I pressed my fingers to his lips until he gave up the effort.
He fell asleep first, his skin glowing a little in the soft sunlight of early afternoon. His breathing became slower, deeper. More peaceful. I pulled the blanket up over us both. Once again, things hadn't gone to plan. I wondered lazily if they ever would. I appeared to really suck at planning. I let my eyes flutter closed.
In my dream, I stood alone and naked in the desert. A gentle wind was blowing across the stones and sand. I knew with the logic of dreams that this austere, lifeless landscape was my home and that it was sacred. There was something I was supposed to do there, and I didn't remember what precisely it was. I knew I was in time, but that a moment would come-and sooner rather than later-when I would have to act. I tried to remember what exactly I had agreed to do.
Far above, a hawk that was also Chogyi Jake cried out. When I looked up, there were two suns in the sky. One was the burning disk I was used to, and the other was darker. Instead of radiating light and heat, it was radiating purification. I opened my arms to it, recalling that this was what I'd been meant to do. Something bigger than mountains whispered my name, and I woke up.
The knock came again. Hard pounding at the door. I lifted myself up. Aubrey muttered in his sleep as I fished his robe off the floor. I heard a voice I recognized. Ex.
I fumbled the security bar off and opened the door. Ex looked ill. His skin was gray, his eyes redrimmed, his pale blond hair hung to his shoulders. He opened his mouth to further announce my absence, went pale, and then blushed a deep scarlet.
"Yeah," I said. "Could you maybe give us just a minute?"
Chapter 9
NINE
We held the postmortem in the back of a French Quarter bar. We had the room to ourselves, and for a couple hundreds, I made sure it stayed that way. Having normal people walk in on the conversation seemed graceless. The sound system in our room was turned off, but Louis Armstrong rolled in from the front, his voice like a cheerful landslide. The chairs were all wooden and worn, three different layers of paint showing in carefully calculated decrepitude. A waitress brought us a bowl of salted peanuts and drinks. Light lagers for me and Aubrey, water for Chogyi Jake, Guinness for Ex. Karen got something hard; a bottle of bourbon and a tall glass.
"Okay," Karen said when the waitress had gone, "time to reassess."
She leaned forward in her chair, one hand brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. She was in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tight-fitting leather jacket that she didn't take off when she came inside.
"I don't think Glapion knew we were there before the loa possessed Aubrey," Karen said. "If Daria's Sight had tipped them off, they would have been prepared."
"Prepared?" Aubrey said.
"Possession is bad," Karen said. "Shot in the face is worse. It didn't go the way we planned, but it could have been much worse."
Aubrey bristled, and I changed the subject before things could degenerate.
"Do we know anything we didn't know before?" I asked. "We saw Sabine. That counts for something, right?"
"Yes," Karen said. "We didn't get to follow her, and I don't think there's much chance that they'll go back to Charity now that they know it's compromised. But we have confirmed that Sabine is in the city."
Ex cleared his throat. If Aubrey looked like the victim of violent crime, Ex looked like someone fighting cancer. The exorcism had left him wasted, dark circles under red-rimmed eyes, a sense of weariness that verged on melancholy on him like an illness. He didn't look at us, his eyes focused on the center of the table.
"What about the time frame?" he asked. "We're here to stop a murder, and the killer knows we're coming close."
"What about it?" I said, specifically to Karen. "You're the resident expert on this thing. Did we spook it? Will it move up the schedule, kill the girl sooner?"
"I don't think it can," Karen said. "When I was chasing it, there were... gaps. Normally when you see a serial killer, they start off needing a lot of time between victims, then slowly ramp up. They need