M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

“I think that we do not,” Chapin said. I felt a tension between my shoulder blades ease, and at the same time a flush of shame. I hadn’t made it halfway through the first step without freaking out. I wondered how Dolores had done. My guess was better.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You did fine,” Ex said, and I saw Carsey and Miguel exchange a glance I couldn’t parse.

“We know considerably more than we did this morning,” Chapin said. “I do not believe that we have anything more to learn from de Tonquedec. Tell me, Miss Jayné, do you know the word larva ?”

Tomás nodded toward his chair, and I sat down gratefully.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s like maggot, right?”

“Linnaeus took the word for this meaning, but it is an older term than the biological sciences. The word is Latin, and before it became another word for grub, it meant a specter. A spirit. And also—this is telling—a mask. The taxonomist wished to describe the fashion in which the form of the young insect masks its adult body, you see? And so he took a metaphor. He took the word that sorcerers and diabolists had used for centuries before. Do you see?”

“So because it’s young, it’s hard to tell what it’s going to be when it grows up?” I said.

“Yes,” Chapin said. “But more than this, it is subtle. It has hidden itself in you as it grows in power. From what we have observed, we know it to be very potent. But from its actions and nature, we can deduce that it is also still vulnerable. And in this we must take hope.”

“It seems unlikely that it is less than the second hierarchy,” Miguel said. “A prince of Dominions, perhaps.”

“I’d have said a Throne,” Carsey said. “The way it crawled up Chewy like a tree? And the wind demon may have been weakened, but our new visitor still swatted it down like it was a schoolgirl. I’d say it’s a gressil. Possibly sonnenelion, but my first thought’s gressil .”

“No,” Ex said, “Not gressil. I’ve been in her company for over a year, and she hasn’t shown anything like that kind of impurity.”

“Maybe not to you ,” Carsey said.

“There is no room to speculate,” Chapin said, a sharpness in his voice that made Ex and Carsey both go silent. “We will know its name when the time comes. To pretend knowledge we do not have leads us astray.”

“Are we sure it’s bad?” I asked.

Chapin looked at me. I hadn’t realized until just then that he hadn’t been. His eyes were unreadable as stones. In my peripheral vision, Ex looked embarrassed.

“I mean, there are riders and there are riders, right?” I said, willing myself not to talk so fast. “Some of them are stone-cold killers. Some are … not so bad. This one’s never tried to hurt anybody. It stepped in with the wind demon. I mean, it’s probably saved my life six or seven times. Are we sure it’s one of the bad ones?”

“She may have a point,” Miguel said. “When the spirit has taken control from her, it hasn’t acted against her.”

“That we know,” Tamblen said, shrugging his wide shoulders.

“A subtle beast is more dangerous than one with mere brute power,” Tomás said. He sounded smug.

Chapin hadn’t looked away from me. If his gaze was supposed to make me uncomfortable, it was working like gangbusters.

“That it has appeared to help you means only that you remain useful to it,” he said in slow, measured syllables. “If it were a holy thing, it would have no need to hide from us. Do not hope to befriend it. Whatever it seems, in truth it is your enemy.”

“Right,” I said. The tears and trembling I’d thought I’d left in the bathroom threatened to come back. “Point taken.”

Chapin’s smile was warm, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Perhaps it would be best if you permitted us to consult,” he said. “The terminology we employ can be confusing. Alarming, even. And, through no fault of your own, it is not possible to include you fully without also including the enemy.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but my voice was steady. I got up.

“All right. That’s cool. I’ll go get some dinner or something. You guys do your thing and let me know what’s next.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ex said. His chair scraped against the brick floor when he stood.

“I will need you here, Xavier,” Chapin said. “With Alexander in the hospital, we will need you actively involved.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “I can drive myself.”

“Point of clarification,” Carsey said, lifting one finger. “Are we sure it’s a good idea to have her wandering about the world unchaperoned?”

“You know what? You can have me here, or you can not have me here, but I can’t do both. I thought the whole point of sending me and Ex off on our own last night was to see if I’d come back. Well, I did. So forgive the language, but what exactly the fuck do you want from me, buddy?”

ght=" height="0em" width="1em">I was shouting. I didn’t care that I was shouting. I kind of liked that I was shouting. Carsey shifted uncomfortably. Tamblen made a deep chuffing sound, his face darkening. It took a second to figure out he was laughing.

“Don’t think that was the beast talking,” Tamblen said. “Think that was the girl.”

“Agreed,” Ex said. “That was Jayné.”

“She can go,” Chapin said. And then, to me, “Please return to us this evening.”

I got the car key out of Ex’s coat pocket. It wasn’t actually a key at all but a little magnetic fob that made me think of a thumb drive. When I stepped out into the twilight and closed the blue double doors behind me, the cold seemed a little better than it had in the morning. In the west, clouds glowed gold and pink and gray. In the east, the sky was almost black. The little house down the road had its television on again. The Quonset huts were closed and quiet, and the boys who’d been lounging on the street were gone. The clock in the car said it was 5:32, but it felt later. I started the engine, cranked up the heat, and leaned back into the soft leather. Part of me wanted to get on the highway and keep on driving south until I hit someplace warm. Brazil, maybe. I was almost sure the part that wanted that was me. Almost.

I didn’t know where I was going, but the GPS had a menu option to find nearby restaurants. It cycled for almost a minute before the map pulled back and a half dozen red dots appeared on the face of northern New Mexico. The closest was a cluster of fast-food joints fifteen minutes away. They were at the highway, and pretty much screamed truck stop. More dots stippled the map near Taos. One, off almost by itself, was labeled O’Keefe’s. I remembered Carsey saying it was good, tapped the dot, and let the car figure out how to get there.

I didn’t like who I was being. Yelling at Carsey had felt good when I’d done it, but the truth was I hated being on a hair trigger. Once upon a time I’d been calmer. Less anxious all the time. Less likely to freak out.

I wanted that Jayné back, and I didn’t know how to get her.

Twenty minutes later, O’Keefe’s was a light in the darkness. A gravel-and-ice parking lot with a half dozen trucks in it. An old sign painted in green and gold and lit with the kind of exterior light you can get from Wal-Mart for twenty bucks. When I got out of my car, an ancient black Labrador appeared at my side, wagging and sniffing at me. The wooden stairs that rose to the front door were warped and uneven. A girl who could have been fifteen greeted me when I walked in the door and pointed toward a table at the back. The walls were wood and hung with hunting trophies and old rock posters: Rush 2112 tacked up next to a bear’s stuffed head. The tables looked like they’d been gathered from estate sales, no two the same. The chairs were all random sets too, and the heat came from a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. Six men in Day-Glo yellow safety jumpsuits sat around a table next to mine, speaking Spanish. Two old men sat together across the room, leather cowboy hats hung on the backs of their chairs, and talked in low voices. Apart from the world’s youngest waitress, I was the only woman there.