SEVEN

“Jayné!” Karen called from the darkness behind me. The thing in Aubrey’s body howled and leaped forward, vanishing as it left the thin strip of light. I tried to backpedal, but the hallway was thick with debris that caught at my ankles. Without the flashlight, I might as well have been blind. I hunched, hands out before me, and braced myself for impact. It wasn’t enough.

Something hit me hard across the chest, and I fell back. The ancient linoleum flooring was gritty and slick, like sand and motor oil. I heard the rider step close.

“Aubrey! Fight it,” I yelled, and his foot slammed down into my ribs. I thought I heard something crack. My breath went out of me, and a terrible calm came in. I swung my arm up, closed fist driving hard into Aubrey’s crotch. He doubled over with a groan, and my legs swept out. I felt them hit the backs of his knees, heard him fall.

The rider cried out words I didn’t recognize, but the tone of its voice was enough; rage and pain and fear. I rose to my fingertips and the balls of my feet, knees bent and ready to spring. It was like I had been pushed to a small, observing part of myself while my body took on the fight. I closed my eyes, the raw spiritual energy of my qi bringing my ears, my nose, my skin to a terrible sensitivity. The shadows brushed against me like small, dry hands. I could smell something sweet and fatty, like burning pork.

“You are mine, little girl,” the rider said. Its voice was inhuman; feminine and raw and powerful. My head shifted a degree, homing in on the sound. “I will taste your soul. Your blood will spill from my mouth. Fear me!”

Something washed over me. Its will, its power. The greatest magic a human being can summon is nothing compared to what riders command, and at its word, the quiet, observing part of me started bouncing around the interior of my skull, screeching like a monkey. My body remained still as stone.

It shifted its weight, and I jumped. The flesh I slammed into wasn’t like Aubrey’s. It was thin as a starving woman but solid. My shoulder took it in the belly, and we both fell down. Skeletal hands wrapped around my throat, but I shifted, pushed, and got on top of the writhing, killing thing.

“Who are you?” it shrieked. My fist buried itself deep in the gristle of its throat.

It’s also Aubrey, I thought. It’s his body. I can’t kill it.

The momentary hesitation was all it needed. With a shout, it arched, throwing me into the air. In the black, I didn’t know where the wall was until I hit it. My head rang and brightness filled my peripheral vision. I fell to the floor. My feet slipped under me as I tried to stand. Something-fists, foot, club- hit me in the right kidney, and I went down again.

Red light flooded the hallway. The double doors had opened, and naked men and women were running silently into the hallway toward us. I saw Amelie Glapion-Legba-limping in the middle of the crowd, her paralyzed face lit with rage. I turned to what had been Aubrey.

His flesh had been turned to the rider’s will. His shirt had ripped in the fight, exposing a shrunken chest, ribs black and red as a burn victim. Small, flaccid breasts hung, black nipples pointing to the ground. The face was still partly his. The angle of its jaw was familiar, the shape of the eyes. It was also a woman’s death’s-head grin. The rider shifted its gaze to the coming cultists, and rose an inch, as if preparing for an attack from them too.

With a shout, I brought up both fists under its chin. It felt like punching cinderblock, but the thing’s head snapped back, and it fell like a marionette with its strings cut. I rolled to my feet.

The cultists came forward. Their naked bodies had no sense of vulnerability. At least two of the men had huge erections. At least one of the women had a machete. I stood up. None of them spoke. The first of them stopped no more than thirty feet from me. Another half dozen came out from the doors, their shadows stretching ahead of them. One of them was Sabine. There were too many.

And Karen flew past me like a wind.

She stood between me and the oncoming mob, knives in both hands.

“Go!” she yelled over her shoulder.

My throat felt stiff. The words had to fight their way out of me.

“Can’t leave Aubrey.”

“Take him and go!” Karen said and turned back to the cultists. At my feet, the body was turning back into the familiar shape, the face filling out, and the burns fading. I scooped the unconscious Aubrey up like he was a child and ran. The shrieks of battle sounded behind me.

Without Karen to lead me, the hospital was a labyrinth. Doors splintered by water damage refused to open. Hallways seemed to lead in circles. After the first couple of turns, I had to stop, fumble with the LED flashlight, and then stumble on. The smell of mold and death nauseated me. As the adrenaline faded, Aubrey grew heavier. I wasn’t looking for the way we’d come. Any way out would do.

It seemed like forever before I hauled Aubrey into a room with an ancient couch decomposing against the wall, and a window wide enough to crawl through. A thin network of rusted wire held the remains of the safety glass in place. I put Aubrey on the couch while I kicked the dead wire free.

Somewhere in my flight, I’d started crying. Small, slow tears that didn’t mean sorrow or fear. They didn’t mean anything in particular, except that as I tried to lift Aubrey’s dead weight to the open window, they shifted into sobs. I ignored myself, pushing his limp arms and legs out into the night air, then crawling after him.

The clean night air tasted wonderful. I let myself pause, my back against the rotting concrete wall, my breath labored. Aubrey lay beside me. His chest rose and fell deep and slow, as if he were only sleeping. As if he were the only one in his body. My hands were shaking with fatigue and the aftereffects of battle, but I couldn’t stop. At any second, Legba’s followers could pour out of the building. Or worse, the thing in Aubrey could wake up.

I fireman-carried Aubrey across the street, shuffling as quickly as I could to get across before a pickup truck ran me down. No one stopped to help, but no one stopped to ask me what the hell I was doing. At the base of the parking structure’s stairway, I paused again, gasping for breath. I was still weeping a little, and I hated myself for that.

Karen was back there, in the hospital. She was probably dead by now. Between one breath and the next, it had all gone to hell, and there’d been nothing I could do. And the elevator was broken, meaning four long flights of stairs to the car. I couldn’t carry him that far. I sank down to the steps, pressed my palms to my eyes, and trembled.

“Okay,” I said. “Get it together. Come on, Heller. Get it together.”

I swallowed my tears, looked up the twisting metal and concrete stairway, then back at Aubrey’s still-inert form. I couldn’t carry him. I just couldn’t.

“Fine,” I said. “You stay here, okay?”

Aubrey didn’t answer, of course. I took a deep breath, nodded, and ran up the stairs by myself. Yes, someone might come by and find Aubrey passed out in the stairwell. Yes, the rider might come awake, and greet me with a renewed attack. But I needed the car, it was on the fourth level, and so I was going to go get it.

Driving slowly down the empty parking structure grounded me. By the time I got back to Aubrey, I’d almost stopped shaking. Karen’s black duffel bag was still in the backseat. I thought I’d remembered seeing a roll of duct tape in it. Not quite as good as handcuffs, but what the hell.

As cars passed by on the street, I wrapped Aubrey’s arms behind him, taping them together with almost half a roll. The rest, I put around his ankles and knees. He murmured once as I moved him, the voice not his own. I debated for a minute between the backseat and the trunk and opted for the backseat. I got him in, pushed the doors closed, and found my cell phone. Ex answered on the third ring.