“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 crying, 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 …
Their cars. There was something about that. It took me a couple of minutes before my subconscious handed me the thing I’d been trying to remember. They’d had a vanity plate. I picked up the little stub of pencil and wrote on the back of the envelope: GODS-WRK. I felt pretty good about that, which was nice because I didn’t get much further on that track.
I turned to how another rider could have been there in the first place. If I’d been a rider, a circle of exorcists was pretty much the last place I’d want to be: the sanctuary was consecrated, and I’d had the rider-stopping medallion on during the rite. When I started listing the reasons that the sewer-stink thing really couldn’t have been there, it was a pretty strong argument. I wrote my questions on the envelope: Why/how can it live with the enemy? Why didn’t the medallion stop it?
I sat looking at the words for a long time, wondering what I’d do if I found Dolores and she didn’t know what I was talking about. It was possible that the Black Sun really had been tricking me. Footsteps crunched through the snow, and I shoved the envelope into my pocket before the knock came. The guy was midtwenties, wearing jeans that actually fit, a thick flannel shirt, and curly dark hair that had been gelled to within an inch of its life. He had a black suitcase in his hand too big to be called an overnight bag, but too small to hide a body in. His smile was cautious.
“I’m looking for Jane Heller?” he said.
“Close enough,” I said. “Tell me those are my new clothes.”
He handed up the suitcase.
“I have the car out in the parking lot,” he said. “There’s some paperwork I need you to sign.”
“No problem,” I said. “Give me ten minutes to change, and I’ll meet you inside.”
“That’ll be great,” he said with a bobbing, deferential nod.
I put the case on the kitchen counter, unzipped it, and popped it open. The top of the pile was fresh underwear, two different sizes of sports bra, and thick white wool socks. I couldn’t stop grinning. Tights that were right on the line between panty hose and thermal underwear. Two pairs of slacks, one black and one tan. Low-heeled boots that zipped up the side that could pass for businesswear, but had enough tread and arch support to take hiking. A pack of undershirts still in their plastic, three blouses, a dark overcoat not that different from the one I’d left behind, a package of ponytail holders, a black baseball cap with insulated foam lining, a pair of sunglasses, a discreet emergency pack with a variety of feminine protection products, a wallet filled with hundreds and twenties, a New Hampshire driver’s license with a picture of me I didn’t remember seeing before, and a black case with a smartphone in it. I pushed the power button, and the little thing sprang to life. It was thicker than the other ones I’d seen, and the matte black case had an almost military feel. The opening touch screen was filled with application icons. The address book had only one entry: my lawyer’s private line. I could have kissed her.