by MLN Hanover
“Hey, I’m a friend of”—I gestured back toward the RV—“of his. Could I use your phone?”
The guy looked from me to the RV and back, then stood back and let me inside. The kitchen was hot, and the smell of cooking chorizo sausage and freshly brewed coffee was like a postcard from a better world. The man gestured me toward a thin green door. I nodded my thanks and ducked through. The office was tiny. The phone was a cheap cordless with a huge chrome-and-red logo on the mouthpiece for a company I’d never heard of. It took me a couple of tries to remember how to call information, and then how to call information in Denver. All the numbers I needed were in my cell phone, and I didn’t know the actual numbers. Eventually, I got the listing I needed.
The first call was disheartening. I’d forgotten it was Saturday, and all the businesses were closed. But the message left an emergency contact number, so I wrote that down, called back, and waited, biting my lips while it rang. Once I got someone to pick up on the other end, it was a question of minutes while the call was transferred. The clicks and hums made it sound like I was going through about a dozen exchanges.
“Hello, dear,” my lawyer said. “How are you?”
“Little rough,” I said. “Trending up, though.”
“What can I do for you?”
I paused. I’d gotten this far without knowing exactly what my plan was, except that I had resources there and I wanted them here. A crowd of things all came at once: shoes, shampoo, proof that the Black Sun’s daughter hadn’t tricked me into running. My backpack. My friends. Lunch.
The truth was, the answer depended on what I meant my next move to be. I’d gotten out, I’d made it to safety. Ex and Chapin and the others were certain to be out looking for me, but if I wanted to, I could head out of the country on my own. Or go to ground behind the best-paid security that money could buy. Flee or hole up. Or something else.
I took a deep breath and blew it out.
“I need a car. Something big with four-wheel drive. No GPS on it, though. And a cell phone with the GPS taken out or broken. And a couple of outfits. I’m wearing borrowed clothes right now. With good shoes. And really thick socks. And maybe a few thousand dollars in cash. Oh, and … Hey, is there a way for me to get a replacement driver’s license without actually being there? Because I can’t really get to mine right now, and I don’t want to explain that to the highway patrol or the TSA or anyone.”
“I’m sure we can arrange something,” my lawyer said. “Is there anything else?”
“I need Chogyi Jake’s cell phone number. I’ve got it in my old phone, and I don’t remember it.”
She gave it to me, and I dug around in the thin gray metal desk drawers until I found a pen that worked and a piece of paper. Behind me, the kitchen rattled with cutlery and the sounds of frying meat and eggs, loud Spanish and quieter, more distant English. I shifted the phone to my other ear.
“That’s enough for now,” I said.
“Where would you like to take possession?” she asked, and I smiled but didn’t laugh.
“I’m staying in an RV behind a roadside restaurant called O’Keefe’s outside Taos, New Mexico. They should bring everything there.”
“O’Keefe spelled like the painter?”
“I didn’t know there was a painter.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find it. How soon do you need all this?”
“As soon as you can,” I said. “Today would be good.”
There was a pause. I heard keystrokes as she typed something on her computer.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to do that. Weekends make these things difficult,” she said. “I can manage tomorrow early afternoon for the license and the car. I could have the rest of it to you earlier if you’d like.”
“No, I don’t want a lot of different deliveries. It’d call attention to me.” I tried to remember how much food had been in Midian’s RV. Could I really even stay there? It had to really belong to someone, and that almost certainly wasn’t him. Well, I could cross that bridge when I found it. “Bring it all at once, but don’t spare money making it happen fast. If throwing cash at it will help, go wild.”
“Understood,” she said cheerfully.
“You may be hearing from Ex. Whatever he tells you, ignore it. If he asks for anything, don’t do it.”
“Yes, dear. And should I take him off the payroll, then?”
“No,” I said. “He thinks he’s doing the right thing. He’s just wrong and he’s not listening to me right now.”
