Sean didn’t know how long it took before he was aware of the rustling beside him. It wasn’t his father. He knew that much without looking. But it wasn’t real either. Wearily, he turned to confront the old man in the porkpie hat. “Now isn’t exactly a convenient time for a chess game,” he said. “Especially if you’re worried about the welfare of your sons.”
But instead of the orisha, it was a priest, in a long, old-fashioned cassock that shimmered along next to him.
“You’re new,” Sean said without enthusiasm.
“Not really.”
“Then let me guess. We were we just playing chess?”
“Yes,” the priest said. “And no.”
“As is so often the case.”
“Perhaps the best way to phrase it would be that my brother and I are aspects of the same, and yet as vastly different as only sons of the same father can be.”
“If you say so,” Sean said. “So why are you here? Your brother too busy to make sure I’m going to make good on my father’s debt?”
“I’m here to tell you there is no debt,” the priest said. “Owed by your father, or owed by you.”
“In other words, you’re a figment of my imagination.” Sean never broke stride. “In case you’re wondering, that one doesn’t have me falling to the ground in shock, either. I’m a lot of things. But one thing I’m not is gullible enough to let a ghost drive me into saving those assholes from extinction.”
“I never had any doubt of it.”
Sean shot the priest a sharp glance. “Then why exactly are you here?”
The priest cocked his head. “You really don’t remember me, do you?” “Nope.”
“Then am I to assume you don’t remember the first words you ever spoke, either?”
“The world remembers them. I asked my mother to fix me a drink. A screwdriver.”
The priest laughed. In fact, he seemed to shimmer with laughter. “No,” he said. “The first words you spoke were a week before that. They were preparing the church for a Mass of Thanksgiving for the founding of this church—the very service in which you most memorably fell ill. Do you remember any of this?”
Sean shrugged. “Does it matter if I do?”
But he was remembering, so much so that the priest’s next words were little more than a voice-over narrating the filmstrip that was unscrolling in his head. “In those days, there was no Outreach Center. On cold nights, the homeless slept on the vents of the church basement for warmth. And that year, the homeless were camped out in droves. Not exactly the sort of people you want as greeters for your anniversary service. Your father was making arrangements to have them removed, when you said—”
Sean stopped and stared at the apparition, as the words rose to his lips out of nowhere. “And when St. Lazarus’ s wanderings brought him to Africa, he was hailed as the orisha Babalu Aye—Lord of the Earth, the Son of the Lord, the Wrath of the Supreme God. At once the Leper Saint and the great healer, his sores are a reminder of the double nature of all things. So it is always wise to care for the beggar saint, especially when you are at a crossroads. For you never know when you might meet Papa Legba himself. And the god of the crossroads can be a trickster, but he will always return an act of compassion with kindness.”
And then he grinned incredulously. “So what’s the great cosmic lesson to be learned here? My poor bastard of a father built the Outreach Center because his autistic son started babbling about lepers and tricksters?”
The priest smiled in the irritating way that priests always did, regardless of whether they were ghosts, avatars, or figments of your imagination. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
Of course not. “Then why are you here?”
The shimmering seemed to redouble, just as the priest’s voice suddenly seemed to echo from every direction. “To open your eyes to the fact that even the god of the crossroads only points the way. He cannot stop you from choosing your own path. From exercising your own free will. And willfully blind or not, the path you have always chosen to follow—then, just as now— is the path of compassion. And that, and that alone, is the only real mystery you need to understand, in order to understand your miraculous cure.”
Sean had to assume that, as cosmic pep talks went, it was meant to be touching. But frankly it felt like nothing so much as Gandalf bolstering Frodo before he threw himself into the flames of Mordor. Thing was, Sean had been thinking more in terms of preventing a break-in at a botanica and then heading back to Danny’s for a well-deserved lager. All that shimmering and booming and talk of miracles sounded a lot more like his priestly friend believed he was contemplating the ultimate self-sacrifice. Which he really sincerely hoped he wasn’t. And if his pet apparitions knew otherwise, he’d find a heads up a hell of a lot more useful than a pep talk.
Yeah, well. Time to hold that thought for a minute, because Sean was finally across the street from the church. And there at the far end, crouched by the back entrance of the botanica were the Lazaritos. Christ. It was an insult to call it predictable or inevitable. It was more like stupidity raised to the level of an art form.
But that was the thing. Sean didn’t like art any more than he liked stupidity. Or cosmic pep talks. He liked the order of a chessboard, the mathematical relations that underlay even the wildest reels, the calm inevitability of seeing your life mapped out in front of you like a series of moves. Moves, not choices.
