by MLN Hanover
I hung my head. My ribs hurt when I breathed too deeply. One of the scabs on my feet had ripped open during the rite; my right leg from knee to ankle was red with blood. What he said made sense. Of course there couldn’t be another rider. Of course the thing inside me would do anything it could to keep its grip on me, to survive. Of course Satan had a thousand tricks.
And yet …
“It’s okay,” Ex said. “We’ll get it next time.”
“Yes,” Chapin said, with a long sigh. “We will take a few minutes to recover ourselves. Then we will begin again.”
“We won’t,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s going on here. Until I’ve got a handle on it, we’re stepping back.”
“That isn’t an option,” Chapin said.
“Really is,” I said.
He knelt by me. His eyes were calm and iplacable. He put his hand on mine, and he felt icy.
“The beast inside you, Miss Jayné? It is a Prince of Hell. That the Black Sun has spawned at all is of great significance. And that you have brought its larva to me is, I am certain, the benign hand of God. If you had come to me when it was fully mature, I might not have been able to help you.”
I wiped a thread of puke off my lips and tried to find the words to say I wasn’t feeling particularly helped just at the moment, but I couldn’t string the sentence together. And there was some point I wanted to make that flickered in and out of my mind too quickly to quite hold on to. Something about the sewer stench.
“You must not let yourself be tricked by it,” Chapin went on. “You must gather up your will and reject Satan.”
“I can reject Satan just as much as the next guy,” I said. “There’s something else going on here.”
“There is not. It is trying to distract you. You must not let it.”
“Be strong,” Tamblen said from behind me.
“Jayné. Please,” Ex said. He really was begging. That, more than any of the God-and-Satan talk, made me want to keep going. I didn’t want to let Ex down, embarrass him in front of his friends. I stood up, Chapin helping me to my feet. The white ceremonial shift looked as if I’d rolled through a bar’s parking lot after closing. They were all around me, silent and expectant. Waiting for me. I found Ex. His ponytail was coming loose, white-blond locks of hair draping to his shoulder. I wondered whether Isabel had been in love with him.
I was about to say okay. I was about to start it all up again when the memory flitting around the back of my head clicked into place. I’d been kneeling in the courtyard, gathering the little girl—Dolores—up. She’d said something. There was a bad ghost. It smelled bad. It tried to get inside me.
It had happened before.
“No,” I said. “We’re done here.”
Chapin sighed, his head sinking toward his chest like a defeated warrior. Ex looked pale and stricken. I wanted to touch his arm or hug him or something. I wanted to tell him it was going to be all right.
“I’m sorry, Ex,” was the best I could manage.
“Xavier assured us that your will was strong, but even so, we knew this was a possibility,” Chapin said. “A likelihood, even. I had hoped …”
“Don’t put this on Ex,” I said. “This is my choice.”
“No,” Tomás murmured in his beautiful whiskey voice. “There’s no choice here.”
My throat went tight and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“When your mind is your own again, you will thank us for this,” Chapin said.
A thick arm wrapped around my throat. Tamblen’s, I thought. The Mark of St. Francis of the Desert, still bound to my arm, flared hot. I tried to twist around, but there were other hands on me, snatching at my arms and legs. Someone grabbed my waist, lifting me off the ground. I thrashed and tried to scream, tried to kick out. The charm on my skin felt like the surface of the sun, and I expected to smell my skin burning.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ex said. “I’m right here, Jayné. I’m right here with you.”
I got a leg free for a second. I hit someone with it, but it was less a kick and more an unfriendly bump. I was one woman who’d just been through the wringer. They were six men. If my rider had been at full strength—not assaulted and bound by magic—I might have stood a chance.
They carried me outside, into the courtyard. The late afternoon air felt like a freezer. Their feet crunched in the snow as if they were walking through Styrofoam. I heard the rattling of a chain, and the creaking of hinges. The cellar doors. They were taking me underground. The wild, irrational certainty that they were going to bury me alive rushed through me, and I fought back with all the strength I had.
