Killing Rites

Always before, the rider had come suddenly or not at all. My hand might move on its own, or I might say something I hadn’t known I was going to say. Or else she just took the wheel, and I was a passenger. This time, it felt like she was welling up around me, pulling herself up to control my body through an act of will. Like running things was hard for her. Like it was a chore.

Ex saw the change. His face went pale and he started to step back, then caught himself. Behind him, Carsey’s eyes went wide. I couldn’t see the others.

“You’ve got no reason to trust me,” Ex said.

My rider swallowed carefully, like my throat was sore.

“Will you help me?” Ex asked.

The pause lasted years.

“Yes, I will,” she said. “Take me to your prison.”

Ex sagged with relief. I heard Carsey and Miguel moving behind me. Tamblen put a hand on my shoulder and the rider shrugged it off.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, and then I was in control again. I turned to look up at Tamblen’s face. “Yeah, I can walk it.”

OUTSIDE, THE cold was bitter. Ex and Chogyi Jake and I walked through the snow together, Tamblen and Alexander following just behind. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and it felt like midnight. Overhead, the crows were wheeling in great, excited flocks, calling to one another. Moonlight silvered the black wings. The smell of snow had the taint of fumes; it was like standing beside a gasoline pump. I stopped and looked up at the stars. Chogyi Jake was at my side.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

“They are,” he agreed.

“Can you go make sure Dolores is all right?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“And thanks for offering to shoot Tamblen.”

Tamblen cleared his throat and looked pained.

“You’re welcome,” Chogyi Jake said.

It took a few seconds to knock the ice off the cellar door. I walked down the rough concrete stairs, ducking under the doorway that led to my prison. The ring waited for me, and the chains. I sat down, my legs crossed, and held out my wrists for the manacles. The others watched while Ex squatted beside me and carefully, gently fastened the metal around me. There were spells and cantrips worked into them, and I could feel my skin trying to pull away from the contact. He closed the locks, the bolts making a final-sounding steel trill as they shot home.

“How are we feeling about the space heater?” I asked.

“I’ll see what I can find,” Ex said. “Thank you for this. I owe you.”

“Not me. I’m just backing her play.”

“Well,” he said, and then left the word hanging there in the cool air. They turned to walk away, Ex going first, with Tamblen and Alexander following him. Before Chogyi Jake could leave, I called out to him.

“Hey!”

He stopped, looking back over his shoulder. I could see the others had paused on their way up the stairs.

“Yes?”

“You’re going to need the car key.”

“An excellent point,” he said, coming back to me. I dug in my pocket as best I could with my restraints, then handed him the fob with the key on it.

“Make sure Ozzie gets fed too, okay?”

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“I’ll be fine.”

I watched them walk away, listened to the cellar door close, and settled back to wait the long hours—maybe the whole night—before they came back for me. For me, and for the rider in my flesh. I thought about the choice it had made, surrendering to Ex and the others. And on what? The strength of Ex’s promise. It was an act of faith I couldn’t help admiring. I wasn’t sure I’d have taken the risk. I lay back, the chains hissing against the concrete, and hoped he’d remember the space heater. Or at least a couple of good blankets.

The summer before I turned five, my mother put me in church day care. Five days a week from eight thirty until noon, I played and fought and laughed and cried in the basement rooms under the church. One of my most vivid memories of childhood was pelting through the great maze of rooms, running until I was out of breath, screaming with delight. At fifteen, I went back as a volunteer, and the rooms I’d known as a girl were gone. Instead, there were three relatively dingy boxes in a straight line, one after the other, that had clearly been designed for storage. Some carpet had been put in, and the walls painted in nursery colors. That was all, and what was more, that was all that had ever been.

The prison was the same. I’d been here a few days ago, bound by the same manacles to the same floor-set ring, and even though it looked the same, smelled the same, felt the same, it barely had any relationship to the place I’d been. It was hard to believe I’d changed all that much until I started thinking about exactly what had happened.

If I went back now to that little church preschool, I wondered what it would look like. The artifact of an alien planet, most likely. How could it not when the places I’d actually been seemed to change so much, and in so little time?