I could almost hear her eyebrow go up, but her voice didn’t give her away.
“Whatever you think is best,” she said.
“All right, then,” I said. “I think that’s got me covered.”
“If anything else comes up, don’t hesitate to call, dear.”
“Won’t,” I said. “Thanks.”
I hung up, turned, and leaned against the desk. Something was bothering me, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what. Eric was saving me again. When he’d died, he had left everything he had to me, and his personal empire was huge. If I’d come running to Midian’s RV with only what I’d actually earned myself, I wouldn’t have been able to afford my own lunch, much less new clothes, a new car, and a semilegal driver’s license. I didn’t know what I would have done. But I didn’t have to know, because I did have Eric’s money.
He was a sonofabitch. He never did anything without a reason. The reason was always that it made things the way he wanted them.
I hadn’t stopped to ask myself what Eric had meant by bringing me into this secret world. Riders, magic, spirits, wealth. All of it. When it had first happened, I’d thought it was because he’d been my own personal support team. He’d always been there. Not at center stage since he and my Dad fell out, but waiting in the wings. There to catch me when I stumbled. After the drunken lost weekend of my sixteenth birthday, he’d nursed me through my hangover and helped me hide the new tattoo from my parents. Now it seemed like he had to have known. All that time he had to have known there was something growing inside me. That I was infected.
And still, he’d put everything he’d built up into my hands. From beyond death, he was saving me again right now. And he was doing it because somehow, it made things the way he wanted them.
“I don’t suppose you have anything you’d like to tell me about why Eric would have wanted me rich after he died,” I said, but if my rider heard me, she didn’t respond.
I was going to take the money anyway. Even with this suspicion that it might all be poisoned, I would take it and spend it to get myself out of a tight spot, because I didn’t see any other option. For the first timee me uncomfortable.
In the kitchen, a woman’s voice rose in fast, annoyed tones. The cook who’d let me in the office answered. I couldn’t understand any of the words, but the tone was dismissive. The woman signed percussively, and a door opened and closed. I picked up the telephone handset, smoothed down the scrap of paper, and punched the code to block caller ID—just in case—and then the rest of the numbers.
The phone on the far end rang three times. Chogyi Jake picked up.
“Hello?” h
e said. I’d forgotten how gentle his voice was.
“Hey. It’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t call before. And by before, I mean weeks ago. I’ve actually been pretty messed up, and I didn’t want anyone to see me like that,” I said, and then when he didn’t reply right away, “Also I was still freaked out over you getting hurt because of me, and I was having a really hard time talking myself into putting you back in harm’s way on my account.”
“I see,” Chogyi Jake said carefully.
“Anyway, I don’t know if Ex called you yet, but I figured out why I have all these weird powers that are getting stronger when they should be getting weak. I’ve got a rider. It’s called Sonnenrad or the Black Sun. Apparently it’s really powerful, but it’s young. Ex took me to New Mexico to find his old mentor, who’s this kind of intense guy named Father Cha
pin. Only, when they tried to exorcise it, there was another rider. It was trying to get in while the old one was being forced out? And I … I took off. I mean, Ex thinks I’m being played by the rider I do have, and so he chained me up, and they were going to try again. Only I kind of called truce with the Black Sun thing and I got out before they could offer me up to this other whatever-it-is. So I’m pretty sure Ex and his old posse are out hunting me on the assumption that I’m in the grips of the devil.”
“Okay,” Chogyi Jake said. I felt a moment’s fear. He was being so distant and withdrawn, and I interpreted his reserve as anger. And then I didn’t. I closed my eyes, chagrined.
“Only Ex called you last night and told you all of this. And you flew out,” I said. “He’s standing, like, right next to you, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Well, that’s awkward.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
We were both silent for a moment. In the kitchen, something fell. The clatter of metal spilling on the floor made me jump a little.
“I’m not coming back in,” I said. “There really is another rider.”
“Okay.”