I might as well not have bothered.
They carried me down into the musty, cold darkness. I’d never seen the room before, but everything about it was familiar. A wide concrete slab with a wide steel ring set in it. Chains were attached to the ring. I’d helped Ex build something like this before. A prison for the possessed. They put me down, belly to the ground, and Tamblen shoved his knee into the small of my back, pinning me. Someone else—Carsey, maybe—had my elbow locked, bending it back until it hurt. I felt the manacles close around my wrists and ankles. There was power in them that didn’t have anything to do with the strength of the metal.
Ex was beside me, holding my arm steady while someone else fastened the locks. His eyes were hard, his lips a line so thin they could have been drawn on his face with a pen. His eyes flickered up at me and then away. Behind him, I saw the bare earth walls, pale as bone, with a single bulb hanging from a wire in the corner. The concrete slab under me was icy. The steel chains clicked and slid, link over link. The soft, rolling, final sound of the padlocks closing on my restraints was like a nail hammered into a coffin lid. The priests stepped back from me all at once, like it was something they’d rehearsed. They probably had.
Light the gray of twilight spilled down the concrete steps. I could see a bright line where the cellar doors stood open, the white of the sky. The crows called to one another. I lay on the floor, stunned. Chapin stood beside the bulb, hard shadows marking his face.
“You will wait here, beast,” he said. “We will return with rites less pleasant than those we have employed until now. This woman will not be lost to you.”
I swallowed. I wanted to say they were wrong, that it was me and not the rider, to for Christ’s sake let me go.
“Ex,” I said. “You have to trust me.”
He crouched down, his head on the same level as mine. Distress was drawing lines in his face. Carving him.
“This is how they work, Jayné,” he said. “This is how they trick you into fighting on their side. Against us. Against me.”
“Why?” I could hear the whine in my voice, and I hated it. ̴Why don’t you believe me?”
“If you had a fever and it made you hallucinate, believing your visions were real wouldn’t help you. It’d be letting the fever win. The riders trick people. It’s what they do. And I won’t let the rider win. Not with you.”
He was so certain that he was being my strength when I was weak, my protection when I was vulnerable. He couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t reach him. He couldn’t even see the betrayal.
“Don’t turn off the light,” I said. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”
“I never will,” Ex said even before Chapin nodded. I closed my eyes, listening to the soft footsteps. At least one of them was limping. That was all I’d managed.
The cellar doors creaked when they closed, and the voices of the crows grew fainter. I was alone and numb. I felt myself start to shiver like it was happening to somebody else. I didn’t feel anything, not hope, not despair, not even betrayal. My heel had started bleeding again. I was thirsty.
In the harsh light and black shadows, I took inventory of myself. Feet all messed up. Bruises on my arms and hands. Cracked rib. Filthy hair. Smelled of puke.
I rose to my knees; the chains wouldn’t let me stand all the way up. The light from the cellar doo
rs was gone. Night fallen or just decent weatherstripping. No way to know from here.
I thought about shouting until someone came, telling them that whatever it was had come after Dolores too, but I already knew what Ex and Chapin would say. The thing inside me had latched onto something the girl said, exploited it, used it to fool me. And I didn’t have any way to prove otherwise. No one would believe me.
I was trapped with one rider in my body, and another one no one believed in stalking me like a fox walking around a henhouse. I was in chains, and the only one of my friends who knew where I was had helped put me there. My family didn’t know me anymore. The uncle I’d idolized was an evil bastard. My lover was back together with his wife. My feet were cut bloody and my ribs hurt.
Something shifted in my chest. Not the rider, but an emotional tidal wave rising up from the deepest part of myself. I expected weeping and rage and sorrow as deep as an ocean.
And so the laughter surprised me.
It was a deep sound, rich and warm and rolling, and it didn’t belong to anyone but me. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. When I spoke, my voice sounded hoarse but surprisingly strong.
“Well. Hel-lo, bottom.”
