M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

Almost.

Chogyi Jake’s smile was as pleased and enigmatic as ever. Alexander leaned back on the couch, whistling low. Even Dolores seemed pleased that we’d figured it out. Only Ex looked like he was braced for a blow. He met my eyes and looked away. The pain would probably have been invisible to someone who didn’t know him as well as I did.

“Hey,” I said to him. “Can I borrow you for a minute? You guys talk amongst yourselves.”

I stepped out the back door. Snow covered the hot tub’s deck. The air bit, and the calling of crows was like the announcement of a funeral. Ex closed the door behind us, the latch clicking into place. In the sunlight, he looked even paler. His white-blond ponytail was loose. His eyes were bloodshot, and he still moved stiffly when he twisted. I wondered how the wounds on his back were doing.

“Hey,” I said.

He nodded.

“I think one of us owes the other an apology,” I said, “but I’m not sure how it goes.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You know that stuff I said about how much I appreciate everything you did for me?”

Ex leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.

“I do.”

“I meant all of it.”

“I know you did,” he said.

“We only had the information that we had,” I said. “There were two ways to read it. I went one way and you went the other. I was right, but it wasn’t like you could have known that. We made our judgments and we acted on them.”

“Nothing else we could have done,” Ex agreed.

“We’re cool, then?”

“Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?”

I pushed my hair back from my eyesbove us, a thousand icicles glittered and shone like tiny transparent teeth.

“Maybe because you chained me up in a cellar, and you were going to feed me to a shit demon. Or how about because I beat you unconscious and spent days running while you worried yourself sleepless. It seems like someone here ought to have some hard feelings about something.”

He shrugged.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I was wrong about there being a second rider,” he said. “Anything else?”

Are you angry with me? I almost asked. But he’d say he wasn’t, either way. And that wasn’t really what I meant.

It was just a few days before that he’d lain on the couch wearing a blanket and told me in a soft voice about falling from grace with God. I’d hesitated at this cracked-open door to see him sleep, and he’d promised that if my feet were too bruised, he would carry me. I wanted to know if we were still those people. The long nights of distracting me when I woke up screaming, the mornings of making coffee for me quietly enough that I didn’t wake up. They’d been hellish, and every single time, he’d risen to the occasion. I didn’t know how I’d have made it through without him. He’d never tried to use my bad nights to make a pass. He’d never been anything less than great, crisis after crisis after crisis. There was an intimacy in it that I hadn’t totally recognized until now. And now I was afraid it was gone.

I wanted to know if the man who’d protected me when I was broken was able to forgive me for saving myself without him. I wanted to know what was behind the poker face. I wanted him to kiss me just so I’d know that he wanted to.

“Seriously,” Ex said. “Is there something you want to say? It’s cold out here.”

“No,” I said past the thickness in my throat. “I just wanted to make sure we were good.”

“We are,” he said shortly.

“Okay,” I said, and he opened the door again and walked inside. It took me a second before I was ready to follow him.

Alexander was standing at the kitchen counter, Ozzie sitting at his knee with her long, pink tongue lolling out. Dolores’s arms were folded, her face a mask of disapproval. Chogyi Jake leaned against the back of the couch, his brow furrowed in thought.

“Do we have any alternatives?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Alternatives to what?” Ex demanded.

“We’re having a tactical discussion,” Chogyi Jake said.

“I’m not going to stay behind,” Alexander said. “For one thing, I’m the best evidence you have that the attack in Questa happened. You can’t take Jayné in by herself and expect Chapin to believe her.”

“Okay, roll this back,” I said. “Why do we want Alexander to stay behind?”

“Someone has to take care of Dolores,” Alexander said, waving toward her.

Dolores’s scowl deepened.

Truth was, I’d been thinking we’d take her with us. Until that moment, I hadn’t seen how bad an idea that was. She was a third grader, thin from growing too fast and still marked by the sores and cuts from the first time we’d met. The chances weren’t good that the thing inside Tomás was going to sit back and take this lightly. We were walking into a trial where she’d be a good witness, but we were also walking into the near certainty of violence.

Of course I couldn’t take a kid into a fight. Especially not one who’d already been traumatized three or four different ways within the last week. I pushed away my sense of confusion and loss around Ex and focused on the girl. As if she could feel the weight of my consideration, she looked up at me.

The first time my mother had left me at home by myself, I’d been fourteen. She’d been going to the grocery store because we were out of milk. I’d been watching TV. It had taken her twenty minutes, but for that time, I’d been alone in the house for the first time in my life. I could still remember the exhilarating sense of power and fear. Dolores was six years younger than that, and we weren’t going on a quick errand. We were going to a confrontation whose outcome we couldn’t know.

I imagined leaving her here on her own, and I couldn’t see doing it. And I couldn’t take her with us into the teeth of danger. We could leave Alexander behind with her, in which case I wouldn’t have any witnesses besides myself. I could leave Ex behind, except that in a million years, he still wouldn’t agree to being ditched. I could ask Chogyi Jake to baby-sit, but he was the only one who’d come in from outside. He’d be able to see things in the tight-knit group of Chapin’s cabal that no one else could. Besides which, I didn’t want to leave any allies behind. We could take her home, except the Akaname would be waiting there, wearing her sister’s skin and waiting to retake Dolores’s. And, to round out the problem set, just having Dolores with us might count as kidnapping and child abduction, and for all I knew, the FBI could be looking for her.

The room had gone quiet, everyone waiting for me to speak.

“How long do we have before we’re supposed to see Chapin?” I asked.

“We can wait as long as we want,” Ex said. “But the longer it takes, the more the Akaname can prepare. It probably didn’t know that we’re aware of it, until Ex told Chapin that we had Dolores back, but now it’s got to be feeling jumpy. And since the one in Dolores’s sister escaped, it’s also possible that it’s gotten a more explicit warning. Or will soon.”

“So the longer we take, the more time the enemy has to prepare,” I said.

“Or escape,” Ex said. I had a momentary sense of Ex feeling pleased to see me struggling with the dilemma, but that was just me being paranoid.

I wondered if my lawyer had any friends or contacts in Taos willing to be an accessory to child abduction. I wondered how I’d ask the question even if I did call her. I hated this. No matter which way I looked at it, there was a problem. If it had just been fighting the rider in Chapin’s group, I’d have known what to do. If it had just been keeping Dolores safe, I could have come up with something, even if it was something incredibly illega. Doing both seemed impossible, and they both had to be done.