Ex touched my hand, and I looked up. I hadn’t noticed him coming across to me. I started to pull away, hesitated, and then went ahead and drew back my hand.
“No food in the place,” I said. “This was the best I could do for coffee.”
“It’s great.”
“It’s kind of crap.”
“It’s enough.”
He poured himself a cup and then one for me, and we stood for a minute in the chill of the cabin, drinking bitter, black coffee. A truck passed unseen on the highway, the rumble distant and softened by the snow and pine boughs.
“We can pick up some donuts on the way through Taos,” Ex said.
“Maybe some real coffee,” I said.
He smiled.
“Maybe that,” he said. “Go hit the showers. I’ll get the car defrosted.”
“About the others? Aubrey. Chogyi Jake. I just don’t want them to get hurt,” I said. And it was true, as far as it went.
He nodded, sighed, and drank off the rest of his cup in a swallow.
“I don’t either,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, my hair still damp, we were heading back down the mountain. Forty minutes after that, we were stocked on cake donuts dipped in powdered sugar. By noon, we were back in San Esteban, parking behind the adobe walls where demons had fought less than a day before.
The town was busier now. An ancient Volvo station wagon scraped down the street, a woman who could have been anywhere between sixty and eighty behind the wheehree teenage boys lounged on the street, talking among themselves, not making eye contact, and pretending to be immune to the cold. Ranchero music rolled out of one of the Quonset huts at the far side of town. The signs of actual life left the place seeming a little less eerie. The crows were there, eyeing me from the bare cottonwoods like they remembered me and weren’t entirely pleased I was back.
The little cutout where we’d parked before was full. In addition to the sedan and the Yukon, two cars with matching pro-life bumper stickers, and one with a heart-and-cross Marriage Encounter decal peeling in the window. The other had a vanity license plate that said GODSWRK. That was one way to keep from getting rear-ended. Ex parked across the street, and we got out. The air smelled of burning wood. I stopped and looked both ways before I crossed the street, only realizing how ridiculous it was after I’d already done it.
The front door swung open as we came close to it. Tamblen haunted in the doorway, nodding to each of us and stepping back into shadow. Voices speaking quickly in Spanish came softly from the back of the building.
“Is he here?” Ex asked as Tamblen closed the door behind us.
“An hour ago,” Tamblen said. “He’s with the girl’s family.”
“How’s Alexander doing?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Stable,” Tamblen said. “Not released yet. They don’t know what they’re looking at, so they’re being cautious.”
“That’s probably wise,” Ex said.
“You?” Tamblen asked. It was clear from his posture that he wasn’t talking to me. “Doing all right?”
“Bloodied but unbowed,” Ex said, and Tamblen hitched up a smile.
“We brought donuts,” I said.
We walked through the rooms again. They seemed smaller than the day before, the windows narrower, the light that glowed off the pale stucco dimmer. The web of cracks was going to take a lot of work to cover over, and it hadn’t happened yet. In the kitchen, Carsey was sitting on the couch with a laptop computer, tapping quietly. The sound of Spanish flowed in from the chapel. Even without knowing the language, I could pick Chapin’s voice out of the group. A woman laughed as I set the box of donuts on the little kitchen table.
“Welcome back to Chapel Perilous,” Carsey said with a wave. “Are those all sugar? Really, Chewy, what did chocolate ever do to you?”
I noticed he was keeping his voice low too. I wasn’t sure what it was about the meeting in the next room that commanded a kind of respect. It was in the air, though. The closest thing I could compare it to was being quiet in our rooms while Dad had some of the more respected men from church in the living room. Everything that wasn’t the main event became peripheral. I edged down through the rooms until, pausing half in the doorway, I found them.