Slowly, I sat up. My mind felt weirdly clear, like I’d just woken up from a long sleep or come back from a good vacation. My body might be trembling-tired, but I could think.
I wasn’t going to be able to get Chapin and his crows to believe me. I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the chains here in the basement and make a run for it. But if I didn’t do something, the sewer-stench thing was going to slip back through whatever chink it had found in Chapin’s defenses, and sneak into my body as the Black Sun’s daughter was ripped out of it. I couldn’t call for help. The cavalry wasṉt coming.
I took one deep breath, and then another, gathering my qi the way Chogyi Jake had taught me. Chogyi Jake, whom I had gone out of my way to exclude from this. Who would have believed me and taken my side if he’d been there. I pushed the thought aside. I didn’t have time for guilt or regret. Might-have-beens later. Right now, I had to focus.
Put on your big-girl panties, Midian said half in my memory, half in my imagination, and tell me what’re you gonna do. Because if you’re getting out of this one, you’re doing it on your own.
“H
ey,” I said. “Are you there?”
By now, it would be dark outside. Starlight on snow. In my little oubliette, the lightbulb was the closest thing to a heater. My nose was running, and no matter how I curled up, I couldn’t get warm. I’d been there for what might have been an hour. Long enough that the cut on my heel had clotted again. I waited. Nothing happened.
“Hey,” I said again. “So, listen. Here’s the thing. We both know there was another rider. And I think we’re both in trouble. I don’t like having something inside me that’s not me, but since it looks like that’s kind of nonoptional, I’ve got a proposal.”
The rider didn’t do anything. I imagined it listening, aware but unable to act. Buried inside of me.
“The way I figure it, we don’t have much to work with except each other. So how about a truce? Just between us. We work together, you and me, until we can get our necks out of this noose. And then I promise I’ll try to find a way to get you out of me that doesn’t … that doesn’t kill you. But I’m the one who makes the decisions. No more running out into the middle of the night without me. That’s the deal. We work this together. I’m the boss, and I’ll make sure you don’t get hurt. Sound good?”
It didn’t sound good. It sounded weak. I’d come here of my own free will. I’d sought out Chapin so that he could do exactly what he was doing now. If I were the rider, I wouldn’t have trusted me. But on the other hand, I didn’t see what options it had either.
“Okay,” I said. “That wasn’t a no.”
I squeezed my hands into fists, working the blood into them until the numbness went away. I pulled back the little Ace bandage on my arm. The hard metal of the medallion felt sharp against my fingertips. I hesitated. If Ex and Chapin were right, if the second rider was a trick, I was falling for it. But at least it was my mistake to make. I plucked the Mark of St. Francis of the Desert out. As much as it had hurt, I thought there would at least be a rashy spot, but my skin was unmarked. I let a couple of layers of bandage fall back in place and slipped the metal in over it. It looked more or less the same. If Ex or Chapin glanced at it, they probably wouldn’t see a difference. But the Mark wasn’t touching my skin.
“All right,” I said. “I’m just going to put my arm down here at my side. I’m not going to move it. See what you can do.”
I wited. Nothing happened. I tried to relax my arm, willing the muscles to be soft and calm. I breathed deeply three times. Four. Five. Six.
Sometimes, right on the edge of sleep, I would twitch. It was just once, and it always meant I was almost down. When my arm moved, it was almost the same. I didn’t do anything, and then the movement just happened, sudden and sharp, sending the arc of steel chain undulating like a snake, and then gone again. I let out my breath.
“Good,” I said. “That was good. Just hang on, little tomato. Things will be all right.”
After that, I waited. There was nothing else I could do. Screaming wouldn’t help. I didn’t want to cry. Mostly I wanted to get warm, get my own clothes on. Maybe find a hot tub somewhere with my name on it. Sweet dreams. Instead, I sang through all the songs on Hey Eugene! and a couple from Splendor in the Grass, slapping the concrete and rattling my chains as musical accompaniment. Then I segued over to some of Pink Martini’s Christmas music, slapping out the percussion and doing my best China Forbes imitation for “Little Drummer Boy” and “Santa Baby.” Singing, I could see my breath.
