Killing Rites

Chapter Fifteen

“Hey,” I said. “Can you talk?”

“Yeah,” my little brother, Curtis, said. “They’re all out doing stuff. What are you up to?”

“Surprisingly difficult question to answer,” I said. “I just got a dog. What’s going on at home?”

For twenty miles, Curtis filled me in on the gossip at home. Our older brother, Jay, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and now my future sister-in-law and her whole extended family had descended to prepare for the wedding. Mom had given up all hope of keeping the bun-in-the-oven issue quiet, and was now explaining to everyone at church that the new in-laws only looked Mexican, but were really Brazilians who’d just been living in Mexico before they came to the United States. In her mind, this was apparently better. Curtis was wildly amused by the whole thing, and his schadenfreude was a little infectious.

Before he hung up, I got Ozzie to bark hello to him a couple of times.

My new cell phone had a web browser that promised me a hotel with a real shower and hot water if I drove back in toward Taos proper. My other option appeared to be heading north into the Carson National Forest and staying there until spring, so with a little trepidation, I headed south.

The sky was enormous, the horizon seemed to fly out before me snow-white and earth-brown and the gray-green of piñons. Clouds draped the overwhelming blue like lace pulled to breaking, and the air smelled of cold and smoke and pine. For all my moving around the world, I’d spent very little time driving, and almost none by myself. I found myself humming, and then singing. Ozzie didn’t object.

There were a few cars and trucks on the highway, zooming along regardless of the ice on the pavement. I passed the turnoff to San Esteban with a little shudder. I kept waiting for Ex’s little black sports car to zoom up alongside and force me off the road. Once I got in close enough that there was traffic and an almost urban concentration of buildings, I actually started feeling better. I had cover and the anonymity of the crowd.

I made it to a little hotel just after three. It was two stories, with low scrub pine around the perimeter and a gravel parking lot mostly buried under ice and snow. We were a long way from the ski valley, and even so, there was only one vacancy. The guy at the desk balked at Ozzie until I gave him an extra hundred. The room was on the second floor, and it would have been physically impossible to do a hundred dollars’ worth of damage to it. The carpet was damp and stank of mildew. The bed sagged visibly in the center. The windows had scallops of dust running down them. At that moment, the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio wouldn’t have been better. I took a hot shower, washing my hair three times to get the last of the cigarette stink out. When I toweled off, my toes were pale and prune-wrinkled.

The scabs and cuts that cross-hatched the soles of my feet burned, the waer loosening the clots, but I didn’t start bleeding again. When I probed my rib, it still hurt, sure enough. In the mirror, my skin was bright pink from the hot water where it wasn’t white with old scars: my arm, my side. I stretched out, and the vertebrae between my shoulder blades cracked pleasantly.

Ozzie had curled up on the bed and wagged heavily as I got dressed again. I was going to need a place to use as my base of operations. This wasn’t the little condo halfway up to the ski valley. It didn’t have the gas fire heater or the hot tub or the little kitchen. If I wanted food, I’d have to head out to the convenience store or a tiny diner a few blocks down the road. In the next room, two women were shouting at each other over the yammering of their television cranked to eleven.

“Okay,” I said. “I know it’s not the best accommodations in the world, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Just don’t take off running down the road with me like last time, okay?”

My rider didn’t reply, but Ozzie sighed and let her head loll down on the bedspread. So I figured that made two out of three in favor with one abstention. Not great, but until I had better, it’d do. I put my few belongings in the closet and bathroom counter, pulled my hair back into a ponytail, and went out for supplies. The convenience store was called Allsup’s, and it was entirely covered in Christmas decorations—tinsel icicles, printed cardboard reindeer, even blinking colored lights strung around the cash register. A weak version of “Little Drummer Boy” was leaking out of the radio, reminding me that I wanted my own music back. But they had dog food for Ozzie and some snacks for me. I bought enough granola bars, sunflower seeds, and Diet Coke to keep body and soul together for a couple of days. Ozzie stayed in the car. As I walked out, flimsy plastic bag on my wrist, my new phone rang, a chiming tritone.

“Hello?” I said, fumbling to get the SUV’s back door open and talk on the phone at the same time.

“Jayné, dear? I have the information on that license plate you wanted me to look for,” my lawyer said.

“Spiffy. Give me just a second, and I’ll … Okay. Got a pen. Go ahead.”

The car was registered to Eduardo Garcia with an address in Questa, New Mexico. I was reasonably sure that none of the women I’d seen sitting around Chapin’s table had been named Eduardo, but apparently someone knew him well enough to borrow his car. It was a start.

“Also I had a call from our friend Ex,” she said. “He seemed a bit upset.”

I closed the rear door and leaned against the SUV. An ancient-looking station wagon pulled up to the gas pumps, an old man at the wheel and three young children mashed close together in the backseat. A fire truck cruised by, slow and stately as a sailboat.

“Dear?”

“What did he say?”

“He seems to think you’ve had a psychological crisis of some sort. Run off in the night. He wanted me to look into getting you an evaluation. Against your will if necessary.”