They were in the room just before the black-floored ritual space. Three women, all with black hair and deep-gold skin and the same squarish nose, sat at a table across from the priests. The oldest of the women was probably sixty, streaks of white at her temples. The youngest was hardly older than Dolores. And also Dolores, sitting at the foot of the table with her hands in her lap. Father Chapin’s back was to me, and Tomás and Miguel were at his sides. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, like the end of a particularly successful dinner party. The only one who seemed out of place in the gaiety was Dolores. I edged in a little more, trying to catch her eye. When I did, she waved at me, a small motion and with a weight of desolation in her eyes I didn’t understand.
“Don’t fuss,” the older girl said, slapping at Dolores’s arm. It was a big-sister move, and I recognized it because I’d done it. Dolores’s gaze went down again, and I sloped back toward the couch and Carsey and Ex. Tamblen was halfway through one of the donuts, sugar spilling down his black front like stars.
“The older sister too?” Ex was saying.
“We thought she was the center of it. The one who was opening other people to demons,” Carsey said. “We went to confront Soledad, and she was possessed, but only by one of the spawn.”
“Wait,” I said. “Dolores’s sister was taken too?”
“Soledad and Dolores and a dozen others,” Tamblen said. “The beast in Dolores was the oldest of them. The most powerful one. All the others were its children.”
“Ah,” I said. “That’d be an awkward Mother’s Day.”
“Victories for the forces of darkness always annoy, don’t they?” Carsey asked with a lightness that seemed barbed. “Well, one disaster avoided. Full speed on to the next.”
The tone of the voices next door changed. I found I could follow the words closely enough to know they’d moved from whatever the first conversation had been about into farewells, protestations of thanks, and modest denials. I moved toward them. I wanted to see Dolores again, and I also didn’t. On the one hand, I liked her and I felt like we’d been through something important to both of us. On the other, she was well now, and I wasn’t. Knowing the shame was unjustified only made it sharper, and I covered it up by eating a donut.
The four women passed through the room, escorted by Miguel and Tomás. They nodded to the men but pointedly didn’t notice me. We passed in mutual anonymity, like patients at the STD clinic. I laughed at the thought, then swallowed it. Not a joke I wanted to explain to Father Chapin.
And there he was. The night rested hard on him. The eye he’d bled into was an orange-pink instead of full-on bloodred. His skin had the gray, powdery look of exhaustion. His curt bow of greeting had all the certainty and energy of before, but his face couldn’t quite carry it off. I hadn’t known him more than a few days, and the first thought I had was He’s getting too old for this shit.
“I’m pleased you came, young miss,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Didn’t think there’d be much question about it,” I said, trying for lightness.
“There are always questions. There are sometimes answers.” He offered up a strictly pro forma smile and turned to the men in the room. “Knowing what we do of the youg miss, what can we say?”
In the moment’s silence, I heard a car engine come to life on the street. Then another. Carsey shifted his weight, but Tomás was the one who spoke. He had a voice like honey glaze and smoke. In a different life, he’d have been Leonard Cohen.
“It cannot stop her. Or it chooses not to,” he said. “If the Enemy had been able to keep her from us, she would not have come.”
“Yes,” Father Chapin said. “It was possible before that the demon had hoped to evade u
s as it did the group in Hamburg. That after we saw the beast, she could leave and return of her own will is a very good sign.”
He stopped here to make eye contact with me and give what was probably supposed to be a reassuring nod.
“And if I hadn’t been able to?” I said.
“Then Xavier would have brought you,” Chapin said, as if it was obvious.
I looked at Ex. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. He’d been waiting. Even as I helped him bleeding over the threshold, he’d been waiting to see if the thing inside me took over and grabbed the car keys or flew up into the air like a Halloween witch. I wondered if he’d really been sleeping when I’d paused by his door. There was an uncomfortable thought.
“We can also say that it likes him more than it does her,” Carsey said, waving a hand at Ex. “When the demon attacked Jayné, it didn’t leap to the defense. Oh, it might have if pressed, but it wasn’t pressed, was it?”
“The attack it defended against was directed against me,” Ex said. “I didn’t see that branch coming. It would have killed me.”
“And what,” Father Chapin said, “do we draw from that?”
