Killing Rites

Chapter Seven

When I was growing up, there were two kinds of magic: prayer and witchcraft.

Prayer, we did in church or at the dinner table. We did it at youth group; we did it before class; we did it last thing before bed. The idea that things could be the way I wanted if I just asked hard enough, if I just wanted hard enough, was the bedrock of my childhood. And so when my grandmother got cancer, I prayed like my heart was on fire. I knelt by my bed for what felt like hours, hands clenched, asking God to make my Nanna better. At her funeral, the priest said that Nanna had gone to a better place and my mother nodded. I spent the rest of the service embarrassed for having been selfish when I’d prayed that she get well.

Witchcraft was something else. It was the tool of evil. Satan’s hand in the world. That didn’t stop a few of the kids from making up hex charms. Especially in middle school, girls would sometimes find little drawings stuffed into their lockers made up of what we thought of as occult scratching—yin-yangs, pentagrams, inverted crosses—with their names inscribed. Once a girl in my Language Arts class—Tracey McCort, I think her name was—threw such a violent fit about one that we all had to go see the school counselor.

Before I walked into my uncle Eric’s secret apartment and found a desiccated corpse smoking cigarettes, cooking omelets, and cracking wise, the one consistent thing I knew about magic was this: it didn’t work.

It turned out I’d been wrong about that. Chogyi Jake, Ex, and Aubrey had taught me a little about how to find my qi, the energy that drove real magic. Right now, I could use it to see through illusions or make someone follow a command, if only a simple one and only for a second. Ex could use it to change what he looked like, if you didn’t look hard. Kim could damp down other magic. We could do parlor tricks.

Riders had access to much more power than any human being. They could fly or change bodies or toss cars around with their hands. Just a normal person trying to face down a rider would need a lot of prep work or a lot of experience or a lot of friends. Sometimes, all three.

The ritual Chapin ran us through that afternoon—de Tonquedec’s exercises—was one of those preparatory moments. After a lunch of tunandwiches and stale potato chips, I sat on the floor at the center of the ritual space, and the men stood around me. My job, as Chapin explained it to me, was to draw myself into a place just over my heart, to retract from my body as much as I could, and focus everything into a very small place at the center of my body. I’d stay there for about an hour, then shift myself into the place just behind my eyes where I went when the rider took over. And then hang out there for an hour.

Two hours sitting on an old cushion while six men stood around me muttering in Latin. I figured it would be a little surreal and uncomfortable, a little boring and a lot goofy. And it was, for about the first ten minutes.

After that, it was some of the hardest work I’d ever done.

My eyes were closed, and in the darkness behind them, I tried to hold myself together. Intangible things brushed against the tiny, compacted version of me. I felt Ex among them, his furnace of a mind comforting only because it was familiar. Each little contact was an echo of a foreign mind like someone in the hallway coughing.

And then, with no trigger I could fathom, I was afraid. Deeply afraid. I was trapped in a haunted house with no way out, and there was something there with me. Something that hissed like an old propane lantern and smelled like burnt cheese. My friends were going to die, and I was going to kill them, and more than anything—more than breath—I wanted not to. I just wanted not to hurt anyone. I felt something happening miles overhead and was disturbed to realize it was me, crying. The sensation I felt so far above me was the thickness of sorrow in my throat. I had the powerful sense that my hands were bleeding. Not my real hands, out there impossibly far away from me, but these small, invisible ones. They were bleeding because I’d used the palms like hammers, driving in the nails. I was killing him. I was killing him again.

Something in my belly moved.

Something that wasn’t me.

I came up gasping. Around me, the six priests stood in pairs: Carsey and Tamblen, Tomás and Miguel, Chapin and Ex.

“Bathroom,” I said. “I need the bathroom.”

“You have to hold on a little longer,” Ex said. “You can—”

“Let her go,” Chapin said. “We’ve seen enough for now.”

The bathroom was tiny. I could put my hands out, pressing palms against both walls at once. The light came from a tiny window, no more than four inches square, outlined in deep-blue tile. The toilet was undersized, and it ran a little. I stood until I was sure I wouldn’t pass out, then slid down, my back against the wall, and cried for a while. I was shaking badly, and I felt light-headed. I briefly reconsidered vomiting, but decided against it. When I rose to my feet again, I didn’t know how long I’d been in there. Five minutes or five hours both seemed equally plausible. I washed my face in the tiny, mineral-streaked sink and looked up into the mirror. In the dim, I looked older. Worn-out. My eyes were puffy and red. My hair was frizzed out like a black cloud. My skin was pallid. There were raw, rashy-looking spots at the corners of my nose.

My right hand rose up without my knowing it was going to. My fingertips touched the mirror gently, caressing the girl in the glass. I shook my head and stepped back. When I went out, the priests were sitting around the big table where Dolores and her family had been before. Their conversation went quiet as I stepped in, and Tomás stood up. Someone had old-school ideas about etiquette. Outside, the light was slanting down from the west with the red-gold glow of evening. It was probably half past four. The dark came so early.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry about that. Hit a rough spot.”

