“Actually, you can’t,” Ex said. “You know how to channel your will. You’ve worked puts like this before. This isn’t something I can do without experienced people at all four points on the circle.”
He was looking at me. His eyes were blue as gas flame. I could feel him wanting me to understand something, and if I hadn’t been up all night, if I hadn’t been wrung out four times in the course of a single day, if there had been any neurotransmitter left in my brain, I might have gotten it on my own. As it was, I needed a prompt.
“Ah. What exactly did you need this guy to do?” David asked.
I looked at him. Eager, worried, guilty over the part he’d played, and frightened of the beast he’d set loose. He was the only one here without any experience. He was the only one who could take Declan Souder’s place. All I had to do was talk him into it. Now. Before Chogyi Jake died.
Lie to him, I thought. Tell him something that puts him in the box. Tell him we need a focus for our energy, that we need someone to hold the bones just right, something. Anything. Just put him in the place and get this done. An emotion I didn’t recognize was rushing through me. I felt light. Unmoored. My chest was widening from inside, and it was wrapped around Chogyi Jake and the chance of getting him upstairs. I thought for a moment this was some new kind of panic, and then I recognized it. It was hope. It was relief. As sure as kittens in springtime, I was about to kill David Souder, and I was grateful.
I felt something spiritual give way with an almost physical click. I knew something in me was broken, that it was going to be broken for a very long time. And I knew I wasn’t going to lie to David.
“He was going to go into the coffin,” I said. “We were going to drive the rider into him, then seal the coffin and bury it again. Put it back where it was before.”
David rocked back on his heels like I’d struck him. His gaze went to each of us in turn. He tightened his grip on the shotgun.
“It was what your grandfather did,” I said. “It was his life’s work. You saw the thing that came out of that hole. You’ve been living with it in your head for over a year now. You know what it’s capable of.”
“You were going to kill him?”
“Bury him alive,” I said. “It’s called an interment binding. And it might be the only chance we have of stopping this thing.”
“But—”
“David,” I said. My voice was soft, but I could hear the steel in it. “If there were another way, I swear I’d take it. But you let this thing out. You’re the only one who can put it back. I need you to be as strong as Grandpa Del was. I need you to be as brave.”
He looked at me, his eyes filling with horror and panic.
“Please,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”
“What . . .” He swallowed and tried again. “What would I need to do?”
“Lie back,” Ex said. “Close your eyes. We do the rest. But you don’t come out alive, and it won’t be peaceful.”
David snorted, a deep sound, like a bull facing the toreador. His jaw slid forward a degree and his eyes narrowed.
“You can make this right,” I said. “We’ll help you make this right.”
He was quiet for a few seconds that lasted days. When he spoke, his voice belonged to a smaller man.
“Good thing I never had kids,” he said and tried a smile.
“Give me the gun,” I said.
He looked down at his hand like he was surprised to see it there. For a moment, I didn’t know what he was going to do. Then he took it by the barrel and held the stock out to me. It was heavier than I’d expected.
“Grandpa Del could do it, right?” he said. “I can’t see doing less.”
“Thank you, David,” I said.
He nodded, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. I took his hand, and he let me lead him down into the darkness.
THE OPEN coffin lay in its shallow grave, the lid ready at its side. Ex set up the ancient-looking, hissing lanterns around the ruined ward, their filaments glowing a perfect white, too bright to look at. The shadows they cast on the walls didn’t flicker. Grandpa Del’s bones lay just to one side among the rotten concrete and fragile rebar. Ex murmured words that might have been Latin or something older over his handful of salvaged nails. His improvised hammer was a nine-inch length of galvanized pipe. Aubrey and Kim let bits of pale dirt fall from their hands, creating the circle like they were making a sand drawing. The broken boxes and twisted machinery stood in mute witness as David lowered himself carefully to stand in the coffin. It looked too narrow for him until he lay down to try it. Then it only looked almost too narrow.
He saw me watching him and grinned.
“I’m used to it,” he said. “My first car was a VW Bug.”