“Great.”

I waited for the next comment, certain sheosedsk what was really going on and unsure what I’d say.

“Are you certain you want to keep him on the payroll?” she asked.

I smiled.

“Yeah, for now. He’s overreacting to some disagreements we had. We’ll figure it out.”

“He’s a darling boy, and very intense, but he seems a bit histrionic sometimes.”

“He just hates not being the one in control,” I said.

“Well, that’s true of us all, I suppose. Is there anything else I can do for you right now?”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m good.”

I got in the SUV, started up the engine, and paused. It was Sunday afternoon, with a couple of hours still before sundown. Questa was half an hour away. If it all worked out right, I could find Dolores tonight and get her back to Chapin and Ex in the morning with her story to back up mine. Except …

Except she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten an exorcism recently. Was it her sister? Someone else in her immediate family had been ridden and cured before she had, and I was pretty sure it had been her sister. And if all of Chapin’s exorcisms came with a secret toy surprise like mine, that meant at least one person in Dolores’s household was being ridden right now. Or maybe everyone. Hell, all of Questa could be one big rider colony for all I knew.

And for that matter, I was making an assumption about Chapin too. I was thinking there was only one ringer in the circle. What if that wasn’t true? What if all of them were under the control of something else? I leaned against the steering wheel. I couldn’t go running after this like I was chasing fireflies. I had to think it through. Ozzie yawned massively and lay down on the passenger’s seat.

Being with Aubrey for as long as I had, I’d learned a few things by osmosis. Things like this: parasitic systems have structure. By watching what a parasite did, you could figure out something about its life cycle. A mycoplasmic infection made mice seek out the smell of cat urine? Pretty fair bet that the parasite wants to get inside a cat. A carpenter ant crawls down out of its nest in the forest canopy and latches onto the bottom of a low-hanging leaf? The fungus that’s about to pop its head open would probably like to rain its spores down from about that height. So if a rider is taking the risk of hanging out with exorcists in order to get fresh victims, that meant something. Specifically, it meant that the benefit it got from being around exorcisms outweighed the risk of being discovered by the kinds of guys who were professionally not in favor of spiritual parasites. Which meant …

I sat back and pulled the folded envelope from my pocket. Midian’s letter was still inside. I plucked it out.

Getting a rider’s like a drinking game. Once you start losing, you keep losing—getting ridden opens you up and getting closed again is tricky.

So this particular rider needed people who were easy to possess. People who were already vulnerable. I remembered something that Aubrey had said once about hospitals being a great breeding ground for infection because there were so many people there with crappy immune systems. An infection that wouldn’t be able to survive in a normal person would have all kinds of room to grow if you gave it a community of people who couldn’t fight it off. And if that was the kind of rider I was looking at, then what it was doing made sense.

So unless Questa was hip-deep in people who’d already been ridden by something else, Stinky’s pool of possible victims was going to be limited.

And it meant something else.

I pulled up my phone and turned the envelope over. I took the extra minute to put Chogyi Jake’s number into the address book before I called. It rang five times and rolled to voice mail. I growled in frustration and waited for the beep.

“Hey. It’s me. Find out if any of Chapin’s boys has had a rider. It may be important. But be discreet about asking. Don’t be obvious. I’ll check back in later.”

I dropped the connection and sat back. Ozzie considered me with wet eyes.

“I think it’s going pretty well,” I said. And then, still out loud, “Okay, listen up. I’m heading toward Dolores and her family. Chances are pretty good that there’s going to be a rider there and it won’t want us to take her back. If you think you’re too weak to take this thing in a fair fight, tell me now, and we’ll find a different plan.”

I waited. The guy with the kids finished gassing up his station wagon and pulled out. A girl maybe thirteen in a huge blue down coat walked across the street and into the store. A car drove by slowly, thumping out a bass line that was rendering anyone inside it deaf and sterile.

“I can,” I said, unaware that I intended to until the words came out. The voice had an exhaustion I didn’t feel myself.

Ozzie scrambled to her feet, whining anxiously. Her head was tilted.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, scratching the dog between the ears. “It freaks me out too. But she’s on our side.”

For now, anyway, I thought while I started the engine.

THE ROAD to Questa was lousy driving—hard-packed snow where it wasn’t ice. I took it slow enough that I didn’t feel the immediate danger of skidding into the oncoming lane but as fast as I could manage. The sun was sliding close to the horizon, and people were already turning headlights on. I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the hotel outside Taos if I could find a room on Questa that kept me from driving back in the dark. Or one with a dry carpet. Part of me rebelled at the idea of having two hotel rooms at the same time, but with a few thousand dollars in my pocket, it was hard to get too worked up over the loss.

