“We’re grown-ups,” I said. “We could have said no.”

Karen smirked into her coffee cup. Her eyes stayed sad.

“Fair enough,” she said.

“What I wanted to talk about, though,” I said. “That thing where the locals are still looking to kick Legba’s ass for whatever got it exiled in the first place?”

Karen sat forward, her brow furrowed, and nodded to me to go on.

“I don’t know if you knew this,” I said. “Eric… sometimes he worked with riders. Pitted the little ones against the big ones.”

“No,” she said.

“It was hard for me to get my head around too,” I said. “But there is a certain ‘the enemy of my enemy’ thing going on. And if we could find a way to use them. Something that would weaken Glapion, or even just distract her-”

“I said no. That’s the end of it. There aren’t any of them that will side with us. If Marinette proved anything, it was that.”

I sipped my coffee, frowning. That actually hadn’t been the message I’d taken from Aubrey’s possession, but Karen seemed sure of herself, and she’d been doing this longer than I had. We sat quietly eating our heart attack of a breakfast. My fingers played idly in the fallen powdered sugar, drawing a snake in the shape of a question mark and dotting it with a drop of coffee.

“I’m sorry,” Karen said after two or three minutes. “I didn’t mean to snap.”

“Didn’t notice that you had,” I lied.

“You’re kind,” she said. It wasn’t the first time someone had called me that, and I still didn’t know what they were talking about. “I don’t trust riders. Not any of them. I know Eric used to play with fire. I was more conservative.”

Who wants to live forever, right? Karen said in my memory. If that was more safety-conscious and conservative, then Uncle Eric must have juggled running chainsaws. But maybe he had taken terrible risks on a regular basis. Maybe that was why he was dead now, and Karen was still alive. If my mother had indulged in a marriage-threatening affair, then literally anything was possible.

“He will heal, you know,” Karen said. It took me a second to figure out she meant Aubrey. “It will take time, and he won’t be the same. It’s even possible that he’ll be better than he was before. Right now, he’s… damaged. Badly. But he’s not out of the game.”

“Like the city,” I said.

“I talked with Ex yesterday after we left the safe house,” she said.

“Did he tell you that it was all his fault that Aubrey and I got hurt?”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Among other things.”

“Ex is a good guy,” I said. “But he can be kind of a dick sometimes.”

“He’s a good man,” Karen said. “Confused, maybe. But at heart, I think he’s a very good person.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “It’s just that we work together, you know? He’s been around since the beginning. He looks at me, and I think he sees the girl I was when he met me. That wasn’t a good night.”

Karen washed down the last bite of beignet with the last swallow of coffee. She’d timed it better than I had. I still had half a lump of sugared dough and nothing to drink with it.

“Back to work?” I asked.

“Let’s,” she said. We walked back across the square, Karen taking my arm like we were old friends. Or possibly lesbian lovers, but I was going for the old friends vibe. Even the few minutes we’d been gone had changed the face of the square. More musicians were gathered. A face-painting table had set up, a thick-faced woman with stars and rainbows running down her cheeks acting as her own advertisement. Tourists wandered through the square, gawking and dancing a little and having their fortunes told. I’d spent my whole life hearing about New Orleans and Mardi Gras. Now that I was here, walking through it all, it seemed both more real and oddly smaller than I’d imagined. I wondered if it had always been this way, or if the glory days had passed. Or if maybe they were still coming.

“Hey, pretty lady!” a man called out from one of the fortune teller’s tables. “Come! Come, sit! I answer all your questions. Tell your future.”

“Qué será, será,” I said gravely and kept walking.

Back at the hotel, Aubrey, Ex, and Chogyi Jake were waiting for the valet to bring out the cargo van. I waved, walking forward with Karen. Aubrey looked a little better. There was more pink in his skin and less in his sclera. Chogyi Jake bowed toward me, smiling. Only Ex seemed awkward and diffident. I thought it was about me until Karen detached from my arm, went to him, and kissed him hello. It involved some unsubtle groping and went on long enough that I got my jaw closed again. I saw one of the bellhops watching us with bare envy on his face.

My mind felt like its clutch had slipped out of fourth gear, and I replayed everything Karen had said about talking with Ex. I couldn’t quite believe what was suddenly perfectly obvious. A stray breeze would have knocked me over.

“Well now,” Karen said, pulling back an inch from Ex’s lips. “Don’t tell me you’re ashamed of me?”

“Of course not,” Ex said, putting his arm around her waist. Karen smiled and leaned into him. Ex looked at me as if challenging me to say something disapproving. Aubrey blinked. Chogyi Jake kept his constant smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

So, okay. Ex and Karen had done more than talk. All right. It wasn’t quite as weird as my mother having a fling, but it was right up there. Not that Ex wasn’t a grown man. And Karen was wildly attractive. I just hadn’t thought…

It wasn’t my business, I thought, angrily. Ex wasn’t my lover, and he could do whatever he wanted with whoever he wanted to. There was absolutely no reason that I should feel betrayed. Or jealous. Or replaced.

The tableau held for two seconds, then three. I turned, waved down a parking valet, and gave her the ticket for the rental minivan. My momentary absence was all it took for the conversation to start again.

“We’re going to start with the one farthest out,” Karen said, “then work our way back in toward downtown.”

“Check in before and after,” Ex said sternly. “If something does happen, we need to know where to find you.”

Karen smiled. A taxi pulled up and let out an older man in a Tulane University sweater.

“If something happens that Jayné and I can’t handle,” Karen said, “you three need to run like hell.”

Ex’s expression went stony, and then to my continuing surprise, he laughed. I looked at Aubrey, who shifted his shoulders in a near-subliminal shrug. Chogyi Jake didn’t meet my eyes. The cargo van-white, anonymous, and belching smoke- arrived. The three men piled in, and we watched them drive away.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Karen asked.

“Mind what?” I said, a little too sharply.

“That I fell into bed with your priest.”

“No,” I said, forcing myself to mean it. “No, of course not.”

Karen sighed. It sounded like relief.

“Good. I told him you wouldn’t care,” she said, and the minivan hove into sight.

For months it had been me and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake and Ex; just the four of us. Karen, as cool as she was, belonged outside the circle. Only now maybe she didn’t. If Ex had a lover, and a lover who was really better equipped to fight riders than any of us, it was going to change things. I just didn’t know how. It wasn’t Ex I was jealous of, it was all of us. The little family that I’d made was changing, and nobody had asked me if I was okay with that. Maybe it was just because I had so little that protecting what was left seemed so important.

I let Karen drive, and half an hour later, we were in a decent-looking middle-class neighborhood, parked in the mouth of an alley, and peering down the street with binoculars. I had pretty much talked myself back to sane. As we drove through, I’d thought the houses looked pretty normal, apart from a bathtub ring four feet above the ground and the ubiquitous, eerie X mark that I’d seen out in Lakeview on the doors. Now that we had stopped, I began to notice other details. The yards with thick weeds and vines. Broken windows. The smell of mold and earth, like we were in the ruins of a place half reclaimed by nature.