No one said anything. I finished my donut. The dry cake had sucked all the moisture out of my mouth, and my tongue felt like a desert. I looked around the room at all the men in their dark shirts, saying nothing. Father Chapin nodded once.
“Then it is a thing to hold in mind as we move forward,” he said. “A place to begin. This morning, we perform the blessings and a complete interview with the woman.”
“Hey. You know I’m standing right here,” I said. Chapin didn’t miss a beat.
“This afternoon, we perform de Tonquedec’s exercises with her. Once we have a clearer sense of the beast, I will permit a rest. If possible, I would like to force it to reveal its name by the day’s end.”
“Okay,” I said, “when you say ‘force it to reveal its name,’ how exactly does that go? Because it sounds a little ominous.”
“It will be in our control,” Miguel said, shaking his head. “There is no danger there, though it may be unpleasant, especially if the beast has hidden itself deep within you. To bring it out by our will instead of its own may cause some discomfort.”
I must not have looked reassured, because Carsey cleared his throat.
“Worse than a tummy bug, better than a sick drunk,” he said. “Have you ever been sick drunk?”
“No, but I had a friend in college,” I said. “Held her hair. That kind of thing.”
“Well, better than that,” he said with a smile. “The ugly part’s not until later. That’s worse than a sick drunk.”
I nodded. Carsey leaned over and tapped my forearm lightly with the tips of his fingers. For the first time since Chicago, I didn’t just half want Chogyi Jake there; I’d have sacrificed a finger if he’d appeared just then. He’d have been able to tell me just how bad this was about to be and make it all seem possible. Instead, I felt like a child with everyone saying her shots wouldn’t hurt. You know. Much.
“All right,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
Chapter Seven
When I was growing up, there were two kinds of magic: prayer and witchcraft.
Prayer, we did in church or at the dinner table. We did it at youth group; we did it before class; we did it last thing before bed. The idea that things could be the way I wanted if I just asked hard enough, if I just wanted hard enough, was the bedrock of my childhood. And so when my grandmother got cancer, I prayed like my heart was on fire. I knelt by my bed for what felt like hours, hands clenched, asking God to make my Nanna better. At her funeral, the priest said that Nanna had gone to a better place and my mother nodded. I spent the rest of the service embarrassed for having been selfish when I’d prayed that she get well.
Witchcraft was something else. It was the tool of evil. Satan’s hand in the world. That didn’t stop a few of the kids from making up hex charms. Especially in middle school, girls would sometimes find little drawings stuffed into their lockers made up of what we thought of as occult scratching—yin-yangs, pentagrams, inverted crosses—with their names inscribed. Once a girl in my Language Arts class—Tracey McCort, I think her name was—threw such a violent fit about one that we all had to go see the school counselor.
Before I walked into my uncle Eric’s secret apartment and found a desiccated corpse smoking cigarettes, cooking omelets, and cracking wise, the one consistent thing I knew about magic was this: it didn’t work.
It turned out I’d been wrong about that. Chogyi Jake, Ex, and Aubrey had taught me a little about how to find my qi, the energy that drove real magic. Right now, I could use it to see through illusions or make someone follow a command, if only a simple one and only for a second. Ex could use it to change what he looked like, if you didn’t look hard. Kim could damp down other magic. We could do parlor tricks.
Riders had access to much more power than any human being. They could fly or change bodies or toss cars around with their hands. Just a normal person trying to face down a rider would need a lot of prep work or a lot of experience or a lot of friends. Sometimes, all three.
The ritual Chapin ran us through that afternoon—de Tonquedec’s exercises—was one of those preparatory moments. After a lunch of tunandwiches and stale potato chips, I sat on the floor at the center of the ritual space, and the men stood around me. My job, as Chapin explained it to me, was to draw myself into a place just over my heart, to retract from my body as much as I could, and focus everything into a very small place at the center of my body. I’d stay there for about an hour, then shift myself into the place just behind my eyes where I went when the rider took over. And then hang out there for an hour.
