Killing Rites bsd-4 Page 2

  “Why not?”

  “It turned out that my uncle—the one I inherited everything from?—wasn’t exactly a good person. He used magic to break up Aubrey and his wife. To make her have an affair with my uncle. The phrase rape spell came up. When we figured that out, Aubrey kind of needed to go resolve that with her.” I paused. “It’s not really as Days of Our Lives as it sounds.”

  “No other sexual activity?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “What is your relationship with God?”

  I shrugged. “Well, we used to be really close, but then I went away to college. The whole long-distance thing was really a drag, so we’re kind of seeing other deities.”

  No one laughed. I felt my own smile go brittle. I shook my head and tried againheight="0em">

  “So, look, my parents are evangelical. We went to church all through my childhood, but the older I got … it just didn’t work for me. I decided to go to a secular college. Took a while to save up the money, but … Anyway, I haven’t been to church since then. Haven’t talked to my parents either.”

  Father Chapin’s smile was a relief, if only because it meant he was skating over the “seeing other deities” comment. I was a little bit annoyed with myself for wanting him to like me as much as I did.

  “What did you study?”

  “I majored in prerequisites,” I said. When he looked quizzical, I said, “I dropped out after a couple semesters. Then Uncle Eric died. Since then, I’ve been kind of busy.”

  The old priest sighed, wove his fingers together on one knee, and leaned forward. I had the feeling we’d just been making small talk and he was ready to get into the real business. I didn’t know what he was going to talk about if my messed-up family, my faith breakdown, Eric’s death, and my sexual history were just the warm-up.

  “Xavier tells me that you have recently killed a man.”

  “Who’s Xavier?” I asked. “You mean Ex?”

  “He tells me the man was an innocent and willing sacrifice, and that you—”

  “All this stuff started a long time before that,” I said. “It’s not related.”

  “Still, to take such an action could have—”

  “It’s not related,” I said again, and my voice shook a little. My heart was racing. I felt a pang of anger at my body for reacting so obviously. Wasn’t I supposed to be the cool-as-a-cucumber demon hunter?

  “I’m not here to judge you, young miss,” he said. “I know something of the circumstances.”

  “Then you know I’ve been seeing this freaky shit a long time before Chicago,” I said. “If I’ve got a rider, I’ve had it since at least last year. Maybe longer.”

  “Yes,” Father Chapin said. “Yes, I understand. Thank you for your candor.”

  The pine log popped again. The quiet got awkward.

  “So, what do we do?” I said. “Is there someplace we should go and get our exorcism on? Some kind of rite to keep things together until we’re full power? What?”

  Father Chapin looked pained. He scratched at an eyebrow with the nail of his right pinky, smiling down toward the coffee table as he spoke.

  “There are many things we will need to do. Little steps. Little steps to be sure that our action is right, yes? Move forward with our eyes open.”

  “Great,” I said, clapping my hands on my knees. “Where do we start?”

  “I would consult with Xavier, please. For a moment.”

  When I did reacting 217;t hop up immediately, Father Chapin looked embarrassed, and I had the sense it was more for me than himself. This is my problem hunched at the back of my throat. Anything you can say to Ex, you can say to me.

  “Just for a minute, Jayné,” Ex said.

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  I walked out of the den, heading for the kitchen. But at the last minute, I turned right instead. Down the hall, and out into the December night. After the warmth of the ranch house, the air was like a sharp slap. To the southwest, the lights of Santa Fe were glowing against a sparse covering of cloud. The stars overhead were brilliant and crowded in the sky. A meteor passed over, a thin silver-white light, gone as soon as I saw it. I stepped out to a stretch of rough wooden fence that divided the scrub and stones near the house from the scrub and stones slightly farther away from it, sat on the top plank, crossed my arms, and waited.

