This, I thought, was the moment. Chogyi Jake had warned me, it seemed like a lifetime ago, that my protections would fail. And now I thought I felt them starting to go. It felt like despair. Desperately, the small part of me that watched the fighting tried to pull my qi up from my belly and press it out into my arms. It seemed weak and distant, a voice shouting in a windstorm. I closed my eyes, trying again. Not to control my body. The last thing I wanted now was Jayné-the-white-belt to start driving. I only pushed to feed the thing that was happening to me, support the spells and wards.
And the weakness and despair began to fade.
The rider lifted a huge hand. Its skin was black as the void and swimming with points of nauseating light. Its impossible fingers dug into my back.
“You’re weak,” I said. “Your days are gone.”
It tugged at me, trying to rip me free, but I was immovable. Something in its throat made a repulsive crunching sound under my arm, and it started to choke. The rider pulsed, its multiple soul gathering itself to break out of David’s body and flow back into the hospital and out of reach. I wrapped myself around it, making a net with my will. A prison. I was doing alone and on the fly what the four of us had struggled to do together.
I had the feeling it would work.
“I bind you, Daevanam Daeva. I bind you to the blood which you betrayed,” I shouted.
It swung me around, beating me against the walls. I felt the stab of a breaking rib like it was happening to someone else. Something like battle rage had flowed into me, lifting me up, widening me out past the confines of my body. The room around us seemed brighter now, even though there was no light. The rider spun, clawing at my arms and drawing blood. Ex and Kim were there too, beating at it with fists and pipe. Aubrey lay at the graveside, exhausted from his efforts. The rider swung hard, bending at the waist and knocking my head against the wall so hard my vision narrowed. For a moment, I was choking the man from my dream. I could smell the Brylcreem in his hair. He stumbled, falling to one knee. My feet hit the floor, and I took him by his collar and the waistband of his pants, lifting him over my head. Ex and Kim stepped back, their eyes wide and frightened. I took two steps to the edge of the grave and swung the body down hard enough that I was afraid I’d broken the casket. The dark wood held. I raised the lid up in one hand, keeping the other on the rider’s chest.
And it was David Souder again. I could feel the rider within him; it hadn’t gotten free. It had thrown its horse toward me like a shield. Human eyes looked up at me in horror.
“Wait!” he shouted.
I slammed the lid down.
“The nails,” I said. “Give me the nails.”
Ex didn’t hesitate. Seven long, silvery nails. The coffin lid thumped, David trying to push it open, but with his arms pinned to his sides, he had no leverage. I put the heads of the nails in my mouth like a carpenter.
“Kim!” Ex said. “The pipe? Where’s the pipe?”
I didn’t have time. I knelt on the coffin, my weight keeping it in place, and put the first nail at the lid’s dark corner. There was a rough hole where the previous one had been. I moved half an inch to the left, set the sharp point down. I gathered my will, drawing the power into my hand until I felt like I was about to catch fire. I screamed and drove my open palm onto the nail head. The metal slid home with a single blow. My palm was bleeding and bright with pain. I didn’t care.
“Oh my God,” Kim said. I ignored her. I drove the second nail home. I could feel the coffin grabbing onto the metal and its cantrips, weaving a seal between box and lid that was more than the simple physical connection. After the third nail, David’s struggles couldn’t even make the coffin shudder.
“Stop,” Ex said. I looked at him, almost understanding the word. It was like something with a cognate in my language. “Stop it, Jayné. We can drive the rest of them with a hammer. Just stop.”
Like a switch being turned off, the strength left me. Every muscle in my body trembled, and I looked around the room. It was like I was just waking from a nightmare, or just falling into one. I tried to say something, but there were still four nails in my mouth. I took them out, amazed by the blood soaking my hand and sleeve. My right palm looked like hamburger. I began to feel the pain, something huge and far away, but coming close quickly.
Had I done that? Driven nails with my bare hands?
“You beat it,” Kim said, awe in her voice. “You really beat it. How the hell did you—”
“We’ll finish it,” Ex said.
“Give me the pipe,” I said.
“We can—”
“Rider’s trapped. In there. Get a gurney. Chogyi Jake. ER.”
Ex looked back at the stairs. He’d forgotten. I couldn’t blame him, but I didn’t have time to argue about it.
“Go,” I said. “I can finish this.”
“Use a hammer,” Ex said. “Kim. Clear the barricade. I’ll find something to carry him on.”
“Aubrey—” Kim said.
“I’m fine,” Aubrey said. It wasn’t true. I could hear the buzz in his voice, the fever, the price of magic. “I’ll be fine. I can help.”
Kim handed me the pipe, and they stumbled up the stairway, Aubrey leaning against her, Ex alone with his shoulders hunched against his own fatigue. The coffin beside me bumped and shuddered. I looked over at the black planes. The ceremony wasn’t finished, but it was close. The danger had passed. Only a few ugly last details remained. I lifted the pipe in my bloody hand, picked up a nail. Four more. Just four more.
“Jayné! Stop!” David’s screams seemed to come from much farther away than an inch of black-stained wood could account for. “Please, wait. Something’s wrong. It didn’t work.”
