I was supposed to be safe. I was supposed to be the one kicking ass. I got to the door, my weight more than my strength pushing the release bar. Behind me, Tamblen cried out. The door opened, and the wind spilled out into the world, hurricane strong.
I’d caught glimpses of the courtyard through the windows. I half fell out into it now. Once upon a time, it might have been a nice little garden for a couple of dozen monks or a place to pray during the bright spring days. In winter, it was brown, dusty earth and dirty, ice-glazed snow. A lone tree stood near the center, branches rising up into the pale sky like a shriek. I pressed my fist into my ribs like I was holding myself closed. The girl—the thing inside of the girl—boiled out past me. I slipped, landing hard on one knee.
She floated in the air, the bare tree behind her writhing in the unnatural wind. Her face glowed with delight and cruelty. She opened her mouth wider than she should have been able to, and I saw her tongue twisting black against the brightness in her throat. She raised her hands, and my ears popped as the air pressure dropped. The sky above me started to change, wisps of cloud twisting in and out of existence like snakes. It sounded like a freight train, and I didn’t think I’d make it off the tracks in time.
Please, I thought, pushing the word in toward the thing—magic, rider, whatever—that had always defended me before. Please, now would be a good time.
Father Chapin stepped past me. His Bible was raised in his hand, and he was shouting something in Latin. The black cloth of his pants fluttered against his ankles like a flag in a storm. Close-cut white hair danced on his scalp. Ex struggled by, his arms spread wide against the wind. He matched Chapin syllable for syllable, and for a moment the demonic wind seemed to stutter and fail.
I rose to my feet. The knee of my pants was torn out where I’d landed, and blood was slicking my shin. My ribs ached and my overcoat flapped around me like a cape. The smell of overheated metal assaulted me again, pressing in at my nose and mouth, and I felt the uncanny shifting of the world as the boundaries between reality and Next Door got thinner. I took a step backward. Miguel ran up to Father Chapin’s side along with another priest I hadn’t seen before, thick-featured and dark-skinned. Tomás, I figured. The double doors leading back inside slammed open and closed and then shattered into splinters and bent metal. A pair of black cellar doors bucked against their chain, like something was trying to rise up out of the earth beneath them.
“Daughter of Satan!” Chapin howled, the first English words I heard from him since the fight started. “You are bound! By the will of God, I bind you! By the will of God—”
Toward Ex.
I tried to scream, tried to warn him. But I couldn’t because, with an almost physical click, I wasn’t in control of my own body.
Two inhumanly fast, loping strides and I was at his side. The branch was shooting down toward us, but it and everything else seemed to slow. When I put my hand on Ex’s shoulder, I felt the heat of his skin and something more too. An echo of his mind, like a voice heard from the far end of a tunnel. His fear and his joy and a deep riptide of longing. His knees were bent against the wind, and I put one foot on his thigh, boosted myself up, twisting to put my other knee on his shoulder. I caught the branch in both hands. The weight bore us both down, but my legs went straight before I touched ground.
I stood in the tempest, Ex sprawled out beneath me. My coat tugged at my shoulders, pulled back almost straight by the wind. The branch was longer than a baseball bat, cold and rough and viciously sharp where it had torn free. I held it in both hands like a staff. The girl floating in the air stared at me, dark lips pulled back in square-gape rage. The sores and wounds on her body oozed black and yellow, pulsing with something like glee. I wanted to step back, but my body ignored me. The wind demon screamed. The power behind the attack was more than physical: raw magic pressed against me. I felt the answering force draw itself up my spine, filling me with a calm that bordered on serenity. I pressed it out from me, expanding it in a sphere that grew from my core. Above me, the tree still whipped and shuddered. The priests staggered under the storm, Bibles fluttering, voices lost in the roar. My coat hung softly at my back.
“Stop this,” I said.
