“Wait,” I said. “You know about them? I mean, you know what they are?”
“Filth-lickers,” Chogyi Jake said. “They’re common in Japan and China, but I’ve never heard of one in the Americas.”
“So they’re a whole bunch of different riders that are all related?” I said. “It’s not just one big demon taking control of a bunch of bodies at once.”
“No,” Chogyi Jake said. “It’s not a haugsvarmr. They’ve very minor riders. Not mindless, but not strong or smart. Any of them could infect someone who was already vulnerable. They survive at all by being hard to detect and spreading quickly.”
“Like the cockroaches of the rider ecology.”
“More field mice, but yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“They seemed like pretty strong field mice to me,” I said.
“Yes. It’s interesting that your rider was able to cast out the wind demon without a great deal of effort but then struggled with the Akaname,” Chogyi Jake said.
“You think these are some kind of superstrength version? Cockroaches on steroids?”
“I was thinking more that the rider in you may be injured. As I understand, the exorcism was very nearly complete when you stopped it. I’d be surprised if it came through unharmed.”
The idea brought a stab of guilt.
“You spend much time in the East?” Alexander asked, changing the subject.
“I spent two years traveling there when I was younger,” Chogyi Jake said. “I needed to break off connections with a group of people I’d been close to, and it seemed like a good opportunity for that.”
“Alexander?” Ex called. “Father Chapin would like a word.”
Alex stood up, wincing, and walked slowly up the stairs. I almost told Ex to bring the phone down; Alexander’s wounds were still bothering him, and making him climb stairs at almost nine thousand feet above sea level seemed rude. But Chapin probably wanted to talk with him someplace I couldn’t hear them, which was probably why Ex went upstairs too. That, and maybe to give me and Chogyi Jake a minute.
With someone else, I might have gone for pleasantries.
“How bad was it?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake’s smile was a constant in my world, but I’d learned to read its subtle variations. He looked down now, and the amusement in the corners of his eyes sharpened.
“Bad. I don’t think he’s slept since you left. And Father Chapin … wasn’t pleased that Ex called me.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not Catholic,” Chogyi Jake said. “Father Chapin has sacrificed a great deal to the path he’s chosen. I knew that about him from Ex’s stories. One of the tenets of his tradition is that all other traditions are wrong. No one has said it, but I think that by including me, Ex might have been seen as disloyal.”
“But you know me,” I said. “If anyone would be able to track me down, it’d be you two. I mean, if I had been taken over by abstract evil, I’d totally want you on the case.”
“Yeah. Well. Sorry about that.”
“No. I admire him, in a way. There’s a purity to him that’s …”
“Freaky?”
“I was going to say remarkable, but freaky works. And he’s an important man in Ex’s life.”
“Yeah, it kind of had that brought-home-to-meet-the-family feeling sometimes,” I said.
Ozzie sighed, stretched, and struggled to her feet. I put out my hand, and she came to me, ready to have her ears scratched. I chewed on my lip for a second. Dolores was going to be done washing her hands, and she’d come back down. Ex and Alexander wouldn’t be talking to Chapin forever. If I wanted to clear the air, this was my chance.
“So hey,” I said. “Talking about how Ex called you in and all that? Yeah, I think I maybe owe you an apology. I’ve been keeping you kind of at arm’s length these last few weeks.”
“You have,” he said. From anyone else, it would have felt like an accusation. From him, it was just agreeing that the sky was blue. I was grateful he hadn’t tried to make light of it, say that I hadn’t been, and that if I had, it didn’t matter.
“I was doing kind of a rebound thing with Ex,” I said. “I mean, there was also the thing where I’m possessed. And what happened in Chicago. And Aubrey. It all got mixed together. I never thought it right out loud, if you know what I mean, but if you’d been here, you’d have put it in perspective. And I kind of didn’t want perspective. I wanted to make the mistake and not think about how it was a bad idea.”
“Are you certain that it is?” Chogyi Jake asked. “A bad idea, I mean.”
“Which part?”
“Do you love Ex?”
Ozzie chuffed impatiently and pushed her head against my palm to get me petting her again. I started to speak, stopped, tried again.
“I love my brothers. I love my mom. And I love Aubrey and you. I don’t think there are two times in my life I’ve used the word love and meant exactly the same thing by it. No matter what I say about Ex, it’s going to mean something different.”
“I think that’s a powerful insight,” Chogyi Jake said.
“You’re just not going to give me anything, are you?” I said, grinning. “You’re just going to listen to whatever I say and make me think through all of it for myself.”
“Yes,” he said, his grin answering mine.
“I missed the hell out of you.”
Dolores came down the stairs wiping her hands on her shirt, then came over to sit next to me. I watched her open and close her hand, the fingers uncurling slowly as a blooming flower and then folding back to a fist.
“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” I said.
“What does?” she asked.
“Being in control of your own body again. Not having something else calling all the shots.”
Her expression was hard, but she nodded. Between the wind demon and the Akaname, she hadn’t been in control of her own flesh much in a long time. I wondered if being young made that harder or if children were built to have other people making decisions for them in a way that softened the blow. Probably that was wishful thinking on my part. Please be okay, little girl.
