just wanted to get the hell out.
Amelie Glapion reached the back of the crowd, her cult parting before her. Dr. Inond茅 met my eyes and nodded with something like apology. I wondered what our chances would be if we all leaped into the river. It didn't look like it was going that fast, but I remembered something about still-looking waters sucking people down.
"Okay," I said softly enough that only Aubrey and Chogyi Jake could hear me, "this might have been an oops."
Amelie came forward, leaning on her cane. Her drooping face was ashen and sour. The air around her seemed to crackle with power that her body alone couldn't begin to justify. Her eyes shifted from me to Aubrey, from Aubrey to Chogyi Jake, from Chogyi Jake back to me with the intensity of a predator sizing up prey.
I felt the subtle shift in my body that I'd come to associate with the onset of violence. When Amelie spoke, her voice was Legba's; deeper than a human throat could fashion, rich with threat and power.
"What the hell you think you doing in my city?"
I wanted to swing forward, to fight my way free, pulling Aubrey and Chogyi Jake along with me. My body almost vibrated with the need to strike, to scream. I forced myself to speak like I was using someone else's mouth to do it.
"Carrefour tricked me," I said. "I've come to you. I need help."
These were demons. They were predators: tigers, wolves, sharks. I looked into Amelie Glapion's eyes, and something else looked back at me. Something inhuman. Someone made a sound that was neither word nor whimper. I risked a glance. Daria Glapion, her face frozen with anxiety, held her sister's hand.
"Well now," Amelie said, "that's more like it."
The woman turned away, and the moment broke. The air itself seemed to slump back. Aubrey touched my shoulder, and I startled. Around us, the cultists were starting to move. At the head of the stone steps that led down to Jackson Square, Amelie Glapion stopped and turned, looking over her shoulder at us.
"You waiting for something?" she asked. "Come on."
Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Someone walking down the street might not have seen anything. An old woman walking pretty well with her cane. A few people accompanying her. A teenager leading a younger girl by the hand. Three touristy-looking types looking unaccountably nervous. A deeply black man with a long face and goofy smile walking by himself. Another group walking in the same direction. A white man in a Hawaiian shirt strolling behind the rest. Apart from everyone moving in the same direction, there was nothing about it that looked different than any other night in the French Quarter.
It felt like being marched to prison.
The Glapions and half their followers before us, Mfume and the other guards behind. I wondered if this was the kind of negotiation Eric had done, and if it was what had gotten him killed. Ahead of us, two of the cultists stepped close and put supporting arms around Amelie Glapion's waist. Wherever we were going, it had to be close.
We turned down one street, and then another into a side street so narrow, I couldn't imagine two cars actually passing each other. Thin trees pushed up, bare as sticks and struggling toward the sky. The brick buildings were painted over, pale colors turning to shades of gray in the darkness. The wrought-iron rails of narrow balconies looked thin enough to break between two hands, and the air stank of a backed-up sewer. All the doors we passed were closed, all the windows dark. I had the sense of walking into a tendril of dead city, as if the destruction of the Lower Ninth had cut a blood vessel, and even here where the city hadn't suffered the flood, its tissue was dying.
Amelie and her entourage stopped at what had once been a storefront, its windows smeared now with gray paint. I was close enough to see Amelie's eyes close for a moment. When she opened them again, there was a stiff determination in her expression, but no strength. One of the cultists-a woman-fumbled with a key chain, unlocked the door, and stepped aside. Amelie Glapion led the way like the general of a failing army, and the rest of us fell in behind her. Aubrey, beside me, shuddered as we passed the threshold, but that was all.
Inside, we passed through a wide space with dark wooden flooring worn in a pattern that outlined where shelves and