by MLN Hanover
“I went into this pretty sure I wasn’t going to slip,” I said. “Turns out that was optimistic. Right now, sitting here? Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to happen again. Fell for it once. Know the score. Ready to take it on, right? But I was wrong then, and I might be wrong next time we go in.”
Ex nodded almost subliminally. A tiny ghost of a smile touched Carsey’s lips. I smiled, a little nervously. They’d want to see a little shame. Nothing says sincerity like eating crow. And since I was putting all the stress on what happened after we started the next rite, I was also taking the focus away from what happened between now and then. I felt a pang of guilt at the deception, but I’d killed an innocent man. Lying to Chapin—as the man said—wasn’t exactly the low rung in my hierarchy of sins.
“What do you suggest?” Chapin asked.
“Well, I’m not going to insist we keep the chains on, but I think we’re going to have to treat me as a hostile witness. I don’t think it’s safe to assume I won’t break when the pressure’s on. So we kind of have to assume I’m going to, right? Then if I do hold it together, pleasant surprise.”
Chapin didn’t smile so much as shift his eyes. The effect was the same.
“I believe you are correct,” he said. “We have been preparing a slightly different ritual. Harder and longer, I think. If you can reject the spirit during this, it will be better. But it is not required.”
“When do we start?” I asked.
“Right away.”
“Cool,” I said, locking my jaw. I couldn’t let them take me back there. I couldn’t let them start. If I didn’t have time, there couldn’t be an opportunity. Which was probably why Chapin had arranged it this way. He was a professional. I had to give him that. “Any chance I could hit the bathroom? Maybe get a fresh outfit? This one’s kind of stinky.”
I saw him hesitate. It was like watching a movie with one skipped frame, there and gone before I could quite register it.
“Of course,” he said. “But under guard.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.
They took off the manacles. Outside, the sky was clear. The stars filled the sky like smoke from a fire. I hopped across the snow, yipping as the cold bit at my toes. Inside, Tomás and Miguel were kneeling before a circle chalked on the floor. Tamblen stood at the doorway, quietly apologetic. Candles the off-white of fresh cream burned all around, and sweet incense thickened the air. As I stepped through the double doors and into the warmth of the room, it occurred to me that for sure the other rider was in the room with me right now. I didn’t let myself look at them and wonder. I couldn’t let anyone see I was thinking about it. I had the powerful physical memory of smelling sewage and the numbing thickness forcing itself down my throat. I hoped the moment of fear read as dread of the punishing ceremony we were all about to begin.
“Just stopping by the little girls’ room,” I said. “Then we’ll get the party started.”
“I’ll take her,” Ex said, putting his hand on my elbow.
I had maybe five minutes. To the bathroom, back from it. I thought about crawling out the bathroom window before I remembered how small it was. Something else then. Whatever happened, I couldn’t step into that circle.
I walked through the kitchen, past the box of donuts that I’d bought years ago, in some different lifetime. I passed a crucifix. The Christ figure’s face seemed turned away from me in particular.
“Don’t be worried,” Ex said as we came to the bathroom door.
A surge of hope rose up in me. He knew about the other rider. I was going to be all right. And then he spoke again, and the hope wen away.
“Lots of people fail the first time out. It’s not that bad. We will beat this thing. I promise.”
I opened the door. Inside, the bathroom was tiny. If I went in, there was no place to go but back out. So this was it. My opportunity. My moment. I looked at Ex and smiled with a brick of lead in my gut. He was doing this—all of this—because he needed redemption for the girl he’d failed before, and because he loved me. It was written in his expression. I hated what I was about to do.
“You know I really appreciate all this,” I said, meaning every word. “Facing up to Chapin for me. Chasing me down in the middle of the night. All of it. You’ve been a really good friend to me.”
“Jayné—”
“I mean it. It’s meant a lot to me.”
His eyes met mine. There were tears in them.
“I couldn’t do anything less. I won’t say it’s all been easy. Or fun. But if I had it to do again, I would.”