When I’d been her age, my little brother had still been in diapers and my older just in middle school. It had been the first time I’d gone to school without a sibling there with me, and I’d known that another one was coming up behind me. There had been a freedom to that. A sense—however small, however brief—that I was my own person and not just a part of the larger unit that was my family.
I wondered about her sister, Soledad. She was firmly in the middle of her adolescence, when girls were building who they were independent of their families. To be ridden then, to have those first green shoots of autonomy and independence crushed flat, might be worse. I wondered if she’d gone home to her mother and Dolores’s yet, and what the rider said. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself in her place, trapped and powerless while the rider drove me out into the night and I strained to go back for my sister …
“What about you?” Dolores said. “Are you you, or are you it?”
“I’m me,” I said. “The one inside me doesn’t take over very much, and then not for very long.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s a little kid like you,” I said. “She’s a really strong little kid, but she’s young. I get the feeling she’s been young for a pretty long time.”
“She isn’t like the ones I had,” Dolores said. “The ones I had sucked.”
“Yeah. They really did.”
“I like yours,” she said, making the pronouncement. The official Dolores seal of approval.
Clumping feet announced the end of the cell phone call to Chapin. Ex and Alexander came down together. They both looked exhausted. As they walked down the stairs, their footsteps fell slowly out of sync.
“Chapin wants us back at San Esteban,” Ex said.
“I’m shocked,” I deadpanned. “We’re not going, though. Right?”
Alexander sat on the couc
h’s armrest and leaned forward, catching his breath. His skin was getting grayer, and the angle he held his shoulders at was changing. Even though I was pretty sure he wouldn’t go, I was tempted to take him back to the hospital. Ex leaned against the counter between the little living room and the kitchen, his arms crossed. The two priestshanged a glance.
“What exactly we should do next is open to debate,” Ex said. “If we’re certain that the group has been compromised, going back there is problematic. But I don’t see how we walk away either. Whether they are coming from inside the group or not, we’ve clearly got an infestation.”
“And there’s the reason you came in the first place,” Alexander said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but we haven’t addressed that yet.”
“Nothing’s happening with the Black Sun until the rest of this is sorted out,” I said. “Not open to debate. You’re telling me Chapin’s not convinced he’s got a cuckoo in the nest?”
Ex shook his head. The gas fire behind me turned off with a tiny pop.
“It’s a hard argument to make,” he said. “Akaname can be subtle when they want to. They have to be, because they’re so weak. But how likely is it that a rider could live in a society of men dedicated to destroying riders and never be noticed?”
“Seems pretty damn likely to me,” I said. “Who’d look there? And, not to put too fine a point on it, how would you know? If my rite had gone through, at the end of it, I’d have been sitting at the table just like Dolores’s family did, and saying how much better I felt and how grateful I was. And if I seemed a little off, it would have been because I’d just been through this huge thing, so of course I’d be a little forgetful or irritable or whatever. How would you know?”
“They’ve been doing this for years,” Ex said. “At some point somebody would have noticed.”
“Yeah, and that would be me,” I said. “I noticed.”
In the silence, Ozzie lay down. Dolores slipped off her shoes and scratched the old dog’s back with her toes.
“If one of the priests is ritually impure,” Alexander said, “they might have been open. I know Tamblen fights against his nature, but—”
“Please,” I said. “He’s just gay. He’s not ritually impure.”
“Homosexuality is a sin,” Alexander said. “I’m not saying Tamblen is a bad man, only that—”
“Everyone’s unclean,” I said. “You told me that. You were the one who went through everybody’s problems. Your doubt, and Carsey’s lust, and Tomás’s gambling. If we’re looking for who’s pure, I’m pretty sure everyone looks bad. But you’re not possessed. Ex isn’t. It’s not about purity.”
“I think,” Ex said, “we need to consider this from Chapin’s perspective. What if the Akaname isn’t in one of the priests? It could still be waiting nearby for a steady supply of vulnerable people.”
“That’s not what happened,” Dolores said. Her voice had enough exasperation for both of us. “It tried to get in when the other one was in there too. It went on at the same time.”
“Then icould have been anyone,” Ex said. “Miguel or Chapin or Tamblen. Any of us who were there.”
“No,” I said. “Not for Dolores.”
“What?”
“Everyone was there for mine because we were doing the short form. They’d been working on Dolores for days, and thought they’d be doing it for days more,” I said, then turned to the girl. “When the wind thing got loose, it was because the other one was trying to get in. That’s when it happened?”
Apparently eye rolling starts sometime well before the eighth birthday. “That’s what I said.”
“But Chapin was talking to us, Ex,” I said. “He was right there in the room with us when it happened. So it can’t have been him.”
Ex’s scowl almost covered the relief. It didn’t completely let Chapin off the hook, but it sure made things look better. Alexander cleared his throat. His eyes were narrow.
“Carsey and I were going in to relieve Chapin and Tomás,” he said. “If we’re all still willing to assume I’m not being ridden—“
“We are,” I said. “At least I am.”
