Killing Rites bsd-4

by M. L. N. Hanover

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “So how’re you gonna get off ’em?”

  The silence lasted a few seconds.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah, jeez. Don’t start crying. Look, you had a bad run. You did your Oh, poor me, and that’s fine. We all get those sometimes. It’s just that being a victim gets to be a habit. You stay there too long, you get comfortable. Gets to where a victim is who you are. So game-plan it. Put on your big-girl panties and tell me what’re you gonna do.”

  I took a deep breath. What did I need?

  “I need to be all right,” I said.

  “Good start, but maybe a little vague, right? How’re you going to get there from here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, choking a little at the end.

  I couldn’t help it. I started crying in earnest. Tears and sobs. Head in hands. The whole thing. Midian’s sigh was like gravel sliding off the back of a pickup truck. The cheap, stinking cushion of the couchlike thing shifted under me as he sat down beside me. His arm around my shoulder was weirdly hot and hard as concrete. The smell of his cigarettes almost covered the garlic and onions and fresh basil. Kitchen smells. I leaned against his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, kid,” he murmured. “You go ahead if you need to. It’s all right.”

  It was bad weather. A storm that came up fast and washed away thought and awareness and then broke. I might have been there, curled up against him for a couple of minutes. It might have been half an hour. I couldn’t have told the difference.

  When I pulled myself back together, he stood up, fished around in his pocket, and pulled out a linen handkerchief. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose. When I spoke, my voice was thick and wet.

  “I need my body back,” I said. “I can’t have this thing living inside me.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, walking the three steps to the back of the RV. “You’ve got a plan for that. What else?”

  “I want to never hurt anybody again ever.”

  “Tall order, but worth aiming for,” he said, grunting. I glanced over. He was pulling on a fresh shirt. I’d left a wide damp spot on the old one.

  “I need to figure out who I really am,” I said. There was a weird sense of déjà vu in saying the words.

  “Yeah, well. That’s never wrong. So here’s what I’m hearing you tell me, okay? No matter what comes next, the first step, you’re finishing up with the papists. After you’re calling the shots on your body, you’re spending some time actually getting your shit together. Which means not running around the world like a decapitated chicken all the time. Slow down. Figure out what your next step is. And—this is me talking now—no more stroking your inner victim. Bad for your skin.”

  “Yes, Oprah,” I said, but I smiled when I said it.

  “Hey. Fuck you too,” he said, grinning. He teeth were black where they weren’t yellow.

  My phone rang at the same moment that something scratched on the thin metal and plastic of the doorway. I turned toward the sound of claws, ready for a threat, but Midian waved me back. I pulled my phone out of the leather backpack I used as a purse. It was Ex. Midian opened the RV door and the ancient Laborador from the parking lot hefted hersef up the stairs on arthritic hips. I answered the call.

  “Is everything okay?” Ex said instead of hello. His voice was tight as a wire.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep the aftermath of tears out of my voice. “Everything’s copacetic. Why?”

  “You’ve been gone a long time. We were starting to worry.”

  “No, I’m at O’Keefe’s,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe—“

  Midian coughed. He stood in the galley, scratching the dog between its ears and looking at me. His yellow eyes were empty, and I understood. If I told Ex he was here, he would tell Father Chapin. If Ex told Father Chapin, the exorcists would come after Midian. If not now, then later. Maybe I should have felt some conflict about lying to Ex, but I didn’t. It was Midian.

  “You wouldn’t believe how good the food is,” I said gamely. “I’m just luxuriating over a little coffee.”

  “Did anything happen?” he asked. The tension in his voice sounded like a small accusation.

  “I haven’t been taken over by the rider and hijacked to Juárez,” I said a little sharply. “I’m fine. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  “All right,” Ex said, backing down. “We’ve got a game plan and a schedule. When we’ve gone over it, we can all call it a night.”

  Meaning that until I showed up, Father Chapin wasn’t going to let himself rest. It was like looking forward in time to who Ex was going to be at sixty. His cranky, paternalistic streak shifted into a different frame. It wasn’t that he wanted to control how long I took eating dinner. He just wanted to take care of his uncompromising old teacher, and this was the closest he could come to saying that out loud.

  “I’ll come home soon,” I said. “Promise.”

  “Thank you,” Ex said.

  We paused for a moment, neither of us with anything to say and neither one hanging up first. I could hear him breathe like he was sitting beside me.

  “Thank you,” he said again, and dropped the connection. I put the phone back in my pack a little more gently than I’d taken it out. Midian stopped scratching the dog’s ears, and it turned to me, pushing its nose under my hand and wagging. It had gray on its muzzle and around its black, watery eyes.

  “Vatican’s junior hit squad wants you back, eh?” Midian said.

  “Guess so,” I said, petting the dog’s head, then scratching its breast. The dog smiled and turned to look over its shoulder at Midian. See, this is how you’re supposed to do it. “This one’s yours? I never saw you as a pet kind of guy.”

  “Ozzie’s not mine. She came with the job. I don’t know how she got here originally. Being loyal to disloyal people’s my bet. Lived by catching rabbits and birds. When she got old and weak, she started hanging out at the back door, stealing scraps.”

