Killing Rites (4)

by MLN Hanover

  Alexander shook his head.

  “That would take a level of control and power that—“

  “That you couldn’t do without a rider,” I said. “But that’s the point, right? Even small fry like the Akaname are better with magic than people are. So if someone who knew the rituals had a rider, he could maybe do things that he couldn’t have by himself. The Black Sun helped you cast the Akaname out of Dolores, Alexander. You couldn’t have done that alone.”

  “If I’d had time—”

  “You didn’t have time,” Ex said. “She has a point. Even if a normal man couldn’t make a sabotaged Mark, someone with a rider might. And Tomás made the Mark.”

  “Ex,” I said. “You said he was kind of before and after for you. He went away for his final vows and then came back. Do you remember where he went?”

  “Japan,” Ex said. “A mission in Japan. Where Akaname are more common. And if he had been possessed by something while he was there and had it cast out, it wouldn’t have been that hard to conceal. He was already part of the group. Chapin wouldn’t have areason to examine him again when he came back.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, but I felt like crowing. My heart was a great big bubbling fountain of I’ve-got-you-now.

  “Well, okay, then,” I said. “I think we’ve got a hypothesis.”

  If I’d tried to, I couldn’t have pointed to the change that came in that moment. I only

  knew that it had happened. It wasn’t just that Alexander and Ex stopped arguing against the rider-in-priest’s-clothing idea. It was also something in the way they looked at me, the way they held themselves. When I was a kid, my older brother, Jay, had shown me how to get iron filings out of the sand in the school sandbox. He’d had a sheet of white paper with a bunch of black dirt on it until he put a magnet under it, and then like magic, everything lined up. It was like that now. The case against the angel-voiced Tomás came together and now we were all pointing in the same direction.

  Almost.

  Chogyi Jake’s smile was as pleased and enigmatic as ever. Alexander leaned back on the couch, whistling low. Even Dolores seemed pleased that we’d figured it out. Only Ex looked like he was braced for a blow. He met my eyes and looked away. The pain would probably have been invisible to someone who didn’t know him as well as I did.

  “Hey,” I said to him. “Can I borrow you for a minute? You guys talk amongst yourselves.”

  I stepped out the back door. Snow covered the hot tub’s deck. The air bit, and the calling of crows was like the announcement of a funeral. Ex closed the door behind us, the latch clicking into place. In the sunlight, he looked even paler. His white-blond ponytail was loose. His eyes were bloodshot, and he still moved stiffly when he twisted. I wondered how the wounds on his back were doing.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I think one of us owes the other an apology,” I said, “but I’m not sure how it goes.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You know that stuff I said about how much I appreciate everything you did for me?”

  Ex leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.

  “I do.”

  “I meant all of it.”

  “I know you did,” he said.

  “We only had the information that we had,” I said. “There were two ways to read it. I went one way and you went the other. I was right, but it wasn’t like you could have known that. We made our judgments and we acted on them.”

  “Nothing else we could have done,” Ex agreed.

  “We’re cool, then?”

  “Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?”

  I pushed my hair back from my eyesbove us, a thousand icicles glittered and shone like tiny transparent teeth.

  “Maybe because you chained me up in a cellar, and you were going to feed me to a shit demon. Or how about because I beat you unconscious and spent days running while you worried yourself sleepless. It seems like someone here ought to have some hard feelings about something.”

  He shrugged.

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I was wrong about there being a second rider,” he said. “Anything else?”

  Are you angry with me? I almost asked. But he’d say he wasn’t, either way. And that wasn’t really what I meant.

  It was just a few days before that he’d lain on the couch wearing a blanket and told me in a soft voice about falling from grace with God. I’d hesitated at this cracked-open door to see him sleep, and he’d promised that if my feet were too bruised, he would carry me. I wanted to know if we were still those people. The long nights of distracting me when I woke up screaming, the mornings of making coffee for me quietly enough that I didn’t wake up. They’d been hellish, and every single time, he’d risen to the occasion. I didn’t know how I’d have made it through without him. He’d never tried to use my bad nights to make a pass. He’d never been anything less than great, crisis after crisis after crisis. There was an intimacy in it that I hadn’t totally recognized until now. And now I was afraid it was gone.

  I wanted to know if the man who’d protected me when I was broken was able to forgive me for saving myself without him. I wanted to know what was behind the poker face. I wanted him to kiss me just so I’d know that he wanted to.

  “Seriously,” Ex said. “Is there something you want to say? It’s cold out here.”

  “No,” I said past the thickness in my throat. “I just wanted to make sure we were good.”

  “We are,” he said shortly.

  “Okay,” I said, and he opened the door again and walked inside. It took me a second before I was ready to follow him.

  Alexander was standing at the kitchen counter, Ozzie sitting at his knee with her long, pink tongue lolling out. Dolores’s arms were folded, her face a mask of disapproval. Chogyi Jake leaned against the back of the couch, his brow furrowed in thought.

  “Do we have any alternatives?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “Alternatives to what?” Ex demanded.