“—then that means Carsey or Tomás.”
“St. Francis,” I said.
They looked at me. I wasn’t sure quite what I’d meant. I wasn’t even a hundred percent positive I was the one who’d said it. But something was shifting in the back of my mind.
“The Mark of St. Francis,” I said. “I was wearing it and it stopped the Black Sun. But it didn’t stop the Akaname. So if the group’s compromised, then maybe the Mark was broken. Maybe whoever made the medallion left a hole the Akaname could get through.”
Alexander shook his head.
“That would take a level of control and power that—“
“That you couldn’t do without a rider,” I said. “But that’s the point, right? Even small fry like the Akaname are better with magic than people are. So if someone who knew the rituals had a rider, he could maybe do things that he couldn’t have by himself. The Black Sun helped you cast the Akaname out of Dolores, Alexander. You couldn’t have done that alone.”
“If I’d had time—”
“You didn’t have time,” Ex said. “She has a point. Even if a normal man couldn’t make a sabotaged Mark, someone with a rider might. And Tomás made the Mark.”
“Ex,” I said. “You said he was kind of before and after for you. He went away for his final vows and then came back. Do you remember where he went?”
“Japan,” Ex said. “A mission in Japan. Where Akaname are more common. And if he had been possessed by something while he was there and had it cast out, it wouldn’t have been that hard to conceal. He was already part of the group. Chapin wouldn’t have areason to examine him again when he came back.”
We sat in silence for a moment, but I felt like crowing. My heart was a great big bubbling fountain of I’ve-got-you-now.
“Well, okay, then,” I said. “I think we’ve got a hypothesis.”
Chapter Twenty-one
If I’d tried to, I couldn’t have pointed to the change that came in that moment. I only knew that it had happened. It wasn’t just that Alexander and Ex stopped arguing against the rider-in-priest’s-clothing idea. It was also something in the way they looked at me, the way they held themselves. When I was a kid, my older brother, Jay, had shown me how to get iron filings out of the sand in the school sandbox. He’d had a sheet of white paper with a bunch of black dirt on it until he put a magnet under it, and then like magic, everything lined up. It was like that now. The case against the angel-voiced Tomás came together and now we were all pointing in the same direction.
Almost.
Chogyi Jake’s smile was as pleased and enigmatic as ever. Alexander leaned back on the couch, whistling low. Even Dolores seemed pleased that we’d figured it out. Only Ex looked like he was braced for a blow. He met my eyes and looked away. The pain would probably have been invisible to someone who didn’t know him as well as I did.
“Hey,” I said to him. “Can I borrow you for a minute? You guys talk amongst yourselves.”
I stepped out the back door. Snow covered the hot tub’s deck. The air bit, and the calling of crows was like the announcement of a funeral. Ex closed the door behind us, the latch clicking into place. In the sunlight, he looked even paler. His white-blond ponytail was loose. His eyes were bloodshot, and he still moved stiffly when he twisted. I wondered how the wounds on his back were doing.
“Hey,” I said.
He nodded.
“I think one of us owes the other an apology,” I said, “but I’m not sure how it goes.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You know that stuff I said about how much I appreciate everything you did for me?”
Ex leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.
“I do.”
“I meant all of it.”
“I know you did,” he said.
“We only had the information that we
had,” I said. “There were two ways to read it. I went one way and you went the other. I was right, but it wasn’t like you could have known that. We made our judgments and we acted on them.”
“Nothing else we could have done,” Ex agreed.
“We’re cool, then?”
“Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?”
I pushed my hair back from my eyesbove us, a thousand icicles glittered and shone like tiny transparent teeth.
“Maybe because you chained me up in a cellar, and you were going to feed me to a shit demon. Or how about because I beat you unconscious and spent days running while you worried yourself sleepless. It seems like someone here ought to have some hard feelings about something.”
He shrugged.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I was wrong about there being a second rider,” he said. “Anything else?”
Are you angry with me? I almost asked. But he’d say he wasn’t, either way. And that wasn’t really what I meant.
It was just a few days before that he’d lain on the couch wearing a blanket and told me in a soft voice about falling from grace with God. I’d hesitated at this cracked-open door to see him sleep, and he’d promised that if my feet were too bruised, he would carry me. I wanted to know if we were still those people. The long nights of distracting me when I woke up screaming, the mornings of making coffee for me quietly enough that I didn’t wake up. They’d been hellish, and every single time, he’d risen to the occasion. I didn’t know how I’d have made it through without him. He’d never tried to use my bad nights to make a pass. He’d never been anything less than great, crisis after crisis after crisis. There was an intimacy in it that I hadn’t totally recognized until now. And now I was afraid it was gone.
I wanted to know if the man who’d protected me when I was broken was able to forgive me for saving myself without him. I wanted to know what was behind the poker face. I wanted him to kiss me just so I’d know that he wanted to.
“Seriously,” Ex said. “Is there something you want to say? It’s cold out here.”
“No,” I said past the thickness in my throat. “I just wanted to make sure we were good.”
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