“You say the sweetest shit,” I said. And then, regret in my chest like a tumor, I turned my attention inward. “All right. Now.”
My left hand took his wrist, snapping it down, and my right rose to clamp his throat, turning him. My body slipped in next to his, my arm around his throat and my rider pulling him off his feet before he had the chance to scream. His feet touched the wall, and he kicked off awkwardly, trying to break my grip. My rider rolled with the motion, using it to shift my hand off his throat and lock my forearm in its place. Then, his head pressed against mine, I rocked back a few degrees and cut off his air.
You’ll snap his neck, I tried to shout. Don’t hurt him. But the rider was in control now, and I might as well have been talking to the thin fella on the crucifix. Ex batted at me awkwardly, tried to flip around, and then convulsed. My arms held him for a few seconds after he went limp, and then lowered him softly to the floor. My rider paused long enough that I could see Ex was still breathing, and then she turned, padding through the brick-floored rooms like a cat. At the blue front doors, she paused, gathered herself, and threw my body out into the snowbound night, sprinting through the high snow with an intensity that could have been fear or joy or both.
THE HIGHWAY barely deserved the name. Two lanes stretched out in the darkness, no wider than a residential street. The snowplows had been through, clearing the asphalt and throwing walls of snow up at the shoulders. I stood in the middle of the lane, my hand up, and hoped that the oncoming headlights would stop. And that my ragged white ceremonial gown wasn’t too see-through. No way around it, this wasn’t going to be a high-dignity day.
The headlights slowed, shifted to the side like the driver was thinking about going around me, and then stopped. I couldn’t see the vehicle itself past the glare, but it was big enough to be a truck or SUV. The passenger’s door opened and a wide, burly man stepped out toward me. He was wearing a black puffy coat with iron-on patches at the elbow and sleeve and a baseball cap that had Guajira printed on it in fading red letters.
“Hey,” he said, an then paused. “You okay? You got car trouble or something?”
It was a pretty obvious assumption to make. Inappropriately dressed, somewhat bloody woman in the middle of a lonely stretch of country road. Car trouble. Sure.
“Something like that,” I said through my chattering teeth. “I could really use a lift.”
A voice came from the driver’s side, a low masculine voice speaking Spanish. The man in front of me shouted back into the light. I promised myself that if I didn’t collapse from hypothermia and die here in the wilderness, I’d make a point of learning a language besides English. The driver shouted something short, and the man in the hat shrugged and turned back to me. I noticed he had a thin mustache and a tattoo on his neck. If I’d seen him at a bar or walking along a street, I’d have been wary of him.
“We can give you a ride, sure.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked to the passenger’s door before he could change his mind. It was a pickup truck, white where it wasn’t muddy. The man behind the wheel was bigger than the one who’d gotten out, and older. Gray at his temples and thick, callused hands. I hauled myself up and scooted into the middle of the long bench seat. The man in the hat got in after me. The cab smelled like WD-40 and pot, and the back window was covered by Gothic-lettered stickers in loving memory of someone who’d died three years ago and young. I t
hought about all the stories I’d heard about girls going hitchhiking and coming to bad ends. I thought about all the stories I’d heard about people picking up mysterious hitchhikers who turned out to be more dangerous than they seemed. The truck’s heater was running full blast, and nothing in my life had ever felt better.
“Me llamo Ramón, y este pendejo llame Marcos,” the driver said. “Como te llamas, eh?”
Even I knew enough to make sense of that.
“Jayné,” I said. “I’m Jayné. And thanks for this. Seriously.”
The driver shrugged—It’s nothing—and we started down the dark road. The passenger crowded himself against the door, trying not to touch me. He took his hat off, fidgeted with it, and put it on again.
“We’re heading for Peñasco,” he said, “but the cops got a station in Carson. We could drop you off there.”
“No,” I said. “No cops.”
The two men exchanged a look over my head. I felt the driver shrug again.
“So where you going?” the passenger asked, and as soon as he did, I knew the answer.