It wasn’t quite a sound that made me sit back up, my heart racing. It was deep and powerful, like the stroke of a church bell or a gigantic gong. If there had been any noise at all, it would have been deafening. Instead, my heart was doing double time over something I couldn’t even describe. I tried yelling, to see if anyone would hear, and it wasn’t more than three minutes before the cellar door scraped open and Ex came down. He didn’t have a space heater, and his lips were pressed tight.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Small change of plan,” he said.

“There was something. I heard … well, not heard. But something happened, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The sanctuary is warded against spiritual and magical attack. Even against physical, a little bit.”

“Okay. And that plays in how?”

He knelt beside me, pulled the keys out of his pocket, and started unlocking my manacles.

“Well, I figure in the last five or six years, Chapin and the others have probably performed a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty exorcisms.”

“Ballpark,” I said.

“Ballpark.”

The chains fell off. I’d been incarcerated for less than twenty minutes. Ex nodded toward the stairs, and when he stood I followed, rubbing at my wrists.

“They’re here,” he said.

I stepped back out into the night. The cawing of crows was thicker now, loud enough it was hard to talk over. The courtyard stank of smoke and gasoline, and a line of fire marked the edge of the building. There were shapes silhouetted by the flames. Men and women. Children. One of them raised a club over her head.

No. Not a club. A fire axe.

The voice that boomed out toward me could have come through a bullhorn, except it didn’t have the tinny, electrical reverberation. The words were deep and wet and they carried over the crows and the flame and the pounding of my heart.

“I’m the hammer now, bitch!” Soledad yelled.

“Oh,” I said. And then: “Spiffy.”

Chapter 25

I should have seen it coming. The situation might have changed, but the logic of it hadn’t. I’d gone to Questa and threatened the riders. They’d come after me. Now, in San Esteban, I’d exposed the rider that had spawned them all. They’d had the same choice as before—fight or flee—and they’d made the same decision.

They’d come to fight. The wards and protections might keep them at bay for a little while. They might not.

We were all in the kitchen now, sitting in a circle made by the chairs and the couch. Someone had pulled the back cushions off the couch to make a kind of bed for Chapin, and Carsey knelt beside him and pressed a bloody towel against his wounds. They hadn’t been able to get him out to the car. The shell of Tomás leaned against the wall, eyes fixed and empty. The rooms were just as bright as they had been before, the religious art gracing the walls was the same mixture of uplifting and horrific, but the air had changed. Everything was pressurized, thick, dangerous. I’d been under siege before, and I recognized the feeling.

“How long have we got before they break through?” I asked.

“An hour,” Miguel said. The bruise on his cheek was darkening nicely. “Not more. Maybe less. They’ve already tried to set fire to the place.”

“They know it’s made from mud and stucco, right?”

“Pour enough gasoline on it,” he said with a shrug, “and you can burn water.”

“Cheerful thought,” Tamblen said.

The not-sound ran through me again. Another attack turned aside by the weakening wards and protections built into the sanctuary. It would keep stopping the riders until it didn’t. Chogyi Jake stood, walked to the doorway, and peered into the next room like he was checking to see if he’d left the lights on. The pistol was in his hand again.

“Okay,” I said. “So if we keep Carsey on nursing duty, that gives us six folks on our side. Seven, counting the Black Sun. They’ve got a hundred or so riders, just one of which almost kicked our collective ass less than an hour ago.”

“Yes,” Ex said.

“And we’re totally surrounded, right?”

“Right.”

“Also, there’s an eight-year-old girl who will eventually be delivered back to her family and taken by demons again if we can’t get out of here,” Alexander said.

I pressed my palms against my eyes until little globs of color appeared. Chapin’s ragged breath was the loudest sound, but just below it there was something else. Inhuman voices lifted together.

“We could call the police?” Carsey said.

“No offense,” I said, “but I don’t think a bunch of dead cops is going to help. Do we know anybody with a helicopter less than an hour from here?”

“Creative thought, but I don’t even think the medevac from Albuquerque could get here in an hour,” Miguel said.

“We’re on our own, then,” I said. I thought about it for a few seconds, trying it from every angle I could think of. “We’re not going to make it.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">