“Face me!”

The thing hesitated, its great, inhuman head craning back to look at me. It had been human once, I thought. I could see the places where the rider hadn’t transformed the flesh past all recognition. The blunt, black incisors, the dagger-long fangs were set in a jaw that belonged to a human being. The weirdly expressionless eyes had been a human’s once. A man’s, a woman’s, or a baby’s; there was no way to tell. I leaped, my right foot sawing through the unnaturally still air. The impact jarred me like I’d hit a concrete wall, but the thing fell back a step.

Before I caught my balance, it attacked. I tried to block, and its claws bit into my arm. A closed fist swung up into my ribs like a car wreck. Something painful snapped. My own hand shot out, the heel of my palm against the thing’s face.

It took a step back, hissing. Stilled for a moment, it seemed broad as a truck, thick shoulders of pale skin mottled with deep veins of dark flesh. There were too many joints in its legs. For a moment, the only sound was the slow drip of blood from my arm, then its chest expanded and it let out a sound more like a storm than a shout. I felt the will and power and rage in its voice. It was chaos and war made flesh, and its hatred of me was as deep as a mine shaft. The pain in my ribs was bright and exquisite. I bent my knees, leaned toward it. When it lunged for me again, I moved into the blow, under it, and past the beast, driving an elbow into the place where a kidney might have been in a human. Its shriek had more to do with pain now. It wheeled to face me again.

I surprised myself by grinning. Its eyes flickered past me, down into the quiet of the suspended street. I could hear its breath, the low growl haunting the back of its throat. Sabine was getting away, and I could see the frustration in its face. A sense of profound peace came through my body, lifting and consoling me. My broken chest and mutilated arm hurt, but the pain didn’t mean the same thing anymore. Even before I moved, I felt the violence spinning up within me like the singing of a choir. This, I thought, was what it must feel like to die.

I dove to the side, hands grasping the pole that held the sidewalk awning, and wrenched from my gut. The wood splintered in my hand, coming away like plucking a blade of grass. I landed in the street, club in hand, one leg back one forward. I felt angelic. I felt beautiful.

The thing turned, and this time the wood caught its claws. I darted in, hammering its shoulder with my fist, then danced back as it howled. The still rain hung around me like a veil. I battered the thing with a flurry of strikes, knee, chest, shoulder, belly. For a moment, I thought I might actually win.

It swung, and I fell for the feint, bringing my club to stop a blow that wasn’t there. Its leg shot out, catching me just above the knee, and I stumbled with the sudden agony.

I saw the killing blow as it came. Knife-sharp claws carving the air, arcing toward my exposed throat. I wasn’t going to be able to block it. I had no leverage to twist aside. I hardly had time to gasp.

But the blow didn’t land. Something bright appeared at the thing’s wrist, and the claws pulled wide, shredding my sleeve as I fell, but not breaking skin. From the black, shining pavement, I looked up.

A man stood in the middle of the sidewalk, a great black coat hanging from his shoulders like the robe of some exotic priest. His black skin shone like he was lit from within, and the close-cut gray of his hair was like a scrim of silver cloud in the night sky. A chain hung from his hand with a vicious hook at one end. The hook that had pulled the creature’s attack aside.

“Not tonight, my friend,” the man said in a Caribbean accent as I struggled back to my feet. His voice was velvet and stone.

The thing turned to him, then to me, then roared in defiance and frustration. I steeled myself for a fresh attack, but my leg wasn’t quite where I thought it was. It didn’t matter. The beast raised its arms, vanished, and the raindrops hammered onto the street. After the unreal silence, the storm was deafening.

I didn’t realize I was collapsing until I was down, the asphalt rough and comfortable against my cheek. I coughed, almost certain that the warmth in my throat wasn’t blood. I rolled to my back, watching the rain fall from the distant clouds down onto my face like a manga cliché.

Sabine Glapion appeared, looming over me. She was soaked, her blouse clinging to her skin, her eyes wide and horror-struck.

You’re in danger, I tried to say. Maybe you noticed. Nothing intelligible came out. Then the black man was kneeling beside me. He had a long, careworn face, and a dark scar ran across one cheek.

“Don’t move,” he said, all concern and soft vowels. “You’re hurt. You need a doctor.”

“Y’think?” I managed, and he smiled a wide, warm, goofy grin. I lay back, darkness crowding the edges of my vision. The last coherent thought I had before I passed out was, Oh shit. That’s Joseph Mfume.

FOURTEEN

In the years before I left home, I went to the emergency room exactly once. Christmas Day, when I was twelve, I had a stomach flu so bad I was getting dehydrated. My father put me in the car, gave me a towel to puke into, and drove me to the ER where they drugged my guts into submission and kept me alive with an IV drip. By the time I got home, my brothers had opened all my presents for me.

Since inheriting Uncle Eric’s money, I’d spent a lot more time in the hospital recovering from wounds of my own and caring for the people who’d been hurt working with me. Swimming back to consciousness, I recognized the dim fluorescent twilight, the smell of antiseptic, the squeak of nurses’ shoes against linoleum. I tried to remember what had happened. A car wreck? No. Someone had stabbed me. Or something.

I tried to sit up and my left side from collarbone to hip lit on fire. I fell back to the bed, gasping. The ceiling above me was all-white acoustical tile. I came a little more awake. My right arm was bandaged. My left knee was swollen to about twice its normal size. I probed my ribs gently through the thin blue hospital gown. My right side felt merely sore and angry. I only tried touching the left side once.

Joseph Mfume. I’d been fighting with something-a rider in its full, unhidden form-and I’d been saved by the serial killer and rapist who’d started the whole messy thing. I remembered Sabine Glapion standing in the unfalling rain of the crossroads between the real world and Next Door. Well, she’d still been alive last time I saw her, so that had to be a good thing. I craned my neck, but there were no clocks. I needed to find out how long I’d been there. I needed to find out where exactly I was, for that matter.

I needed to find Aubrey and Ex and Chogyi Jake. The best I could manage was a nurse call button. After what felt like an hour, I hit it again. A couple hours after that, a nurse came, explained to me that I had hairline fractures in two of my ribs, soft tissue damage to the connective tissue in my knee, and they’d stapled my arm closed where it had been cut. When I asked him who’d brought me in, he didn’t know. When I asked for my stuff, he said he’d try to find it. He pronounced my name “Jane” and I didn’t correct him.

A couple junior cups of fruit juice later, I was feeling almost human. The so-called hairline fractures hurt like hell anytime I moved or laughed or breathed in too deep, but I took comfort in the intellectual knowledge that they only felt shattered. I forced myself to sit up, then slowly, carefully, figured out how I could walk without mind-altering pain. By the time a different nurse appeared with my things, I could see the first, faint light of dawn in the windows.

My clothes were gone, cut off me by the paramedics. My laptop case was rain-soaked, but the interior looked dry enough that it might have escaped harm. The leather backpack I used as a purse was probably trashed. The scraps of paper inside were all waterlogged, and Dr. Inondé’s unpleasant little gris-gris had leaked something gray and filmy over the interior pouch. I checked my cell phone’s side pocket with a sense of dread. What I took for dead was actually just turned off, and when I powered it back up, it seemed fine. I had five messages waiting for me. I sat on the threadbare chair by the window, the hospital gown wrapped tightly around me in an attempt to preserve what was left of my modesty, and called voice mail.