“I can call in a doctor,” I said. “Seriously, I’ll call my lawyer, and she’ll find someone.”
“And do what?” he asked. “It’s all right. I’ve had my tetanus shots. I’m clotting up. There’s nothing to do but wait. What about you? Are you feeling all right?”
I tried turning. The pain was more a deep ache than a sharp stab.
“Bruised,” I said. “Not broken, I don’t think.”
“What about your knee?”
I looked down. I’d forgotten ripping my jeans there, but my kneecap peeked out into the room, grimy with dirt and blood of my own.
“Way better than your back,” I said, sitting on the floor. The warmth of the fire pushed gently against my neck.
“Well,” Ex said through his smile, “that’s a good minimum, I guess.”
We were silent for a moment, the only sound the muttering of the flames and the quiet ticking of a clock. Ex put his head down on his arms, his face toward me. He looked tired and distant. His hair was unbound, spilling across his face, softening him. Here I was, alone in a secluded mountain cabin with a man wearing a blanket. I watched the firelight flicker on his skin. It should have felt weird. It didn’t.
I knew Ex had a thing about me. Crush, call it. Or attraction or unrequited love. Pick a card. I’d even felt it once when we were doing a ritual that meant blending my mind and his. And my just-barely-ex-boyfriend Aubrey, and his ex-wife and still-significant Kim. We’d been in a lot of trouble at the time, and so all our attention had really been on the battle at hand. Looking back on it from here, it had been intimate in a way that almost nothing else in my life had been. I’d been able to feel Aubrey’s confusion from the inside, like it was mine. Kim’s desperation and hope. I’d been able to feel them become aware of me. But there hadn’t been words. I’d felt Ex’s desire and guilt and determination, roaring like a furnace, but not the facts and details of the life that created them.
He sighed. His eyes closed. He didn’t look like the passions I’d felt were in him. Even his usual almost-disapproving intelligence was gone right now. I wanted to take his hand, but I wasn’t sure what I’d want after that, so I didn’t.
“It didn’t want to come out this time, did it,” Ex said. When I didn’t answer, he opened his eyes again, pinning me with them. “When the wind demon attacked you, the rider didn’t want to come out, did it?”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
Ex nodded, his cheek brushing against the cushion.
“It’s aware, then,” he said. “Intelligent. It knew that manifesting would give the game away. More evidence that it’s not just spells and cants that Eric put on you. They wouldn’t have any reason to keep hidden. Or the intelligence to know when they should.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. Something in my belly felt cold.
“Did you and Chapin talk about that too?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“It’s what we came here for. To talk about it. He agrees that whatever it is, it’s powerful. We’d knocked the edge off the wind demon, but the way you took it out was …” He shook his head without lifting it off his arms. “That wasn’t small stuff.”
“Did he have any idea why we couldn’t find anything before?”
“A few thoughts,” Ex said. “There are some kinds of riders that survive by stealth. They can live in someone for years and never show any sign, even when you know that you’re looking for something. This could be a particularly effective one of those.”
“Or?”
“Or the rider may be digging in deeper. Trying to get far enough inside you that we can’t see it to pull it out. Or it may be young. Or it may be that the thing where you’re hard to see with magic extends to the rider. Or comes from it.”
“And no way to guess which one we’re looking at.”
“Well, there are some other things that point toward it being young.”
“Really?” I said, wanting to know and not wanting to know.
“The fact that we’re here at all,” Ex said. “The rider can take complete control of you. We know that. But it wasn’t able to keep us from coming here. That means your will still trumps it most of the time. With a mature rider, you’ll usually see it running things all the time. That yours is … I don’t know. Intermittent? That makes it seem like it’s not full-grown.”
The warm feelings I’d had before were fading fast, and the hiss of the gas flame started to bother me. Anxiety and impatience nibbled at my skin, and I shifted to sit farther from the fireplace. Ex didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t care.
“Chapin’s working hypothesis is that it can’t take over for a very long time. A few minutes here and there. And usually in extremis. If you’re not threatened somehow, it can’t take the reins. Influence you, maybe. Steer you. But not the all-out control like we saw today.”
“So as it gets older, it gets more powerful and I get … what? Slowly eaten?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s more like a cocoon. The control dynamic stays right about where it is until the rider’s fully formed. Then it breaks out of the chrysalis, and the rules change all at once.”
The cold feeling in my gut got worse. I’d had the sense of rider and magic before, and this wasn’t it. It was old-school, please-Jesus-get-it-off-of-me fear. I had to change the subject, and I had to do it now.
“So, Che?” I said, forcing a grin. “What’s that?”
Ex chuckled. When he sat up, he winced, but he didn’t lie back down.
“Father Ignatius. He was my unofficial mentor when I was a novice. He had this long beard, and when I started my regency with Father Chapin, I tried to grow one too. It didn’t go well. One morning, Carsey said it made me look like a Wookiee. I was clean-shaven by afternoon, but it stuck.”
His smile was gentle—chagrined and embarrassed, but gentle.
“What did Father Ignatius think of it?” I asked.
