M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

“Forgive me?” I said.

“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.

Four men came out of the cathedral. Two I didn’t recognize, one was the archbishop, and the last was Tamblen. He nodded at me as they passed. A truck drove by playing music loud enough to shake the air. Charming.

“Jayné!”

Dolores ran up, throwing her arms around me and grinning. She looked so bright and delighted, I had to smile back. Funeral black couldn’t keep her down. The marks of what she’d been through were invisible. She’d lost her body twice now to beings of terrible power. No matter how much she looked like a child, no matter how bright her eyes were, she and I both knew that her life had been touched by fire. There would always be a scar.

And we both knew it was true for me too.

“Hey, kid,” I said. “You’re looking better.”

“I get to go back to school after Christmas,” she said, bouncing on her toes. I wondered if I’d ever been that happy at the idea of going to class. Probably, but I didn’t remember it. “Where’s Ozzie?”

“Back at the ranch,” I said. “Holding things down. How’s Soledad doing?”

Dolores wrinkled her nose.

“She’s a little fragile,” she said. Her inflection was so adult, I was sure she’d been hearing her mother and grandmother saying it.

“Well, be a little patient with her. She had a hard time.”

“I hd a hard time too,” she said, frowning.

“We all did.”

The new voice was sharp as a cracking stick.

“Dolores, come here .”

The three women stood at the curb below us. The oldest one stared up at me with something that bordered on hatred. The youngest—

Soledad—wouldn’t look at me. Dolores hesitated for half a breath, then gave me a fast hug.

“I love you,” she said, then turned and bounded down to her family. Her grandmother’s eyes fixed on me as she crossed herself and spat over her shoulder. Her grip on the little girl’s arm was steely as they walked away.

“Well, that seemed uncalled-for,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I didn’t really keep my situation a secret from Dolores, and they’ve got a thing about people with riders living in them. Got to say it’s honestly come by.”

“I suppose so. And you?”

“And me what?”

“How do you feel about people with riders?”

I squinted up at the sun. The only thing it radiated was heat and light. The question hung in the air for a few seconds. A sparrow sped by us, its dust-brown wings fluttering.

“You know,” I said, “I think there’s a coffee shop down there on the left. Buy you a cup?”

“All right.”

THE BLACK Sun.

Once I had the laptop in range of a real wireless connection, I found encyclopedias’ worth of information. It was central to the Nazi occultism. In some traditions, it was the burnt-out antisun that heralded regeneration, in others it was the actual physical ball of burning gas that seemed to rise in the east and set in the west every day, called “black” because it was made from matter and was therefore spiritually impure. The Black Sun was the symbol of Left-Hand path groups like the Temple of Set, or it was a name for Jesus. It was Blavatsky’s Invisible Sun around which the universe revolves, it was a cult of Finnish serial killers in the 1960s, it was the most powerful crime syndicate in the Star Wars universe.

When we went into Santa Fe, I downloaded everything I could find. Back at the ranch, I sat on the couch and read until my eyes hurt. Chogyi Jake and Ex were in full research mode with me, and the dinner conversation was equal parts theosophy and alchemy and whether we had enough coffee beans for the morning. After four days, I felt like I knew less than when I’d started.

I kept waiting for her to reach out and point me in the right direction. Pick out a particular document or point my finger at a sentence or a symbol that would draw a line through the rest of it. She was as quiet as the dead. I knew she was in there, but I didn’t know what shape she was in. My half exorcism and the battles that had followed from it had hurt her. Weakened her. I could still see the desert of my dreams scorched. Maybe it was something that a young der shrugged off like a bruise. Maybe we’d broken her in some fundamental way. I didn’t know, and she wasn’t telling me.

Still, I was pretty sure that if someone jumped me, she’d be there. And she had to know I’d had the chance to renounce her and I’d chosen not to. I didn’t know what was living inside of me, but she’d revealed herself in the first fight against the wind demon in order to save Ex. And she’d let herself be chained in order to convince Chapin to go to the hospital. And she’d stood by me when nobody else in the world had. Until I had evidence to the contrary, I figured the truce was still on.

My nightmares didn’t stop, but they slowed down a little. Chogyi Jake’s presence got me back to meditating once a day. Or every other day. More than I had been, anyway. It seemed to help, though there were times I could still smell the dirt and cyclopropane. Hear the screaming. Sometimes it was just the fear.

Ex didn’t talk about Chapin or the other men in the group. It was almost like none of it had happened, except that I caught glimpses every now and then—when he was starting to nod off to sleep by the fireplace, when he was trying to figure out the connector on the satellite dish I had installed, when he thought no one was watching. I saw the pain and the loneliness that echoed against my own, but if I tried to approach him, he changed the subject. He didn’t touch me even to see how the wounds on my feet were healing, and he didn’t ask me to wash out his wounds. He slept with his bedroom door firmly shut. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

Maybe there was room for both.

The closest we came to calling the question was a week before Christmas. It was half past four in the afternoon, and the sun was about to set. The clouds to the west were glorious and gaudy—pink and gold and scarlet and blue, like someone had slipped some kind of mild hallucinogen in the world’s drink. Chogyi Jake was in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stir-fry and singing along with the carols on the radio. He had a surprisingly good voice. Ex and I were in the back den, and I was trying to coax a little more bandwidth out of my cellular card. He was reading something called The Nightside of Eden with an expression somewhere between amusement and disgust.

“Got anything?” he asked.

“A strong urge to leave Santa Fe,” I said.

“This isn’t Santa Fe,” he said, and pointed out toward the horizon. “Those lights way over there? That’s Santa Fe. We’re lost in the desert.”

The phrase caught me. Lost in the desert. It was like the words meant something I used to know.

“Well, a strong urge to leave, anyway,” I said. “Spend the winter in Australia or something. Somewhere warm. With some sunlight.”

“Where are we going?”

He wasn’t asking about geography. From the time I’d figured out I wasn’t alone in my skin, we’d had a purpose. Just the two of us. We were going to scratch it out, get me back to myself. Make me safe. Now that I’d stepped back from that, Ex didn’t know what the agenda was. Before that , we’d been bouncing around the world like a pinball cataloging the things that Eric had le me. Did we really go back to plan A now? Picking a place on the list, and rushing into it, hoping that somewhere, he’d left me the clue that made it all make sense. That told me why putting me where I was made the world the way he’d wanted it.

“I’m working on that,” I said.

“Let me know what you come up with,” he said.