M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

Her eyes were just brown again, but shocked and empty. Her gaze shifted for a few seconds, disoriented and lost, before fixing on me. And I was driving. My body was once again my own. I stepped back, and her skin made a wet squelching sound. Dolores started to say something, and then her face became a mask of disgust. She rolled to her side and vomited. I stroked her hair while Alexander rose slowly to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. I heard the water running in the sink, and by the time Dolores had control over her guts again, he was back, a wet white towel steaming in his hand. Dolores sat up, her arms held out from her body, trying not to touch herself.

“Oh God ,” she said.

“I know,” Alexander said, handing her the towel. “It’s okay, though. It’s over.”

I stepped into the bathroom, grabbed a hand towel, and started scraping the layer of muck off of my body. Ozzie followed me, wagging and smiling. We might smell like Roto-Rooter’s worst night, but we’d won, and she knew it. The version of me in the mirror looked like something from a cheap horror film where they were skimping on the effects. My hair fell over my face. Even after a brisk toweling, my skin looked shiny and slick. My was pale and my eyes bloodshot.

I smiled and my reflection smiled back.

“Nice work,” I said, my voice hoarse.

I heard Alexander and Dolores talking in the front room, but I had the tap on. Their words were lost in the rush of water and the singing of pipes, but the tones of their voices were unmistakable. Alexander thoughtful, gentle, consoling. Dolores frightened and lost, not even crying. The matter-of-fact calm that comes between the blow and the pain. Traumatized. It was over for her now, except that it wasn’t. A year from now, five years, ten. It didn’t matter. There would still be a part of her here. If not in this room, then in this time when her body was not her own, when she’d been soiled to the soul. When she’d watched the same thing happen to her sister and been powerless to stop it.

What had happened to her wasn’t the kind of thing you got over. Whatever girl she had been before the wind demon took her was gone. Whatever girl she might have been if Chapin and his exorcists hadn’t handed her over to the Akaname was gone too. In my memory, I heard Midian Clark. Being a victim gets to be a habit. You stay there too long, you get comfortable. Gets to where a victim is who you are.

Was that Dolores now? Would she be one of those people who invited trouble by being afraid of it? Was she going to expect evil to jump out of every shadow, and if she did meet it with fear, would that even be a wrong call?

I wondered what I could do or say to her that would make sense. If there was a way to tell a little girl that everything was going to be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t, I didn’t know what it was. I turned off the tap, lowered my face into the warm water, let my hair float around me. When I rose up, cleaner but not clean, Dolores was crying. Not sobs, but a low keening more exhaustion than sorrow. Alexander’s voice was insistent and soft and a little desperate. Whatever the words were, I knew what they meant. Please be okay, little girl.

I took a deep breath. All right, then. I couldn’t make anything better. I couldn’t undo anything that had happened. But I could offer an example. Here’s what a brave face looks like. Do this.

I stepped back out into the room, Ozzie close at my side. Dolores looked up at me. She’d seen me before, but now I saw her recognition.

“Hey, kid,” I said with a grin that I meant more than I’d expected to. “We have got to stop meeting like this, right?”

I wrapped ten hundred-dollar bills in a sheet of paper with the word Sorry written on it and shoved it under the office door before we left. My hip ached, my breath was white, and the coating of filth and slime made the night air even colder. I felt like I’d dragged myself through a thousand yards of sewer pipe. Even though no one else had come out to investigate, the darkness felt like it was watching me. Somewhere out there, the rider inside Dolores’s sister still knew it was in danger. If anything, it would be more desperate now, and I didn’t have a clue what kind of backup it could call on. So the next move was get the hell gone.

The SUV was idling, exhaust pluming out the tailpipe lke a permanent exhalation. Alexander had taken the passenger’s seat, leaving Ozzie and Dolores in the back. The dog was looking happily into the night, the girl less so, but at least she’d stopped crying. I slid in behind the wheel, buckled in, and flipped on the lights. If you didn’t know to look, the door to our thoroughly ruined motel room just seemed a little scuffed above the knob, the dent where the riders kicked it in showing as nothing more than a little discoloration. They were going to have to change the carpet to get the stink out. As I shifted to reverse, I promised to send them more money. A thousand bucks wasn’t going to cover the damage we’d done.

The roads were bad—ice and snow and other drivers who seemed dismissive of the dangers of ice and snow—but I’d been bouncing back and forth between Taos and Questa so much, it was becoming familiar. Probably if I came back in the summer, I’d have been lost, but in the black hours before dawn, I was recognizing individual snowdrifts. The heater roared, blowing its artificial desert wind against my cheek and ankles and drowning out the pop tunes on the radio. In the backsplash of the headlights, Alexander’s expression was sober.

“It’s ski season. We’re never going to find a place to stay,” Alexander said.

“I’ve already got a room,” I said. “It’s kind of craptastic, but it has a shower.”

He looked over at me.

“You have a hotel room already rented?”

“Key card’s in the glove box,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “Nice work.”

“Makes me wish I’d planned it,” I said.

When we got there, we trudged up the stairs in single file. Me and then Ozzie and then Dolores and then Alexander, like ants. Even Ozzie was looking tired, her head hanging at an angle and her tongue lolling pinkly from her mouth. I gave Dolores first bath rights. She handed out her soiled clothes. The slime and filth had begun to dry, flaking off the cloth. I took the plastic liner out of the wastebasket and put her things there. When she came out wrapped in towels, I took the next turn. First Midian’s cigarettes, now the Akaname’s stench. I washed my hair twice, scrubbed my skin with a washcloth until it hurt a little, and I still caught a whiff of sewer when I got out. I felt much better, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever really feel clean. I had one more complete outfit from my lawyer, so I put that on and threw my ruined clothes in the plastic liner with Dolores’s.

When I stepped out of the bathroom, Dolores was sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in her towel, Alexander on the floor beside her. They were watching a morning show on TV. The anchorwoman was smiling at an old Korean woman and talking animatedly about a new movie she’d directed. They were both wearing Santa hats and the network logo was worked with computer-generated holly leaves. Ozzie, curled in a perfect circle with her nose tucked under her tail, snored gently beside them. Outside, the first blue of the coming dawn lit the windows.

“There enough hot water left for me?” Alexander asked.

“Better be,” I said. “You smell like ass.”

Dolores chuckled. She looked hausted. I wondered what her mother was going to think, waking up with one or both of her daughters missing. If I were the Akaname, I’d say Dolores had been taken by a crazy Anglo woman named Jayné who’d been staying at the Sangre de Cristo. I imagined myself explaining to the FBI that it wasn’t really kidnapping, because if I’d let her go home, the demons would have gotten back into her. Until I heard differently, I’d have to assume there was an Amber alert out for all of us. It always surprised me how much fighting against spiritual parasites could look like crime.