  It had been a little over two months since I’d killed an innocent man. I’d had a good reason—saving-the-world-from-madness-and-war-level good—and he’d known what we were going to do. He’d gone into darkness of his own free will. But I was the one who’d put him in the box, driven in the nails, and buried him and the thing living in his body while they screamed and begged. Me. Little old Jayné Heller. My palms were almost healed. There wouldn’t even be much of a scar. According to my lawyer, the police weren’t investigating. It was a missing persons case, and it probably would be forever. Once upon a time, there was a man named David, and then one day, for no particular reason, there wasn’t.

  I hugged myself closer, the cold pressing into my skin. I’d bought an overcoat when we were in London—soft black wool that went down to my ankles—and I thought about going in to get it.

  The days since then hadn’t been the best of my life. I wasn’t sleeping enough. I had weird spikes of anxiety and fear that felt like I’d accidentally gunned the gas with the car in neutral. I didn’t know if it was the aftermath of my very bad day in Chicago or more evidence for my new theory of why I kept winning fights I should have lost.

  From the moment I’d told Ex my suspicion that I had a rider in me, I felt like I’d fallen into a wheel-chair that he was pushing. He’d arranged for the ritual tests in Hamburg that we’d tried with spectacularly inconclusive results. He’d orchestrated the trip back to the States—plane tickets, car, hotels. He even drove on the way up from Albuquerque International Sunport to Santa Fe.

  He’d brokered the meeting with Father Chapin and his cabal of Vatican-approved exorcists. He’d made them sound like the ninja SWAT team of God. And maybe they were, but right now, sitting on my fence, I felt more alone than I had since I’d left college. I heard the front door open and close on the other side of the ranch house, then a car door. An engine came to life. Tires punished the gravel. I watched the headlights curve over the landscape of piñons and cactus without ever seeing the car itself. I figured it was safe to go in, but I didn’t. A few minutes later, the door behind me opened. I heard Ex’s footsteps coming out toward me, and I smelled the hot chocolate before I saw it. He had a cup for each of us, complete with half-melted marshmallows.

  The news was going to be bad,hen.

  He leaned against the fence, looking out toward the smudge of light that was Santa Fe.

  “He’s in the middle of something right now,” Ex said. “There’s an Akkadian wind demon that’s been possessing people all through the northern part of the state and up into Colorado. They’ve tracked it through almost three dozen cases. Father Chapin says they’ve got a rite coming up that’s going to stop it for good.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “They’ve been chasing this thing for months.”

  He sounded defensive. I waited. I’d known Ex long enough to tell when he was working himself up to something. I let the silence push for me while I sipped the hot chocolate. It was good, but he always put a little too much cinnamon in it.

  “There’s some work we can do, though,” Ex said. “So that we’re ready when he’s done with that. Hit the ground running.”

  “This is the part I’m not going to like, right?”

  “Yeah,” Ex said. “It is.”

  I popped what was left of the marshmallow into my mouth and talked around it.

  “Lay it on me, Preacher Man.”

  “There’s someone in Taos he’d like you to talk with.”

  “Another priest?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  I
laughed. The amusement didn’t reach down as far as my gut.

  “It’s not about you,” Ex said. “It’s standard. It didn’t used to be, but … well, it is now. People come to him and say that they’re hearing voices or that demons are trying to control them or … anything really. What he does won’t help people who are mentally ill, so it makes sense to have someone do that kind of triage. And he doesn’t know you. All he sees is your history.”

  “And what does my history look like?”

  Ex’s sigh plumed out white in the freezing air.

  “It looks like someone with a very controlled, fairly sheltered childhood who’s been through a lot of changes in a very short time. Just falling into that kind of money can put lottery winners into therapy. Then there’s everything else. It wouldn’t be strange for someone who has been through all the things you have to be …”

  “Mentally ill?”

  “Shell-shocked.”

  “Great.”

  We were quiet for what felt like a long time. The moon was new, a starless spot in the star-strewn sky. The breeze was no more than a breath, cold and dry. For as long as I could remember, I’d had dreams of being in a desert not entirely unlike this one. I wondered now if they’d really been my dreams. Maybe they belonged to something else that was living in my skin. Or maybe that was really mine, and everything else in my lif mentas the falsehood. I thought I was a woman, but maybe that was a mistake.

