“So because it’s young, it’s hard to tell what it’s going to be when it grows up?” I said.
“Yes,” Chapin said. “But more than this, it is subtle. It has hidden itself in you as it grows in power. From what we have observed, we know it to be very potent. But from its actions and nature, we can deduce that it is also still vulnerable. And in this we must take hope.”
“It seems unlikely that it is less than the second hierarchy,” Miguel said. “A prince of Dominions, perhaps.”
“I’d have said a Throne,” Carsey said. “The way it crawled up Chewy like a tree? And the wind demon may have been weakened, but our new visitor still swatted it down like it was a schoolgirl. I’d say it’s a gressil. Possibly sonnenelion, but my first thought’s gressil.”
“No,” Ex said, “Not gressil. I’ve been in her company for over a year, and she hasn’t shown anything like that kind of impurity.”
“Maybe not to you,” Carsey said.
“There is no room to speculate,” Chapin said, a sharpness in his voice that made Ex and Carsey both go silent. “We will know its name when the time comes. To pretend knowledge we do not have leads us astray.”
“Are we sure it’s bad?” I asked.
Chapin looked at me. I hadn’t realized until just then that he hadn’t been. His eyes were unreadable as stones. In my peripheral vision, Ex looked embarrassed.
“I mean, there are riders and there are riders, right?” I said, willing myself not to talk so fast. “Some of them are stone-cold killers. Some are … not so bad. This one’s never tried to hurt anybody. It stepped in with the wind demon. I mean, it’s probably saved my life six or seven times. Are we sure it’s one of the bad ones?”
“She may have a point,” Miguel said. “When the spirit has taken control from her, it hasn’t acted against her.”
“That we know,” Tamblen said, shrugging his wide shoulders.
“A subtle beast is more dangerous than one with mere brute power,” Tomás said. He sounded smug.
Chapin hadn’t looked away from me. If his gaze was supposed to make me uncomfortable, it was working like gangbusters.
“That it has appeared to help you means only that you remain useful to it,” he said in slow, measured syllables. “If it were a holy thing, it would have no need to hide from us. Do not hope to befriend it. Whatever it seems, in truth it is your enemy.”
“Right,” I said. The tears and trembling I’d thought I’d left in the bathroom threatened to come back. “Point taken.”
Chapin’s smile was warm, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Perhaps it would be best if you permitted us to consult,” he said. “The terminology we employ can be confusing. Alarming, even. And, through no fault of your own, it is not possible to include you fully without also including the enemy.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but my voice was steady. I got up.
“All right. That’s cool. I’ll go get some dinner or something. You guys do your thing and let me know what’s next.”
“I’ll come with you,” Ex said. His chair scraped against the brick floor when he stood.
“I will need you here, Xavier,” Chapin said. “With Alexander in the hospital, we will need you actively involved.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “I can drive myself.”
“Point of clarification,” Carsey said, lifting one finger. “Are we sure it’s a good idea to have her wandering about the world unchaperoned?”
“You know what? You can have me here, or you can not have me here, but I can’t do both. I thought the whole point of sending me and Ex off on our own last night was to see if I’d come back. Well, I did. So forgive the language, but what exactly the fuck do you want from me, buddy?”
ght=" height="0em" width="1em">I was shouting. I didn’t care that I was shouting. I kind of liked that I was shouting. Carsey shifted uncomfortably. Tamblen made a deep chuffing sound, his face darkening. It took a second to figure out he was laughing.
“Don’t think that was the beast talking,” Tamblen said. “Think that was the girl.”
“Agreed,” Ex said. “That was Jayné.”
“She can go,” Chapin said. And then, to me, “Please return to us this evening.”
