And then I knew what they reminded me of. They had been parasitized. Tomás had been the one with the actual beast in it, but they had all been used. Tamblen and Carsey, Miguel and Chapin. All these men dedicated their lives to freeing people from possession, and instead they’d become an engine for spreading riders. Tracking down the Akaname they had spread would be the work of years, if it could even be done. Right now in front of me, Chapin was doing anything he could to distract himself from the grief bearing down on him. And grief, I knew, made people crazy.
Chapin really was going to let himself die.
“Jayné,” Ex said. “I need a favor.”
“You want to lock me up,” I said.
“Just long enough to get him to the hospital. So that he can know you’re safe.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Please,” Ex said. “I need to save him. At least let me try.”
I looked over at Chogyi Jake. The gun in his hand hadn’t moved. I had the distinct impression that if I’d said so, he’d have shot everyone in the room who tried to keep me from walking out. It wasn’t what I’d expected of him, but the fact that he was there—that the choice was there—made choosing possible.
Ex stepped closer, leaning in. His voice was low and fast, and his hands fluttered in front of him as he spoke, like little sparrows trying to take wing.
“If you don’t want the rite of exorcism, I’ll make sure you don’t have it. Just let me put you down there for now. I promise I’ll free you again later.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not my call,” I said. And then: “Hey. We’ve got a situation here. You want to chime in?”
Always before, the rider had come suddenly or not at all. My hand might move on its own, or I might say something I hadn’t known I was going to say. Or else she just took the wheel, and I was a passenger. This time, it felt like she was welling up around me, pulling herself up to control my body through an act of will. Like running things was hard for her. Like it was a chore.
Ex saw the change. His face went pale and he started to step back, then caught himself. Behind him, Carsey’s eyes went wide. I couldn’t see the others.
“You’ve got no reason to trust me,” Ex said.
My rider swallowed carefully, like my throat was sore.
“Will you help me?” Ex asked.
The pause lasted years.
“Yes, I will,” she said. “Take me to your prison.”
Ex sagged with relief. I heard Carsey and Miguel moving behind me. Tamblen put a hand on my shoulder and the rider shrugged it off.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, and then I was in control again. I turned to look up at Tamblen’s face. “Yeah, I can walk it.”
OUTSIDE, THE cold was bitter. Ex and Chogyi Jake and I walked through the snow together, Tamblen and Alexander following just behind. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and it felt like midnight. Overhead, the crows were wheeling in great, excited flocks, calling to one another. Moonlight silvered the black wings. The smell of snow had the taint of fumes; it was like standing beside a gasoline pump. I stopped and looked up at the stars. Chogyi Jake was at my side.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“They are,” he agreed.
“Can you go make sure Dolores is all right?”
“I’d be happy to.”
“And thanks for offering to shoot Tamblen.”
Tamblen cleared his throat and looked pained.
“You’re welcome,” Chogyi Jake said.
It took a few seconds to knock the ice off the cellar door. I walked down the rough concrete stairs, ducking under the doorway that led to my prison. The ring waited for me, and the chains. I sat down, my legs crossed, and held out my wrists for the manacles. The others watched while Ex squatted beside me and carefully, gently fastened the metal around me. There were spells and cantrips worked into them, and I could feel my skin trying to pull away from the contact. He closed the locks, the bolts making a final-sounding steel trill as they shot home.
“How are we feeling about the space heater?” I asked.
“I’ll see what I can find,” Ex said. “Thank you for this. I owe you.”
“Not me. I’m just backing her play.”
“Well,” he said, and then left the word hanging there in the cool air. They turned to walk away, Ex going first, with Tamblen and Alexander following him. Before Chogyi Jake could leave, I called out to him.
“Hey!”
He stopped, looking back over his shoulder. I could see the others had paused on their way up the stairs.
“Yes?”
“You’re going to need the car key.”
“An excellent point,” he said, coming back to me. I dug in my pocket as best I could with my restraints, then handed him the fob with the key on it.
“Make sure Ozzie gets fed too, okay?”
“I’ll be back,” he said.
“I’ll be fine.”
I watched them walk away, listened to the cellar door close, and settled back to wait the long hours—maybe the whole night—before they came back for me. For me, and for the rider in my flesh. I thought about the choice it had made, surrendering to Ex and the others. And on what? The strength of Ex’s promise. It was an act of faith I couldn’t help admiring. I wasn’t sure I’d have taken the risk. I lay back, the chains hissing against the concrete, and hoped he’d remember the space heater. Or at least a couple of good blankets.
The summer before I turned five, my mother put me in church day care. Five days a week from eight thirty until noon, I played and fought and laughed and cried in the basement rooms under the church. One of my most vivid memories of childhood was pelting through the great maze of rooms, running until I was out of breath, screaming with delight. At fifteen, I went back as a volunteer, and the rooms I’d known as a girl were gone. Instead, there were three relatively dingy boxes in a straight line, one after the other, that had clearly been designed for storage. Some carpet had been put in, and the walls painted in nursery colors. That was all, and what was more, that was all that had ever been.