  I bit my lip, pulling myself back from that train of thought.

  “You know I’m not going to do it, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “So do we have a Plan B?”

  “Sort of,” Ex said.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Step one: Make a Plan B.”

  “Let’s get inside,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

  He took my hand, steadying me as I got down. He kept hold of my fingers for a few seconds longer than he needed to, and I let him. My plan to tour all the properties Uncle Eric had left in my name and catalog everything I could find had gone off the rails when I’d been called to Chicago. In the aftermath, we hadn’t gotten back to it. But of places I’d actually seen, the New Mexico ranch house was one of my favorites. It sat alone on fifty acres of undeveloped wilderness, a single gravel road the only way in or out. It had power from the grid and utilities from the city, but there was also a generator and a well. The walls were white stucco that caught the desert sunlight, glowing yellow at dawn, pink and red and gold in the five o’clock winter dusk. And there was a patio that looked out to the west, catching the gaudy, improbable sunsets that had been different every day I’d remembered to look. I couldn’t imagine myself living there. It was too isolated. But I could see curling up there to lick my wounds for a few weeks. A few months. Years, maybe.

  I went to the kitchen and poured out the hot chocolate now well on its way to tepid. Ex went to the front room and stirred the fire with a black iron poker. The floors were red brick with thick Navajo rugs over them. My cell phone rested on the couch next to the leather backpack I used as a purse. It said I had one new message. The number was Chogyi Jake’s, and I told myself I’d call him back later. After dinner, maybe. A demon-ridden mob had beaten him a good three-quarters of the way to death in Chicago. All his news would be about recuperating, which I didn’t want to know. All mine would be about my quest for a first-class exorcist, which I didn’t want to tell him. It didn’t leave a lot in the middle.

  “I could be wrong, you know,” I said, sitting on the couch. “Maybe there’s another explanation. The whole thing about having a rider on board could be crap I made up, and I’m scaring myself for no reason.”

  “I’m not willing to take that chance,” Ex said. “It fits the data too well. If we can’t figure out what’s going on and Father Chapin won’t help us, then I’ll find someone else. I’m not giving up on him yet, though. He’ll be in a better position after he’s done with this thing with the wind demon. If I can just get him to look at you himself, try a few cantrips and pulls to see what’s there to see, he’ll change his mind.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I thought this guy was your Yoda.”

  “He taught me most of what I know about riders. The occult. I trained with most of the men he’s working with now. I was going to be one of them.”

  “So what happened?”

  Ex shrugged. The fire muttered to itself. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more, I stopped waiting.

  Chapter Two

  My bedroom was lavish. King-size bed, wide picture window looking out toward the mountains on the horizon. The master bathroom had a Jacuzzi tub with a separate walk-in shower big enough for two. On the other hand, the pillows smelled like dust, and the water was rusty for the first couple of minutes. And there were other things. The television set up for watching movies from bed dated from before the switch to digital. The only input that worked was a black VCR with a half dozen cassettes dating from the late eighties. I’d watched about the first half of The Big Blue while we waited for Father Chapin’s arrival, and while Jean Reno had been pretty cute before he got old, I couldn’t quite bring myself to start it back up.

  The only Internet access was a cellular card I’d bought for the laptop, and the signal kept fading in and out with no discernible pattern. Streaming was impossible, and even web stuff was problematic. I felt like I’d been cut off from the world. I propped my laptop on the bedside table, cranked up Pink Martini, and let China Forbes sing to me about losing her head on the Rue St.-Honoré. The music was so relentlessly cheerful that by the time she shifted over to telling Lorenzo that he wasn’t welcome anymore, I was feeling almost human again.

