“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.”