“And the young one? Daria? That poor thing. Sharp as a tack, but odd. You seem like the skeptical type, and I want you to know I respect that. There are any number of frauds in this business. I’m more than half a fraud myself, so I can say that. Daria Glapion gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

She had a worm inside her when it happened, so you be gentle with her.

“Me too,” I said.

“You’ve met her, then?”

“Once,” I said. “And Amelie once, but we didn’t really hit it off.”

A flash of lightning turned the windows white, and a breath later, the thunder boomed. Dr. Inondé folded thick fingers together. With his brows knit, he looked more like a shop teacher than a houngan.

“Is this what you wanted to know?” he asked.

“I can’t tell yet,” I said. “I’ve heard stories.”

“But you don’t believe them,” he said, as if offering sympathy. He thought I meant stories about voodoo, the supernatural, riders, and loa. I meant every word Karen had said.

“I believe something’s going on,” I said. “I just don’t know what it is yet.”

“But you’re going to find out,” he said.

“That’s my job.”

Dr. Inondé untangled Doris and put her on the table, then rose with a gesture that told me to remain where I was. He stepped past one of the cheap red curtains into an alcove I hadn’t noticed. The snake looked at me with shining, empty eyes, then turned and slid down toward the chair where the man had been sitting like a cat curling up in a warm spot.

“For that thousand dollars, you can have this too,” he said, passing me a red cloth pouch on a leather thong. It smelled like dust and old chicken, and I had an immediate, intense dislike of it. “It’s gris-gris. Salt for the sea, ashes for fire, graveyard dirt for earth, and a baby’s first breath for air. It’s good medicine.”

I didn’t want to touch it, but I didn’t see how to refuse. I took the thong in my fingers and lowered the thing into my backpack. When it was safely away, I took out my wallet and counted out ten hundreds onto the table. Dr. Inondé looked at the bills and then up at me.

“I don’t want to know what’s going on with this, do I?” he said.

“Probably not,” I said.

He nodded, gathered up the money, and shoved it into his pocket.

“If I have more questions later?” I said.

“This sad fake is always at your service, Miss Jayné,” he said in the theatrical voice. I smiled. He smiled back. As I opened the door to leave, a thought struck me.

“Inondé?” I said. “Doesn’t that mean…?”

“Flooded,” he said with an apologetic rise of his brows. “You can pretend it didn’t happen or you can make it part of the magic of the place. What other option have you got? And Dr. David Mackelwhite doesn’t pull them in.”

The rain hadn’t slackened. Tiny streaks of silver and gray darted out of the sky and crashed onto the pavement like suicides. I walked under the awnings, as far from the street as I could manage, and my jeans were still getting wet. I thought about what I’d learned, if I had learned anything.

I knew that Amelie Glapion was possessed by a rider. That was firsthand knowledge, and I didn’t have to trust anybody about anything. So that was the center to work from. Amelie was running a rider cult, and her granddaughter Sabine was attending rituals. I knew her other granddaughter Daria had the ability to see things that were true, but that she didn’t necessarily understand herself. Again, that was direct evidence.

At one remove, I knew that the rider had been cast into exile, killed a bunch of people including Karen’s old partner, and was now making its way back home. I knew Amelie Glapion had suffered a stroke at the same time New Orleans was wrecked by the hurricane. She had been a woman of serious importance in the community, but she was weaker now, and the community scattered.

I reached an intersection, ducked out from beneath the awning, and ran. The rain was hard, but warmer than I’d expected. My shirt and hair were soaked by even that short time. I double-checked my laptop carrier, but it was closed tight. Still, probably best to keep as dry as I could.

I turned down the street. A neon sign announced LARRY FLYNT’S BARELY LEGAL, white lightbulbs dancing above it. The pictures in the window showed airbrushed girls younger, I assumed, than I was. A woman in a bright yellow raincoat came out, lit a cigarette, and looked at me. She was wearing half a display counter worth of makeup, but underneath it, she looked tired. I smiled, and she nodded back. I had heard somewhere that the sex shows were the first businesses on Bourbon Street to reopen. At the time, it had been said in an approving voice, but I couldn’t remember whose. I kept walking.

Nothing I’d heard conflicted with Karen’s story. But if I were Legba, would I really choose Amelie Glapion for my victim? Someone that high in the community would be a coup, certainly, but I couldn’t see why the rider would try to surround itself with people who were aware of riders and how they worked. If Karen was to be trusted, the local loa didn’t think much of old Legba. Diving into an existing rider cult…

Maybe there was a reason. Maybe it made sense, if you looked at it from the right perspective. Eric would have known, could have put all the points in a line and seen what it all meant and what would happen next. But he was gone, and I was here.

And, much as I hated it, I did have someone I could ask. Karen had evaded my questions and played weird power games and all that, it was true. But if I wasn’t seduced or cowed, I could insist that we talk about it. I’d present my questions in simple, clear words, and I’d just keep leaning until I had an answer. Then afterward, I could find a way to fact-check it.

I had just about resolved to head back to the safe house when I realized where, only half aware, I’d been heading all this time. I’d been walking and thinking, aiming for the dry spots and holding tight to awnings, and some part of me had known where it was headed. The Voodoo Heart Temple was right in front of me, its windows dark, its grisly sign swinging in the storm wind. I didn’t see anyone inside, but I stepped out into the street, rain sluicing down me, and looked up. There, on the third floor, lights were burning. An apartment above the temple.

I needed to go. I needed to walk away right then and go to the hotel and get in my car and leave New Orleans. I tried to turn, but my body didn’t move. I felt the cold distance come over me, the sense of being an observer in my own body. Something was wrong, and I knew it.

A voice, nothing more than a change in the tone of the raindrops. Three girls were coming along the street toward me, laughing and prodding each other. The one nearest the wall might have been Chinese or Vietnamese, I couldn’t tell at that distance. The tall girl in the middle was black, gangly and awkward; a girl who hadn’t quite grown into her body yet. The third-the one walking closest to the storm-was as graceful and beautiful now as she had been when I’d seen her in the flickering hell of Charity. Sabine Glapion.

And there, in the shadows of the doorway just before them, something moved. The raindrops paused, hanging in the air like crystal. The roar of the storm became silence. The two girls at Sabine’s side froze in mid-stride, and Sabine alone went on for half a step.

I dropped my pack and my laptop in the street.

“Sabine!” I screamed. “Run!”

The thing that boiled out of the shadows shrieked; a wet, angry sound full of rage and hatred. Sabine turned and sprinted away, the dark thing surging after her, and me after it. The beast knocked the frozen girls aside with long, knifelike claws. Sabine ran into the suspended rain, her passage carving a tunnel through the falling water. I drew the psychic energy of my qi up from my belly through my chest, pressing the living force out my throat as I shouted.