The girl I’d saved a few days before grinned at me and spat. Her teeth were a stained yellow, and the voice that spilled obscenities from her lips was rough and guttural. My body shifted to the right, bringing up my left knee and kicking hard at her belly. She shifted, taking the worst of it as a glancing blow to the ri but I still thought I felt something give way under my heel and she stumbled back onto the chair.
I’m sorry, I thought toward the little girl.
She was eight. In a sane world, her biggest problem would be memorizing her times tables.
My hip swung around, my weight following it. When I brought my elbow down, she slipped away. The chair disintegrated under my blow. Somewhere nearby, Ozzie was barking in a frenzy. Something behind me cracked like a baseball bat hitting a home run, but I couldn’t even look back to see what it was. Dolores’s hand was on my shoulder, the grip colder than snow and stronger than a vise. I heard my voice cry out in pain, felt myself stumble, and then she was up on my shoulders, thighs squeezing my neck and arms wrapped around me. I was blind, and my throat felt like it was about to collapse.
Something in my larynx crackled—cartilage starting to give—and I tried to cough, but no air would go in or out. I started to panic, but my rider spread my stance, bending at the knee like a sumo wrestler, and then bent forward hard from the waist. Dolores spun down through the air, crashing through the front window. Her grip on my throat eased, and I sucked in foul air. I almost retched, but at least I was breathing. My flattened hands forced their way between the possessed girl’s legs and my own throat, and we strained against each other. Bones creaked like trees in a high wind, but millimeter by millimeter, she lost ground until all at once, she jumped away.
“Betrayer!” Dolores cried in her loathsome voice, the thick tongue slurring the words. “Meat-fucker! You turn against your own kind for them, and you will suffer the price.”
“Oh, whatever,” my rider said, then twisted and sunk a balled fist deep into the child’s solar plexus. I felt the heat of her will in the blow, and the thing inside Dolores grunted, stumbling back. My head turned. The black fog put the whole room in twilight, lights that had burned gold now struggling to a dirty orange. Alexander was on his hands and knees, the older sister standing above him, axe raised above her head like an executioner. Ozzie had her teeth set in the girl’s right calf, pulling at it and growling. The axe arced down as Alexander rolled to the side. The axe rebounded off the floor with a grinding sound. The rip in the carpet bled black.
Ozzie jumped back, barked, and lunged again, taking a fresh grip on Soledad’s leg. With a shout of rage, it turned its head, taking aim at the dog.
“Stop,” my rider said. Or I did. It was getting hard to tell the difference. The force of our combined will was like an explosion. The thing riding Dolores’s sister turned toward me. Cold pressed out from it. A black, snake-long tongue slid out from between the girl’s lips, lolling down almost to her belly. Foul saliva dripped in ropes toward the floor.
“The Desert has no hold over us,” it hissed. “We stand with the Father Ba’al.”
“I don’t see Father Ba’al here,” my rider said. Soledad’s blackened eyes flickered once, looking behind me, and my body shifted, bending at the knee and swinging back an arm to meet Dolores in mid-leap. I caught her like a baseball, and my arms lifted the little girl over my head. From my distant place behind my eyes, I could feel her writhing, the slick feeling of her skin against my palms. The smell was nauseating. But even when the dark tongue draped down, smearing filth across my cheek, the Black Sun didn’t flinch. Alexander sat up, scooting on his ass until his back touched the wall. His eyes were wide, his face flour-dusted pale.
“I am the Black Sun’s daughter. These people are under my protection,” my rider said. The voice was like mine, but deeper. More certain. “The dog’s under my protection too, so don’t fuck with her.”
“Your protection means nothing,” Soledad said. Above me, Dolores was whimpering. Her thrashing was growing wilder. “We came to end you, and we will.”
“You came to kill Jayné Heller,” my rider said. “And you came because she tricked you. She was the bait in this mousetrap, and I am the hammer.”