  “And now she’s part of the place.”

  The dog chuffed happily.

  “Sort of,” Midian said. “The guy that owns the place still wants to shoot her, but I let her come in when it’s cold out. I’ve got a soft spot for down-on-their-luck predators. Don’t know where it comes from.”

  “Can’t imagine.”

  “So we’re good?” he asked.

  “Of course we’re good,” I said, but when I stood up to go, I found I didn’t want to. I wanted to sit back down and pet the dog and drink the coffee and talk all night. I had a powerful flash of resentment toward Ex and Father Chapin and all the rest. Men who were risking their lives to help me. I looked down.

  “You want to talk about Eric, don’t you?” Midian asked.

  “Yeah. And about a million other things.”

  He lifted his beef-jerky arms to the RV like he was displaying a treasure.

  “You know where to find me,” he said.

  “All right, then.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “All right. ’S good seeing you, kid.”

  The wind outside was biting cold and it smelled like snow. Low gray clouds had rolled in while I wasn’t watching, smothering stars and moon. I wrapped my coat around me and ran around the side of the restaurant. The parking lot was nearly full now, and it took some maneuvering to get the car to the ragged blacktop. The heater roared discreetly, and I turned up the music to carry over it. China Forbes sang “Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love” and I sailed through the darkness, feeling something like peace for the first time in weeks.

  I cried after Chicago without knowing particularly what I was crying about, but I had been alone and there hadn’t been any catharsis in it. Tears wouldn’t clean me. I’d thought at the time it was only because I was so thoroughly blackened. Now I wondered if it was just that I’d done it alone. If Chogyi Jake had been there instead of recuperating in Chicago, if I hadn’t broken the thing off with Aubrey, and there had been someone to talk to. Someone to confess to. Would
it have been different?

  I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I’d gone to Ex. On the one hand, it was kind of unthinkable. From the moment I told him I had a rider, he’d been focused on fixing the problem. If I’d talked to him about guilt, he’d have handed me over to God, and it was a long time since I’d taken comfort there.

  But on the other hand, what if he’d listened? What if he’d put his arm around me and let me cry his shirt wet. Would it have stopped there? Would I have wanted it to? Maybe the kind of intimacy where I could tell him about what I was afraid of and guilty over would have led to the other kind. And maybe that was where we were going anyway.

  The road went under the highway, and I reached the ramp up, signaling my lane change even though there was no one in sight. I swung the nose of the car to the left, crossed the oncoming lanes, and flew up toward the interstate like a crow taking wingirst fat flakes of snow spattered against the windshield, and the car knew to start the wipers without my touching anything. The GPS glowed, guiding me. There was more traffic, and I checked my blind spot as I merged.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” something said with my mouth.

  My heart started spinning like a bike wheel. My hands dug hard into the wheel, white-knuckled. I drove eighty miles an hour down a dark, mostly unfamiliar road, waiting for my body to speak to me again.

  Chapter Nine

  The crows were there when I pulled up, watching me from the dead branches. The snow was coming down harder now, grabbing any stray ray of light and trading it back and forth until the world was a deep gray that never quite made it to black. I trudged up to the blue double doors through half an inch of fresh snow, humming the melody to “White Christmas” without any particular pleasure. My jaw ached with the tension of the drive. My hands were balled in my pockets. Winter drifted down around me.

  I opened the blue doors, and the light spilled out. Behind me, the crows lifted into the snow-heavy air, their caws like threats and accusations. I walked into the warmth and shook the snow and water off my coat. In the darkness, the electric lights seemed even more out of place strapped on the ancient adobe walls. Jesus was staring down from his cross or collapsed on his mother’s lap in every room. I found them in the kitchen. Tamblen squatting like a bear and poking at the fire. The whiskey-voiced Tomás sitting across a checkerboard from Ex. Miguel looking even more like Benicio Del Toro sitting on the same gray couch as thin-bodied, thin-faced Carsey. And Father Chapin standing by the tiny window, looking out into the snowy courtyard.

  He looked terrible. Shadows hung around his eyes, seeping into his skin. His hair was so short it could barely look disarranged, but it managed. The square of his shoulders and his upright head made me think less of strength and more of bloody-minded endurance. Yesterday, he’d been fighting a demon. Losing to it. And for weeks before that, tracking down the thing’s spawn. What Aubrey would have called the daughter organisms. And now, me. No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good.

  “Hey,” I said, trying for a lightness I didn’t feel. “How’s it going?”

  “Good that you’ve come back, young miss,” Chapin said. “We have a schedule set. If you are willing, we will begin tomorrow. The rite itself.”

  “No more prep work?” I said, my stomach tightening and hope soaring up my spine. Nothing more to do, no more hoops to jump through, just getting whatever was in me back out and taking my real life back.

  “None. Only, I must warn you of one thing. If we are to attempt this, you must be constant in your own rejection of the beast. Knowing as little as we do of this infesting spirit, there are longer paths we can take. Paths that are more certain, perhaps, but at the cost of time. But I believe, and my good friend Xavier agrees, that you are strong enough to reject the evil in your heart. If we are wrong about you, the rite will fail. Time and effort wasted.”