But what other choice did he really have? Hoisting the strap of his fiddle case on his shoulder, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and got on with it.
“Excuse me!” he called.
Suddenly the closest punk shrieked, his eyes rolling back in his head. Sean sighed. It was not what you’d call an auspicious start.
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m just here to talk.”
The punk with the crowbar swung it up with both hands. “Jose’s a pussy,” he hissed. “I ain’t afraid of you.”
“Good, because little as I might like it, I’m on your side here,” Sean said. “And I’m pretty certain that I’m about the only one around here who is.”
“Shows what you know,” the Lazarito said.
“Oh, I know about your friends.” Sean jerked his head toward the half-jimmied lock. “They the ones that told you this was a good idea?” Another punk licked his lips. “He be watching us. I tol’ you.”
“What the fuck you playing at?” the Lazarito demanded. “You think you’re gonna hypnotize us again? Fuck with our heads?”
That would only be a redundancy, even if Sean could. Christ, why was he wasting his time? There would be those who would say letting them blow themselves to Kingdom Come was nothing but Darwin at work.
Chief among them, Trey Carey. And that was the problem here.
“No mojo this time. Just logic. Gasoline,” Sean said, gesturing down at the cans they were carrying. “I’m assuming they told you to torch the place?”
“You want to fight, bro? You want I should take a swing at you?”
“I want,” Sean said, “for you to take a deep breath, and then tell me exactly what you smell.”
The Lazarito thought for a moment. Sean sighed. That wasn’t likely to contribute to the situation. But then he hefted the crowbar from hand to hand as he took a cautious sniff.
“I smell gas,” he said, and the crowbar wavered. “What the fu ... ?”
“It means, if you open that door, I won’t have to mess with your head, because it will be a mess already.” Sean looked at the gasoline cans. “That’s nothing but window dressing. You’ll never even get a chance to use it. One spark, and this botanica will blow sky high. And it will provide evidence of your criminal intent once they decide to piece things—along with what remains of you—back together.”
“Shit!”
Two or three of the punks were starting to listen, but the main man stayed stubborn. Sean guessed that was why he was the main man.
“Why should I believe you ain’t messing with our heads again?” he snarled. “You made us see things, why shouldn’t you be able to make us smell things, as well?”
Well now, that was at least creative. Stupid. And wrong. But creative.
“Face it, you guys are nothing but pawns in another man’s game. The Man’s game. And pawns are always expendable. Especially when they’re also the evidence in the case.”
Sean breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the last point hit home. “That’s what they told you, isn’t it?” he pressed. “That you’re destroying evidence. They just didn’t happen to mention that you’re the evidence you’re destroying. Have to admit, that takes more of a sense of irony than I would have given them credit for.”
“Who the fuck’s they?”
“What the fuck’s irony?”
“He’s reading our minds, man.”
“It’s the fiddle, man ... ”
“I tol’ you. We got no business burning down a botanica. The saints will protect their own. Ol’ Luisa always said so.”
The main man might be hanging tough, but the others were clearly terrified. Which was nothing short of annoying. Terrified people were hell to deal with. Someday, maybe someone in the Middle East might figure that out.
“What the fuck does that mean?” the Lazarito asked.
“It means you’ve outlived your usefulness to your friends. And now they want you gone.”
Which was at least a concept a gangster could understand. “But we done nothing—”
“Since when does that matter?” Sean said. “Honestly, how old are you?” “Old enough,” the leader said, but his heart wasn’t in it. His face fell.
“Shit.”
“In a word.”
“What we supposed to do?”
Sean nodded toward the Church of St. Lazarus across the street. “You could head in there and claim your right of sanctuary.”
“You fucking kidding? That nun?”
Was about the only thing standing between them and a death that frankly no one would mourn. But as Sean tried to come up with a way to phrase that somewhat more ... diplomatically, a small skinny Lazarito stiffened, then fell to his knees, his eyes focusing everywhere and nowhere at once.
“Our Lady Oyá! The owner of the marketplace, who keeps the gates of the cemetery. She wields lightning and rides the winds into battle, often fighting with her machetes side-by-side with Chango. She raises armies of the dead and stole Chango’s secret of throwing lightning ...”
The leader’s hand clenched on the crowbar. “I tol’ you—”
“No!” the skinny kid cried. “She says we have to listen to him. Says she will protect us, that if we go to the church, she be waiting for us there.”
You didn’t need Sean’s powers to see it was all over but the shouting. “She tends to go by Sister Saint John these days,” he said, thinking wearily that if he hadn’t just earned himself a glass of Martin’s best whiskey, he didn’t know when he had. “I’m guessing it’s simplest if you just go ahead and ask for her by name.”