“Where are you?” I asked.

“At the house,” he said. “We’ve finished the first cycle of wards. I was thinking we could go pick up a refrigerator.”

“Stay there,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” he said. I could see his face, the hardness of his eyes, the cold fury.

“The reconnaissance went south,” I said. “Just… just stay there.”

I dropped the cell onto the passenger’s seat, turned on the engine, and started to pull out to the street. The cell lit up.

“Hey,” it said. “You’ve got a call.”

The display said it was Karen Black.

“Hello?” I said.

“Where are you?” Karen asked.

What if she’d been taken captive? What if it wasn’t really her?

“In the car,” I said, not lying, but not giving away anything.

“Great,” she said. “Take La Salle south. Toward the Superdome. Turn left at Perdido. I’ll watch for you.”

“How do I know this isn’t a trap?” I said.

There was a pause. I thought she was laughing, but she might only have been out of breath.

“You don’t, really,” she said. “But it’s not.”

In the backseat, Aubrey muttered angrily and shifted his weight. I wondered what I was going to do if the rider came to before I got back to the house. Was it a bigger risk to get Karen, who might be the free cheese in the mousetrap, or drive alone with a demon in the backseat? I thought about how I would have felt if she’d been the one to reach the car.

There wasn’t really a choice.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

The traffic was light. I took La Salle down a long city block. Perdido was a one-way, and 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 a blow.

“I can,” he said.

Karen put a hand on my arm. I nodded, and we walked out of the shed into the darkness of the yard. The house squatted before us, light blazing from the windows. The bareness of the kitchen was like a particularly depressing movie. Bare bulb, no furnishings, old paint. I half expected a film student in a black turtleneck to come out with a handheld camera and tell us to start improvising dialogue. Chogyi Jake followed us, and the shed door closed behind him.

“I’ll stay with them,” Chogyi Jake said. “You should go back to the hotel. There’s no food here. No beds.”

“We could sleep on the floor,” Karen said.

“It wouldn’t help,” he said.

“Ex can do this,” I said. “He’s done worse before. And he’s really good.”

Chogyi Jake didn’t answer one way or the other. I could have stood some reassurance. In the shed, something popped and I heard Ex’s voice in a rising chant. Aubrey screamed. I wanted to go in. I wanted to stop it or help or something. Anything.

“This will take hours,” Chogyi Jake said. “Go. Rest. Only… be careful.”

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. I didn’t sound convincing, even to myself.

I crawled back into the car and aimed us south again, for the French Quarter. Karen, in the passenger’s seat, had grown quiet. I went through my leather pack with one hand while I drove, found a Pink Martini mix disk I’d burned, and popped it in the CD player. Their soft, eerie version of “Qué Será Será” started up. What will be, will be, I thought, whether I like it or not. I skipped ahead to “Cante E Dance.”

When Karen sighed, I knew it was a preface. I expected her to apologize. This was her fault, she’d led us into danger, and so on. It was what I’d have been saying in her place, and I had my response all planned out. We were big boys and girls, we knew the risks, and we’d come of our own free will. All the things I’d have wanted to hear.