Ozzie, backing up from the older sister, growled. Her bared teeth were worn and yellowed, but the old dog’s expression promised murder. Soledad looked back at her, then at me, then at Alexander rising slowly to his feet. Above me, Dolores began to wail. The older sister whirled, extending the axe so smoothly it seemed like part of her arm. My body had to move back to avoid the blade, and Soledad sprinted for the door.
“Don’t leave me!” Dolores cried, but she was already gone. The unnatural darkness lessened a degree. The smell of filth became a little less overpowering. Alexander limped to the doorway.
“Let it go,” my rider said, struggling to hold the thrashing child above me. “You can find it later if you need to. We have what we came for.”
“We can’t stay here,” Alexander said. He was winded. Gasping for breath. If he doesn’t pull it together, I thought, we’re going to have to take him straight back to the hospital. “The noise. The police. They’ll come.”
“They might,” my rider said. “But they aren’t here yet and she is.”
My body turned a half step, shifted to the right, and slammed my burden down on the bed. The force of it broke the frame. The mattress tilted in toward the wall, headboard rattling. My hand was around the girl’s throat, and it felt like I was holding ice. The other rider’s tongue licked out, slathering my face with outhouse slime.
“Take its name,” my rider said.
Alexander stood beside the bed and lifted a thin silver cross. Behind him, Ozzie sat back, scratching her shoulder with a rear paw. When Alexander spoke, his voice was shaking.
“I come in the name of Christ, and in His holy name I command you, beast. Reveal your name!”
The thing in Dolores said something obscene and arched its back, trying to break free. The white sheet beside Dolores’s head was smeared yellow-green.
“In the name of God, I command you! Reveal your name!”
Alexander’s will batted against me like a moth blundering into a window. I heard footsteps coming behind us, but my body wasn’t my own. I couldn’t turn my head to look. Dolores shouted again, her voice deep as a gravel pit, her words sexual and delighted in their perversion. Jesus, I thought, there’s a kid in the room.
“Reveal your—”
“What the hell is going on in here?” a man’s voice said. My head turned toward the door. A Hispanic man in his middle sixties stood in the shattered frame. His white hair was wild from the pillow. When he caught sight of the thing writhing on the bed, his mouth went tight and thin. He looked from it to me to Alexander and back again.
“We have it under control,” Alexander said. “I’m a priest.”
“Okay, padre,” the old man said. “You need a shotgun? I got a shotgun.”
“No, it’s all right,” Alexander said. “We’ve got it covered. Thanks, though.”
The old man nodded, crossed himself, and stepped back into the night. A woman’s voice called out, and the old man said something in a calm, certain tone.
“There are times I love New Mexico,” Alexander said, and then turned his attention back to the girl. “In the name of Christ, the Lord, reveal your name!”
“I don’t answer to your God.” Dolores leered. “You and your—“
My rider’s will rose up from the base of my spine, gathered in my throat, and pushed down my arm. When it reached my hand, the thing in Dolores shrieked. Ozzie, at my side, barked twice and looked up at me, wagging. She seemed to be having a good enough time.
“Reveal your name!” Alexander said, pressing the thin silver cross forward. I felt my rider trying to gather her power for another strike, and I tried to add my own qi to hers. I had a momentary sense of gratitude, and then we bore down on the girl again.
“Akaname!” it screamed. “I am Akanam
e of the tribe of Akaname of the legion of Akaname.”
“How did you get in this girl?” my rider asked, but Alexander shook his head.
“Don’t talk to it. Talking to it gives it power,” he said. And then, lifting his voice in a ragged shout: “In the name of Christ the Redeemer, I command you to leave this child.”
His will was stronger this time, but I could see the cross trembling in his hands. I’d been on the other end of this rite, and I had the sense of what it would take. He didn’t have it in him. He was too weak, too injured, too tired. The thing inside of me hadn’t had it particularly easier. Between the fight with the wind demon and my own near exorcism, I didn’t know how much juice she had left in her. Like it was reading my mind, the Akaname smiled. Dolores’s lips were black, and the dark tongue lolled out of her open mouth.