  I wondered how much time Uncle Eric had spent in this room, lying on this bed and staring out at the vast emptiness of New Mexico. The wind-paved desert didn’t seem like his kind of joint. As little as I knew him, that might have been accurate or I could have just been making it up. Certainly, with all the places he’d owned, he couldn’t have spent much time in any one of them. The more I looked at it, the more it seemed like anytime he’d needed to go somewhere, he’d bought himself a house or condo—sometimes a couple of them—fitted them out for whatever he needed, then left them in place. If there was a pattern behind it all, a great and secret plan that all these locations fit into, I couldn’t see it. The more I found out about my uncle, the less he seemed like the guy I’d thought he was.

  I lay as still as I could, my palms toward the ceiling, and my heels pointing at the bathroom door. I waited for my body to do something—twitch, speak in tongues, leap up in a killing rampage. Say something I hadn’t meant to say or walk someplace I hadn’t meant to walk or pick something up I hadn’t meant to carry. Anything to show me that I wasn’t the only one in my flesh. But if there was a rider there, living with and within me, it was onto the game. Apart from the vague Pavlovian impulse to curl a pillow around my head and sleep, I didn’t feel or do anything.

  “Hey. Are you there?” I said to the empty room.

  In another lifetime, I would have pushed the words out toward God. Now they were aimed inward at my maybe-rider. Either way, there wasn’t an answer.

  In the kitchen, a radio came on announcing the news from Washington. I heard Ex open the refrigerator, then the clank of pots, the clatter of the blue ceramic dishes that we’d bought the last time we were out here. Dinner on its way. I sighed and sat up just as my cell phone rang. Once upon a time, the ringtone had been my uncle’s voice. Now it was the first twenty seconds of Tempo Perdido. I took a deep breath, let it out, and answered the call.

  “Hey,” I said, forcing my voice to a brightness I didn’t feel. “How’s the Windy City?”

  “Cold,” Chogyi Jake said. “Unpleasantly cold. Damp too.”

  “Bummer,” I said. “Sounds like you’re recuperating pretty well, though.”

  The pause on the line told me that I’d said so
mething a little weird. I bit my lip.

  “I am recuperated,” Chogyi Jake said. “They released me from the hospital five weeks ago. The stitches dissolved three weeks ago. I am as whole, I think, as I will ever be.”

  “Didn’t let you keep the spleen, though,” I said. “Could have had it infused with plastic or something. Made a great paperweight.”

  “How are you, Jayné?”

  “It’d be a little Gothic, maybe, but how many people can hold down their taxes with a spleen? Auditor comes in, you can wave it at her and say, ‘Stand back, I’m not afraid to vent this thing.’ ”

  I got a chuckle. I pressed on before I lost the tempo.

  “How are Kim and Aubrey settling in? Everything going all right?”

  It was a noble effort on my part. I gave myself full marks. It didn’t work.

  “I’m worried about you,” Chogyi Jake said. “Since you left, I’ve had the feeling that you didn’t want me to rejoin you.”

  “Oh, gimme a break,” I said. “You got hurt. You’ve been healing up. Of course I’m looking forward to getting the gang together again. It’s just …”

  The lies backed up in my throat. I had the sudden powerful memory of telling my mother that I didn’t know who’d poured all the milk on my older brother’s bed. The hot, choking feeling of standing by something that we both knew wasn’t true was just as humiliating now as it had been when I was a kid.

  “It’s just?” Chogyi Jake said. When he wanted it to, his voice could be like warm flannel. My eyes were tearing up.

  “Just not right now,” I said. “I think Ex and I are probably about done here, and I’m not sure where we’re heading next. But as soon as I’ve got a game plan, buddy, we’ll coordinate flights. No problem.”

  “Ex isn’t returning my calls either.”

  “Isn’t he? There may be a service issue. The connections out here are pretty spotty. I’ll ask him about it, okay?”

  The sound wasn’t quite a sigh. It was just an exhalation with a comment at the back. I lost control of one of the tears, and it dripped down my cheek. I felt annoyed by it. They were my eyes. I’d decide when they leaked.