The prison was the same. I’d been here a few days ago, bound by the same manacles to the same floor-set ring, and even though it looked the same, smelled the same, felt the same, it barely had any relationship to the place I’d been. It was hard to believe I’d changed all that much until I started thinking about exactly what had happened.
If I went back now to that little church preschool, I wondered what it would look like. The artifact of an alien planet, most likely. How could it not when the places I’d actually been seemed to change so much, and in so little time?
It wasn’t quite a sound that made me sit back up, my heart racing. It was deep and powerful, like the stroke of a church bell or a gigantic gong. If there had been any noise at all, it would have been deafening. Instead, my heart was doing double time over something I couldn’t even describe. I tried yelling, to see if anyone would hear, and it wasn’t more than three minutes before the cellar door scraped open and Ex came down. He didn’t have a space heater, and his lips were pressed tight.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Small change of plan,” he said.
“There was something. I heard … well, not heard. But something happened, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The sanctuary is warded against spiritual and magical attack. Even against physical, a little bit.”
“Okay. And that plays in how?”
He knelt beside me, pulled the keys out of his pocket, and started unlocking my manacles.
“Well, I figure in the last five or six years, Chapin and the others have probably performed a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty exorcisms.”
“Ballpark,” I said.
“Ballpark.”
The chains fell off. I’d been incarcerated for less than twenty minutes. Ex nodded toward the stairs, and when he stood I followed, rubbing at my wrists.
“They’re here,” he said.
; I stepped back out into the night. The cawing of crows was thicker now, loud enough it was hard to talk over. The courtyard stank of smoke and gasoline, and a line of fire marked the edge of the building. There were shapes silhouetted by the flames. Men and women. Children. One of them raised a club over her head.
No. Not a club. A fire axe.
The voice that boomed out toward me could have come through a bullhorn, except it didn’t have the tinny, electrical reverberation. The words were deep and wet and they carried over the crows and the flame and the pounding of my heart.
“I’m the hammer now, bitch!” Soledad yelled.
“Oh,” I said. And then: “Spiffy.”
Chapter Twenty-four
I should have seen it coming. The situation might have changed, but the logic of it hadn’t. I’d gone to Questa and threatened the riders. They’d come after me. Now, in San Esteban, I’d exposed the rider that had spawned them all. They’d had the same choice as before—fight or flee—and they’d made the same decision.
They’d come to fight. The wards and protections might keep them at bay for a little while. They might not.
We were all in the kitchen now, sitting in a circle made by the chairs and the couch. Someone had pulled the back cushions off the couch to make a kind of bed for Chapin, and Carsey knelt beside him and pressed a bloody towel against his wounds. They hadn’t been able to get him out to the car. The shell of Tomás leaned against the wall, eyes fixed and empty. The rooms were just as bright as they had been before, the religious art gracing the walls was the same mixture of uplifting and horrific, but the air had changed. Everything was pressurized, thick, dangerous. I’d been under siege before, and I recognized the feeling.
“How long have we got before they break through?” I asked.
“An hour,” Miguel said. The bruise on his cheek was darkening nicely. “Not more. Maybe less. They’ve already tried to set fire to the place.”
“They know it’s made from mud and stucco, right?”
“Pour enough gasoline on it,” he said with a shrug, “and you can burn water.”
“Cheerful thought,” Tamblen said.
The not-sound ran through me again. Another attack turned aside by the weakening wards and protections built into the sanctuary. It would keep stopping the riders until it didn’t. Chogyi Jake stood, walked to the doorway, and peered into the next room like he was checking to see if he’d left the lights on. The pistol was in his hand again.
“Okay,” I said. “So if we keep Carsey on nursing duty, that gives us six folks on our side. Seven, counting the Black Sun. They’ve got a hundred or so riders, just one of which almost kicked our collective ass less than an hour ago.”
“Yes,” Ex said.
“And we’re totally surrounded, right?”
“Right.”
“Also, there’s an eight-year-old girl who will eventually be delivered back to her family and taken by demons again if we can’t get out of here,” Alexander said.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until little globs of color appeared. Chapin’s ragged breath was the loudest sound, but just below it there was something else. Inhuman voices lifted together.
“We could call the police?” Carsey said.
“No offense,” I said, “but I don’t think a bunch of dead cops is going to help. Do we know anybody with a helicopter less than an hour from here?”
“Creative thought, but I don’t even think the medevac from Albuquerque could get here in an hour,” Miguel said.
“We’re on our own, then,” I said. I thought about it for a few seconds, trying it from every angle I could think of. “We’re not going to make it.”
“No,” Ex said. “We aren’t. But if we do it right, a few of us might get out in the chaos. I think we should take the fight to the riders. Concentrate all our effort in one place, and then sneak as many people as we can out the other side.”