“It is fine,” Father Chapin said.

“Do we—” I started, but the question stuck in my throat. I actually had to swallow twice before I could talk again. “Do we dive back in?”

“I think that we do not,” Chapin said. I felt a tension between my shoulder blades ease, and at the same time a flush of shame. I hadn’t made it halfway through the first step without freaking out. I wondered how Dolores had done. My guess was better.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You did fine,” Ex said, and I saw Carsey and Miguel exchange a glance I couldn’t parse.

“We know considerably more than we did this morning,” Chapin said. “I do not believe that we have anything more to learn from de Tonquedec. Tell me, Miss Jayné, do you know the word larva?”

Tomás nodded toward his chair, and I sat down gratefully.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s like maggot, right?”

“Linnaeus took the word for this meaning, but it is an older term than the biological sciences. The word is Latin, and before it became another word for grub, it meant a specter. A spirit. And also—this is telling—a mask. The taxonomist wished to describe the fashion in which the form of the young insect masks its adult body, you see? And so he took a metaphor. He took the word that sorcerers and diabolists had used for centuries before. Do you see?”

“So because it’s young, it’s hard to tell what it’s going to be when it grows up?” I said.

“Yes,” Chapin said. “But more than this, it is subtle. It has hidden itself in you as it grows in power. From what we have observed, we know it to be very potent. But from its actions and nature, we can deduce that it is also still vulnerable. And in this we must take hope.”

“It seems unlikely that it is less than the second hierarchy,” Miguel said. “A prince of Dominions, perhaps.”

“I’d have said a Throne,” Carsey said. “The way it crawled up Chewy like a tree? And the wind demon may have been weakened, but our new visitor still swatted it down like it was a schoolgirl. I’d say it’s a gressil. Possibly sonnenelion, but my first thought’s gressil.”

“No,” Ex said, “Not gressil. I’ve been in her company for over a year, and she hasn’t shown anything like that kind of impurity.”

“Maybe not to you,” Carsey said.

“There is no room to speculate,” Chapin said, a sharpness in his voice that made Ex and Carsey both go silent. “We will know its name when the time comes. To pretend knowledge we do not have leads us astray.”

“Are we sure it’s bad?” I asked.

Chapin looked at me. I hadn’t realized until just then that he hadn’t been. His eyes were unreadable as stones. In my peripheral vision, Ex looked embarrassed.

“I mean, there are riders and there are riders, right?” I said, willing myself not to talk so fast. “Some of them are stone-cold killers. Some are … not so bad. This one’s never tried to hurt anybody. It stepped in with the wind demon. I mean, it’s probably saved my life six or seven times. Are we sure it’s one of the bad ones?”

“She may have a point,” Miguel said. “When the spirit has taken control from her, it hasn’t acted against her.”

“That we know,” Tamblen said, shrugging his wide shoulders.

“A subtle beast is more dangerous than one with mere brute power,” Tomás said. He sounded smug.

Chapin hadn’t looked away from me. If his gaze was supposed to make me uncomfortable, it was working like gangbusters.

“That it has appeared to help you means only that you remain useful to it,” he said in slow, measured syllables. “If it were a holy thing, it would have no need to hide from us. Do not hope to befriend it. Whatever it seems, in truth it is your enemy.”

“Right,” I said. The tears and trembling I’d thought I’d left in the bathroom threatened to come back. “Point taken.”

Chapin’s smile was warm, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Perhaps it would be best if you permitted us to consult,” he said. “The terminology we employ can be confusing. Alarming, even. And, through no fault of your own, it is not possible to include you fully without also including the enemy.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but my voice was steady. I got up.

“All right. That’s cool. I’ll go get some dinner or something. You guys do your thing and let me know what’s next.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ex said. His chair scraped against the brick floor when he stood.

“I will need you here, Xavier,” Chapin said. “With Alexander in the hospital, we will need you actively involved.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “I can drive myself.”

“Point of clarification,” Carsey said, lifting one finger. “Are we sure it’s a good idea to have her wandering about the world unchaperoned?”

“You know what? You can have me here, or you can not have me here, but I can’t do both. I thought the whole point of sending me and Ex off on our own last night was to see if I’d come back. Well, I did. So forgive the language, but what exactly the fuck do you want from me, buddy?”

ght=" height="0em" width="1em">I was shouting. I didn’t care that I was shouting. I kind of liked that I was shouting. Carsey shifted uncomfortably. Tamblen made a deep chuffing sound, his face darkening. It took a second to figure out he was laughing.

“Don’t think that was the beast talking,” Tamblen said. “Think that was the girl.”

“Agreed,” Ex said. “That was Jayné.”

