by MLN Hanover
I didn’t want to die. The primitive monkey part of my brain was screaming and bouncing around the inside of my skull just to remind me how much I didn’t want to die. But if that wasn’t an option, at least I didn’t want to die for nothing. And that was all the choice I had left. I felt like a balloon with its string cut, spinning up into the sky.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ex replied. Meaning he’d thought all the same things I had and come to the same conclusions. “There’s a kind of beauty in heroic last stands.”
“Remember the Alamo,” I said.
“I thought we lost that one,” Carsey said. “Didn’t we lose that one?”
“Depends what you mean by we,” Miguel said. “My family’s Mexican.”
The gallows humor was as comforting as anything could have been. It didn’t quiet my fear, but it made it easier to ignore. Another wave of not-quite-sound. This one felt closer, more threatening. Time was running out.
“Who makes a break for it?” I asked.
“Alexander and Miguel,” Tamblen said.
“They’re hurt but not incapacitated,” Carsey said. “They’ll be the least use in a fight and still have a decent chance of getting away. And, more to the point, Alexander’s young enough that he’ll have more years spinning fantastic tales of our glory. If Tamblen went over the fence, he’d tell it all in three sentences and a shrug.”
Tamblen grinned. “True,” he said.
For a moment, I saw it. Just a glimpse. For a moment, here in death’s waiting room, I knew how these men had been a family. The shared jokes and the shared secrets, the sorrow and the dedication and the willingness to die together. It made them beautiful, and for the moment I was part of it. I rose first.
“Well,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we’d better get going. Hate to be late for the party.”
Ex stood up too, and Chogyi Jake stopped pacing to come stand by me. I felt Aubrey’s absence just then, and I was more grateful than I could express that he wasn’t there. A weird kind of peace settled over me. I wondered if it was from my own mind, or if my rider was letting her feelings be known. I couldn’t tell the difference.
“We should go out the main doors,” Carsey said, still pressing the bloody cloth to Chapin’s side. Chapin looked like a man made of wax, less realistic than some of the crucified saviors on the walls. “It’s the widest entrance. And there’s a window on the north side wide enough for the runners to squeeze out.”
“Do we try to press out into them or open the doors and fall back, try to get them to follow us inside the sanctuary?” I asked.
“Stop!”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell who’d spoken. Then Chapin opened his eyes. I was amazed that he was conscious, but he turned his head toward me, pointing with two bloody fingers.
“You … submit to me, to my will …”
I had to laugh.
“Seriously? I’m about to go sacrifice my life to save a couple of your boys, and we’re still on how I’m the beast and evil?”
He shook his head. His face was white. Even his lips had lost all color.
“You mistake me, Miss Jayné,” he said. “There is another way, but I cannot do this. You must submit yourself to my will. I will guide you. I will guide the both of you.”
Slowly, I walked to him. Three steps had never seemed like such a long way. He tried to smile, his bared teeth hardly paler than the gums they sat in. He’d bled white, but he held on to consciousness through brute force of will. All around us, the others had gone silent.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I am an old man. I have many, many years of finding the thin places between the demon and its prey. I have freed many, many people.”
“That didn’t work out all that well,” I said.
“Be quiet! Listen!” His shout was only a change in the sape of his mouth. It didn’t have more power than a whisper. “With only the human will given us by God, I have defeated the lords and presidents of Hell. With the power of a few brave souls, I have conquered demons. To do so much with so little can only be accomplished with great knowledge. Much practice. With the power that lives within you and the craft of the life behind me, these little evils can be broken. Even though they number in the hundreds.”
He wanted to work together. An hour ago, he’d been willing to risk his own death to keep me in chains, and now he wanted something closer than an alliance. The desperation burned off him, or if not desperation, certainty.
“Can he do that?” Carsey asked of no one in particular.
I knelt beside the dying man. Pride flickered in his eyes. Pride and defiance and fear. The non-sound washed over us again and left the smell of sewage behind it. Something physical crashed far down at the end of the building, followed by the sound of voices raised in anger.
