The caped woman emerged from the house, and Marla stood on her tiptoes to get a glimpse of what lay beyond the door, but all she saw was a staircase leading up, blocked off with a velvet rope, and an open doorway to the right of the entrance, with the suggestion of movement beyond. The gatekeeper held up four fingers, opened the gate, and ushered four more people inside. The gate closed again, and Marla began to feel a slow burn of impatience start in her chest. She’d had to stand in line at the airport, too, just this morning, and that had nearly driven her insane. Marla hadn’t had to wait in line for anything in a long time, and it didn’t suit her.
“I hate this line,” her erstwhile admirer commented to the short-haired, stocky woman in biker’s leathers standing in front of him. “I remember in the old days, there was no waiting, even if you got here later than this. Now you have to come before nine to get even a crappy spot downstairs.”
“According to you, everything was better in the ‘old days,’” the biker muttered, without turning around. “Personally, I’m glad more people come these days. I was getting sick of seeing the same bunch every week.”
The young man sighed theatrically. “Sure, I guess, but some of these new people have no manners.”
“Some of the old ones didn’t have manners, either,” the biker replied. “Hell, even Mr. Finch can be a pushy bastard.”
“It’s his party—he can have all the party favors he wants, right? And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to come.”
“I don’t know why I hang around with you, Jared,” the biker said. “You’re some kind of a post-feminist misogynist, I think.”
Marla was reassured to hear both that Finch lived here and that these people had been here before—that this wasn’t some killing-ground she and Rondeau were being lured into. That would have been a pretty amusing way for the Chinese sorcerer to get his revenge—sending them into a sacrificial pit disguised as a party.
Rondeau wandered back to stand beside her. “That’s Zara,” he said, nodding toward the blond girl.
“Oh? Did you learn anything useful from her?”
“She likes drinking vodka and Red Bull and she shaves everything,” Rondeau said. “She’s one of the most forthcoming people I’ve ever met, actually, though she seemed disappointed to hear that I don’t have anything pierced. Maybe I should look into it.”
“You don’t have much of a threshold for pain,” Marla reminded him.
He shrugged. “No, but I think Zara could expand my threshold for pleasure.”
“Nah,” Marla said. “She’s all image. People with real technique don’t have to flaunt their kink like she does.”
Rondeau looked at Marla speculatively, and she gave him another grin. There was a time when he’d been hopelessly in love with her, though he seemed to have gotten over it lately; probably the plain fact of spending so much time with her in a business capacity had worn down his romantic aspirations. Marla in person wasn’t easy to idolize—she was too earthy, too cranky, and too prone to practicalities.
The velvet doorkeeper appeared, and let four more people in, including Zara. Now that Marla was closer to the wrought-iron gate that blocked the porch, she noticed that the metal wasn’t curved in a sunburst or fleur-de-lis or any other standard design. The gate was clearly custom-made, the metal twisted in a sinuous and organic design that suggested flowers and snakes. She recognized the shape.
The design was a veve, a ritual symbol, used in a ceremony to call up a loa, an occupying spirit. This was not the well-known veve of Papa Legba (which Marla had even seen on the occasional T-shirt), not did it belong to any of the better-known gods of Voudon, like Baron Samedi or Maitre Carrefour or Damballah. This was the veve of a minor spirit, one of the Guede, a loa of sexual passion. When summoned, a loa would take over the body of one of its worshippers, using it to communicate and satisfy corporeal desires (many of the loas were gluttons for rum and candy); the loa signified by this particular design would push its adherents to acts of sexual excess and gratification, and gain power from the mass coupling (and tripling, and quadrupling, and so on). Having the design in a gate wouldn’t actually call up the loa—the ceremony was more complicated than that—but as a design choice, it was certainly suggestive. Marla now had a pretty good idea what kind of sorcerer Finch was. Marla herself was a general practitioner when it came to magic; Hamil sometimes called her a brute-force-omancer. Many sorcerers chose to specialize to a greater or lesser degree, however, becoming necromancers, pyromancers, diviners, aviomancers, biomancers, technomancers—all with their own strengths and weaknesses, all with their signature obsessions.