He was right, but the weight of implication behind the plan was vicious. The wounded—Tomás and Chapin—would have to be abandoned. For the distraction to be effective, most of us would have to be part of it, meaning most of us were about to die. Including me, because I had the Black Sun’s daughter living inside me, and if there was a distraction, she’d have to be part of it.
I didn’t want to die. The primitive monkey part of my brain was screaming and bouncing around the inside of my skull just to remind me how much I didn’t want to die. But if that wasn’t an option, at least I didn’t want to die for nothing. And that was all the choice I had left. I felt like a balloon with its string cut, spinning up into the sky.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ex replied. Meaning he’d thought all the same things I had and come to the same conclusions. “There’s a kind of beauty in heroic last stands.”
“Remember the Alamo,” I said.
“I thought we lost that one,” Carsey said. “Didn’t we lose that one?”
“Depends what you mean by we,” Miguel said. “My family’s Mexican.”
The gallows humor was as comforting as anything could have been. It didn’t quiet my fear, but it made it easier to ignore. Another wave of not-quite-sound. This one felt closer, more threatening. Time was running out.
“Who makes a break for it?” I asked.
“Alexander and Miguel,” Tamblen said.
“They’re hurt but not incapacitated,” Carsey said. “They’ll be the least use in a fight and still have a decent chance of getting away. And, more to the point, Alexander’s young enough that he’ll have more years spinning fantastic tales of our glory. If Tamblen went over the fence, he’d tell it all in three sentences and a shrug.”
Tamblen grinned. “True,” he said.
For a moment, I saw it. Just a glimpse. For a moment, here in death’s waiting room, I knew how these men had been a family. The shared jokes and the shared secrets, the sorrow and the dedication and the willingness to die together. It made them beautiful, and for the moment I was part of it. I rose first.
“Well,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we’d better get going. Hate to be late for the party.”
Ex stood up too, and Chogyi Jake stopped pacing to come stand by me. I felt Aubrey’s absence just then, and I was more grateful than I could express that he wasn’t there. A weird kind of peace settled over me. I wondered if it was from my own mind, or if my rider was letting her feelings be known. I couldn’t tell the difference.
“We should go out the main doors,” Carsey said, still pressing the bloody cloth to Chapin’s side. Chapin looked like a man made of wax, less realistic than some of the crucified saviors on the walls. “It’s the widest entrance. And there’s a window on the north side wide enough for the runners to squeeze out.”
“Do we try to press out into them or open the doors and fall back, try to get them to follow us inside the sanctuary?” I asked.
“Stop!”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell who’d spoken. Then Chapin opened his eyes. I was amazed that he was conscious, but he turned his head toward me, pointing with two bloody fingers.
“You … submit to me, to my will …”
I had to laugh.
“Seriously? I’m about to go sacrifice my life to save a couple of your boys, and we’re still on how I’m the beast and evil?”
He shook his head. His face was white. Even his lips had lost all color.
“You mistake me, Miss Jayné,” he said. “There is another way, but I cannot do this. You must submit yourself to my will. I will guide you. I will guide the both of you.”
Slowly, I walked to him. Three steps had never seemed like such a long way. He tried to smile, his bared teeth hardly paler than the gums they sat in. He’d bled white, but he held on to consciousness through brute force of will. All around us, the others had gone silent.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I am an old man. I have many, many years of finding the thin places between the demon and its prey. I have freed
many, many people.”
“That didn’t work out all that well,” I said.
“Be quiet! Listen!” His shout was only a change in the sape of his mouth. It didn’t have more power than a whisper. “With only the human will given us by God, I have defeated the lords and presidents of Hell. With the power of a few brave souls, I have conquered demons. To do so much with so little can only be accomplished with great knowledge. Much practice. With the power that lives within you and the craft of the life behind me, these little evils can be broken. Even though they number in the hundreds.”
He wanted to work together. An hour ago, he’d been willing to risk his own death to keep me in chains, and now he wanted something closer than an alliance. The desperation burned off him, or if not desperation, certainty.
“Can he do that?” Carsey asked of no one in particular.
I knelt beside the dying man. Pride flickered in his eyes. Pride and defiance and fear. The non-sound washed over us again and left the smell of sewage behind it. Something physical crashed far down at the end of the building, followed by the sound of voices raised in anger.
“Jayné?” Chogyi Jake said. “Whatever we do, we need to do it very, very soon.”
“You still think she’s evil,” I said.
Chapin’s throat worked, half swallow, half spasm.
“It is,” he said.
“And you’d still work with us?”
His smile was built from regret. His eyes were seeing something else now, something only he remembered.
“I will save my little boys,” he said. “If the price is damnation, I pay it. Take me.”
Tears poured down Carsey’s cheeks. His eyes locked on mine, and he shook his head in refusal. Glass broke, a window shattering and the shards dancing on brick. Then a second shattering, and the unmistakable roaring of fire.
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