Two hours sitting on an old cushion while six men stood around me muttering in Latin. I figured it would be a little surreal and uncomfortable, a little boring and a lot goofy. And it was, for about the first ten minutes.
After that, it was some of the hardest work I’d ever done.
My eyes were closed, and in the darkness behind them, I tried to hold myself together. Intangible things brushed against the tiny, compacted version of me. I felt Ex among them, his furnace of a mind comforting only because it was familiar. Each little contact was an echo of a foreign mind like someone in the hallway coughing.
And then, with no trigger I could fathom, I was afraid. Deeply afraid. I was trapped in a haunted house with no way out, and there was something there with me. Something that hissed like an old propane lantern and smelled like burnt cheese. My friends were going to die, and I was going to kill them, and more than anything—more than breath—I wanted not to. I just wanted not to hurt anyone. I felt something happening miles overhead and was disturbed to realize it was me, crying. The sensation I felt so far above me was the thickness of sorrow in my throat. I had the powerful sense that my hands were bleeding. Not my real hands, out there impossibly far away from me, but these small, invisible ones. They were bleeding because I’d used the palms like hammers, driving in the nails. I was killing him. I was killing him again.
Something in my belly moved.
Something that wasn’t me.
I came up gasping. Around me, the six priests stood in pairs: Carsey and Tamblen, Tomás and Miguel, Chapin and Ex.
“Bathroom,” I said. “I need the bathroom.”
“You have to hold on a little longer,” Ex said. “You can—”
“Let her go,” Chapin said. “We’ve seen enough for now.”
The bathroom was tiny. I could put my hands out, pressing palms against both walls at once. The light came from a tiny window, no more than four inches square, outlined in deep-blue tile. The toilet was undersized, and it ran a little. I stood until I was sure I wouldn’t pass out, then slid down, my back against the wall, and cried for a while. I was shaking badly, and I felt light-headed. I briefly reconsidered vomiting, but decided against it. When I rose to my feet again, I didn’t know how long I’d be
en in there. Five minutes or five hours both seemed equally plausible. I washed my face in the tiny, mineral-streaked sink and looked up into the mirror. In the dim, I looked older. Worn-out. My eyes were puffy and red. My hair was frizzed out like a black cloud. My skin was pallid. There were raw, rashy-looking spots at the corners of my nose.
My right hand rose up without my knowing it was going to. My fingertips touched the mirror gently, caressing the girl in the glass. I shook my head and stepped back. When I went out, the priests were sitting around the big table where Dolores and her family had been before. Their conversation went quiet as I stepped in, and Tomás stood up. Someone had old-school ideas about etiquette. Outside, the light was slanting down from the west with the red-gold glow of evening. It was probably half past four. The dark came so early.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry about that. Hit a rough spot.”
“It is fine,” Father Chapin said.
“Do we—” I started, but the question stuck in my throat. I actually had to swallow twice before I could talk again. “Do we dive back in?”
“I think that we do not,” Chapin said. I felt a tension between my shoulder blades ease, and at the same time a flush of shame. I hadn’t made it halfway through the first step without freaking out. I wondered how Dolores had done. My guess was better.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You did fine,” Ex said, and I saw Carsey and Miguel exchange a glance I couldn’t parse.
“We know considerably more than we did this morning,” Chapin said. “I do not believe that we have anything more to learn from de Tonquedec. Tell me, Miss Jayné, do you know the word larva?”
Tomás nodded toward his chair, and I sat down gratefully.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s like maggot, right?”
“Linnaeus took the word for this meaning, but it is an older term than the biological sciences. The word is Latin, and before it became another word for grub, it meant a specter. A spirit. And also—this is telling—a mask. The taxonomist wished to describe the fashion in which the form of the young insect masks its adult body, you see? And so he took a metaphor. He took the word that sorcerers and diabolists had used for centuries before. Do you see?”
Killing Rites bsd-4 Page 7