I laughed. Chogyi Jake was at the top of the stairs, still unconscious. Still breathing. We were moving as quickly as we could.
“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Chances are pretty good I’d have killed myself anyway. If you hadn’t come, I’d still be back at my place, thinking I was crazy, right?”
“Probably,” I said.
“So at least this way, it’s not like nothing good comes out of it, right?”
Tell yourself that, I thought. For ten more minutes, tell yourself this is something besides hellishly unfair.
“You’re a good man,” I said.
“Hey. Jayné. Could you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
He sat up, his arms wrapping his knees. He looked like he was in a rowboat too small to reach the shore.
“Alexis. My ex. Tell her I did something real. Tell her I made a difference.”
There was a history in those words. A boy who’d met a girl, fallen in love or at least in bed. A wedding that was supposed to end with happily ever after and wound up in divorce court instead. Those were the bones of it, but they carried the flesh of a life on them. There had been a first time they’d met, a first kiss, a first fight. Maybe he was thinking right now of the moment when everything might have gone one way but instead fishtailed into another, or of the one thing he’d said that he regretted. The last kiss. The last thing he’d said to her.
All of those details that made it his life, his history, were about to be wiped away.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “Promise.”
Ex surveyed the circle of dirt, his expression sour. He didn’t find anything to object to. I watched David watching him, and I could see the fear in his eyes like fish swimming under ice.
“We should do this soon,” David said. “Before I chicken out.”
“You won’t,” Ex said. “You’re too strong for that. It’s going to be okay.”
“I’m going to die,” David said.
“We all are,” Ex said. “Sooner or later. This just means you’ll see God’s face before I get to.”
David blinked and managed an amused smile, then twisted in the narrow space, digging at his sock. A moment later, he handed my paper talisman up to Ex.
“Hey, if I’m supposed to get possessed, I probably shouldn’t have this, eh?”
Ex’s face went grayer. I wondered what would have happened if David hadn’t remembered it.
“No, probably not,” Ex said.
“Okay,” Kim said. “I think we’re ready.”
“You should lie down, David,” Ex said.
Slowly, David lay back, folding his arms over his chest. I heard Ex whispering a benediction as he made the sign of the cross in the air. Then the four of us took our places at the cardinal points. Ex began chanting. Kim and Aubrey and I came in one at a time, like kids singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The comparison struck me as hilarious, and I had to bring my focus back to the moment before I took out nos dico vobis and put in life is but a dream.
I couldn’t tell if the shuddering was the power of the qi flowing among us, the rider becoming suddenly aware of us, or my own exhausted body. My eyes closed, and I tried to keep my intention tightened down to a single point. The flutter of up-al
l-night random thoughts was my enemy. I couldn’t afford to worry about Chogyi Jake or the guards we’d hurt. I couldn’t wonder what Oonishi was doing, or whether Eric had planned to do something like this, or what I was going to do about changing my ringtone. There could only be the words, cycling around all of us.
I became vaguely aware that I could feel the others: Kim and Ex and Aubrey. I knew that Kim’s left knee was aching badly. I knew that Ex was suffering a headache that he hadn’t mentioned. They were becoming part of my own body, unfamiliar and immediate and close. I’d never been part of a circle like this before, and the intimacy of it was startling. I felt Kim’s desperate hope. Aubrey’s guilt and confusion and discomfort at his psychic proximity to Kim and me at the same time, and I knew when he felt my amusement, remembering what he’d said about not liking the idea of a menáge à trois. And Ex. His mind was a furnace: powerful, unnerving sexual desire; guilt as black as ink; and a bone-deep resolve that felt like a mother bear ready to kill and die for her cubs. Our minds slid into one another, the barriers between us softening, weeping, being erased in the whirlpool of our combined intention. We reached out for it.
And then we had it.
