And Theo being a friend of Sher’s, and me knowing both of them; Sher being friends with China Black; meeting Frances on the bridge; Mick finding my body in the first place. Further back, that I had come to this City, and stayed, and further yet, that I’d been brought to life at all. We, the tarot cards, had come off the deck in order.

I faced Sherrea, queasy with nerves. “Because I think I know half a secret, and I can’t keep it properly until I know the rest. Because whoever’s shuffling is stacking the deck. Why did Josh ask if I knew about hoodoo, then tell me to ask you about the town?”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Then: “Maiden, Mother, and Crone. I didn’t think you were gonna do it.”

“Do what!” I said, my patience frayed.

“Prove you knew enough to understand the answers, dipshit,” she told me happily. “I’m gonna fetch a candle. If I tell you to wait under the big tree, will you trust me to come back and answer you?”

So I stood under the big tree and waited for her. I could see the stars between the heavy branches. The grass of the circle, faintly reflective with dew, was a little lighter than the sky.

I was still queasy. It was as if my stomach knew something my reason didn’t, about what I had asked, what I was about to find out. It was hard not to go straight to the farmhouse and lock the door behind me. I sat down, leaned against the trunk, hugged my knees, and tried to think of nothing.

Then I looked up to find Sher standing over me. “Santos, this isn’t even the hard part,” she said.

“I don’t know what it’s a part of.”

She dropped down on the grass in front of me. In her hand was a little lantern, glass framed in tin with a squat white candle inside. She set it down between us and lit it, and a pleasant piney smell began to spread around us. “I’ll make it easy. Heck, maybe I’ll even make it boring. What do you know about hoodoo?”

“It’s magic. Crowley’s definition, about making changes in conformity with will.”

“Do you believe it works?”

“No,” I said, before I quite thought about it.

“Good. Because it does, and that’s not how.” She let me wrestle with that for a moment, her face impassive and erratically underlit. “We’re living in a closed system. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. That’s true of mental energy, too, and spirit, and emotions — all the stuff that magic and religion are about.

“People who work with those kinds of energy, the unmeasurables, have been called hoodoo doctors. Somebody’s got a lousy love life, or is being worked against by somebody else, or wants to find a better job — it’s sort of like going to the medical doctor when you’re sick.” She grinned suddenly at the farmhouse and said, “G’night, Josh. Anyway, they go to the hoodoo doctor, who does the spell and asks the loa to help the customer. What’s really happening is that the hoodoo doctor, who has a lot of energy and can get hold of more, moves it into the system in favor of the customer, and asks some of the major components in the system to keep things stable.”