The words were no more than conversational, but they carried over the pandemonium. The thing in the girl screamed again, but the attack seemed weak now. Futile. I walked toward her, and the dark, inhuman eyes widened with fear. Too late, it turned and tried to fly away. My body didn’t move, but something else did, reaching up for her, pulling her back down to me. The thing’s wail was all venom and despair. I dropped the branch and put my hands around her ankles, drawing her to the ground. As soon as her feet touched the dust, she collapsed down, gravity regaining its control. The thing was still in her, and it beat and kicked against me. There was power in the blows, but I didn’t feel any pain.
“It’s over,” my voice said. “You should go.”
Her hand shot out toward me, clawed and cat fast. I shifted out of the way, and she spat black bile on my shirt. I gripped the girl across the forehead like her skull was a basketball. The conscious part of me trapped just behind my eyes cringed, expecting something terrible and violent to happen. Instead, my body pulsed once, heat and dryness and solitude filling me, filling my arm, my hand, flowing into the little girl’s body. I felt the rider leave her like a joint popping back into place. Painful, a little disturbing, but also now made right.
The world clicked back to normal. The cold air rushed in. I was holding a little girl. Her hair felt soft and hot against my hand. The wounds and sores still marked her, but they were the red and pink of abused flesh now. Her eyes were tea-with-milk brown, and when she opened her mouth, no unearthly light spilled out. The only smell in the air was dust and pine sap. The smell of overheated metal was gone.
“Hey,” I said. I said. Not something else. I was in control of my body again. “I’m Jayné. What’s your name?”
“Dolores?”
I pulled off my coat. I’d been sweating, and the cold against my stained and soaking shirt felt like dipping into ice water. I ignored it. I hung the dark wool over her shoulders. She was weeping. No sobs, no running nose, just tears falling down her cheeks and splashing by her toes. Toes that were starting to turn mottled and dark from the chill. I scooped her up in my arms, my ribs protesting sharply.
“There was a bad ghost,” Dolores said. “It smelled bad. It tried to get inside me.”
“I know it did,” I said. “Now come in where it’s warm. I’ll make you some tea, okay?”
The priests watched me as I walked back inside: Tomás and Miguel leaning on each other like soldiers struggling back from battle; Tamblen leaning in the doorway with blood on his lips; Ex rising from where I’d pushed him down in the dirt; Carsey with his mouth in a smile that was as thoughtful as it was amused.
And Chapin, flat-eyed and empty. I stopped in front of him, the girl hugged close to my chest. I was starting to shiver and my earlobes hurt. He looked away. I took the girl inside.
UNFORTUNATE GOATEE’S name was Alexander. Ex rode with him and Chapin in the big, beat-up Yukon all the way back to the hospital in Taos. I followed along in Ex’s rented sports car. The others stayed back at camp, tending their wounds, fixing the broken doors, soothing Dolores with hot soup, and, I hoped, calling her mother to come take her home now that the worst was over. The good guys had won, demon driven out, like that. Go us.
I cranked up the music, singing along to the songs I knew by heart, even when I didn’t know the languages they were sung in. I was starting to feel the effects of the fight. When I got ready for bed that night, I’d have a bumper crop of new bruises. I was pretty sure the wind demon’s initial strike had cracked a rib, but I wouldn’t be positive until morning. If I could turn to the left, I’d be fine. If not … well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d broken a rib. I pretty much knew the routine.
The drive seemed shorter going back into town. Maybe it was just the sense of going bac
k to someplace known. The steering wheel buzzed against my hands, the music celebrated and mourned. Pine trees gave way to smaller, twisted piñons. The dead grass at the side of the road lay buried in drifts of melted and refrozen snow. I grinned at the landscape—distant canyon, snow-clad mountains, pale sun in endless blue sky.
The fight had released something in me. Ever since the night in London when I’d realized that my so-called magical protections might be significantly creepier than I’d thought, I’d been waiting for the thing in my body to take over. I’d been second-guessing every move that I made—had I really reached for the salt, or had it been something else controlling my hand? I’d thought that when it happened, if it happened, it would be the creepiest thing ever. the event itself, since I’d been through that before plenty of times, but what it meant. Now that it had happened, I was all relief and rib pain.