It was only a couple of more weeks until Christmas. With the strange tangle of spirits and darkness, demons and angst, that my life had become, the idea of normal holidays seemed to belong to a different world. I wondered what I would have been doing if not for the money and trouble that Eric had left for me when he died. I imagined myself working in a supermarket in Tucson. Arguing about who had to work the holiday shift and going back to a little apartment I’d probably have to share with someone just to make rent. Compared to what I was really doing, the grubby little kitchenette in my imagination seemed impossibly romantic.
It was weird to think that back home, Mom and Dad and my little brother, Curtis, would be putting up the tree, hauling the same ceramic nativity scene out of the attic and putting it on the lawn, going to the extra prayer meetings on Wednesday nights to beg that the Jews see the error of their ways, and I was here, doing this. I had the powerful memory of the smell of the mulled wine we kids weren’t allowed to drink. If I’d stayed home, been the girl they wanted, I’d probably have been able to have a cup by now.
If I’d been who they wanted, I’d probably be married to someone from the church singles group. And pregnant, so maybe no wine after all. Probably all the girls I’d gone to high school with had families of their own now. It didn’t seem right somehow that they still existed. They belonged to a different world, in some past life. And God help me, right now it seemed like a better one.
The truth was, I’d never really had a plan for my life. My whole childhood had been programmed and controlled by my father and the church, and my adult demon-hunting career had followed along the tracks that my deceased uncle Eric had laid down right up until it all went wrong. The only accomplishment that hadn’t been in the shadow of one older male relative or another was making it through two semesters of a secular college before I dropped out. It wasn’t much. But my life was mine, and I wanted it.
The cellar door creaked open. I stopped singing and shifted to sit cross-legged beside the concrete-set ring. Father Chapin, Ex, and Carsey came down, one after the other. They looked deathly solemn.
“Hey,” I said. “I don’t guess you guys brought a space heater or anything?”
“Who am I speaking to? In the name of Christ, I
demand you answer with the truth, deceiver!”
I felt a pulse of something pass through me. Will, magic, qi. Whatever I wanted to call it. It didn’t have the raw, screaming power of a rider’s magic. It could have been just the focused power of a really well-practiced human being. I wondered if the other thing might be hiding inside Chapin and pulling its punches to keep anyone from noticing. It was one of them. If not Chapin, then one of his cabal.
Right now, though, it didn’t matter. Wherever the invader was hiding out, my job was the same. Put everyone at ease, let them relax the security protocol a little, and then get out of Dodge. The first part, at least, wasn’t something a rider could do for me.
I was the one playing this game.
“It’s me,” I said. “Jayné. The real one. I had one little twitch a while back, but things have been really quiet otherwise.”
The three of them exchanged glances. Chapin had the best poker face, but I grew up in my father’s house. I’d been faking contrition since before I could fit all the right consonants into Sorry.
“Look,” I said, “you were right. It had a trick. I fell for it. It was just that right there, in the moment …”
“Satan is the lord of lies,” Chapin said. I could see he was choosing his words carefully. “There is no shame in being fooled by him.”
“Maybe not once,” I said. “If it gets to be a habit, that’s more of an issue.”
Chapin knelt just far enough away from me that if I made a break for him the chain would pull me up short. I felt like a Doberman. Chapin rubbed his palm across his chin, the sound of skin against whiskers like wind moving sand.
“I am not certain what you mean by this, Miss Jayné,” he said.
I sighed, looked down, hoisted an eyebrow. I couldn’t say “All better, trust me again.” It was the sort of thing you’d do if you were planning to make a break. Since that’s exactly what I was planning, this was when to look different. I had to be the smart-ass girl struggling to admit she wasn’t so smart after all. Bluff and bravado over a creamy center of vulnerability.