Darker Angels - By Daniel Abraham Page 0,23

sister," Karen said. "Daria is still in school, and I've met her so I know what she looks like. The downside of that is that she's precognitive, and the things that affect her directly are going to be easier for her to foresee."

"So the closer we get to her..." I said.

"The more likely we are to walk into an ambush," Karen said. "Which leaves the grandmother."

"Hanging out with the evil serial killer lady seems a little problematic," I said.

"It is," Karen said. "But there are advantages. For one thing, we know that in a showdown, the two of us together can beat her. We already have."

"I had a question about that," Chogyi Jake said. His smile might have been apology or accusation or anything in between. "From what Jayné said, I'm not perfectly clear on how the attack at the hotel happened. Or how it was turned aside."

Karen nodded.

"I'll admit that I was surprised at how well Jayné fought," she said.

"Eric put some sort of juju on me," I said. "We haven't found his notes to know all the details."

"But the way the rider seemed to stop time..." Chogyi Jake said.

Karen took her hands out of her pockets. Her eyes were focused on the back wall, as if she were reading something there.

"The rider we're fighting is the god of the crossroads," Karen said.

"Legba. Opener of ways," I said. "I've been reading up. It's supposed to belong to a bunch of relatively benevolent spirits. Radha?"

Karen shook her head.

"Radha, Petro, Ghede. Who's benevolent and who's evil just depends on who was winning when the propaganda was written," she said. "But what I was coming to was the way Legba gets between things. Between places, between moments. It brought Jayné into that place because it thought they wouldn't be interrupted. I've been working for years to find a way to break through that protection. I can do it again."

"Let's hope you won't need to," Ex said.

"Crossroads," Chogyi Jake said. "I've read something about that. But it wasn't Legba, I thought. Carrefour..."

"Carrefour is another loa with very similar attributes," Karen said, a little sharply. "Sometimes they're mistaken for each other, but they're different. Legba is Radha, Carrefour is Petro. They aren't on the same team."

"I don't understand," Chogyi Jake said. "They can do the same things..."

"It could be like two competitors in the same ecological niche," Aubrey said. "Wolves and hunting cats can have the same prey, and even use the same strategies, but they hate each other. Maybe these Radha and Petro gangs are the same."

Karen blinked, her brow furrowed. She looked at Aubrey and smiled.

"That's a really good metaphor," she said.

"Let's get back to the part where we're following the bad guy," I said.

"Right," Karen said. "My first point was that we can beat her in a fight. The second is that Amelie Glapion is a living woman, and she needs to eat. She's got her voodoo cult, and they have meetings and ceremonies that require her to be out in public. We know where she'll be. And we know that Sabine will be close to her. We do our reconnaissance, find where the girl is, and then we can make a more detailed plan for getting her out."

"But sooner is better than later," I said.

"Absolutely," Karen said. "Time is an issue."

"So how quickly can we do the thing?"

She smiled. The gleam in her eye looked like complicity.

"Funny you should ask," she said.

BETWEEN THE near-apocalypse of places like Lakeview and the Ninth Ward and the undamaged icon of the Vieux Carré, there was a middle ground with no tall grass, no bare foundations. The corpses of the buildings hadn't been washed away in part because they were too large to dispose of. Even if they weren't too big to kill.

Aubrey and Karen and I stood in the empty fourth story of the parking structure as the twilight around us deepened into true night. Across Tulane Avenue, Charity Hospital still towered, but the hundreds of windows were all dark. Pigeons rose in the dim light, whirled above the street and the traffic and us, and then settled again. We weren't more than ten minutes' drive from the hotel and the restaurants, the music and the tourists, and the life of the French Quarter, and we were in the ruins.

"It's better now," Karen said softly. "Not fixed, better. And not Charity. That's... that's never coming back. But the city is better than it was right after."

"I can't believe that," Aubrey said.

"No," Karen said.