I got the car key out of Ex’s coat pocket. It wasn’t actually a key at all but a little magnetic fob that made me think of a thumb drive. When I stepped out into the twilight and closed the blue double doors behind me, the cold seemed a little better than it had in the morning. In the west, clouds glowed gold and pink and gray. In the east, the sky was almost black. The little house down the road had its television on again. The Quonset huts were closed and quiet, and the boys who’d been lounging on the street were gone. The clock in the car said it was 5:32, but it felt later. I started the engine, cranked up the heat, and leaned back into the soft leather. Part of me wanted to get on the highway and keep on driving south until I hit someplace warm. Brazil, maybe. I was almost sure the part that wanted that was me. Almost.
I didn’t know where I was going, but the GPS had a menu option to find nearby restaurants. It cycled for almost a minute before the map pulled back and a half dozen red dots appeared on the face of northern New Mexico. The closest was a cluster of fast-food joints fifteen minutes away. They were at the highway, and pretty much screamed truck stop. More dots stippled the map near Taos. One, off almost by itself, was labeled O’Keefe’s. I remembered Carsey saying it was good, tapped the dot, and let the car figure out how to get there.
I didn’t like who I was being. Yelling at Carsey had felt good when I’d done it, but the truth was I hated being on a hair trigger. Once upon a time I’d been calmer. Less anxious all the time. Less likely to freak out.
I wanted that Jayné back, and I didn’t know how to get her.
Twenty minutes later, O’Keefe’s was a light in the darkness. A gravel-and-ice parking lot with a half dozen trucks in it. An old sign painted in green and gold and lit with the kind of exterior light you can get from Wal-Mart for twenty bucks. When I got out of my car, an ancient black Labrador appeared at my side, wagging and sniffing at me. The wooden stairs that rose to the front door were warped and uneven. A girl who could have been fifteen greeted me when I walked in the door and pointed toward a table at the back. The walls were wood and hung with hunting trophies and old rock posters: Rush 2112 tacked up next to a bear’s stuffed head. The tables looked like they’d been gathered from estate sales, no two the same. The chairs were all random sets too, and the heat came from a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. Six men in Day-Glo yellow safety jumpsuits sat around a table next to mine, speaking Spanish. Two old men sat together across the room, leather cowboy hats hung on the backs of their chairs, and talked in low voices. Apart from the world’s youngest waitress, I was the only woman there.
The menu was printed on white copy paper. I picked the steak because it was at the top. The girl brought me a Coke and a glass of water and then went away I was t>
Sitting there, alone and not alone, I wondered whether the rider was aware of my thoughts. I didn’t know if it could pick through my mind like a kid in a sandbox searching for treasure or if I was as hidden from it as it was from me. But I hoped that it couldn’t. I wanted—maybe needed—something that was my own, and if it wasn’t my body, all that was left was my thoughts.
Because my body wasn’t mine. The fact sat there like a toad, malefic and poisonous. Something was inside me, and had been since who knew when. I couldn’t get it out, not by myself.
And that was why I was gnawing at myself like a wolf caught in a trap. Father Chapin and Ex and all the others were there to help me, and so I was going to give my body over to them. I wasn’t taking control. At best, I was choosing who got to control me because I was too weak to do anything for myself. I needed Ex and Chapin, and I resented them because I needed them, and above anything, I just didn’t want anybody else to know.
The shame pulled my shoulders in, t
hickened my throat. All my secrets pressed down on me—I was a killer, I was the puppet of a demon, I was a stupid little girl playing at games she didn’t understand. If I’d been stripped naked in public, it wouldn’t have been worse than this. I felt like I was going for an abortion.
“You okay, lady?” the girl said, sliding the plate in front of me.
“I’m fine,” I said, not meeting her gaze. “Thanks.” When she retreated back through the kitchen door, I picked up the knife and fork and cut joylessly through the meat in front of me. It had been cooked in red wine and black pepper and onions grilled until they were sweet, and the first bite exploded and melted and brought me suddenly back to myself. The greens on the side were squash and broccoli with butter and garlic that made them taste more like themselves.
I know this, I thought. I’ve had this before.
