M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

And Chapin, flat-eyed and empty. I stopped in front of him, the girl hugged close to my chest. I was starting to shiver and my earlobes hurt. He looked away. I took the girl inside.

UNFORTUNATE GOATEE’S name was Alexander. Ex rode with him and Chapin in the big, beat-up Yukon all the way back to the hospital in Taos. I followed along in Ex’s rented sports car. The others stayed back at camp, tending their wounds, fixing the broken doors, soothing Dolores with hot soup, and, I hoped, calling her mother to come take her home now that the worst was over. The good guys had won, demon driven out, like that. Go us.

I cranked up the music, singing along to the songs I knew by heart, even when I didn’t know the languages they were sung in. I was starting to feel the effects of the fight. When I got ready for bed that night, I’d have a bumper crop of new bruises. I was pretty sure the wind demon’s initial strike had cracked a rib, but I wouldn’t be positive until morning. If I could turn to the left, I’d be fine. If not … well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d broken a rib. I pretty much knew the routine.

The drive seemed shorter going back into town. Maybe it was just the sense of going back to someplace known. The steering wheel buzzed against my hands, the music celebrated and mourned. Pine trees gave way to smaller, twisted piñons. The dead grass at the side of the road lay buried in drifts of melted and refrozen snow. I grinned at the landscape—distant canyon, snow-clad mountains, pale sun in endless blue sky.

The fight had released something in me. Ever since the night in London when I’d realized that my so-called magical protections might be significantly creepier than I’d thought, I’d been waiting for the thing in my body to take over. I’d been second-guessing every move that I made—had I really reached for the salt, or had it been something else controlling my hand? I’d thought that when it happened, if it happened, it would be the creepiest thing ever. the event itself, since I’d been through that before plenty of times, but what it meant. Now that it had happened, I was all relief and rib pain.

When we got near Taos proper, my cell phone chirped. When we stopped at a traffic light, I checked the log. Chogyi Jake had called again, twice, and left voice mail both times. I’d listen later, when I wasn’t driving. I turned right, following the Yukon through the press of ski-racked SUVs and expensive trucks.

At the hospital, three men in white uniforms and a woman in green scrubs transferred Alexander onto a gurney. The long, deep cut wasn’t bleeding so much as starting to weep a little blood, but the wounded priest was able to move his arm a little and he was trying to speak. I took those as good signs. Chapin stood next to a doctor whose face made me think of India even though her accent was pure Boston. The sun was already edging down toward the western horizon, pulling our shadows out long and reddish. It wasn’t quite four o’clock yet. The night was going to be long.

Once Alexander got rushed inside, Ex pulled himself back into the Yukon and drove it off toward the parking spaces. Chapin and the doctor exchanged a few last words, and the doctor went back inside. Chapin huddled down in his clothes. He looked older than he had before, his skin gray, his eyes bloodshot where they weren’t bloody. And there was something else. It was in the way he held his shoulders and the timbre of his voice. Anger maybe. Or fear.

“I will stay here,” Chapin said. “Until we are sure he is stable. Xavier says the two of you will find rooms in the city. We will … regroup, yes? Once we have had opportunity to finish here, we will regroup.”

“All right,” I said.

We stood silently. In the distance, I heard the Yukon’s door crash open and closed, and then the almost subliminal sound of Ex getting in the sports car. An old man in a bright green parka walked out of the ER, speaking Spanish into a cell phone. Neither Chapin nor I moved. I figured that was as close as I was going to get to permission to speak.

“So this stuff I’ve been seeing? The unnatural fighting and weird powers? I’m thinking it’s not just a psychological issue,” I said.

“I see your point,” he said.

“So we can skip the shrink?”

“We can.”

I never went skiing when I was a kid. Other kids in school did, but only the rich ones. They’d come back from vacation talking about exotic places like Lake Tahoe and Park City. A couple of kids from church—Jacob and Stacey Corman, putting too fine a point on it—always made sure to have a little sunburn when they came back to school after Christmas break. Snowburn, they called it. They’d show off their pinked skin like peacock feathers until their mother got angry, started lecturing about the sin of pride, and threatened never to take them again.

Taos was apparently just the sort of place the Cormans went to. Finding a place to stay was harder than I’d expected, and Christmas vacation was exactly the problem. A few nights were easy. An open-ended stay-until-whenever widtd running up against previous bookings pretty fast. Jacob and Stacey were making my world less pleasant one more time. Ex and I sat in the Mercedes outside the hospital, the engine purring away just to keep the heater going, while I made a series of increasingly frustrating calls. In the end, I gave up and called my lawyer’s private line. She put me on hold for ten minutes and came back with an address halfway up to the ski valley where I now had a rental condo waiting. When she asked if I needed anything else, I almost laughed. I fed the address into the GPS.

“You want to drive?” Ex asked.

“Really?” I said.

He nodded.

“Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”

“I’ve had better days,” he said, and handed me the key.

We traded places and headed out. Going up the mountain was also more of an adventure than I’d expected. The road was narrow, twisting through the high mountains. It had been plowed and salted, but the ice and snow still clung to the blacktop in places. The falling-rock signs were reinforced by the occasional basketball-sized boulder at the roadside. I turned the heater up to full blast and thumbed on the heating pads hidden in the seats. Ex laid back in the dark leather of the passenger’s seat, eyes closed. He looked pale, and I thought he might be sleeping except that when I hit a bump or rough patch, he hissed a little under his breath.

At about nine thousand feet above sea level, there was a turnoff marked by a tiny, unreadable wooden sign. I waited for three sets of SUV headlights and one pickup truck to pass, then made the left turn and headed up the hill. The road twisted and turned among the high, snow-laden pine trees. I could feel the ice in the way the tires struggled to keep their grip. I more than half thought the last little rise was going to strand me or send me backward, but the little car made it. I pulled up to Spirit House Condominiums. It was five closely built structures huddling close enough to make good use of the limited space but with the distance to leave each one private. There were lights on in four of them. The fifth was dark, the windows looking out at the night like blind eyes.

I pulled into the carport, gravel and snow crunching under the wheels. Ex looked ragged enough that I left him in the car while I scouted the place. The wind had been cold before. Here, it was frigid. I left the headlights on while I went out, exploring the front entrance. It had a little alcove, a thick wooden archway, and a bench where people could put on or take off complicated footware. The door was locked, but a key hung from the knob by a thick rubber band. I tried it. It worked. Low security.