  “We’re having a tactical discussion,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “I’m not going to stay behind,” Alexander said. “For one thing, I’m the best evidence you have that the attack in Questa happened. You can’t take Jayné in by herself and expect Chapin to believe her.”

  “Okay, roll this back,” I said. “Why do we want Alexander to stay behind?”

  “Someone has to take care of Dolores,” Alexander said, waving toward her.

  Dolores’s scowl deepened.

  Truth was, I’d been thinking we’d take her with us. Until that moment, I hadn’t seen how bad an idea that was. She was a third grader, thin from growing too fast and still marked by the sores and cuts from the first time we’d met. The chances weren’t good that the thing inside Tomás was going to sit back and take this lightly. We were walking into a trial where she’d be a good witness, but we were also walking into the near certainty of violence.

  Of course I couldn’t take a kid into a fight. Especially not one who’d already been traumatized three or four different ways within the last week. I pushed away my sense of confusion and loss around Ex and focused on the girl. As if she could feel the weight of my consideration, she looked up at me.

  The first time my mother had left me at home by myself, I’d been fourteen. She’d been going to the grocery store because we were out of milk. I’d been watching TV. It had taken her twenty minutes, but for that time, I’d been alone in the house for the first time in my life. I could still remember the exhilarating sense of power and fear. Dolores was six years younger than that, and we weren’t going on a quick errand. We were going to a confrontation whose outcome we couldn’t know.

  I imagined leaving her here on her own, and I couldn’t see doing it. And I couldn’t take her with us into the teeth of danger. We could leave Alexander behind with her, in which case I wouldn’t have any witnesses besides myself. I could leave Ex behind, except that in a million years, he still wouldn’t agree to bei
ng ditched. I could ask Chogyi Jake to baby-sit, but he was the only one who’d come in from outside. He’d be able to see things in the tight-knit group of Chapin’s cabal that no one else could. Besides which, I didn’t want to leave any allies behind. We could take her home, except the Akaname would be waiting there, wearing her sister’s skin and waiting to retake Dolores’s. And, to round out the problem set, just having Dolores with us might count as kidnapping and child abduction, and for all I knew, the FBI could be looking for her.

  The room had gone quiet, everyone waiting for me to speak.

  “How long do we have before we’re supposed to see Chapin?” I asked.

  “We can wait as long as we want,” Ex said. “But the longer it takes, the more the Akaname can prepare. It probably didn’t know that we’re aware of it, until Ex told Chapin that we had Dolores back, but now it’s got to be feeling jumpy. And since the one in Dolores’s sister escaped, it’s also possible that it’s gotten a more explicit warning. Or will soon.”

  “So the longer we take, the more time the enemy has to prepare,” I said.

  “Or escape,” Ex said. I had a momentary sense of Ex feeling pleased to see me struggling with the dilemma, but that was just me being paranoid.

  I wondered if my lawyer had any friends or contacts in Taos willing to be an accessory to child abduction. I wondered how I’d ask the question even if I did call her. I hated this. No matter which way I looked at it, there was a problem. If it had just been fighting the rider in Chapin’s group, I’d have known what to do. If it had just been keeping Dolores safe, I could have come up with something, even if it was something incredibly illega. Doing both seemed impossible, and they both had to be done.

  “I’m open for suggestions here,” I said low enough that my rider would know I was talking to her. I waited a few seconds, but I didn’t get an answer. Either she wasn’t listening or she was stuck too. I knelt at Dolores’s side, putting my eyes even with hers.

  “Hey,” I said. “You have anything you want to have happen, because the options are looking pretty bad to me.”

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “I’m going someplace dangerous,” I said.

  “I don’t care,” she almost shouted. There were tears in her eyes. She turned away from me. “I want to go home.”

  “We can do that,” I said. “But your sister might be there. And she’s still got the demon inside of her.”

  Dolores was quiet for a moment.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  “Jayné,” Chogyi Jake said. The two syllables of my name were all it took to carry a truckload of meaning. She’s a kid, so stop asking her to take responsibility and This decision has to be yours and I’m sorry. I hung my head.

  She had been through so much that she hadn’t deserved. I wanted to give her her own voice in whatever happened next. I wanted her to have power, or at least to feel like she did. That giving her that was also another burden on her shoulders seemed profoundly unfair. The kid needed someplace safe and someone to watch out for her, and she also needed to stand up on her own. I didn’t know how to get that for myself, much less for her.

  “Okay,” I said as much to myself as to anyone. “Dolores? Sweetie? I need you to be a big girl right now, okay?”

  She turned back to look at me. Her eyes were wet, tears streaking down her cheeks. She looked about as unlike a big girl as humanly possible. She didn’t have her family. Didn’t even have her own clothes. I’d saved her from riders twice when everyone else around her had failed or betrayed her, and now I was going to abandon her. The thought rested uncomfortably in my gut. I nodded to her and smiled, hoping it would get her to smile back at me.

  “I’m going to go try to stop the thing that’s been doing these things to you and your sister. And I need you to stay here and take care of Ozzie while I do it.”

