Darker Angels - By Daniel Abraham Page 0,56

were all afraid you were in trouble."

I looked up through my eyelashes. The man in the room across the hallway was writhing in half-sedated pain, a wide, bloodless wound gaping in his belly. From farther away, someone screamed.

"Yeah, well," I said.

"You are okay?"

"I'm fine," I said. "But if you could bring a fresh change of clothes to Tulane University Hospital, I'd really appreciate it."

"Are you... Jayn茅? What happened?"

I replayed the night in my mind. Dr. Inond茅 and Doris the snake, the girl with the cigarette at the Barely Legal club, Sabine Glapion, the thing in the suspended rain. Mfume's concerned voice and goofy grin. The rider with its pale flesh and knifelike claws.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what that was."

I waited for what seemed like days, but wasn't more than an hour and a half. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake showed up with a fresh white button-down shirt, blue jeans, underwear, shoes, socks, and probably my least comfortable bra. In the thousand times I'd almost thrown it out, I had never thought putting on that particular example of underwire madness would feel good. Today, it did.

The nursing staff was very reluctant to let me go without talking to the doctor or possibly the police, but since it wasn't actually legal to restrain me, I was out of there fifteen minutes after Aubrey and Chogyi Jake showed up.

The morning was bright, clear, and warmer than I'd expected. Last night's storm was just puddles on the asphalt, thick humid air, and a few high clouds now. I could tell I was walking slowly because Aubrey kept getting a little way ahead and then dropping back. Chogyi Jake kept by my side, but I had the sense it was only that he was better at restraining himself.

When we got to the minivan, I crawled up into the passenger's seat and pulled the seat belt across, gritting my teeth the whole time. When Aubrey turned on the engine, the air conditioner blasted us. I leaned back in my seat.

"So," I said. "How bad did I fuck things up?"

Neither man spoke.

"Great," I said, closing my eyes.

"Perhaps," Chogyi Jake said, "you could tell us what happened?"

So I did. They both listened as I went through the whole thing. My decision to investigate on my own, my interview with Dr. Inond茅, walking to the Voodoo Heart Temple, the foiled attack on Sabine, and being saved by Mfume. It only took fifteen minutes to do a rough recap; we hadn't even reached the lake when I was done.

Even with the hundred questions that I had- was the thing I'd fought in the street another aspect of Legba or a different rider altogether, what was Mfume doing there, why had he taken me to the hospital-I'd overlooked at least one.

"I wonder why you could fight at all," Chogyi Jake said. I turned to look at him over my shoulder. His expression was sour and puckered.

"What?" I said.

"When the rider attacked Sabine," he said, "time stopped. Just as it did when you were attacked at the hotel. The rain stopped falling. Sabine's companions couldn't move."

"Right," I said.

"You could," Chogyi Jake said. "Why?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe it's got something to do with the wards that Eric put on me."

"Yes," Chogyi Jake said, as if he'd tasted something unexpectedly bitter. "The longer we go on, the more convenient those become."

"Mfume could move too," Aubrey said. "And Sabine."

"I figured Sabine could move because she was the one under attack," I said. "Just like with me back at the hotel. And Karen was able to interfere with that one, so there is a way for normal people to break into that spell. Maybe Mfume knows how to do it too. I just don't understand why he would. But I figure we'll ask Karen."

"I'm not sure how well that will go," Aubrey said.

I shifted to look at him. A dull ache bloomed in my knee. He was looking ahead at the road, and very much not at me.

"She's a little pissed off?"

"THEY'RE FUCKING gone," Karen said.

The safe house looked different in the light of middle morning. The tiny cracks in the wall where the structure had settled over the course of years looked like crow's-feet at the corner of an old woman's eye. The picture window seemed to include the wide swath of unmowed, semi-tended lawn. The Virgin Mary gravestone had turned its back on me.

"Jayn茅!" Karen barked.

I looked back at her. The mixture of guilt and resentment and wordless outrage