“Stone strong and waver-free,” I said. “That’s me in a nutshell.”
He patted me gently on the back of the neck as he rose to take his place, and I tried to smile. I felt like I was about to jump out of an airplane. My chest was tight, and I didn’t want to breathe so much as pant. The place at the back of my neck where Tomás had touched me tingled, and the small of my back where the tattoo was itched like I’d sat in poison oak. I had to put it all aside.
I knelt on the floor more or less where I’d first seen Dolores. The six priests were all around me: Father Chapin in front of me, Ex to his right, Carsey to his right. Tamblen was directly behind me, and Tomás and Miguel to either side. We’d covered the windows, but the midday sun pressed in at the edges. The only other light in the room came from the single white candle. A single stick of incense gave the room a sweet smell. The bricks under me were cold. I wondered whether a space heater would have been too secular for the occasion. It seemed like it might be worth trying.
The consecrated ceremonial robe was rough cotton cut like a sack, and since I was only wearing it and the medallion-enhanced Ace bandage, I was pretty cold. I stared at the still, yellow flame, focusing myself like a meditation. The energy of magic—my qi, my soul, whatever name it goes by—was narrowed to that one bright spot. I could barely see the faces of the priests past it. When Father Chapin lifted his palms toward me, they were pale spots in the darkness.
He began reciting the names of saints, the others echoing him. After the first five or six, the flame began to shift back and forth—toward him and away and toward him again like seaweed in the waves. I’d been part of magical rituals before, and I could feel the combined will of men around me starting to cohere. By the time Father Chapin ran out of saints, the air around me was about equal parts oxygen and raw magic. Time seemed to stretch. I didn’t know how long they’d been chanting, but the candle had burned lower than just a few minutes could explain. I felt disoriented and had to work to pull my qi back into place.
“I come in the name of Christ, and in His holy name I command you, beast. Reveal yourself!”
It was like a bus speeding by, missing me by inches. The combined will of the men pounded past me, violent and intense and hot as a burning coal. In my gut, just below my navel and about three inches in, something shifted. Writhed. I gritted my teeth.
“Reveal yourself!”
Another hit.
Come on, I thought, pressing the words toward the thing living inside me. It’s going to happen anyway. Fighting’s just going to make it hurt worse.
“Reveal yourself!”
The candle flame in front of me ballooned, fire bursting up and out. By the light of it, I could see Chapin’s face clearly. He was smiling like this was exactly what he’d wanted. I felt my fists clench, but I hadn’t clenched them. The growl came from low in my throat, and it sounded like despair.
“In the name of God,” Father Chapin said, and the others repeated it. The words had a pressure like diving too deep underwater. My ears ached. “In the name of God, I command you. Reveal your name!”
“Why are you doing this to me?” my voice said without me.
“Reveal your name!”
“I am innocent.”
Father Chapin shook his head. The darkness around us weighed in against me, and I knew that whatever I was feeling, the rider was suffering a hundred times worse than I was.
“Innocence is the claim you make. What is your name?”
I felt my jaw clench. I had the sense that the rider had already made a mistake, already given up more than it had meant to. The candle sputtered, the flame fading to a pale blue sphere with a glowing ember at its center. I wondered, when this was over, whether I’d ever dream about the desert again. Was losing that emptiness and stillness part of the price of being just Jayné?
“Reveal your name!” they all shouted together. I could feel each of them. Chapin was like a strap of leather, hard and unforgiving. Carsey was like a knife, cold and focused and precise as mathematics. Tomás’s will was wide and deep and strong, like a pillow over the face. Tamblen—strong, silent Tamblen—felt like a request, the weakest of all of them, but implacable and patient and unbreakable. Miguel’s voice had the raw tenacity and violence of a bare-knuckle fighter’s jab.
And Ex.
