I slowed the car to a crawl. City hall was creeping up on my right when Karen stepped out of the shadows, opened the passenger door, and got in without my stopping the car.
She looked spent. Her face was spattered with blood, and a long rip along the side of her shirt showed a deepening bruise. She'd lost her hat, and her hair was pale and wild as hay.
"How's our friend?" she said.
"Possessed by evil. Wrapped in duct tape," I said.
She muttered something obscene.
"What about the others?" I asked. "Legba? The cult?"
"I held them off as long as I could, then rabbited. Nothing slows down a naked man like an angry woman with a knife. We're clear. For now."
"What happened?"
"I don't know," Karen said. Her voice was low and tired.
I got on I-10, heading north. Heading toward help. Aubrey growled low in his throat, but didn't sit up or try to kill us. I was reconsidering the wisdom of picking the backseat over the trunk. We passed the edge of the land, black water on either side.
We could take care of Aubrey, I told myself. We could pry the rider out of him. He'd be okay. I told myself he would be okay, and hunched over the wheel, and drove too fast.
We were five miles over the river when Karen said, "Not doing that next time," at the same moment I said, "That could have gone better." She turned and looked at me. I glanced at her. I couldn't say who started laughing first. The panic and the danger and the violence spilled out of us in shared, wordless hilarity. For the rest of our passage across the lake, we were sisters. Travelers on the same dark road.
"MARINETTE," Ex said. "From what it looked like, I'm thinking definitely Marinette."
The shed was lit by the white, unforgiving light of a Coleman lantern. The air smelled like turned earth and burning fuel. Darkness pressed in at the windows. The lights of the city were a glow on the underside of scattered, low clouds. The first crickets of spring were singing.
I felt like I was waiting for a doctor to tell me whether the lump was malignant.
Aubrey sat in the center of the space, looking at each of us-Ex, Chogyi Jake, Karen, me-with a pure, black hatred. A double circle of salt with careful designs in brightly colored chalk dust between them kept the rider bound.
"It's supposed to be kind of an ambassador figure between loupines and the loa," Ex went on. "And it's apparently a queen bitch to keep confined, so we need to move fast."
"You've been reading up," Karen said.
Ex scowled at her, but a heartbeat later allowed himself a little smile. Chogyi Jake nodded to Aubrey. Or to the thing inside of him.
"It isn't in the same clan as Legba," he said. "Legba is supposed to be Radha loa. Marinette is Petro."
"And when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way?" I asked. Both men turned to look at me. I shrugged. "What does it matter what team the thing's supposed to be on?"
"I'm wondering why Legba, an exiled spirit making its toehold for a forced return to unfriendly territory, would be working with its traditional enemy," Chogyi Jake said. "Perhaps this isn't Marinette. Karen mentioned how difficult it could be to tell one loa from another."
"Or maybe the local spirits are attacking the exile, and we just got in the way," Karen said, her voice oddly sorrowful. "Maybe they all still hate it."
"Okay, but if it's after Legba, why attack us?" I said.
"You have no place here," the rider said. "You have fallen."
"Be quiet," Karen said, and I could feel the force of her will in the air like the draft of a truck speeding past. Aubrey made a strangled sound.
"Karen's right. Don't listen to it," Ex said. "The only power it has right now is to confuse us. You three go. This is my job."
"You're an exorcist?" Karen said.
"I've managed before," Ex said.
She smiled at him a little more warmly.
"I've known others," she said. "It's hard work. Painful."
"But you can do it, right?" I said. "You can get it out of him? You can get Aubrey back?"
Ex turned to look at me. The lantern threw shadows on his cheek and in the hollow of his eyes. There was something in the way he held his body that I couldn't understand, like he was guarding himself. It reminded me of a man with broken ribs steeling himself for