“You ever been to a place called O’Keefe’s?”
When we pul
led into the slush and gravel of the parking lot, I was amazed by the number of cars. It was eight o’clock, and apparently still the height of the dinner rush. Ramón and Marcos let me out and headed back to the road with my gratitude and a sense of being relieved to be done with me. I turned and considered the front doors. I knew I looked like hell. I didn’t want word of me to spread back to Ex and Chapin, so marching straight in seemed unwise. Freezing in the parking lot was also not a great plan. I walked quickly around the side of the building. I could hear voices from inside the restaurant, shouting over the radio. The truck’s heater had taken the edge off my cold, but I was still barefoot in the snow. I needed to get into shelter.
Midian’s RV was dark but unlocked. I didn’t know what it used for a heater, but the air was warm and close. The only light was a tiny fluorescent bulb over the stovetop. Clean dishes were stacked beside the sink. A magnet with a scorpion encased in plastic pinned an envelope to the fridge. Somewhere under the sink, a water heater burbled and hissed. No one else was there.
I sat down on the little couch and cradled my feet. After a few minutes, I stumbled to the back and pulled a comforter off Midian’s bed to curl up in. I was shivering hard, my body reacting to the cold and abuse and hellish day I’d just suffered. I didn’t figure Midian would mind if I messed up his bed. The cotton and down stank of old cigarettes, but I didn’t care. I folded myself onto the miniature couchlike thing, pulled the comforter around my head, and waited to get warm. Twelve hours ago, I’d been driving in toward San Esteban.
I thought about the little condo near the ski valley. It had my clothes. My laptop. The leather backpack I used as a purse was with Ex and the priests, along with my wallet, my credit cards, my cell phone. I wondered what they were doing now. Searching for me, no doubt, but I’d always been hard to locate magically, everything I owned with a GPS chip was somewhere else, and the trail of my footsteps in the snow ended at the highway. So far even Midian didn’t know I was here. The ashtray-stinking darkness was about as safe as I was going to get.
When Midian’s shift was over and he came back home, I could talk to him about it. Make a plan. I kept telling myself that. Feeling seeped back into my arms and legs. My toes hurt like hell, and one place near my little toe was still numb. But everywhere I pressed white went pink again when I let up the pressure, so I seemed to have avoided frostbite. I took the Ace bandage off of my arm, throwing the exorcist’s medallion in the sink.
Part of me wanted to keep going, think everything through, take action, but exhaustion and the slowly growing warmth scattered my thoughts. I was only vaguely aware that I was falling asleep, and then the sound of claws against metal woke me up.
It was daylight outside, and not the blue that came before dawn either. I’d slept through the night on the little not-quite-couch, and Midian hadn’t come in. Claws scratched against the door again, and I levered myself up, muscle-sore and aching, to open it. The Labrador chuffed at me, her breath white, and wagged her thick tail.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Come on in.”
As she clambered up the steps, I looked around. The snow-covered ground was so white it had flecks of color—blue and purple and pink. Icicles hung from the restaurant’s eaves while meltwater from the roof dripped down them, making little caves of ice by the wall. The sky was huge and blue and marbled by cloud and contrail. And Midian hadn’t come home last night. Ozzie the Lab sat on her graying haunches, looked at me, and wagged. I scratched her ears absently. Maybe he was out feeding. Or maybe he̵d come in, seen me, and made other arrangements for himself. I was still wearing the white shift from yesterday, and it was starting to reek. My rider was quiet. I figured she had had at least as rough a time as I had. I didn’t know what kind of damage the near exorcism had done to her, or even what kind of shape I should hope she was in.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you there? Truce is still on as far as I’m concerned.”
I might have been talking to myself. I didn’t know. My stomach growled, my hunger level going from background noise to ravenous in about ten seconds. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten anything. Something like twenty-four hours ago, and that had been donuts. No blood sugar probably wasn’t helping me think. I leaned over, reaching the refrigerator door easily from where I sat. The light took a second before clicking on. A glass bottle of milk, three apples, half a loaf of bread, four eggs, and a hunk of cheese. I took an apple, the cheese, and the bottle of milk. I didn’t figure Midian would mind. When I closed the refrigerator door, I noticed the scorpion magnet again, clipping its envelope to the door. With the daylight, I saw there was a single word written on the pale paper like an address: Kid.