In the midst of the riot of personality, I felt Ex. His guilt and his longing, his deep internal pain carried in silence and forged into a weapon. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of a girl who looked a little like me: dark hair cut in a bob, mouth a little wider than mine, cheeks a little more generous. Isabel, I thought. He was using Isabel, and I realized t could follow his lead. I brought the night in Grace Memorial, the guilt and horror of killing someone who didn’t deserve to die, and I wrapped myself around it. It was the most painful, terrible thing I ever experienced, and I held it like a knife so hot it burned me.
“Reveal your name!” they shouted again, beating at the rider. I stabbed at it too, adding myself to the assault. The thing inside my skin shrieked, but only I could hear it.
Something cold brushed against my neck, surprising me. I smelled sewage. What the hell was that?
“Reveal your name!”
“I am my mother’s daughter,” the rider said, almost too softly to hear. But Chapin had been waiting for it. He pounced on the words, pointing a finger at me—at it—as if in accusation.
“That is the path by which you have taken this woman. Reveal your name!”
There, trapped in my skin with the rider like we were sewn in the same sack, I lost my balance. The bus didn’t miss me this time. The room spun around me. A part of me that wasn’t my body hurt. The sewage smell was getting worse.
“Beast, in the name of God and all His saints, in the name of Christ and His apostles, I command you! Surrender your name!”
My head lifted, and my body stood. I felt the effort it took, like a giant rising against a mountain of chains. When it spoke, my voice trembled with defiance and fear.
“I am Sonnenrad, the Voice of the Desert,” the rider said. “I am the Black Sun and the Black Sun’s daughter.”
Silence fell on the room. I saw triumph in Father Chapin’s expression.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”
Chapter Eleven
I’d seen exorcisms before, mostly as performed by Ex going it alone in the field. I hadn’t understood how difficult the rites he’d performed were. He was the expert. I made sure he had what he needed, and he did the rest. If afterward he’d seemed a little sapped, he hadn’t complained about it. So I had figured that, taxing as it might be, it couldn’t be that punishing.
Bad call.
I had thought forcing the rider to give us its name had been bad, and it had been. The next part was worse. The combined will of the six men around me was a constant source of pain, even though the burning and nausea and disorientation I felt was just the spillover of what the rider was absorbing.
“… qui ambulavit super aspidem et basiliscum, qui conculcavit leonem et draconem, ut discedas ad hoc hominae …”
After the second hour, time had stopped having any meaning. The candle I’d used at the ceremony’s beginning was gone—kicked over and stomped into the brick under my feet. I didn’t remember doing that. My skin felt hot, like I had a bad sunburn. My vocal cords strained with screaming. At one point, the rider had fallen to the ground, writhing in a pain that felt like bathing in acid secondhand. The fall left my lip bleeding, and the taste of blood hadn’t left my mouth since.
“Ecce Crucem Domini, fugite, partes adversae!” Chapin shouted, waving a crucifix at me. It was enchanted like the medallion that still burned and blistered my arm. The rider couldn’t look at it.
“Stop this,” it cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what this means!”
The Latin kept on beating at it, the syllables a medium for the power behind it. It didn’t feel holy. It didn’t feel like the cleansing power of a gl
orious God. It felt like violence, but I’d put in for this, and I was going to see it through. Caught in the space behind my eyes, I pressed myself hard as a stone and endured.
For what seemed like weeks, the rider didn’t shift. It just took the abuse like a mountain in a windstorm. But slowly, at first by degrees so small I could barely feel it, they started to pull it away. It felt like someone ripping off a scab. Something I’d always thought was part of me started to ache and then burn and then—painfully—to lift at the edges.
And once it started losing, it kept losing. I felt its frenzy, its frantic search for something in me to hold on to. I kept my will tucked tight, small and safe, and put everything I could spare into pushing it away.
When it came for me, I knew we were close to the end.
The desert had changed. The stones bore long, black scorch marks. The sky, usually vast and blue, was hazy with smoke and a shining curtain like the aurora that hurt to look at. We stood there, the two of us. We were both bleeding from the lip, but mine was red where hers was white. She held her hand out to me, begging me to take it. And despite everything, I wanted to. I put my hands behind me, locking my fingers around the opposite wrist. The wail of despair wrenched itself out of the desert to the room where my physical body shook against the floor like someone in a seizure. For a moment, I could see it all at once, and I knew the rider was losing its grip.