“Only they’re not going to believe that. At least not coming from me. So … yeah. I’ll check back in later.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Chogyi Jake said. I could hear him smile.
“It’s good to hear you, though,” I said.
“You too,” he said. “We’ll talk again soon.”
The line went dead, and I put the handset down on the desk. I didn’t know if I was disturbed that Chogyi Jake was with Ex and trying to track me down, or glad that he was in the neighborhood even if he wasn’t by my side. Both, maybe. It was interesting that he hadn’t wanted Ex to know it was me on the phone. I tried to imagine what Chogyi Jake would see, looking at Father Chapin’s cabal, and I failed. Warriors against the army of the unclean. Unhealthy religious zealots. Something else. It all seemed equally plausible.
I stepped out of the little office and back into the kitchen. The guy with the cross was scraping a steel spatula over the grill, the muscles of his arm tense with the effort. Voices and the clinking of knives and forks against plates came from the front like it was a different planet. I waited until he looked over his shoulder at me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah. You know when he’s getting back? I don’t want double shifts my whole life.”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Couple of days at least.”
He said something casually obscene and turned back to the grill. I slipped out the back. The cold was vicious and the jeans-and-sweater outfit, while better than a ceremonial shift, still counted as underdressed for the occasion. I ran across to the RV, opened the door, and hopped up. Ozzie the Labrador bumped against me, pushing out through the door I’d come in. I watched for a few seconds while she peed, scratched gleefully at the snow, and trotted back to me. I wondered whether Midian had housebroken her or if she’d come that way. I let her clamber back in beside me.
It took me a few minutes to figure out the stove. There was a switch that turned the whole thing on and off separate from the controls for the individual burners. I assumed it had something to do with safety and not having your apartment catch fire while you were driving it. I scrambled one of the eggs and ate it while sitting on the couchlike thing, petting the dog with my feet to keep my toes warm. After a while, my nose became accustomed to the ashtray smell, and I didn’t even notice it.
I was alone, or as near to it as I’d been in years. I didn’t quite have enough food to make it through to tomorrow afternoon without a few hours of mild hunger. I still had a foreign thing living inside of me, ready to take over at any moment. The guilt and horror of Grace Memorial were at the back of my head like a headache that wouldn’t quite go away. I didn’t have shoes or a coat. I didn’t have chains on me, but I was almost as trapped here as I had been in the basement in San Esteban.
It should have felt like a prison, but it didn’t. It felt like a retreat. The cheesy, decrepit RV was where they couldn’t find me. There was nothing to do but listen to the radio, doze, and watch the late afternoon sunset turn the snow from white to gold, gold to unearthly red, and red fading to gray under an unimaginable spread of stars. I could feel the cold radiating from the windows, but the heater was working just fine. I found a spare fitted sheet stuffed in a cupboard, stripped Midian’s bed, and made it my own. Ozzie went out just after dark and didn’t come back for a couple height="urs.
Hundreds of miles away, my little brother, Curtis, was getting ready for what was going to be his last Christmas at home. Next year, he’d graduate high school and go off to Bible college or a job, if he could find one. My older brother, Jay, was probably still getting ready for his shotgun wedding. I hadn’t spoken to him about it, hadn’t met the girl who was going to be my sister-in-law and the mother of my nephew or my niece. I knew her family was Mexican and that my mother was embarrassed. I wondered if Jay was in love with her or seduced and trapped or something else that I hadn’t even imagined. The wind started to pick up, the RV creaking and rocking under the pressure.
In Chicago, Kim and Aubrey would be getting home from work. I’d set them up with enough money that they could make their own research plans. I’d never thought about the questionable joys of parasitology before I’d met them. Now I was going to be responsible for funding some good basic research about Toxoplasma gondii that I probably wouldn’t understand. Closer to hand, Chogyi Jake and Ex were looking for me, both worried about me, probably for totally different reasons.