All through New Mexico, I’d passed little houses sitting back off the highway. Sometimes they were by themselves, sometimes in clumps of three or four sharing the same mile of asphalt. Except for a car-parts store and the whitewashed and ominously named Sangre de Cristo motel, Questa seemed less like a town than a few of those random, lonely, improbable buildings that had landed together. The main street was the highway, and the two lanes divided by the broken yellow line looked cosmopolitan compared to the side streets. Sidewalks would have been an affectation. Yellow-gray grass and scrub pressed in on the road, none of it rising much above knee-high, and the difference between a road and a driveway wasn’t immediately obvious. Leafless cottonwoods, some chopped back so viciously it was amazing they’d lived through it, stood in the snow, and huge hills rose up to the east. I squinted through the rose and orange light of a glorious, gaudy sunset, looking for road signs and comparing what I saw to the map on my phone. Cisneros Road. The corner of Cisneros Road and Cisneros Road. Old Cisneros Road …

The house sat back from the road. Pitched roof, pale stucco, with a raised wooden deck for a front porch and a dish antenna aiming its gray platter at the sky. The sunset reddened the house and left everything in the shadows gray. The flickering blue and white of a television lit the windows. At the side, a familiar car assured me from its bumper that I couldn’t be Christian and pro-choice. The plate was GODSWRK. So bingo.

I hopped out of the car. The air was cold, and only getting colder. I considered letting Ozzie out to sniff the local fire hydrant equivalents and decided against it. I wanted the option of a fast getaway if things went poorly, and whistling for the dog while unholy spirits attacked me sounded like bad tactics. The snow was solid as rock under my feet. Road salt covered the deck. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. Inside, a little dog yapped and growled. A man’s voice snapped something I couldn’t make out, and the door opened a crack.

He was maybe sixty years old, white hair with a sprinkling of black. The wrinkles in his face looked like they’d been carved there by a sculptor who’d gotten a little carried away. A gold crucifix hung at his neck.

“Hi,” I said. “Eduardo Garcia?”

His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t close the door.

“I’m not buying anything,” he said. “Fixed income.”

“I’m not selling. I’m looking for a girl named Dolores. I think you might know her.”

He paused. I could see him thinking. I smiled, doing my best innocuous.

“You got the wrong house,” he said and closed the door.

Inside, the little dog started barking again. I stood silently for a few seconds, wondering what to do. My first impulse was to keep pestering the guy until he admitted that he knew Dolores and told me where she lived, but the small, still voice of wisdom suggested that strategy was more likely to end in gunplay that I wasn’t really up for. And I didn’t even know if I was looking at small-town suspicion or demon-cult stonewalling. I walked back to the SUV, got behind the wheel, and sat for a few minutes. The curtains shifted open an inch and then closed. I figured he was on the phone right now, warning Dolores’s family that a twentysomething Anglo girl was looking for them.

Okay, so no element of surprise, but at least I’d shaken the tree. What was going to happen next? He’d warn Dolores. If the rider had gotten into Dolores in the time since her exorcism, it would see me as a threat and either run like hell or come after me. If it hadn’t gotten into Dolores, it was still almost certain to be in her sister, and she would hear about it and either run like hell or come after me. If it ran, the chances were pretty slim I’d be able to catch it. I didn’t even have a last name to work with, and

If it attacked, I’d be able to fight it off or else I wouldn’t. I needed backup. I needed Chogyi Jake or Aubrey. Or Kim. Someone who already knew about riders and how they worked. Someone who Ex and Chapin would trust, since anything I said was going to be discounted as a propaganda leaflet from the Black Sun. Here I was, spitting distance from one of the most experienced groups of exorcists in the world, possessed, and still totally on my own. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Unless …

I paused, turning the new idea over slowly. There were holes in it. Risks. But even if I failed, I wouldn’t be any worse off than I was now. I got back out of the car, walked back up to the door, knocked again. The little dog inside sounded like it was about to have a seizure. Eduardo didn’t open the door. I knocked again, and kept it up every few seconds for what felt like an hour but was probably three or four minutes. When the door opened, he had a rifle in his hand, so I’d called the gunplay thing right.

“If you don’t—” he started.

“My name’s Jayné,” I said. “You just tell her I’m in town and that I want to talk. I haven’t told anybody what they are, but I still can. I’ll get a room at the Sangre de Cristo. They can meet me there in the morning if they want to negotiate. If no one shows up, I’ll start spilling beans.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you crazy bitch.”

“She will,” I said, then turned and walked back to the SUV. The back of my head itched like someone had painted a bull’s-eye on my hair, but when I got into the car and started the engine, he still hadn’t shot me. I took a long, shuddering breath, started the engine, and backed out.

Five minutes later, I was at the hotel. I booked a room for three nights, got the key—a real key on a real key ring—and then took Ozzie out for a quick walk before she peed in the car. I’d been lying, of course. I didn’t have anything to negotiate. There was nothing that I wanted from the other rider apart from evidence that it really existed. But now they’d know where to find me.

And when they got there, I hoped to have a witness. Someone whom Chapin and Ex would trust. Or at least listen to.

When I got on the road, it was almost six o’clock and dark. Ozzie lay on the passenger’s seat, her nose tucked under her tail. The moon lit the night around us an unearthly blue as I headed back south toward Taos, and—maybe—help.