“Oh, he never saw it. There are a couple of years of study between your novitiate and regency. The last time I saw him was when I took first vows. I’d have been … what? Nineteen years old?”
“What kinds of vows do they make you take at nineteen?”
“The usual ones,” Ex said, his voice exhausted and melancholy. “Poverty, chastity, obedience. At the time I thought it was better that way. Disassociate myself from sin before I’d ever experienced it. It’s hard to miss a place you’ve never been. Worked great in theory.”
“But in practice, not so much,” I said.
“Well, I made it through my first studies and regency,” Ex said.
“You keep saying regency. Do you have to dress up in a double-breasted tailcoat and an ascot or something?”
“Sorry. It’s a Jesuit thing where we were supposed to really commit to apostolic work. Lasts three years.”
“You went three years with Chapin?”
“And Tamblen and Carsey. Miguel came in my second year. Tomás finished his regency the year before I came in, and then went on mission. He took his final vows in Japan and came back just before I left, so he was sort of before and after. The new kid. Alexander? I didn’t meet him until today.”
“Wonder what Carsey calls him,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t see your attempt, but when it comes to un-dignified facial hair, Alexander pretty much takes it walking.”
“It did look kind of … pubic, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” I said. “So why’d you do it?”
“Leave them, you mean?”
“That too, I guess. But I meant why did you go in the first place? When I was nineteen, I was about trying to get out from under the church. Anything secular was cool. Why take vows?”
Ex breathed in deeply, held the air inside himself, and then let it seep back out, but it wasn’t exactly a sigh. It seemed more like he was steeling himself for something more painful than the wounds on his back.
“I was wondering when you were going to ask me that,” E
x said. “God called me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
I tried not to smile or roll my eyes.
“He stopped by the bedroom one night after prayers? I mean, how does that happen?”
Ex shrugged.
“It’s different for everyone. When I was ten years old, I wanted to be a soccer star. Didn’t have the build for football. That was my brother’s thing, anyway. He was on the varsity team at the high school, and he’d have ground me into the turf if I’d tried to horn in on his territory. I went to youth soccer, I watched all the games I could find. I had an old poster of Pelé in my room. And then one morning I got up, and I knew I was supposed to be a priest. I took down the poster, and that was that.”
“You just knew?”
“I did. I didn’t tell my father about it for a few years, but by the time I did, he’d already figured out what I was up to. He didn’t like it. Always suspected I was playing some kind of angle. The idea that I’d actually been called just didn’t seem plausible to him. But I finished high school a little early, I had good grades, and I’d gotten to know all the priests at church. When I applied to become a novice, it was easy. I taught catechism. I worked with the poor and the homeless. I studied. It was more like being home than being home ever was. When the time came for vows, I didn’t hesitate. I was … certain. God called me. I answered. Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. I felt blessed.”
“Never looked back, then?”
“Not then. During first studies, I found myself drawn to the rites of exorcism. I read about possession, the way the soul can be corrupted. There’s a special program for people with a talent for that kind of ministry, and I fought to get into it. I was good. Had a talent for it like no one had seen in a generation. When Father Chapin agreed to take me on, I knew that this had been the plan all along. God had made me to fight the devil and save the innocent, and He’d put me in place so that I could do it.
“I was a weapon in His hand. Tamblen and Miguel and Carsey. Father Chapin. I was going to spend my life with them. They were more than family. They were the other guys in my foxhole. And we saved people. We really did.”
Ex shifted his weight and winced. A dark spot was blooming on the towel draping his shoulder where he was bleeding through the bandage. The blanket pooled in his lap, and one bare leg shifted out toward the fire. His pale skin, the angle of his thigh, the distant expression, all conspired to make him seem like a sculpture worked out of marble. Something hard and beautiful and cold.
“And then?” I said.
“And then,” he echoed, like he was agreeing with me. “And then we lost one. Badly.”
“Isabel?”
His eyes went a little wider, but he nodded.
“The first guy … Um. Miguel? He mentioned the name when we got here,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Yes, Isabel.”
“You want to tell me aut it, or would that be too weird.”
“She came to us for help, and I betrayed her trust. I broke my vow to God.”
The fireplace hissed.
“You slept with her,” I said.
“I did. And because I lost perspective, we lost her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and he shook his head, refusing even that weak comfort.
“It’s different this time,” he said. “This time, we’ll win.”
Chapter Six
When a little before midnight I got to bed, I was asleep almost before my eyes closed. My consciousness fell away like shrugging off a jacket, and I slept through to morning without a single nightmare. I woke up with sunlight struggling in past wooden shutters and only a vague sense of where I was. With all the travel I’d done in the past year and a half, I’d built up a strategy of sorts for waking up in unfamiliar beds. First thing was not to get uptight, this happened all the time. Memory always wandered back eventually. The second was to find coffee.
The upstairs floor was scarred hardwood, and cold against my feet. I dug my bathrobe out of my suitcase, huddled into it, and went down the stairs. Arriving in the dark, I hadn’t understood the way the snow amplified light. The sun was hardly visible over the steep, pine-crowded mountains, but it was already bright as noon. I cranked up the thermostat, looked unsuccessfully through the cupboards and refrigerator for anything resembling food, and went back upstairs to raid the emergency supply of coffee from my leather backpack.