I felt it fall away. There was space between us. The rite was going to work. It was going to be cast out. It was going to die.
The mixture of elation and regret was the last thing I felt before the new attack came.
I smelled sewage again. Something touched my belly, wet and soft, and I wasn’t sure if it was in the desert or on the brick floor. I tried to sit up, but then I wasn’t anywhere. The rider screamed, but it didn’t use my throat. No one else could hear it.
Something foul slid into my mouth. Not my real mouth, but mine all the same. It tasted like salt and rot. The outhouse stench was overpowering. I choked, and the thing pushed deeper into my throat. It wasn’t just the two of us. There was something else.
Something else was in there with us.
Another rider.
“Stop!” I shouted. I did, with my own flesh. Chapin ignored me. The desert spasmed, and the other me was falling away, her hand out toward me. “I said stop! It’s me! Jayné! Something’s wrong!”
“I adjure you, ancient serpent—
em"eight="0em" width="1em">“I said something’s wrong! You have to stop!”
The thing in my throat thickened, pulsed once. I couldn’t speak. My throat froze open, and I heard myself retching. It was shutting me off, silencing me. With my real eyes, I looked up at Ex. His palms were toward me like he was taking heat from a campfire. Look at me, I thought. See what’s happening. Save me.
He didn’t. A sense of Novocain-like numbness was spreading from my mouth out through my body. For a strange moment, I was in control of my arms and legs, but not my breath or neck. The other thing—the invader— pushed out, trying to fill me. I felt a sense of triumph, deep and powerful and unfamiliar and threatening as a strange man’s cough in my bedroom.
I reached out to the desert, to my other self. I felt my rider grab on to me, and I pulled her in with all my strength. The numbness faded. The foul smell receded. In my real body again, I rolled onto my side and vomited. The cold, hard bricks under me felt as comfortable as a feather bed. It took me a while to realize that no one was shouting in English or Latin. I looked up. They were all around me. The sunlight pushing in around the window shades glowed gold and red. Sunset colors. We’d been going at this hammer and tongs for hours. No wonder I felt like this. I tried to talk, coughed, and tried again.
“Different rider. It was trying to get in me while the other one got pushed out.”
“No, Miss Jayné,” Chapin said. His voice was almost as weary as mine. “There was not. Satan has a thousand tricks. We were making great progress. We might very well have succeeded, had your will not broken.”
I forced myself up to sitting. My muscles ached and trembled. I was cold.
“Didn’t break,” I said. “There was another one.”
“Not actually possible,” Carsey said. “You’re in a circle of exorcists, in a consecrated building, and you’ve got the Mark of St. Francis of the Desert clapped up against your arm. You’re in more danger of being eaten by an alligator than being attacked by a demon you didn’t bring in here yourself.”
I hung my head. My ribs hurt when I breathed too deeply. One of the scabs on my feet had ripped open during the rite; my right leg from knee to ankle was red with blood. What he said made sense. Of course there couldn’t be another rider. Of course the thing inside me would do anything it could to keep its grip on me, to survive. Of course Satan had a thousand tricks.
And yet …
“It’s okay,” Ex said. “We’ll get it next time.”
“Yes,” Chapin said, with a long sigh. “We will take a few minutes to recover ourselves. Then we will begin again.”
“We won’t,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s going on here. Until I’ve got a handle on it, we’re stepping back.”
“That isn’t an option,” Chapin said.
“Really is,” I said.
He knelt by me. His eyes were calm and iplacable. He put his hand on mine, and he felt icy.
“The beast inside you, Miss Jayné? It is a Prince of Hell. That the Black Sun has spawned at all is of great significance. And that you have brought its larva to me is, I am certain, the benign hand of God. If you had come to me when it was fully mature, I might not have been able to help you.”