“Jayné?” Chogyi Jake said. “Whatever we do, we need to do it very, very soon.”
“You still think she’s evil,” I said.
Chapin’s throat worked, half swallow, half spasm.
“It is,” he said.
“And you’d still work with us?”
His smile was built from regret. His eyes were seeing something else now, something only he remembered.
“I will save my little boys,” he said. “If the price is damnation, I pay it. Take me.”
Tears poured down Carsey’s cheeks. His eyes locked on mine, and he shook his head in refusal. Glass broke, a window shattering and the shards dancing on brick. Then a second shattering, and the unmistakable roaring of fire.
“Give him here,” I said. Carsey closed his eyes, bent down, and together we scooped the old man into my arms. Chapin’s head turned toward me, nestling between my shoulder and my neck like a sleeping child’s. His breath was soft against my skin. When I stood, I had more than my own strength.
“Go,” I said. “All of you. Now. I don’t know if we can do this, but even if we fail, I will give you the best distraction you’ve ever seen.”
“I’m coming with you,” Ex said. Chogyi Jake didn’t speak, but his smile was enough to tell me he was being polite. He would be two steps behind me whichever way I walked. White smoke was trickling in from the rooms west of us, the fire burning between us and the blue doors at the front. I hefted Chapin and walked toward the flames.
We ran through the rooms as the images of Hell split and curled; real fire consumed them. Christ burned on cross after cross as we passed them. I felt Chapin’s heartbeat and the patterns of his shallow breath, and the answering pulse of the rider rising up inside me. An eerie serenity came over me. I heard Ex and Chogyi Jake coughing, but the smoke and heat didn’t bother me. I had a sense of peace that had nothing to do with the conflagration. My rider welled up around me again, and I slipped back behind my eyes, curling up in the space that was my own, but as I did, I tried ull Chapin’s soft, fluttering breath with me, to keep my connection with him and the three of us together. The roaring of the fire and the riotous anger of the attackers were quieter than his gentle breath, like they’d had the volume turned down almost to nothing.
I had worked group rituals before. I had felt the different personalities of the people involved touching one another, supporting one another, making the group stronger than the whole. This was nothing like that. We were something else, something new. I breathed in Chapin’s breaths, and my footsteps changed. I sank into my knees and hip, the power of the stride riding lower. I walked the way a man walked, and I saw the world with a vision that belonged to the closed eyes resting against me. We weren’t priest or possessed or spirit, but we also were. It felt as natural as falling.
In the spreading fire before me, two bodies seemed to condense out of the smoke. A young man and an old woman sprinting toward me, hands spread wide and black tongues whipping through the searing air. Still carrying Chapin across my forearm, I waved one encumbered hand. The motion was simple and graceful, and the will it directed was cold and hard as a chisel. I felt it strike a
fault line too subtle to see at the place where soul and demon met, and I felt my enemies shatter. The black tongues vanished. Man and woman stumbled, fell screaming, and Ex and Chogyi Jake hunched forward to grab them and haul them away from the flames. Five more were waiting at the broken blue doors. I could feel Chapin’s joy in slipping forward, ahead even of our bodies, and popping the riders off their victims like crushing ticks between his thumbnails. The Akaname shrieked, falling back into the abstract space of the Pleroma.
I stepped into the doorway, and they were waiting for me. The crows whirled through the sky, drawn by the battle and fleeing from it. The snow glowed blue from the moon and red from the flames, and on it, rank upon rank of rider stood, with rifles and blades, baseball bats and demonic, whipping tongues. I turned my head to where Ex and Chogyi Jake were crouched behind the doorway, their heads low to keep from breathing the smoke. Seven others were with them. People who had been my enemy moments before, and now were my charges. The innocents I had spent my life protecting.
“Stay here,” I said, and my own voice seemed distant, drowned, not entirely my own.