The door to the second bedroom stood open a few inches. Ex’s snores stumbled out on the air, as disoriented and tentative as I was. I paused in the hallway. His bed sat across the room, against the outside wall. Ex was curled around a pillow, his back to me. I watched for a few seconds as his rib cage rose and fell. The wound on his shoulder had bled a little more in the night, a smudge like a shadow across his skin. Somewhere in the crappy filing cabinet of my memory, a woman said something about falling into bed with a man just because they were alone in a cabin together, that it was the sort of thing men and women do. I wondered if that was true.
I’d lived with my family until I’d left home, and then on campus, and then on the road with Ex and Chogyi Jake. And Aubrey. I wasn’t a virgin, and even before I’d passed that supremely anticlimactic milestone, I’d had a pretty graphic understanding of how tab A fit into slot B.
It didn’t mean I knew what men and women do together. Not really.
Anyone who’d grown up with any actual experience—even just someone to talk to about it—would have known better than I did. Maybe after you spend a few weeks alone with a man, after you’ve washed the blood off his back, after he’s sat up until dawn with you waiting for the nightmares to fade, something just happens. No one’s responsible, and no one’s surprised. Was that how it was supposed to be? If I went to him now, slid into bed beside him, would he roll over and smile at me? It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered what his lips would taste like. Or what it would be like toslake the longing I’d already felt burning in his mind.
Was I falling for him? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to be held, and he was there. I was pretty sure if I pushed open the door and went to him, he wouldn’t turn me away. Just knowing that made it more tempting.
Ex shifted, and the movement sent a shock of panic through me. I walked down the rest of the hall as fast as I could on cat toes, my heart racing. I dug the little foil bag of ground coffee out of my bag and went back downstairs. I didn’t glance at Ex’s door as I passed, but I felt a little twinge of shame at wanting to.
An old plastic drip coffeemaker lurked in one of the lower cupboards, but without a filter. I banged around for a couple of minutes before I uncovered a French press still in the washing machine and a saucepan to heat up some water. When I pushed my hair back from my face, it occurred to me that I hadn’t made it all the way into the shower in a couple of days. I’d need to before we went back down the mountain.
On the countertop, my cell phone chirped its little you-missed-something notice. The number was Chogyi’s, of course. I’d forgotten to call him back or even listen to his messages. The water started to bubble, rocking the pan on its burner. I picked up the phone, thumbed the call return, and started pouring dry coffee into the French press. It was ground too fine. The coffee was going to be muddy, but it was better than none at all. The phone connection clicked.
“Hey,” I said, apology in my voice, “sorry that I—”
“Jayné,” Aubrey said. He leaned into the syllables, rushing to say my name so that he wouldn’t hear anything that wasn’t meant for him. “Hey. He’s not here. Chogyi Jake. He went to grab some fresh eggs, and he left his phone.”
I felt a reflexive shock of guilt, as if by thinking about Ex I was somehow being unfaithful to Aubrey. Like by answering the phone, he’d caught me at something illicit.
“Oh, right,” I said, and nodded even though no one could see me. “Yeah, okay. He left a message for me, so I was just calling him back.”
“I know he was wanting to talk with you. Che
ck in.”
“Well, everything’s fine,” I said.
It was one of those pauses. I picked up the pan of water, focusing on pouring the boiling water into the press. In the glass, black coffee and pale foam mixed and settled. I could feel the pressure building to say something. This was Aubrey. This was the guy I’d been sleeping with for months. He was the guy I’d called for help when things first got weird in Denver. I could tell him anything. I could trust him with anything.
He was also the guy who I’d broken up with so he could be with his wife. Ex-wife.
“Everything’s fine,” I said again. “Everything copacetic over there?”
“Things are going all right,” he said. “We’re all a little worried about you, though.”
Drop it, Aubrey, I thought.
“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Have Chogyi Jake gi me a call when he gets back in, okay? And tell Kim hey for me.”
“Okay,” Aubrey said. I could hear the cool come into his voice. The distance. My chest felt as if someone had hit me right on the sternum. Maybe with a hammer. I fit the top of the press into place and pushed down, the pressure against the palm of my hand slow and steady as the plunger fell.
“Talk to you soon?” I said, falsely cheerful.
“Sure. Anytime.”
I dropped the connection before he could. The stairs creaked as Ex walked down them, his steps painful and slow. The coffee smelled a little strong and I didn’t even have sugar to cut it.
“You didn’t tell him,” Ex said.
“It was Aubrey. He answered the phone.”
“Ah.”
His clothes from yesterday were ruined, but he’d had an extra set in his bag. I was going to have to figure out if this place had a laundry, or if the life of an international demon hunter was about to involve washing my underwear in the sink. I supposed I could call my lawyer, have her arrange a personal shopper to bring me everything I wanted wrapped up in gold lamé. That was supposed to be the charm of too much money, wasn’t it? Never having to worry about anything.
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