“I will not,” the Akaname said. “She is mine. Forever, she is mine. Shi-neh!”
“We have to do this together,” my rider said, looking up at Alexander through locks of my hair. “Will you let me help you?”
I saw him hesitate like a video holding a frame a little too long. It was asking him to cooperate with the kind of beast he’d dedicated his life to fighting against. The betrayal would be small. He just had to make common cause with a rider for a f minutes, just this once. The advantages were unmistakable. Going forward with the rite without joining his will to ours might kill him and exhaust us without ever freeing Dolores. And still, if he’d said no, I would have understood. Chapin would have refused.
“All right,” he said.
My free hand took his. Still locked in my own head, I felt an echo of him: the bone-deep weariness and the excitement. He had surrendered himself to this ceremony like a swimmer heading out to sea without keeping the reserves to come back. The Akaname writhed, trying to sit up or slide out from my rider’s grasp. The shattered bed creaked and dropped another couple of inches as another support gave way. Tendrils of shadow swirled in the air around us like living smoke.
Alexander took a deep breath, nodded. He was ready. I threw all my own will behind the force rising in my body. Alexander’s eyes were closed, his lips moving in silent prayer, and I felt him beside me. The Black Sun, Sonnenrad, the Voice of the Desert, swirled around us. For a moment, the motel room was gone, and we crouched in a vast, empty plain. Something like a sun but not radiated something that wasn’t heat. The vastness flickered, and we were back in our little room with the chintzy wallpaper and the ruined bed and the stench. But when Alexander spoke, his voice had a weight and authority I hadn’t known he lacked until just then. The words seemed as solid as mountains, and implacable as the sea.
“In the name of God, I command thee, demon. Go.”
The sensation of the rider leaving her body was eerie. My hand was pressed hard against Dolores’s chest, fingers digging in to keep a grip despite the slime. As Alexander’s last word resonated, echoing in a space larger than the room we were in, I felt an icy mist rise between my fingers. It bit at the skin between my fingers, burning like acid, and then dissipated. The scent of the raw sewage boiled up, and I felt more than heard Alexander gagging as he sank down to his knees. His breath was heavy and ragged, like a man who’d just run a race. And then the enemy was gone. The room grew brighter as the unnatural darkness fled, and I had my hand on a little girl instead of a demon.
Her eyes were just brown again, but shocked and empty. Her gaze shifted for a few seconds, disoriented and lost, before fixing on me. And I was driving. My body was once again my own. I stepped back, and her skin made a wet squelching sound. Dolores started to say something, and then her face became a mask of disgust. She rolled to her side and vomited. I stroked her hair while Alexander rose slowly to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. I heard the water running in the sink, and by the time Dolores had control over her guts again, he was back, a wet white towel steaming in his hand. Dolores sat up, her arms held out from her body, trying not to touch herself.
“Oh God,” she said.
“I know,” Alexander said, handing her the towel. “It’s okay, though. It’s over.”
I stepped into the bathroom, grabbed a hand towel, and started scraping the layer of muck off of my body. Ozzie followed me, wagging and smiling. We might smell like Roto-Rooter’s worst night, but we’d won, and she knew it. The version of me in the mirror looked like something from a cheap horror film where they were skimping on the effects. My hair fell over my face. Even after a brisk toweling, my skin looked shiny and slick. My was pale and my eyes bloodshot.
I smiled and my reflection smiled back.
“Nice work,” I said, my voice hoarse.
I heard Alexander and Dolores talking in the front room, but I had the tap on. Their words were lost in the rush of water and the singing of pipes, but the tones of their voices were unmistakable. Alexander thoughtful, gentle, consoling. Dolores frightened and lost, not even crying. The matter-of-fact calm that comes between the blow and the pain. Traumatized. It was over for her now, except that it wasn’t. A year from now, five years, ten. It didn’t matter. There would still be a part of her here. If not in this room, then in this time when her body was not her own, when she’d been soiled to the soul. When she’d watched the same thing happen to her sister and been powerless to stop it.
