M L N Hanover: Killing Rites

“The blame?”

“Well, if there’s any blame to be taken. That’s the good thing about guys like Carl. No one misses ’em.”

Carl said something obscene, spitting the words out. Gravel crunched, and the impact drove the shadow forward, slamming it up against the truck. Marisol heard Carl grunting, straining. She’d been around enough fights to recognize the sound of violence. She moved forward, the plastic cough syrup bottle in her hand as if she could use it as a weapon.

The roar was deep, ragged, and inhuman. It rose up like something out of the earth, the sound towering over the desert night. Marisol had heard mountain lions call before. She’d heard the howling of a wolf pack. This was worse. It wasn’t even animal. And it was huge.

The shadow moved once, twice. Carl screamed, his voice almost lost in the overwhelming demonic wail. Marisol dropped to her knees. Even when she’d been alone in the truck with Carl, knowing what was going to happen, even when the shadow man had ripped Carl away, she hadn’t thought to pray. It was that sound. That sound had her hands in front of her, clasped to her chest, and the Our Father pouring from her lips before she knew she was doing it. Santificado sea su nombre. Venga su reino. Hágase to voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo …

It seemed to go on forever. The thunderous voice rose and deepened, washed away the world. When it was gone, all that was left was a wet sound, like someone sucking something, and deep ripping. She’d heard that sound every night when they served ribs: meat coming away from bone. The cold air smelled thick with blood and something else. Shit, maybe. Or death. Or brimstone.

The shadow rose up again. He wiped the back of a hand across his mouth and let out a small, satisfied sigh. Then he bent down again, paused for a second, and reappeared. When he lit the cigte, the lighter’s flame showed his face for the first time. Ruined lips, yellowed eyes, shrunken, gaunt cheeks with the flesh tight across the bone. The front and cuffs of the white button-down shirt were soaked in fresh blood. It was a corpse, walking. It was a vampire. It was the devil.

The flame died. The cherry glowed, just the way it had for Carl. She realized she didn’t hear Carl breathing anymore. That she hadn’t expected to.

“All right, kid. I think we’re about done here. A little messier than I’d hoped, but you know. Fallen world, right?”

Marisol didn’t speak. The thing bent down a third time, grunted, and stood. He had something in his arms. Carl’s body. It was smaller than it should have been, like bits of it were missing. The shadow began to walk off into the desert night. Another star fell overhead.

“Hey!” Marisol said.

The shadow stopped, turned to look back. The cigarette was pointing toward her. She swallowed, loosening the knot in her throat.

“I’m not going to remember any of this? Really?”

“You’re already forgetting, kid.”

“I won’t know I saw you.”

“Nope.”

She nodded. The red of taillights on the horizon. The stars overhead like snowfall.

“Thank you,” she said. “I owe you one, okay?”

The shadow was still for a long moment. A pang of fear touched Marisol. When he spoke, he sounded tired.

“I know you’re not going to remember I said this, but just in case it gets through, lodges somewhere in the back of your head, I’ll give it a shot. You’ve got a bad fucking habit. And if you don’t stop it, it’s going to get you killed. So listen close, okay?”

“Okay,” Marisol said.

The shadow shifted his burden, took a drag on his cigarette. She felt a chill that was only half about the cold of the night. She waited.

“Next time you see someone like him or like me, walk away. You can’t make friends with predators, mi hija. That’s just not how it works.”

“So, Miss Jayné,” Father Chapin said, pronouncing my name correctly: Zha- nay. Either he knew a little French or he’d been coached. “You believe you are … possessed ?”

“Yes,” I said.

He wasn’t what I’d expected. I only knew a few things about him—that he’d been my buddy Ex’s mentor back when Ex had still been studying for the priesthood, that he ran some kind of Jesuit exorcism squad, that he was presently working just south of the Colorado border in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. It had left room for me to imagine some kind of Old West demon hunter. If he’d walked into the ran. &ouse wearing a black duster with a Sergio Leone movie soundtrack playing in the background, it would have been closer. Instead, he looked like someone’s pharmacist or grocery manager. Close-cropped, wiry white hair, a beard that was more a collection of individual whiskers each doing their own thing, and watery blue eyes that were a little red about the rims. He was a small man too, hardly bigger than me. His shirt was dark to match his slacks, and he didn’t even have the Roman collar.

I felt cheated.

He took a sip of the coffee I’d made while we waited for him. It was a little after six at night, and already an hour past sundown. If he was anything like me, the caffeine would keep him awake until bedtime. The pine log burning in the fireplace popped, scattering embers like fireflies inside the black metal grate. Above us, shadows danced between the vigas.

“What leads you to suspect this?” he asked.

“All right,” I said, took a breath, blew it out. “This goes back a little way. About a year and a half ago, my uncle died. Got killed. Murdered. It turned out he’d left me everything he had, and he had a lot. Like more than some small nations a lot.”

“I understand,” Father Chapin said.

“It also turns out that he was involved with riders. Demons, or whatever. We call them riders. Spirits that cross over from Next Door and take people over. Like that. I didn’t know anything about it, so I was flying blind for a while.”

“How did you discover your uncle’s involvement with the occult?”

“There was a guy staying in one of his apartments. He turned out to be a vampire.”

“The varkolâk ,” Ex said. “Midian Clark. I mentioned him before.”

“So there was that,” I said. “But then I started getting these weird powers, you know? Wait. That sounds wrong. I don’t mean like I can fly or turn invisible or anything. It was just that when someone attacked me, I’d win. Even if I really shouldn’t have. That, and everyone tells me I’m sort of invisible to magic. Hard to locate. We figured that Eric—that’s my uncle—had put some kind of protection on me.”

“What did it feel like?”

“What did what feel like?”

“When you felt you should have lost in some conflict, but didn’t.”

“Oh. It’s like my body just takes over. Like I’m watching myself do things, but I’m not really driving that car.”

“I see. Thank you. Go on.”

I looked over at Ex. He was sitting at the breakfast bar, looking down at the couch and overstuffed chairs like a bird on a perch. His white-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail and he wore his usual basic black pseudo-priestwear. Looking at Father Chapin, I could see where his fashion sense came from.

I wished the others were there too—Chogyi Jake and my now ex-boyfriend Aubrey. Kim. The ones who’d been there from the beginning. I wasn’t sure what to say that I had eready told Father Chapin. I felt like I was at the doctor’s office trying to explain symptoms of something without knowing quite what information mattered.

“It isn’t fading,” Ex prompted.

“Yeah. That’s right. It’s not,” I said. “The guys always told me that magic fades, you know? That when someone does some sort of mojo, it takes upkeep, or it starts to lose power. We were looking through my uncle’s things for months, and we never found anything about putting protections on me. We never used any kind of magic to keep them up. But instead of getting weaker, it seems like I’m getting stronger.”