  It felt like a challenge. I felt the distant touch of anger. I’d come here for help, not a lecture on how I needed to really mean it or else everything would be my fault.

  “I can do it,” I said. “I mean, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but whatever I can do to make sure this works, I’ll do it.”

  “Your resolve must not waver,” Chapin said.

  “Won’t.”

  He smiled and reached out, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Then tonight, rest. We will all rest. And in the morning, we will begin. We will find its name, and then God will free you of this burden.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate what you’re doing. For me.”

  “Well, this should be quite the event, shouldn’t it?” Carsey said. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

  “You should rest now, Father,” Tomás said, rising from the checkerboard, red and black disks abandoned behind him. “We all should.”

  Ex appeared at my side. I’d seen him look worse, but only a few times. And besides the fatigue—within it—there was something else. A fierceness.

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” he said.

  We walked out to the car together. The snow was still falling, and there was already a scattering of white on the black of the car, the heat of my drive not enough to defeat the cold. The priests huddled in the doorway behind us, watching us go.

  “For that, he made you wait?” I asked.

  “Chapin wanted to see you when he asked if you’d keep your resolve.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to see if he believed you.”

  “A little creepy, but okay, whatever,” I said. “How’s your back?”

  “Hurts. Why? You want me to drive?”

  “Yeah. It talked to me. After you called, before I got here. Makes me a little nervous about having the steering wheel.”

  I passed him the key chain. We got to the car, and I slid down into the passenger’s seat. Ex closed his door, put the fob in place, and the engine purred to life. In the headlights, the snow was pure and perfect.

  “What did it say?” he asked.

  “It asked me not to do pretty much exactly what we’re about to do,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  The road conditions were awful. I turned off the music and tried not to talk just so that Ex wouldn’t be distracted from the slush and ice and the New Mexican drivers trying to take the highway turns at seventy. In Taos, we stopped at a drive-through, fueling Ex on a greasy burger, fries, and a diet soda. Then it was back into the treacherous black.

  When we reached our place, we didn’t even try driving up the hill; we parked at the bottom and walked up. The other condos were lit up, glowing in the dark. Someone in a bright green coat the approximate proportions of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was hooting and twirling around outside of one, his arms out to embrace the sky. I hadn’t thought about it, but it would be a pretty good night for skiers. He waved at us as we headed in toward our door. I waved back. He shouted something I couldn’t make out, but it sounded happy.

  Once we were inside, Ex cranked up the heat. The gas fireplace ignited with a soft huff, then hissed. The sound left me anxious. I washed my hands more for the sound of the water drowning out the voice of the flame. Ex groaned and lay down on the floor, his feet to the grate.

  “Did you get any food down there?” I asked. “Or was that burger the only food you’ve had since lunch?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just … tired.”

  “Council of war took it out of you?”

  “It was a little fraught. You can’t have that many men working together on something this hard without some fault lines. They’re all dedicated to the work, and they all love Chapin.”

  “So if he says, it goes?”

  Ex chuckled.

  “With some grousing and argument, yes,” he said.

  “You want to let me in on anything about that conversation? Spread out the inside dirt? Or would that be telling?”


  “There are some things about this you shouldn’t know,” he said.

  I thought of Midian, leaning against his RV’s galley. It wasn’t like I was sharing everything either.

  “Yeah, all right,” I said. “Maybe after. When it’s over.”

  He sat up. The shadows of the fire shifted on his skin. A few strands of white-blond hair had escaped his ponytail, draping down the side of his face. He looked up at me almost grimly.

  “Jayné, when this is over … when you’re safe … there’s another conversation we need to have.”

  My breath caught. I was very aware of being alone in a house with a man, away from the world, away from everyone I knew, and halfway to snowbound. With a hot tub three feet out the back door. I imagined what it would be like to sit back in that steaming warmth with the snow shawling down around us. I felt an echo of the furnace of longing and guilt that I’d touched back in Chicago when our minds had been less separate than they were now. Adrenaline was leaking into my blood, and this wasn’t even fear. Wasn’t anything like it.

  It occurred to me for the first time that my shame about the rider really wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t told Chogyi Jake to rejoin us.

  “Then we should probably get this over,” I said, my voice carefully even. “Right?”

  “Right,” he said softly, and et gravity pull him slowly back down. “Oh yeah.”

  “You really should have seen a doctor about that back,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Once you’re safe, I’ll be perfect.”

  THE BAD dreams came fast that night, but at least they weren’t the vicious reenactment of past events I sometimes had. Instead, I was lost in a city I didn’t know. I was supposed to have studied the local language, but I’d blown it off. Now I needed to get somewhere, but I couldn’t find anyone who could understand me. Sometimes I had a phrase book but couldn’t read the script, sometimes I was just trying to string syllables together and hoping. There was always a sense of being late for something I couldn’t afford to miss. And of being alone in the middle of a crowd. Every time I thought I was about to get there, the dream reset, and I started again.