I stepped out into the mob. Their foul voices rose up together, their combined will hitting me like a hard wind. A rifle cracked, and I shifted my weight, letting the bullet slip by me like a bee in a meadow. An aluminum baseball bat already stained with someone’s blood swung toward Chapin’s head, and I turned just enough that it ruffled his close-cropped hair as it passed. A boy in a pale sheepskin coat ran for me, knife in hand, and I bent one knee, twisted, and slid away out of his reach.
They tried to stop me with the raw press of bodies, the riders using the flesh they’d stolen to limit my movement. I danced through the assault, untouchable, like I was walking between raindrops, and my threefold will reached out to devastate my enemies. I could see our power swirling around me like a white aurora, shifting with Chapin’s attention, striking with my rider’s strength. I felt their cries of horror and despair. I watched the lolling, evil flesh of their filthy tongues boil away into smoke. The black eyes faded to blue and brown and white. And with every one, I felt the old warrior bare his teeth in triumph.
Dolores’s sister, Soledad, appeared amid e crowd, her mouth a square gape of rage. The red steel axe swung toward me and the old man in my arms. Freeing her took no more than a breath. She and Dolores had almost beaten me in the hotel, days or weeks or years before, and now breaking her bonds was just one note in a symphony. It was the grace and knowledge of a lifetime translated into a few moments of transcendence. Our dance was the final product of Father Chapin’s life lit from within until, together, we glowed brighter than the sun, violence without the violence. I never hit anyone, never felt the bones give way under my foot or fist, only reached out with our combined will where Chapin showed us, and they fell before us like mown grass.
And then it was over. I stood in the winter night, my enemies sent broken back to Hell. The ground was littered with the confused, stumbling people from whom the unclean spirits had fled. The sky was a mosaic of crows and floating embers and stars.
The three of us looked around, suffused with the combined sense of profound satisfaction and desolating regret.
The work of a lifetime, now finished.
I fell back into the world like I was waking from a dream. There were voices all around me, crying and shouting. Someone to my right was retching violently, and the sanctuary was in flames, the heat radiating out into the darkness. Fire spat out from a half dozen shattered windows, and men still coated with nauseating greenish slime were throwing handfuls of snow into the flames. As if that could stop it.
Ex touched my shoulder, and I turned. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and soot streaked his face and hair. He was grinning.
“Are you okay?” he shouted.
“I think so,” I said. “Where is everyone? Are they okay?”
“I don’t know. Chogyi Jake’s over there. The others went toward the back like you told them. I think they made it out, but I’m not sure. I’ll go check for stragglers.”
“Don’t go alone,” I said. “We cleaned these out, but there may be more Akaname out there. I may have missed some.”
The fire lit half his face in the warmth of red and gold, and the moon shone white-blue on the other. He shook his head.
“You didn’t,” he said. Before I could say anything else, he leaned in, kissed me on the lips, and then turned and marched off into the night. The fatigue was sudden and absolute. My arms ached. My legs burned from the muscles out. Slowly, gently, I put Father Chapin down in the snow. His eyes opened, tiny glittering slits between the lids.
“Not bad for an old, gutshot guy,” I said, and his lips widened a millimeter.
He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but I could no more hear him than I could turn dim the moonlight. I shifted forward on my knees, leaning into him until his breath warmed my earlobe.
“I am sorry, Miss Jayné,” he whispered, “that I could not save you.”
It was the last thing he said.
Chapin’s funeral filled the cathedral in Santa Fe. Men and women, white haired and weak with age to babies still in strollers. It seem
ed like a lot of people knew one another. On the way in, there had been lots of quiet conversations and long-held hand clasping. I sat in the back in a pew beside three old men who pointedly didn’t look at me and Chogyi Jake. Every now and then, I caught sight of the back of Ex’s head far ahead of us. Near the altar. Miguel sat to his left, Carsey to his right. Carsey was getting a little bald spot. I hadn’t noticed that before.