I set the nail. My hands shook, and the pipe wasn’t a great substitute for a real hammer. It took three tries before the metal started biting into the wood.
“It’s not in here. Jayné, it’s not in here. It got out before you closed the lid.”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was true or a ploy to trick me into freeing it. The lanterns hissed out their steady light. The air didn’t carry the oppressive, filthy feeling that it had before. I set the fifth nail and steadied myself. When I brought the pipe down, it only drove the nail about half an inch in, but the rider roared; David’s pleading voice turned to a stream of impotent rage and despair. I sat on the coffin to keep it from shifting and spoiling my aim. When the nail was in, the shaking was less violent, the shrieking more muffled.
My hand was slick with blood and every swing of the fake, improvised hammer felt like the nail was going into me. Above me, Ex shouted something, and Kim’s voice was a muttering reply. Something crashed, and Ex’s voice sounded more pleased. The wheels of an ancient gurney squeaked in protest and then faded. They were getting Chogyi Jake to help. My friends were leaving me and finding safety. I was alone in the deepest hole of Grace Memorial. Down in the dark, with only the lanterns, the sacrifice, and the beast.
I didn’t know when I’d started weeping. Maybe I had been all along. Driving the last nails became a long, slow torture. The pain in my hand was constant now, the flares that came with the blows hardly noticeable through the constant roar of exposed nerves and torn flesh. I didn’t have the strength, so I soldiered on with determination instead. I couldn’t believe that a few minutes ago I’d done the same job with one bare-handed strike.
The screams and threats floating up from the coffin felt light and powerless as fluff. I went through the punishing steps of my chore almost without noticing them. When the blow sank the last nail, I stopped for a minute. I wanted to collapse, to fall asleep and never wake up. And never dream. I’d been sandblasted, left outside in a desert storm, shocked and abraded until I was clean and pure and skinless. I told myself it would pass. A few days to recover, and I wouldn’t be empty. My brain would start working again. I would be able to feel something that didn’t hurt. I watched myself crying from a distance, as if the sobs weren’t related to me. The cof
fin still let out muted knocks and thuds, and far, far away, David Souder was screaming. He’d be screaming for the rest of his life. The best I could do now was make sure that wasn’t a very long time.
I stumbled up out of the grave, banging my shin against the crumbling concrete edge. I found a roll of gauze and a bandage pack in a yellowed paper seal, sterilized and marked a year before my mother was born. I opened it, pressing the old cotton against the new wounds on my hand. It sucked up the blood hungrily. The gauze held it in place. It felt almost like I had a lace glove. I didn’t have the strength to laugh at the incongruity. I hauled myself to the wall. The shovel David had used to dig the coffin out lay on the ground beside Declan Souder’s scattered bones.
“Well,” I said to the empty skull, “we did it. Just like the old days, eh? Evil defeated. Hell of a price, but we paid it. Go us.”
The skull didn’t do anything. I hadn’t expected it to. After all, it was just a lump of calcium phosphate. It didn’t have dreams or hopes or regrets. It didn’t have to live with what it had done. Still, I turned its eye sockets toward the wall. I didn’t want it to see me.
I picked up the shovel.
“Hey.”
Ex stood on the stairway. The shadows clung to his eyes, and his cheeks looked sharper than I remembered them. Pale hair had escaped his pony-tail, spilling down his face.
“What?” I said. It was the best I could manage.
“I got them on their way to the ER. Aubrey and Kim are with him. There’s nothing I can do there.”
“Nothing here either,” I said. “One shovel.”
I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want anyone here. I wanted my crimes committed in the dark, without witnesses.
“Never heard of taking turns?” Ex asked, coming down the stairs. “What kind of day care did you go to as a kid?”
“Don’t do this,” I said. “Please. Go. I have to—”
I was crying again. I hated it, but I could no more stop than I could will myself not to breathe.
“You have to what?” Ex said.
“I have to kill him,” I said, then folded. My knees gave way gracefully, and I hunched on the floor, supported only by the shovel. The words kept spilling out of my mouth. “I have to kill him. Oh God, I have to kill him.”
“Give me the shovel,” he said.
“No.”
“I can do this for you,” he said. His voice was so soft. So gentle. He wanted so badly to spare me this. To spare me something. Anything.
“No,” I said. The anger in my voice surprised me, but it also gave me a last sip of strength. “Don’t make this easy. Don’t you dare make this easy.”
Ex smiled. He understood. So maybe his being here wasn’t so bad after all.
“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”
He held out his right hand, and I took it with my left. My legs were rubber and string. We walked together, side by side, to the edge of the grave. The rider was screaming obscenities somewhere. And when it wasn’t, David’s weaker voice wailed piteously. I wasn’t doing him any favors by waiting.
Ex stepped away from me, standing at the coffin’s head. He took something out of his pocket—a bottle of something that looked like olive oil—opened it, and poured it onto the coffin lid. Then he put his hands out, palms down toward the grave. His voice was low and resonant and rich. Almost like he was singing a dirge.
“Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam miserecoridiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum.” With this oil and His own gracious glory, may God forgive you those sins which you have committed by sight.