  The dog’s ears shifted forward at her name, and she started wagging her thick tail. Dolores sniffed wetly, looking from me to the dog. She knew it was bullshit. I’d have left Ozzie alone or even curled up in the back of the SUV a hundred times before I left a little girl by herself.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Dolores asked in a small voice.

  “You just stay here with Ozzie. There’s a TV upstairs and I’ve got some snack food in the car. If the dog needs to go out, let her out. When she wants in, let her in. There’s some dog food for her. And I can help you find a bowl for that and her water before I go.”

  “What if she goes out and she never comes back?” Dolores asked, and I knew from the high, rough voice that we weren’t just talking about the dog anymore.

  “She’ll come back. It might take some time, but she will come back,” I said. “And I will too. Your job is to hang out here for the night and be safe. Knowing that you’re okay is what’s going to let me do the things I need to do next, okay? Can you do this for me?”

  Dolores hesitated, then nodded. She wasn’t looking at me. I leaned close, kissing the top of her head.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Twenty minutes later, the rest of us were piling in the SUV. I had my laptop and the leather backpack I used as a purse. Chogyi Jake had meditated in the master bedroom, focusing his qi and calming his mind. If you had to pick whether Alexander or Ex looked worse, it would have been a hard call. Next door, three snowboards were leaning against the little fence, and four guys about my age were shouting at each other about how to get a grill started. They sounded drunk. I ignored them, climbing up behind the wheel. Chogyi Jake took shotgun, looking back at the lights shining in the condo’s windows as the sun began its winter descent among the high peaks in the west. All around us, the pines had gone from green to black. I started the engine and paused.

  From the time I’d arrived at Denver International Airport, just shy of my twenty-third birthday, until Chicago, I’d driven only when I was alone. Aubrey was our default driver before he left, and Ex had taken over in the weeks since. Now I was sitting behind the wheel, and it felt as natural and obvious as something I’d done every day. I had the feeling it meant something. I hoped it was something more than If this all goes south, it’ll be my fault.

  “Will she be all right by herself?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  I followed his gaze. The condo was dark, already in shadow despite the blue still showing in the sky and the glorious gold and pink cloud lace of the coming sunset. It was like a Magritte painting made real. One of the upper windows began to flicker the television’s blue.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

  “I can stay,” he said. “Take care of her.”

  “For how long?” I asked. “Her home won’t be safe unless we win this. So unless you’re thinking you’d like to flee the country and raise her yourself, you’re better off coming with us and making sure we win. There are kids her age and younger all across the world who are dealing with worse than having a place to themselves for a night.”

  “It just feels wrong,” he said.

  “Really does,” I agreed, then slid the SUV into drive and headed down from the mountain.

  NIGHT FELL as I drove. The twisting little road down from the ski valley was thick with skiers heading down from their day on the slopes. The music on the radio was all “Winter Wonderland” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” every jolly note and unseen smile like a parody meant to make the evening feel more threatening. Once, neaision̵e last cliff on the road, a fallen boulder squatted in the middle of the lane, and I had to swerve around it. The snow and ice made everything slow and dangerous.

  In the backseat, Alexander’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping. His hand was pressed to the wound in his chest. I shifted the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of Ex. He was brooding at the darkness. He’d tightened his ponytail, until the skin at his temples looked stretched back. It reminded me of war paint and smiley-face stickers on combat helmets. The ritual preparation for violence.

  This was everyt
hing for Ex. His past with Father Chapin and his failure with Isabel and his redemptive drive to care for me. By slipping into Tomás, the Akaname had managed to threaten all of it at once. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have everything in your life come to a single point like that. An event where it could all be won or all be lost. For a moment, I was in Chicago again, in the basement, driving nails into the coffin while an innocent man screamed inside it. The sick dread and fear flowed into me with the memory, and also Ex’s voice reciting in Latin. Performing the last rites over the man I was killing in part to save the man’s soul, and in part to be there with me during the worst of it. Making sure I didn’t go through it alone.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said to myself, and then in an almost perfect imitation of me, my rider took my throat and spoke. No one listening would have noticed the transition.

  “One way or another.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but a chill climbed up my spine that didn’t have anything to do with the teeth of winter all around us. I looked back to the road, reached up to shift the mirror away from Ex and closer to where it was supposed to be, and headed for San Esteban for the last time.

  By the time we got there, the town was a study in black and white. The last traces of sunset fade

  d as I watched, leaving black sky with a billion stars and a sliver of moon haunting the horizon. Snow caught every ray of light from moon or star, glowing blue. The black-barked trees were like cuts in the world with the darkness behind everything showing through. The few bits of light and color—the yellow of a lit window, the single red eye of a truck’s unbroken taillight—only served to make everything else seem bleaker. Ansel Adams meets H. P. Lovecraft.

  I parked almost exactly where we’d been the first time. When I killed the engine, the only sounds were the whisper of the breeze blowing snow against the SUV, the ticking of the engine cooling, and the commentary of the crows. I pushed the door open and stepped down into the road. The building looked dead, the blue double doors made darker.