I wiped a thread of puke off my lips and tried to find the words to say I wasn’t feeling particularly helped just at the moment, but I couldn’t string the sentence together. And there was some point I wanted to make that flickered in and out of my mind too quickly to quite hold on to. Something about the sewer stench.
“You must not let yourself be tricked by it,” Chapin went on. “You must gather up your will and reject Satan.”
“I can reject Satan just as much as the next guy,” I said. “There’s something else going on here.”
“There is not. It is trying to distract you. You must not let it.”
“Be strong,” Tamblen said from behind me.
“Jayné. Please,” Ex said. He really was begging. That, more than any of the God-and-Satan talk, made me want to keep going. I didn’t want to let Ex down, embarrass him in front of his friends. I stood up, Chapin helping me to my feet. The white ceremonial shift looked as if I’d rolled through a bar’s parking lot after closing. They were all around me, silent and expectant. Waiting for me. I found Ex. His ponytail was coming loose, white-blond locks of hair draping to his shoulder. I wondered whether Isabel had been in love with him.
I was about to say okay. I was about to start it all up again when the memory flitting around the back of my head clicked into place. I’d been kneeling in the courtyard, gathering the little girl—Dolores—up. She’d said something. There was a bad ghost. It smelled bad. It tried to get inside me.
It had happened before.
“No,” I said. “We’re done here.”
Chapin sighed, his head sinking toward his chest like a defeated warrior. Ex looked pale and stricken. I wanted to touch his arm or hug him or something. I wanted to tell him it was going to be all right.
“I’m sorry, Ex,” was the best I could manage.
“Xavier assured us that your will was strong, but even so, we knew this was a possibility,” Chapin said. “A likelihood, even. I had hoped …”
“Don’t put this on Ex,” I said. “This is my choice.”
“No,” Tomás murmured in his beautiful whiskey voice. “There’s no choice here.”
My throat went tight and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“When your mind is your own again, you will thank us for this,” Chapin said.
A thick
arm wrapped around my throat. Tamblen’s, I thought. The Mark of St. Francis of the Desert, still bound to my arm, flared hot. I tried to twist around, but there were other hands on me, snatching at my arms and legs. Someone grabbed my waist, lifting me off the ground. I thrashed and tried to scream, tried to kick out. The charm on my skin felt like the surface of the sun, and I expected to smell my skin burning.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ex said. “I’m right here, Jayné. I’m right here with you.”
I got a leg free for a second. I hit someone with it, but it was less a kick and more an unfriendly bump. I was one woman who’d just been through the wringer. They were six men. If my rider had been at full strength—not assaulted and bound by magic—I might have stood a chance.
They carried me outside, into the courtyard. The late afternoon air felt like a freezer. Their feet crunched in the snow as if they were walking through Styrofoam. I heard the rattling of a chain, and the creaking of hinges. The cellar doors. They were taking me underground. The wild, irrational certainty that they were going to bury me alive rushed through me, and I fought back with all the strength I had.
I might as well not have bothered.
They carried me down into the musty, cold darkness. I’d never seen the room before, but everything about it was familiar. A wide concrete slab with a wide steel ring set in it. Chains were attached to the ring. I’d helped Ex build something like this before. A prison for the possessed. They put me down, belly to the ground, and Tamblen shoved his knee into the small of my back, pinning me. Someone else—Carsey, maybe—had my elbow locked, bending it back until it hurt. I felt the manacles close around my wrists and ankles. There was power in them that didn’t have anything to do with the strength of the metal.
Ex was beside me, holding my arm steady while someone else fastened the locks. His eyes were hard, his lips a line so thin they could have been drawn on his face with a pen. His eyes flickered up at me and then away. Behind him, I saw the bare earth walls, pale as bone, with a single bulb hanging from a wire in the corner. The concrete slab under me was icy. The steel chains clicked and slid, link over link. The soft, rolling, final sound of the padlocks closing on my restraints was like a nail hammered into a coffin lid. The priests stepped back from me all at once, like it was something they’d rehearsed. They probably had.
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