The rider’s howl was inaudible and deep as a well. Its rage raked cold teeth against us, tearing at our minds. It gathered itself and launched a furious assault on the combined mind we had created. I pushed back, or Ex did. Or Kim. It was a distinction without a difference. We shifted, pulling the rider down. I felt the words of the chant roughening in my throat. I wanted to cough, but I didn’t dare to. My spine and knees ached, and I was sweating like I’d been put in a fire. It had to go down, into the coffin, into David’s waiting flesh. I bared my teeth, forcing out the words. My jaw hurt. The rider didn’t move. I felt it floating in the air that was either graveyard-still or hurricane-whipped or both. I knew that if I opened my eyes, it would be there, just like in the dream. Its inhuman fingers brushed against me, grabbing at me, trying to break my concentration. We could not make it move.
And then it slipped. It caught itself almost immediately, but it slipped. I felt the surge of joy from all of us, and our gestalt mind redoubled its effort. The rider threw images at us like stones. Worms crawling through living flesh. Fire-charred bodies. A naked woman stretched upon a cross while a pale man did something unspeakable. The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils. Of burning skin. The smell of the vast, cold ocean, lifeless as a desert, and more hostile. A woman’s voice, soft and throaty, offered obscene things and a man’s low growl threatened force. Every time it came too close to a weakness, every time one of us recoiled in fear or shame, the others flowed in. The rider could have broken any of us, but together we were more than four fragile, imperfect, wounded people.
Together, we were Legion.
The rider slipped again, and for a moment, David was in the unreal struggle too. I heard him crying out in the old civil defense ward, miles away from me and close enough to touch. He fought, pushing the rider away in mindless panic. I felt him drowning in the filth and ice water; I heard his heels kicking against the bottom of the open casket.
It’s all right, we thought to him. This is the worst part. It’s almost over.
David’s scream was despair and fear. Something in our group mind reached out, and the rider recoiled. I felt David grow calm and his resistance fade. The rider slid into his flesh, unable to find a handhold. The silence was so sudden, it seemed loud. My eyes fluttered open.
The ward looked just the same. The lanterns were still glowing. The ruined boxes and machinery stood where they had been. Tremors shook my body, seeming to start in my belly and grow more violent as they radiated out my arms and legs. Aubrey, across the pit from me, was soaked with sweat. Kim’s eyes were still closed, and I didn’t need the magic of the ceremony to feel the raw exhaustion in her. It was too much like my own. Ex only seemed a little more drawn than usual, a little harder. I could still feel my connection to them. I knew that if I pushed my awareness to the back of my mind, I could find my way into them all, and the knowledge was as eerie as it was comforting.
“Not done yet,” Ex said. “Almost.”
I risked a glance down. David Souder was gone, and something demonic was staring out from him. His eyes glowed a cold blue. The light spilled out his nose. When he opened his mouth, his lips forming threats I could understand but not hear, his mouth was bright, his teeth sharp and glasslike, his tongue tar-black and unnaturally mobile. His fingers had sprouted extra joints. I knew that the man was in there, trapped behind those evil, luminous eyes, but I couldn’t see him. All sense of David vanished, and the Beast Rahab, Angel of Shells, was in his place. Its presence still pressed against me like the chill of an opened door in the dead of winter. The sigils and marks that lined the coffin swirled with something that wasn’t quite light. The prison was ready. All we had to do was close the door.
“Help me,” Ex said, but not to me.
Aubrey rose to his knees, and together he and Ex lifted the black plank of the coffin lid. Gingerly, they positioned it over the silent, screaming man.
It almost worked.
I couldn’t tell which of them slipped, only that the lid twisted, and Ex bent hard, trying to catch it. Kim leaned forward, putting out her hand to steady him. Her leg went out behind, balancing her and scraping a break in the thin line of dirt. I felt the connection to the others vanish. With a shriek, David’s spirit-ridden body boiled up out of the coffin, wide, meaty hands batting Ex away like they were slapping a fly. Kim screamed and Aubrey dropped the coffin lid.
The circle was broken, and the beast was loose.
TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t think, didn’t consider. I dropped back a few inches behind my eyes, and my body leaped forward, shoulder hitting the rider’s side. It was like trying to tackle a wall, but the haugsvarmr stumbled. I swung around, driving my elbow in toward the small of its back, but the rider had already moved. It wore David’s body like a shawl. I could see the force of its will making the air shimmer, heat waves off a highway, and I noticed again that David was really a very large man. Ex scrambled backward, cursing furiously. Kim and Aubrey stood caught between fleeing and fighting. The rider’s hand shot out, grabbing me by the head, lifting me, and tossing me across the room like I weighed about a pound. I landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me.
While I tried to sit up, the rider turned its head, slowly taking each of us in. David’s flesh was changing under its influence: the skin taking on a starlit glow, the mouth starting to protrude. I’d seen riders transform their mounts before, the spirit’s nature curdling skin and blood and bone. This was no different. When it spoke, its voice was soft, friendly, and genteel. It made my skin crawl.
“So close, daughter-thing,” it said. “You were so close. Do you know what I thought? That you’d wrap yourself in the Mark of Forcas and hide until I slipped my leash.”
It laughed, a low and rueful sound. Its eyes shifted across the room where it had thrown me, its gaze skittering off me without quite managing to connect. I felt a stab of profound cold at the small of my back. It still couldn’t see me. I tried not to move, afraid that any sound would give me away.
“I looked through every pair of eyes I could find in this piss-pot Carcer, and then I turned away. I thought you were my second problem. And you were doing this. It was good. Oh, it was very good. I am all admiration and fear. Trembling,” it said, laughter in its voice. It pulled one leg up from the grave hole and onto the shattered floor. David’s jeans shredded when the rider bent its knee. It was getting bigger.
Ex crouched, and the rider turned to fix him with its gaze. It moved so quickly, it seemed like a jump cut made real.
“I know what you’ve got on those nails, boy,” it said. “Come close to me with them, and I’ll put them through your eyes.”
“Leave him alone,” I said. The rider’s attention snapped back to me, homing in on the sound of my voice.
“You care about the meat? She did too.
” It stepped up, the concrete crumbling under its weight. “We don’t have to do this, little one. You’ve fought bravely and well. I respect you. But it’s over now. You can see it’s over.”
It took a step toward me, and my body moved, curling over until I was on toes and fingertips, tight as a spring. Aubrey and Kim were on the far side of the grave. He had a length of pipe in his hand: Ex’s improvised hammer. Don’t be stupid, I thought, trying to press the words through the air and into his brain.
“There are only two ways this ends,” it went on. “You enter into a pact with me, or I bind you. Ally or slave, daughter-thing. It makes no difference to me.”
It was lying. The difference between pact and binding was the difference between contract law and slavery. If it was offering up a pact with me, it wasn’t sure of the fight’s outcome. I grabbed onto the thought that there might be some hope, something I could do that would defeat the beast. I didn’t know what that was.
The rider took another step toward me. Aubrey handed the pipe to Kim and drew in a deep breath. The rider’s head snapped up a degree, and then back toward Aubrey. The glowing eyes went round, and Aubrey’s mouth opened wider than I thought possible.
The Oath of the Abyss rang out, Aubrey’s soul forged into a weapon and shaking loose from his flesh. The only other time I’d heard it, he’d been saving my life. The rider stumbled, glowing fragments of its flesh skirling out from it like fireflies. It bared its teeth and screamed back, the roar of its voice drowning out even the most powerful magic any of us knew. The walls shook and dust swirled down from the ceiling. In the lamplight, it looked almost like snow.
Aubrey hadn’t knocked the rider out, but he had knocked it back. This was my opportunity. Maybe my only one.
I felt myself jump, landing hard on the rider’s back. It staggered forward as I wrapped my arm around its huge neck and squeezed. With my ears still ringing, I felt its chuckle more than I heard it. My legs locked onto the thing’s back, holding it as close as a lover. Its skin shifted and bumped against me. I tightened my grip and hauled, fighting to cut off its air. If it needed air. My shoulders ached with the effort, and I felt something in me begin to weaken.
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