I stood, my breath fast, adrenaline speeding the blood through my veins. Three steps to the door, and I pushed through. The kitchen was small and sauna hot. The smells of garlic and meat, tomato sauce and basil, wine and cigarette smoke, were like walking backward in time.
A vampire stood at a narrow prep table, his flesh ropy and desiccated, his eyes the yellow of old ivory. The mouth was a ruin and his skeletal hands were the dark of dried meat. For a moment, we stared at each other, unmoving. When he took the cigarette from his mouth, I swear the skin creaked.
“Jayné Heller. As I live and breathe,” Midian Clark said, smoke curling out from behind stained teeth. “What’s the matter, kid? You look like shit.”
Chapter Eight
“Lemme get this straight. You broke up with Captain Milquetoast, killed some poor bastard, and figured out your body’s got a dual-boot operating system all in the same week?” he said with a sticky-sounding chuckle. “No wonder you’re looking rough.”
I didn’t know where to start. Aubrey isn’t milquetoast or How do you know about dual-boot computers or How many cigarettes do you smoke in a dy anyway? Instead, I shrugged and leaned back on the little vinyl couchlike thing that was the closest Midian’s RV had to guest seating. Over the last half hour, I’d told him everything—the thing with the guy in London, our adventure in New Orleans, the catastrophe of Grace Memorial, each bit of my last year spilling out like I was talking to my best friend.
The RV was parked out behind the restaurant, and probably had been for the last decade. The tires were gray and tiny; dead-twig weeds had lived and died where the missing hubcaps let dirt accumulate. The interior was clean and neat apart from the patina of cigarette tar that turned the white surfaces amber. The combined scents of old smoke and coffee and garlic oil made me think of my grandfather. Midian stood in the tiny galley as if the four feet between us really made it a different room. His tiny espresso machine hissed and burbled as he steamed the milk for me. He still wore the white shirts and forties-style high-waisted pants he’d had in Denver. Zombie Bogart.
“What about you?” I asked. “You’re looking … wetter.”
He grinned, ragged lips exposing teeth like old stones.
“I try.”
“What happened to you? I had a plane ready for you at the airstrip. When you didn’t show up, I thought the Invisible College caught up with you after all.”
“Yeah, I appreciate the thought, but I figured it’d be better if I just took off. Headed south, kept my head down, stayed off the grid. Northern New Mexico’s not a bad place to vanish if you’re looking to. All the locals know you don’t belong, but they aren’t generally talking to anybody else, so it doesn’t get out far. And if you pull your weight, speak Spanish, and don’t start off every conversation with an Indian by pumping their hands, making eye contact, and asking ’em to tell you how they’re feeling, you can make a niche.”
“Even with the looks?”
“Yeah, well. I told ’em I’m a veteran. Burned in Iraq,” Midian said, then took a long drag on his cigarette, the cherry blooming red and fading to gray. “Actually, I feel kind of bad about that. But I figure passing myself off as a serviceman isn’t exactly the low rung in my hierarchy of sins, y’know?”
“You mean feeding?”
“I mean feeding,” he said. “I’m still trying to get my feet under me on that score. Turns out if you fast for a couple of centuries, it takes it out of you. I’ve been pretty much keeping to goats and rats.”
“Really?”
He looked over at me.
“That was a joke, kid.”
He poured the steamed milk into the espresso, the careful shaking of his hand forming a perfect rose in sepia and white on the surface. When he passed it over, the ceramic was hot against my fingers. His voice made me think of Tom Waits in the later part of his career.
“I’ve been trying to keep a low profile. Mostly I’m just harvesting the kinds of guys nobody misses. Some guy deals smack to middle school kids, no one really cares when he drops out of sight, ou know?”
“Misdemeanor murder.”
“Yeah. I love that term,” he said, then turned and leaned against his counter. It creaked under his weight. His eyes flickered over me with something like sorrow.
“So you want to finish the latte and we can get this over with?”
“Get what over with?”
