M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

If I went back now to that little church preschool, I wondered what it would look like. The artifact of an alien planet, most likely. How could it not when the places I’d actually been seemed to change so much, and in so little time?

It wasn’t quite a sound that made me sit back up, my heart racing. It was deep and powerful, like the stroke of a church bell or a gigantic gong. If there had been any noise at all, it would have been deafening. Instead, my heart was doing double time over something I couldn’t even describe. I tried yelling, to see if anyone would hear, and it wasn’t more than three minutes before the cellar door scraped open and Ex came down. He didn’t have a space heater, and his lips were pressed tight.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Small change of plan,” he said.

“There was something. I heard … well, not heard. But something happened, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The sanctuary is warded against spiritual and magical attack. Even against physical, a little bit.”

“Okay. And that plays in how?”

He knelt beside me, pulled the keys out of his pocket, and started unlocking my manacles.

“Well, I figure in the last five or six years, Chapin and the others have probably performed a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty exorcisms.”

“Ballpark,” I said.

“Ballpark.”

The chains fell off. I’d been incarcerated for less than twenty minutes. Ex nodded toward the stairs, and when he stood I followed, rubbing at my wrists.

“They’re here,” he said.

I stepped back out into the night. The cawing of crows was thicker now, loud enough it was hard to talk over. The courtyard stank of smoke and gasoline, and a line of fire marked the edge of the building. There were shapes silhouetted by the flames. Men and women. Children. One of them raised a club over her head.

No. Not a club. A fire axe.

The voice that boomed out toward me could have come through a bullhorn, except it didn’t have the tinny, electrical reverberation. The words were deep and wet and they carried over the crows and the flame and the pounding of my heart.

“I’m the hammer now, bitch!” Soledad yelled.

“Oh,” I said. And then: “Spiffy.”

I should have seen it coming. The situation might have changed, but the logic of it hadn’t. I’d gone to Questa and threatened the riders. They’d come after me. Now, in San Esteban, I’d exposed the rider that had spawned them all. They’d had the same choice as before—fight or flee—and they’d made the same decision.

They’d come to fight. The wards and protections might keep them at bay for a little while. They might not.

We were all in the kitchen now, sitting in a circle made by the chairs and the couch. Someone had pulled the back cushions off the couch to make a kind of bed for Chapin, and Carsey knelt beside him and pressed a bloody towel against his wounds. They hadn’t been able to get him out to the car. The shell of Tomás leaned against the wall, eyes fixed and empty. The rooms were just as bright as they had been before, the religious art gracing the walls was the same mixture of uplifting and horrific, but the air had changed. Everything was pressurized, thick, dangerous. I’d been under siege before, and I recognized the feeling.

“How long have we got before they break through?” I asked.

“An hour,” Miguel said. The bruise on his cheek was darkening nicely. “Not more. Maybe less. They’ve already tried to set fire to the place.”

“They know it’s made from mud and stucco, right?”

“Pour enough gasoline on it,” he said with a shrug, “and you can burn water.”

“Cheerful thought,” Tamblen said.

The not-sound ran through me again. Another attack turned aside by the weakening wards and protections built into the sanctuary. It would keep stopping the riders until it didn’t. Chogyi Jake stood, walked to the doorway, and peered into the next room like he was checking to see if he’d left the lights on. The pistol was in his hand again.

“Okay,” I said. “So if we keep Carsey on nursing duty, that gives us six folks on our side. Seven, counting the Black Sun. They’ve got a hundred or so riders, just one of which almost kicked our collective ass less than an hour ago.”

“Yes,” Ex said.

“And we’re totally surrounded, right?”

“Right.”

“Also, there’s an eight-year-old girl who will eventually be delivered back to her family and taken by demons again if we can’t get out of here,” Alexander said.

I pressed my palms against my eyes until little globs of color appeared. Chapin’s ragged breath was the loudest sound, but just below it there was something else. Inhuman voices lifted together.

“We could call the police?” Carsey said.

“No offense,” I said, “but I don’t think a bunch of dead cops is going to help. Do we know anybody with a helicopter less than an hour from here?”

“Creative thought, but I don’t even think the medevac from Albuquerque could get here in an hour,” Miguel said.

“We’re on our own, then,” I said. I thought about it for a few seconds, trying it from every angle I could think of. “We’re not going to make it.”

“No,” Ex said. “We aren’t. But if we do it right, a few of us might get out in the chaos. I think we should take the fight to the riders. Concentrate all our effort in one place, and then sneak as many people as we can out the other side.”

He was right, but the weight of implication behind the plan was vicious. The wounded—Tomás and Chapin—would have to be abandoned. For the distraction to be effective, most of us would have to be part of it, meaning most of us were about to die. Including me, because I had the Black Sun’s daughter living inside me, and if there was a distraction, she’d have to be part of it.

I didn’t want to die. The primitive monkey part of my brain was screaming and bouncing around the inside of my skull just to remind me how much I didn’t want to die. But if that wasn’t an option, at least I didn’t want to die for nothing. And that was all the choice I had left. I felt like a balloon with its string cut, spinning up into the sky.

“Well,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ex replied. Meaning he’d thought all the same things I had and come to the same conclusions. “There’s a kind of beauty in heroic last stands.”

“Remember the Alamo,” I said.

“I thought we lost that one,” Carsey said. “Didn’t we lose that one?”

“Depends what you mean by we, ” Miguel said. “My family’s Mexican.”

The gallows humor was as comforting as anything could have been. It didn’t quiet my fear, but it made it easier to ignore. Another wave of not-quite-sound. This one felt closer, more threatening. Time was running out.

“Who makes a break for it?” I asked.

“Alexander and Miguel,” Tamblen said.

“They’re hurt but not incapacitated,” Carsey said. “They’ll be the least use in a fight and still have a decent chance of getting away. And, more to the point, Alexander’s young enough that he’ll have more years spinning fantastic tales of our glory. If Tamblen went over the fence, he’d tell it all in three sentences and a shrug.”

Tamblen grinned. “True,” he said.

For a moment, I saw it. Just a glimpse. For a moment, here in death’s waiting room, I knew how these men had been a family. The shared jokes and the shared secrets, the sorrow and the dedication and the willingness to die together. It made them beautiful, and for the moment I was part of it. I rose first.

“Well,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we’d better get going. Hate to be late for the party.”