What had happened to her wasn’t the kind of thing you got over. Whatever girl she had been before the wind demon took her was gone. Whatever girl she might have been if Chapin and his exorcists hadn’t handed her over to the Akaname was gone too. In my memory, I heard Midian Clark. 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.
Was that Dolores now? Would she be one of those people who invited trouble by being afraid of it? Was she going to expect evil to jump out of every shadow, and if she did meet it with fear, would that even be a wrong call?
I wondered what I could do or say to her that would make sense. If there was a way to tell a little girl that everything was going to be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t, I didn’t know what it was. I turned off the tap, lowered my face into the warm water, let my hair float around me. When I rose up, cleaner but not clean, Dolores was crying. Not sobs, but a low keening more exhaustion than sorrow. Alexander’s voice was insistent and soft and a little desperate. Whatever the words were, I knew what they meant. Please be okay, little girl.
I took a deep breath. All right, then. I couldn’t make anything better. I couldn’t undo anything that had happened. But I could offer an example. Here’s what a brave face looks like. Do this.
I stepped back out into the room, Ozzie close at my side. Dolores looked up at me. She’d seen me before, but now I saw her recognition.
“Hey, kid,” I said with a grin that I meant more than I’d expected to. “We have got to stop meeting like this, right?”
Chapter Nineteen
I wrapped ten hundred-dollar bills in a sheet of paper with the word Sorry written on it and shoved it under the office door before we left. My hip ached, my breath was white, and the coating of filth and slime made the night air even colder. I felt like I’d dragged myself through a thousand yards of sewer pipe. Even though no one else had come out to investigate, the darkness felt like it was watching me. Somewhere out there, the rider inside Dolores’s sister still knew it was in danger. If anything, it would be more desperate now, and I didn’t have a clue what kind of backup it could call on. So the next move was get the hell gone.
The SUV was idling, exhaust pluming out the tailpipe lke a permanent exhalation. Alexander had taken the passenger’s seat, leaving Ozzie and Dolores in the back. The dog was looking happily into the night, the girl less so, but at least she’d stopped crying. I slid in behind the wheel, buckled in, and flipped on the lights. If you didn’t know to look, the door to our thoroughly ruined motel room just seemed a little scuffed above the knob, the dent where the riders kicked it in showing as nothing more than a little discoloration. They were going to
have to change the carpet to get the stink out. As I shifted to reverse, I promised to send them more money. A thousand bucks wasn’t going to cover the damage we’d done.
The roads were bad—ice and snow and other drivers who seemed dismissive of the dangers of ice and snow—but I’d been bouncing back and forth between Taos and Questa so much, it was becoming familiar. Probably if I came back in the summer, I’d have been lost, but in the black hours before dawn, I was recognizing individual snowdrifts. The heater roared, blowing its artificial desert wind against my cheek and ankles and drowning out the pop tunes on the radio. In the backsplash of the headlights, Alexander’s expression was sober.
“It’s ski season. We’re never going to find a place to stay,” Alexander said.
“I’ve already got a room,” I said. “It’s kind of craptastic, but it has a shower.”
He looked over at me.
“You have a hotel room already rented?”
“Key card’s in the glove box,” I said.
“Well,” he said. “Nice work.”
“Makes me wish I’d planned it,” I said.
When we got there, we trudged up the stairs in single file. Me and then Ozzie and then Dolores and then Alexander, like ants. Even Ozzie was looking tired, her head hanging at an angle and her tongue lolling pinkly from her mouth. I gave Dolores first bath rights. She handed out her soiled clothes. The slime and filth had begun to dry, flaking off the cloth. I took the plastic liner out of the wastebasket and put her things there. When she came out wrapped in towels, I took the next turn. First Midian’s cigarettes, now the Akaname’s stench. I washed my hair twice, scrubbed my skin with a washcloth until it hurt a little, and I still caught a whiff of sewer when I got out. I felt much better, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever really feel clean. I had one more complete outfit from my lawyer, so I put that on and threw my ruined clothes in the plastic liner with Dolores’s.
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