Taking a long drink of milk with my left hand, I plucked the letter out from under its scorpion with my right. A single sheet of paper. The note was in perfectly clear handwritten letters, tiny and flowing. Almost like calligraphy.
Hey, Kid.
I’m going to be a little vague here. I don’t know for sure who’s going to be reading this. Figure you’ll get what I’m talking about. You’re smart that way.
I make it the chances of your coming back here are pretty good, or I wouldn’t be leaving this. And probably you won’t have anybody of a clerical bent with you. But if you do, that could make for a really bad day. No offense meant, but I didn’t make it this far by taking risks that weren’t strictly necessary. Sorry to let you down and all. You’re a good kid and I like you, but I don’t see how you and me get to spend a lot of time hanging out. It’s a lifestyle thing. Dietary. You know what I mean.
I’ve been thinking about that guy you did wrong by in Chicago. I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with exactly that kind of problem over the years. Thing is, what you did comes pretty naturally to me. I know what you’re going through, but I don’t really get it. So maybe that’s what I’ve got for you. Some folks it bothers, some it doesn’t. You’re one of the ones it does.
And I’ve got to tell you, I think it’s a good thing Capt. Milquetoast’s out of the picture. I know how this sounds coming from me, but the age gap between you two was always a problem. He’s just at a different place in his life. And this work you’ve been doing? He’s not cut out for it. Twice now he invoked the abyss. Plus which what you said about him getting ridden in New Orleans? Getting a rider’s like a drinking game. Once you start losing, you keep losing—getting ridden opens you up and getting closed again is tricky. That’s something you’re probably going to have to deal with too, now that you’ve gotten the thing shucked out of you. So, you know, good luckt ifthat.
Okay. My ride’s here. I know you’ve got a metric shitload of questions about your uncle. I wish I could help you more, but hey. We do what we can, right? Here’s what I’ve got for you in three sentences or less: He was a sonofabitch. He never did anyt
hing without a reason. The reason was always that it made things the way he wanted them. You’ve got a rough road, kid. Good luck with it. Don’t come looking for me.
Your pal, Midian.
I read it over twice more, waiting to see if I felt betrayed, but all that was there was vague disappointment. Yes, he was a vampire. Yes, he killed people. Ex and Chapin and all the others would have wanted him destroyed, and for good reason. But I liked him. I wondered if my willingness to give him a free pass might not be another step down the path toward not being one of the good guys. I put the letter back in its envelope. Ozzie looked up at me with black, watery eyes, her tail thumping heavily against the floor. I sighed and headed for the back.
Midian hadn’t cleared everything out when he went. The tiny closet had a pair of paint-splattered men’s jeans that I could just about squeeze past my hips, and I found a gray sweater with a stain across the front that might have been blood, but smelled like barbecue sauce and cigarettes. The shower was almost too small to turn around in, but it was there. No shampoo, but I used the bar of soap. Lousy for shine and body, but plenty good enough for getting the worst junk in my hair out of it. The water was hot enough to scald, and ran out after about two minutes. Still, pulling on Midian’s hand-me-downs, I felt better than I had in days. I still didn’t have shoes. Or money. Or anything of my own.
So, that was what I needed to fix next.
O’Keefe’s was open for breakfast. I didn’t go around to the front. I’d done terrible things to my feet in the last two days, and sleeping through the night seemed to have gotten the blood back to every single nerve ending I had. The snow felt burningly cold. I hopped quickly to the kitchen door. The man who opened it was maybe eighteen with hair cut close to his scalp and an ornate cross hanging at his collarbone. He was wearing an ironic Santa hat complete with white pom-pom at the floppy tip, and he was smoking a cigarette.