At the pulpit, the archbishop said the Mass. I followed along as best I could. It had been a long time since I’d gone to church, and when I had, it had all been in English. Here, it was all Requiem aeternam dona eis, Dominae. On the one hand, it seemed like it didn’t have anything to do with Chapin as a man. On the other hand, it was what he’d dedicated his life to. What he’d died for.
The requiem began, the notes of the organ rising toward heaven. I felt like an impostor. I folded my hands in my lap and waited. Somewhere nearby, a man was sobbing uncontrollably. I didn’t know who. When the time came to go forward for communion, the three men shuffled past me with sour expressions on their faces. The urge to go up to the front and take the body and the blood tugged at me, but I couldn’t. I imagined Ex trying to retake his vows, unable to say the words because he couldn’t mean them. I was there. I got it.
When the recessional finally came, Chogyi Jake and I stood out on the steps. The sun was warm, even in the winter air. The snow had melted off everywhere except the deepest shadows where it still lurked, dark and light at the same time. The other attendees streamed out past us, heading left toward the parking lots or the plaza. Ex appeared at my side. In the three days since he’d kissed me as the sanctuary burned, he hadn’t touched me, and he didn’t touch me now.
“I’m going to need a few minutes,” he said.
Looking back through the doors into the beautiful darkness of the cathedral, I could see Alexander, Carsey, and Miguel talking together. Tamblen sat in a pew beside them, his head still bowed in prayer. They were all that remained of Ex’s previous family. Alexander looked up, his gaze meeting mine. He lifted a hand, and I waved back.
“As long as you want,” I said. “There’s no rush.”
He walked back in with his shoulders stiff. The gouges on his back hadn’t healed yet. My bruised rib still ached sometimes when I breathed in too deeply. My feet hurt a lot, but they’d pretty much stopped bleeding. From all I’d heard, rebuilding the sanctuary was dicey, and there were still a couple of dozen Chapin’s group had “saved” in the last few years who hadn’t been part of the attack. I guessed tracking down the remaining filth-lickers trumped fixing the architecture, but it wasn’t my call to make.
I watched the cars go by, one after another, going about the business of the world. Most of the people on the street didn’t know or care what had happened in San Esteban. I envied t
hem that.
“How are you feeling?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Tired,” I said. “Weirdly lonesome. Undercaffeinated.”
“Lonesome?”
“Yeah. Can’t explain that,” I said. “But I do.”
“Do you miss Aubrey?”
“Sure,” I said. “Are he and Kim … Are they happy, do you think?”
“Yes. They’re happy. And they’re sad. Confused, grateful, hurt, angry. They’re all those things, and will be, I think, for a while before they find a place of relative calm.”
“Do you think they’ll make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you still angry that I ditched you in Chicago?”
I smiled when I said it. I wanted it to be a joke.
“Yes,” he said gently. “I am. But the anger comes from being hurt. When the one fades, the other will.”
“I know it doesn’t help, but I’m really sorry.”
“No,” he said. “That helps.”
I looked back. Ex and Miguel were walking away from us. Miguel had an arm over Ex’s shoulder, like they were brothers or lovers. Intimates. I knew how I would have felt if Chogyi Jake or Ex or even Aubrey had given me the runaround for weeks. Months. I’d have been a lot less Zen about it.
“Forgive me?” I said.
“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
Four men came out of the cathedral. Two I didn’t recognize, one was the archbishop, and the last was Tamblen. He nodded at me as they passed. A truck drove by playing music loud enough to shake the air. Charming.
“Jayné!”
Dolores ran up, throwing her arms around me and grinning. She looked so bright and delighted, I had to smile back. Funeral black couldn’t keep her down. The marks of what she’d been through were invisible. She’d lost her body twice now to beings of terrible power. No matter how much she looked like a child, no matter how bright her eyes were, she and I both knew that her life had been touched by fire. There would always be a scar.