When we got near Taos proper, my cell phone chirped. When we stopped at a traffic light, I checked the log. Chogyi Jake had called again, twice, and left voice mail both times. I’d listen later, when I wasn’t driving. I turned right, following the Yukon through the press of ski-racked SUVs and expensive trucks.
At the hospital, three men in white uniforms and a woman in green scrubs transferred Alexander onto a gurney. The long, deep cut wasn’t bleeding so much as starting to weep a little blood, but the wounded priest was able to move his arm a little and he was trying to speak. I took those as good signs. Chapin stood next to a doctor whose face made me think of India even though her accent was pure Boston. The sun was already edging down toward the western horizon, pulling our shadows out long and reddish. It wasn’t quite four o’clock yet. The night was going to be long.
Once Alexander got rushed inside, Ex pulled himself back into the Yukon and drove it off toward the parking spaces. Chapin and the doctor exchanged a few last words, and the doctor went back inside. Chapin huddled down in his clothes. He looked older than he had before, his skin gray, his eyes bloodshot where they weren’t bloody. And there was something else. It was in the way he held his shoulders and the timbre of his voice. Anger maybe. Or fear.
“I will stay here,” Chapin said. “Until we are sure he is stable. Xavier says the two of you will find rooms in the city. We will … regroup, yes? Once we have had opportunity to finish here, we will regroup.”
“All right,” I said.
We stood silently. In the distance, I heard the Yukon’s door crash open and closed, and then the almost subliminal sound of Ex getting in the sports car. An old man in a bright green parka walked out of the ER, speaking Spanish into a cell phone. Neither Chapin nor I moved. I figured that was as close as I was going to get to permission to speak.
“So this stuff I’ve been seeing? The unnatural fighting and weird powers? I’m thinking it’s not just a psychological issue,” I said.
“I see your point,” he said.
“So we can skip the shrink?”
“We can.”
Chapter Five
I never went skiing when I was a kid. Other kids in school did, but only the rich ones. They’d come back from vacation talking about exotic places like Lake Tahoe and Park City. A couple of kids from church—Jacob and Stacey Corman, putting too fine a point on it—always made sure to have a little sunburn when they came back to school after Christmas break. Snowburn, they called it. They’d show off their pinked skin like peacock feathers until their mother got angry, started lecturing about the sin of pride, and threatened never to take them again.
Taos was apparently just the sort of place the Cormans went to. Finding a place to stay was harder than I’d expected, and Christmas vacation was exactly the problem. A few nights were easy. An open-ended stay-until-whenever widtd running up against previous bookings pretty fast. Jacob and Stacey were making my world less pleasant one more time. Ex and I sat in the Mercedes outside the hospital, the engine purring away just to keep the heater going, while I made a series of increasingly frustrating calls. In the end, I gave up and called my lawyer’s private line. She put me on hold for ten minutes and came back with an address halfway up to the ski valley where I now had a rental condo waiting. When she asked if I needed anything else, I almost laughed. I fed the address into the GPS.
“You want to drive?” Ex asked.
“Really?” I said.
He nodded.
“Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”
“I’ve had better days,” he said, and handed me the key.
We traded places and headed out. Going up the mountain was also more of an adventure than I’d expected. The road was narrow, twisting through the high mountains. It had been plowed and salted, but the ice and snow still clung to the blacktop in places. The falling-rock signs were reinforced by the occasional basketball-sized boulder at the roadside. I turned the heater up to full blast and thumbed on the heating pads hidden in the seats. Ex laid back in the dark leather of the passenger’s seat, eyes closed. He looked pale, and I thought he might be sleeping except that when I hit a bump or rough patch, he hissed a little under his breath.
