Страница 64 из 73
“We need another damned plan,” said Sherrea.
“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘we.’ I don’t need one to get in; this time I know he’s expecting me. He’ll probably leave a light on.”
“Wait, wait.” Frances dropped cross-legged on the floor and jammed her fingers into her hair. “What do you want to accomplish?”
I thought about it, and for a wonder, they kept quiet and let me do it. “I want to get Dana out. If you’re asking what I’d like for my birthday, hell, I’d like to make it possible for Theo to go back. And I’d like to keep Tom Worecski from ever doing this again.”
“Then you’ll have to kill him,” said Frances.
“Will I? You’re the expert.” I felt bad when I saw the color go out of her face. I hadn’t meant it to hurt.
“Sparrow,” Sher said suddenly in a terrible voice. “What did you dream?”
I tried to recite it as fairly, as clearly as she had hers, but she’d had a more coherent original to work from. She closed her eyes partway through, and drew her knees up and rested her forehead on them when I was done. “Oh,” she said, muffled. “Oh, no. I’ve blown it. We’ve run out of time. I’m sorry,” she said, and raised her head. She was red-eyed. “You don’t know anything, because I started too late, and now it has to be done whether you’re ready or not. It’ll kill you. Oh, what’s the fucking date?”
The rest of us sat awed by the whole terrible-sounding, unintelligible speech. But Josh’s voice, from the front door, said, “June twenty-third. Saint John’s Eve.”
“Well, I’ll be plucked and basted,” I said. “It really is my birthday. What a coincidence.”
“Don’t you understand?” Sher cried. “There are no coincidences here. You were made by the loa for this. Everybody else has a soul that’s part of the continuity. Yours is brand-new. You’re a custom-made item for breaking up a jam in the energy flow, and this is the jam, and the time. Tomorrow is Midsummer. The celebration of the sun, the energy source. Of course it’s supposed to be done then. And you’re not ready!” She buried her face in her knees again.
Josh stepped out onto the porch and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t take it all on yourself.”
“Who’m I supposed to share it with?” she groaned, but she raised her head and wiped her eyes. “You’re right. That won’t accomplish shit.”
It had accomplished something, actually. “This is what that reading was about, wasn’t it, Sher?” I said. “The one you did for me back in the City. There’s go
She nodded, slowly, probably because she didn’t like the sound of my voice. I wouldn’t have, either.
“I’m a quick study. Let’s see if I have this right. You’re saying that the loa animated a cheval to use, eventually, to bust up something… ” Even as I said it, the answer occurred to me. “Albrecht’s monopoly, right? And they turned me loose to grow up and get ready for this. Now here they are. And the message is: We made you. You owe us.”
Sher shook her head.
“Sure it is. This may kill me, you said. But they have a right to do that, because I belong to them. I was right, Sher, and you lied. I don’t own anything. And nothing is free.”
Frances and Theo were watching us. I don’t know how much of it made sense to them. But I wasn’t talking to them.
Sher found her voice at last. “We’re reading the same book, but your translation sucks. Okay. If that’s true, you don’t have a choice. But you’re going to find out that nobody is forcing you to do this. I’m trying to make you want to do it, because if you knew as much as you ought to know by now, you would. Santos, the only person who’s leaning on you is Worecski. But your damned stupid life was a gift. And I meant it last night when I said that the only reasons to do a thing were out of love, or because you knew it needed doing.” She stood up, her shoulders very straight. “If you decide to go to Ego, because of Dana or Worecski or whatever, let me know. I’ll help. Out of love, and because it needs doing.”
She was down the steps and six paces away before I could move, or knew I wanted to. I vaulted the railing, landed in the flowerbed, and lunged for her arm.
“I take it back. I can’t replace it with anything yet, but I take it back.”
“Why?” she said, her face pinched.
“Because… because I don’t know anything about your damned loa, and I can’t say whether they would do what I just said they did. But I don’t think that you would.”
She stared at me, her chest rising and falling. “Not bad reasoning,” she said finally, “for a dipshit. That reading I did for you — it had Death in it. D’you remember?”
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t mean dying, in the tarot. It means change, transformation. I think that’s what it means on the Gilded West, and I think that’s why Theo’s family took it over and closed it up.”
“Symbolic barrier to change.”
“Hell, no — an actual barrier. Hoodoo works on the symbolic level to do something to the actual. I think closing up the Gilded West was a hoodoo work. And I think my dream was a request that we undo it. That we light the building again.”
Theo, behind me, said, “I could do that.”
“What?”
“I could light up the Gilded West. The stuff’s all up there. All I’d need is some initial input of power.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not going back to the City.”
“I’m not going back to Ego. I don’t have to. Except I have to get some charge. I might have to steal juice from next door.”
“Frances,” I said slowly, “how do I stop Tom?”
“You know very well how you stop Tom. You lock him in his head, and you kill the head.”
“What would happen if he were locked out?”
“What?”
“Would he live if he didn’t have a body to ride?”
“Of course not. He’s not a blasted poltergeist. But how do you propose to do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to get Theo his first shot of juice, either, without getting it from Ego. But I don’t like that, and I don’t like the thought of killing someone else’s body to get Tom Worecski.”
“He’s probably already killed the host mind,” Frances said, just as Sher said, “Of course not. It screws up the symbolism.”
“It what?” Theo asked.
“If hoodoo works on the symbolic level,” Sher said, impatient, “then what does it mean, symbolically, if you steal power from the thing you want to get rid of to fuel the process that gets rid of it? And you can’t kill the body that Tom’s in because you don’t have any more right to it than he does. You wouldn’t get rid of him, you’d become him.”
“Probably literally,” I said, “based on past experience.”
“Present company is unexcepted, of course,” Frances broke in pleasantly.
“Save a little tar on that brush for me.” Sherrea, to my amazement, blushed.
“It doesn’t do to forget that I’m one of them, too,” Frances added. She looked, abstracted, at her hands; then she said, “I’ve smothered her. Like smothering an infant with a pillow, though it took longer. I’ve been four years in her body, and she was not, God help her, a strong little soul.”
“You’re right,” Sher said. “I had forgotten. But you can have a great time hitting yourself over the head later. It’s irrelevant to what we’ve got to do.”
Frances slid one daunting eyebrow upward. “Where were we then? Sunk up to the undercarriage in a symbolic pothole. Unless one of you has a metaphysical shovel?”
She hated this, I could tell. She didn’t have even the tolerance for hoodoo that I did. She hadn’t spent her life in the streets surrounded by it, making deals with it, using its forms as polite social fictions, its person-principles as swear words. If Sher’s carryings-on about energy had any truth in them, Frances’s power was from the past that gave birth to her. She wouldn’t think of asking favors from the loa.