Last rites. He was giving David last rites. There was no magic in the words, no sense of the human will bending the world to account. But maybe there was something, even if it was only hope and respect. I sank the shovel into the pile of dirt, lifted, and poured it onto the coffin. Then another. David screamed every time more dirt struck the lid. I closed my eyes and kept going.
“Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam miserecoridiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per audtiotum.”
It took me half an hour, but I filled the grave. I buried an innocent man alive. At some point, the screaming stopped being loud enough to hear and became something I only imagined.
It sounded just the same.
TWENTY-FIVE
When I was still living at home, back even before I’d broken the news to my parents about going to a secular college, I found a picture in the back of an old book. I still remembered it now. Two boys in front of a wide, white fence. The color was off; all red and yellow and hardly any blue. They were both wearing pea coats and haircuts that made me think of the late 1960s. The taller boy grinned at the camera. He might have been seven or eight years old, and the rictus grin of his false smile looked charming. I could see where the cheeks would thicken, the flesh fill out, and a small, well-intentioned mustache grow in. I could see my father in the boy.
The smaller one wasn’t aware of the camera. He was pointing at something off to his right, his eyes wide with wonder and joy. He would grow up to be, in Ex’s words, at minimum a sociopath and a rapist.
There had to be a moment. Somewhere in the path between that little boy discovering the world with an innocent delight so powerful it could impress itself onto a fold of paper and a little light-sensitive chemistry and the man who wrote Fucked her. There had to be something that made it all go wrong. Not just a lost innocence. Something worse than that.
Becoming soulless, maybe.
“THEY TELL me that spleens are, for the most part, optional,” Chogyi Jake said. A television across the hall burst into authoritative news-on-the-hour music.
“I’d heard that,” I said.
As soon after the operation as he’d been stable enough to move, I’d had him transferred out of Grace. Without my being his wife or his kid, it hadn’t been as straightforward as I’d hoped. I wound up playing the employer card and throwing a lot of money at it, and the problem eventually went away.
The first time I’d walked into Northwestern Hospital, coming to see him even if it only meant watching him sleep, I’d had a flash of panic. The complexity of halls and elevators brought up a bone-deep terror that didn’t have anything to do with the place. After a couple visits, I got a better handle on the new space. Coming to see him today, I hadn’t had anything more than a little mild anxiety.
“I hear they had to put six units of blood into me,” he said.
“That’s what they tell me.”
“I don’t actually know how much that is.”
“The word massive came up,” I said. “They were apparently fairly angry at Kim and Aubrey for not getting you in sooner.”
Chogyi Jake smiled. He’d been in the hospital for three days, and he looked a million times better. The gray tone of his skin was gone. His hair was growing out. His smile seemed to carry a meaning behind it instead of just being a habit of the flesh. Even the gown he wore looked less sickly. I didn’t know whether it was because he wore it like a meditation robe or he’d been sucking up to the nursing staff for a better class of patient-wear.
“You explained that you were saving the world?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, there’s the mistake,” he said. “If they’d just told the surgeon more about the circumstances . . .”
“They’d all be in for psych evaluations, even as we speak,” I said. Chogyi Jake nodded and laughed, then twitched and lay back, a hand pressed to the incision site on his belly.
“Only hurts when I laugh,” he said.
“Really?”
“Well, that and when I take a dump, but I was being polite,” he said. “How are things at Grace?”
“Weird,” I said. “Go figure. Kim said there’s going to be a bunch of new policy announcements in the next couple weeks, but I don’t have any idea what they are. I would have thought invoking evil spirits was already considered inappropriate workplace behavior.”
�
��There’s nothing else they can do,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Yeah. One weird night, no explanations. I’m not sure what I expected of them.”
“And the rider?”
“It’s in there. There’s still weird stuff going on. Oonishi’s screwed. He’s shutting down his study until Kim can re-create the Invisible College’s spell that I broke. Quiet it down a little.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Chogyi Jake said. “He’s doing interesting work.”
“Yeah, well. He can try again next year.”
Chogyi Jake nodded and lay back on his pillow. Outside his window, the high air was a hazy white.
“Seems like a long time,” I said.
“It can be,” he said, and from his tone of voice, I knew we’d changed subjects. I heard Kim again, from when we’d first arrived. What a difference a year makes. Or a day. Or a moment, if you pick the right one.
“How are you?” he asked.
“We’re leaving the country. Me and Ex. Aubrey’s staying here. You heard about that, right?” I was talking too fast.
“I did,” he said. And then, gently, “It might be awkward, you and Ex being alone together for an extended period.”
I chuckled. It was cute, Chogyi Jake treating me gently, not pushing me, with him being the one in the hospital bed. He knew we were both hurt.
“Yeah, I can handle it. Anyway, Ex thought it would be a good idea to be a little hard to reach for a while. Burying someone alive as a ritual sacrifice is still a felony last I checked. There are going to be a lot of phone records between him and my cell, and I don’t really want to explain to the judge why this time it was different. My lawyer said that forcing any inquiries to be international would give her enough time to make it all disappear. If we need it to. You can catch up with us when you’re okay to fly. I mean, if that’s all right?”
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