“I know why you’re here. We don’t have to dance around it. You came to kill me, and I’m not up for dying just yet. So—“
“I didn’t come to kill you. I came for dinner. I didn’t even know you were here,” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t do that. You’re my friend.”
I had never astonished a vampire before. He crossed his arms. A gust of wind pushed against the RV, rocking it gently on its ruined springs. I felt the breath of cold through the cracked window at the back of my neck.
“Damn. You have got it bad. I figured we were doing that moment of camaraderie for old times’ sake thing before we went all Bushido on each other,” he said.
“Just wanted some coffee,” I said.
“So if you weren’t hunting for me, what exactly brings you to the ass end of nowhere?”
“A bunch of Ex’s old priest buddies are up here. He was hoping they could scrape me clean.” The words came out more bitter than I’d intended them. I took another sip of the coffee. It was rich and warm and soft. Like a coffee-flavored cloud. Midian must have seen my reaction.
“Pretty good, eh? I get the milk straight from the dairy. Makes the difference,” he said. “So that bunch up in San Esteban are Ex’s crew, are they? Makes sense, I guess. I knew he fell from grace right around here somewhere. Add that things have been a little rowdy since we kicked over the Invisible College’s anthill. Anybody around here who’s in the habit of dealing with folks like me’s been doing bumper-crop business.”
“Folks like us,” I said.
He paused, considering.
“Yeah, you put it that way. Folks like us. What does Tofu Boy think about the whole exorcism thing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t told him. Can I ask you a question? What does it feel like?”
“What does what feel like?”
“Being a rider.”
He took a long breath and let it hiss out between his teeth. The body he was in had died sometime in the nineteenth century, so I had to take his breath as an editorial statement. I looked down at my hands. I had a scab across the knuckles that I didn’t remember. Something from the fight against the wind demon, maybe. I couldn’t keep track anymore.
“Should I not have asked that?” I said.
“No, no. It’s all right. Just kind of a personal question is all. What’s it feel like? We, it feels … It’s like putting your face underwater. Look, imagine you’re by a lake or something. Nice blue water stretching out to wherever, right? Now you lean over, put your face in water, and open your eyes. Boom, there’s this whole other place with fish and plants and whatever junk the kids threw off the dock last year. This whole world you weren’t part of, but now you can see it. Be part of it. And everything there’s amazing, you
know? There’s light and thoughts and sex and hunger and … being. Things exist. It’s gorgeous.”
He rubbed his ear, grinning. I’d never heard him sound excited or passionate about anything before. Maybe food, a little, but this was different.
“And so you dive in,” I said.
“No, kid. You want to. Worse than anything, you want to. But the only thing I can do is push in a little. I’m like an iceberg. Some of me’s in this body, sure, but most of me’s in the Pleroma. I don’t fit here. I don’t belong,” he said. Then, a moment later, “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I wondered. What if … What if I’m not really Jayné Heller at all? I mean I don’t know how long this rider’s been in me. Maybe it always was. What if the real Jayné never took a breath. Never had a thought. What if I’ve been the rider all along.”
“You’re spilling your coffee, kid.”
I righted the cup.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right. But anyway, the theory doesn’t wash. Who comes and kicks ass when you’re not calling the shots? Who does all this weird magic shit that you can’t? You’re not a rider, kid, no matter how pretty it’d be to think so.”
“Pretty?”
“Sure, that’s the point, right? If you’re the nasty evil boogum, then Jayné still gets to be clean. She didn’t kill that guy. The exorcism comes, and you get cast into the darkness where you belong. She gets to live her life innocent and free of sin. That’s what you’d be hoping for, right?”
The blush started at my neck and crawled up toward my forehead, feeling like a sunburn. It was a dumb idea, and I felt like a stupid kid for having said it.
“It was just a theory,” I mumbled. “Never mind.”
“Nah, I get it. You kill someone the first time, it’s traumatic. And then you find out you aren’t even in control of your own body? That takes a lot away from you. Makes a hell of a one-two punch. I figure you’ve got a right to be on the ropes.”
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