“She can go,” Chapin said. And then, to me, “Please return to us this evening.”

I got the car key out of Ex’s coat pocket. It wasn’t actually a key at all but a little magnetic fob that made me think of a thumb drive. When I stepped out into the twilight and closed the blue double doors behind me, the cold seemed a little better than it had in the morning. In the west, clouds glowed gold and pink and gray. In the east, the sky was almost black. The little house down the road had its television on again. The Quonset huts were closed and quiet, and the boys who’d been lounging on the street were gone. The clock in the car said it was 5:32, but it felt later. I started the engine, cranked up the heat, and leaned back into the soft leather. Part of me wanted to get on the highway and keep on driving south until I hit someplace warm. Brazil, maybe. I was almost sure the part that wanted that was me. Almost.

I didn’t know where I was going, but the GPS had a menu option to find nearby restaurants. It cycled for almost a minute before the map pulled back and a half dozen red dots appeared on the face of northern New Mexico. The closest was a cluster of fast-food joints fifteen minutes away. They were at the highway, and pretty much screamed truck stop. More dots stippled the map near Taos. One, off almost by itself, was labeled O’Keefe’s. I remembered Carsey saying it was good, tapped the dot, and let the car figure out how to get there.

I didn’t like who I was being. Yelling at Carsey had felt good when I’d done it, but the truth was I hated being on a hair trigger. Once upon a time I’d been calmer. Less anxious all the time. Less likely to freak out.

I wanted that Jayné back, and I didn’t know how to get her.

Twenty minutes later, O’Keefe’s was a light in the darkness. A gravel-and-ice parking lot with a half dozen trucks in it. An old sign painted in green and gold and lit with the kind of exterior light you can get from Wal-Mart for twenty bucks. When I got out of my car, an ancient black Labrador appeared at my side, wagging and sniffing at me. The wooden stairs that rose to the front door were warped and uneven. A girl who could have been fifteen greeted me when I walked in the door and pointed toward a table at the back. The walls were wood and hung with hunting trophies and old rock posters: Rush 2112 tacked up next to a bear’s stuffed head. The tables looked like they’d been gathered from estate sales, no two the same. The chairs were all random sets too, and the heat came from a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. Six men in Day-Glo yellow safety jumpsuits sat around a table next to mine, speaking Spanish. Two old men sat together across the room, leather cowboy hats hung on the backs of their chairs, and talked in low voices. Apart from the world’s youngest waitress, I was the only woman there.

The menu was printed on white copy paper. I picked the steak because it was at the top. The girl brought me a Coke and a glass of water and then went away I was t>

Sitting there, alone and not alone, I wondered whether the rider was aware of my thoughts. I didn’t know if it could pick through my mind like a kid in a sandbox searching for treasure or if I was as hidden from it as it was from me. But I hoped that it couldn’t. I wanted—maybe needed—something that was my own, and if it wasn’t my body, all that was left was my thoughts.

Because my body wasn’t mine. The fact sat there like a toad, malefic and poisonous. Something was inside me, and had been since who knew when. I couldn’t get it out, not by myself.

And that was why I was gnawing at myself like a wolf caught in a trap. Father Chapin and Ex and all the others were there to help me, and so I was going to give my body over to them. I wasn’t taking control. At best, I was choosing who got to control me because I was too weak to do anything for myself. I needed Ex and Chapin, and I resented them because I needed them, and above anything, I just didn’t want anybody else to know.

The shame pulled my shoulders in, thickened my throat. All my secrets pressed down on me—I was a killer, I was the puppet of a demon, I was a stupid little girl playing at games she didn’t understand. If I’d been stripped naked in public, it wouldn’t have been worse than this. I felt like I was going for an abortion.

“You okay, lady?” the girl said, sliding the plate in front of me.

“I’m fine,” I said, not meeting her gaze. “Thanks.” When she retreated back through the kitchen door, I picked up the knife and fork and cut joylessly through the meat in front of me. It had been cooked in red wine and black pepper and onions grilled until they were sweet, and the first bite exploded and melted and brought me suddenly back to myself. The greens on the side were squash and broccoli with butter and garlic that made them taste more like themselves.

I know this, I thought. I’ve had this before.

I stood, my breath fast, adrenaline speeding the blood through my veins. Three steps to the door, and I pushed through. The kitchen was small and sauna hot. The smells of garlic and meat, tomato sauce and basil, wine and cigarette smoke, were like walking backward in time.

A vampire stood at a narrow prep table, his flesh ropy and desiccated, his eyes the yellow of old ivory. The mouth was a ruin and his skeletal hands were the dark of dried meat. For a moment, we stared at each other, unmoving. When he took the cigarette from his mouth, I swear the skin creaked.

“Jayné Heller. As I live and breathe,” Midian Clark said, smoke curling out from behind stained teeth. “What’s the matter, kid? You look like shit.”