I couldn’t do anything about any of it. Not now, and not until late tomorrow, and I didn’t feel powerless. I felt relieved. If great power brought great responsibility, then being totally impotent meant I was off the hook, at least for a while. Tomorrow would come, and I’d need to make some decisions. I’d have to find a way to prove that there really was another rider. I’d have to figure out how it had gotten past a circle of exorcists and explicitly rider-proof magic. I’d have to decide what I was doing about having a Prince of Hell sharing my body. All of it tomorrow.
I wondered, nestled in the little metal and plastic shell, whether this was how my rider felt. Just before midnight, I heard claws at the door, stumbled out of bed, and let the dog back in.
“You are a pain in the ass,” I said sternly. “I was comfortable.”
She chuffed happily, jumped on the couchlike thing, and fell instantly to sleep. I went back to my bed—I already thought of it as mine—and curled up under the blanket. I remembered the first time I’d seen Midian, stretched out like a corpse on a bed in the apartment Eric owned. I’d been sure he was dead until his eyes opened. And then a couple of hours later, we’d been attacked, and I’d felt my rider for the first time. I tried to pull back from the memory, but sleep-soaked as I was, I couldn’t help it. I saw Midian walking over the fallen wizards, a Luger in his hand. He’d told me at the time that they weren’t people, just qliphoth. Shells. That the riders in them had displaced anything human. Probably, he’d been lying.
From there it was a short step into nightmare. I was in Grace Memorial, burying the black coffin with an innocent man inside it. I was crying. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I drove the nails into the coffin with the palm of my hand.
And then I was outside myself, watching. That was new. The dream never went like that before. I was in a theater, watching myself twenty feet tall. A beam of dusty light hung in the air above us, connecting the projectionist’s booth to the screen. Beside me, my rider took my hand.
“I had to,” I said.
“I know,” she repliedas there too. We did it together.”
“If I hadn’t—”
“Shh.”
I turned back to the movie. It was just like all my other nightmares except for the distance that came from watching it all from outside. I felt the same sickening grief and guilt and fear, but maybe not as vividly. When I woke up c
rying, it was just weeping instead of the violent sobs I was used to. Ozzie was at the bedside looking concerned. Her breath was warm and stank. I scratched her between the ears, and, reassured, she went back to her place on the couch.
I WAS sure when I went back to sleep, I would dream of the desert. Instead, I spent the rest of the night talking to my boyfriend from college about his plan to start a business delivering ice cream wirelessly over the Internet and walking through a cathedral-sized shopping mall trying to return a cookbook my mother had written for me while sparrows did complex mating dances with bits of trailing ribbon and twine. I woke up to the yellow-blue light of approaching dawn, feeling more rested, peaceful, and calm than I had in weeks.
I got dressed in yesterday’s clothes, cooked the last eggs, and scouted around the RV for paper and something to write with—a stub of dull pencil and the back of the envelope Midian had left for me. The radio muttered the best of the nineties, bringing with it some surprisingly vivid memories of my church preschool classroom and Mrs. Springsteen, who’d taught it. I couldn’t think she’d ever played Nirvana during our nap time, but the two things had become conflated in my memory. I let Ozzie out, and she bolted after a half dozen crows that were going through the restaurant’s trash. I still had a few hours before I had to do anything, but then the new car would come—the new shoes—and break time would be over.
My first order of business was the other rider. I couldn’t leave things with Ex and Chogyi and Father Chapin the way they stood. I had to find proof that there had been another rider. How to go about that …
I took the pencil stub and wrote Dolores.
If she could tell them what had happened to her, it would give my story some weight. The problem, of course, being that what I knew about her was her first name, that she’d had an exorcism go south on her four days ago, and that she probably lived somewhere in northern New Mexico or southern Colorado. Or maybe farther afield. I didn’t really know how wide an area Father Chapin covered, but I, at least, had come to him from Austria. I didn’t have the impression that Dolores’s family was quite the jet-set type, given their cars …