At about nine thousand feet above sea level, there was a turnoff marked by a tiny, unreadable wooden sign. I waited for three sets of SUV headlights and one pickup truck to pass, then made the left turn and headed up the hill. The road twisted and turned among the high, snow-laden pine trees. I could feel the ice in the way the tires struggled to keep their grip. I more than half thought the last little rise was going to strand me or send me backward, but the little car made it. I pulled up to Spirit House Condominiums. It was five closely built structures huddling close enough to make good use of the limited space but with the distance to leave each one private. There were lights on in four of them. The fifth was dark, the windows looking out at the night like blind eyes.
I pulled into the carport, gravel and snow crunching under the wheels. Ex looked ragged enough that I left him in the car while I scouted the place. The wind had been cold before. Here, it was frigid. I left the headlights on while I went out, exploring the front entrance. It had a little alcove, a thick wooden archway, and a bench where people could put on or take off complicated footware. The door was locked, but a key hung from the knob by a thick rubber band. I tried it. It worked. Low security.
Inside, the lights were soft orange-gold glows, barely enough to cast shadows. A little mood-rich, but they worked. Small kitchen, check. Recessed conversation pit by gas fireplace, check. Through the picture window in the back, I could see the dark lump that was probably a hot-tub cover. A thin stairway led to the second floor and more bedrooms. In a pinch, the place would probably have slept eight. It was plenty for us.
When I came back out, Ex was pulling himself out of the car, stiff and awkward. He walked in toward the house, silhouetted by the headlights so that I didn’t see how bad he looked until he was almost to me.
“Hey. What’s the matter?”
When I put my arm around him, his back was wet. When I looked at my fingers, I saw blood.
“What the hell?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Just get me inside.”
At the little kitchen, I leaned him against the counter and ran back out to shut off the headlights. When I returned, he’d pulled off his shirt. Two deep gouges scored his back, one beginning at the shoulder and digging down to the middle of his shoulder blade, the other starting at the middle of his spine and running down over his kidney. A thin red smear mottled his skin, dark and dried at the edges, fresh and bright where blood still leaked from the wounds.
“Jesus!” I said, shutting the door behind me. “What happened?”
He chuckled, then bent over in pain, resting his weight on the kitchen counter.
“Well, there was this wind demon,” he said, smiling through the pain. “We had a little fight.”
“You’re hurt.”
“Little bit. Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you say something when I asked?”
“Like what? ‘Ouch’? That would have helped.”
&
nbsp; I drew him closer to the sink. The hot water ran icy cold a few seconds before it went warm. I found an old dish towel in a drawer. Water and blood mixed, sheeting down Ex’s side. Under the mess, the skin around the wounds was red and angry. When I started cleaning out the actual gouges, he winced.
It felt strange, touching him. We’d been very careful over the weeks together to keep our physical contact down to taps on the shoulder or steadying hands. I was washing him now, my palm against his side, my fingers feeling the ridges and valleys of his rib cage. I pressed the wet cloth against him and watched him respond to it. He wasn’t wincing now. Even with the wounds to excuse me, it felt dangerous and sweet, and I found myself being gentler and taking longer than I probably needed to.
“You’re going to need stitches,” I said. “I can’t believe you, Ex. We were just at a hospital. I mean, we were right there.”
“It would have attracted too much attention,” Ex said. “Father Chapin and I agreed that it would be better to keep outside involvement to a minimum. And I don’t need stitches.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t see your back.”
“He did.”
I stopped dabbing, but I didn’t take my hand away. Ex looked over his shoulder at me. His white-blond hair had blood in it, and his eyes held as much sorrow as exhaustion. I shifted my hand between his shoulder blades, and he looked away. I went back to cleaning up. When I’d done as much as I could, I left him there and went upstairs. There were towels in the two bathrooms, and I used them to improvise bandages.
We moved him to the couch where he could lie on his belly. Between the blood and the water, his pants were sopping, and I put a blanket over him so that he could pull them off without compromising his modesty. He pushed his clothes out from under it and collapsed forward with a sigh. I turned up the thermostat by the stairway, and the gas fire grate hissed to life, orange flames licking the ceramic logs.
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