Killing Rites

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 glorious 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.

Light the gray of twilight spilled down the concrete steps. I could see a bright line where the cellar doors stood open, the white of the sky. The crows called to one another. I lay on the floor, stunned. Chapin stood beside the bulb, hard shadows marking his face.

“You will wait here, beast,” he said. “We will return with rites less pleasant than those we have employed until now. This woman will not be lost to you.”

I swallowed. I wanted to say they were wrong, that it was me and not the rider, to for Christ’s sake let me go.

“Ex,” I said. “You have to trust me.”

He crouched down, his head on the same level as mine. Distress was drawing lines in his face. Carving him.

“This is how they work, Jayné,” he said. “This is how they trick you into fighting on their side. Against us. Against me.”

“Why?” I could hear the whine in my voice, and I hated it. ̴Why don’t you believe me?”

“If you had a fever and it made you hallucinate, believing your visions were real wouldn’t help you. It’d be letting the fever win. The riders trick people. It’s what they do. And I won’t let the rider win. Not with you.”

He was so certain that he was being my strength when I was weak, my protection when I was vulnerable. He couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t reach him. He couldn’t even see the betrayal.

“Don’t turn off the light,” I said. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”

“I never will,” Ex said even before Chapin nodded. I closed my eyes, listening to the soft footsteps. At least one of them was limping. That was all I’d managed.

The cellar doors creaked when they closed, and the voices of the crows grew fainter. I was alone and numb. I felt myself start to shiver like it was happening to somebody else. I didn’t feel anything, not hope, not despair, not even betrayal. My heel had started bleeding again. I was thirsty.

In the harsh light and black shadows, I took inventory of myself. Feet all messed up. Bruises on my arms and hands. Cracked rib. Filthy hair. Smelled of puke.

I rose to my knees; the chains wouldn’t let me stand all the way up. The light from the cellar doors was gone. Night fallen or just decent weatherstripping. No way to know from here.

I thought about shouting until someone came, telling them that whatever it was had come after Dolores too, but I already knew what Ex and Chapin would say. The thing inside me had latched onto something the girl said, exploited it, used it to fool me. And I didn’t have any way to prove otherwise. No one would believe me.

I was trapped with one rider in my body, and another one no one believed in stalking me like a fox walking around a henhouse. I was in chains, and the only one of my friends who knew where I was had helped put me there. My family didn’t know me anymore. The uncle I’d idolized was an evil bastard. My lover was back together with his wife. My feet were cut bloody and my ribs hurt.

Something shifted in my chest. Not the rider, but an emotional tidal wave rising up from the deepest part of myself. I expected weeping and rage and sorrow as deep as an ocean.

And so the laughter surprised me.

It was a deep sound, rich and warm and rolling, and it didn’t belong to anyone but me. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. When I spoke, my voice sounded hoarse but surprisingly strong.

“Well. Hel-lo, bottom.”

Slowly, I sat up. My mind felt weirdly clear, like I’d just woken up from a long sleep or come back from a good vacation. My body might be trembling-tired, but I could think.

I wasn’t going to be able to get Chapin and his crows to believe me. I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the chains here in the basement and make a run for it. But if I didn’t do something, the sewer-stench thing was going to slip back through whatever chink it had found in Chapin’s defenses, and sneak into my body as the Black Sun’s daughter was ripped out of it. I couldn’t call for help. The cavalry wasṉt coming.

I took one deep breath, and then another, gathering my qi the way Chogyi Jake had taught me. Chogyi Jake, whom I had gone out of my way to exclude from this. Who would have believed me and taken my side if he’d been there. I pushed the thought aside. I didn’t have time for guilt or regret. Might-have-beens later. Right now, I had to focus.

Put on your big-girl panties, Midian said half in my memory, half in my imagination, and tell me what’re you gonna do. Because if you’re getting out of this one, you’re doing it on your own.