laptop, checked mail, checked a couple of blogs I followed, and turned to Google.
I got no hits at all for Amelie, Daria, or Sabine Glapion. Not even a MySpace page. I wondered if being a voodoo queen meant being technologically pure or something. I tried loa and got a little over eighteen million hits, including things like the Logistics Officer Association, letters of agency, and the Mauna Loa Observatory. I found a Wikipedia article on voodoo gods, and then another three or four references that explicitly disagreed with it without ever agreeing with one another. Damballah was the voodoo spirit of the snake. Or Baron Samedi was. Or Carrefour. Or Legba.
I paused.
Legba.
It was what I had said during the fight in the lobby, the name I had called the old woman and the shining snake. There was a pretty detailed article about Papa Legba on a site Chogyi Jake had shown me, but when I tried to read it, I found myself losing the sense of it. I bookmarked it and promised myself I'd look again when I was functional. I shut down the laptop and stumbled into the shower.
I ran the water cool, and it woke me a little bit. I still felt the exhaustion, but I didn't have the same sense of being caught half in dream, unable to wake up or go down to sleep. I washed my hair twice, just because it felt good to do it. The hotel had a white terrycloth robe with its logo embroidered on the right breast, and I had just wrapped myself in it and stepped out of the bathroom when a knock came at the door. My heart ramped up a little.
"Who's there?" I said.
"It's me," Ex said. His voice sounded odd.
I hesitated, then went to look through the peephole. It was Ex, and he was alone. I gathered my qi, the mystic energy that let me do the little bit of magic I could. I pulled the energy up my spine and into my eyes, using it to see through enemy spells, but Ex was still just Ex. I opened the door.
The stink of alcohol was the last thing I'd expected, but he smelled like the mop at a liquor store. His eyes were red, and he was unsteady on his feet.
"Ex?" I said.
He nodded a half a beat late. He was drunk off his ass. I had never seen