“He did.”
I stopped dabbing, but I didn’t take my hand away. Ex looked over his shoulder at me. His white-blond hair had blood in it, and his eyes held as much sorrow as exhaustion. I shifted my hand between his shoulder blades, and he looked away. I went back to cleaning up. When I’d done as much as I could, I left him there and went upstairs. There were towels in the two bathrooms, and I used them to improvise bandages.
We moved him to the couch where he could lie on his belly. Between the blood and the water, his pants were sopping, and I put a blanket over him so that he could pull them off without compromising his modesty. He pushed his clothes out from under it and collapsed forward with a sigh. I turned up the thermostat by the stairway, and the gas fire grate hissed to life, orange flames licking the ceramic logs.
“I can call in a doctor,” I said. “Seriously, I’ll call my lawyer, and she’ll find someone.”
“And do what?” he asked. “It’s all right. I’ve had my tetanus shots. I’m clotting up. There’s nothing to do but wait. What about you? Are you feeling all right?”
I tried turning. The pain was more a deep ache than a sharp stab.
“Bruised,” I said. “Not broken, I don’t think.”
“What about your knee?”
I looked down. I’d forgotten ripping my jeans there, but my kneecap peeked out into the room, grimy with dirt and blood of my own.
“Way better than your back,” I said, sitting on the floor. The warmth of the fire pushed gently against my neck.
“Well,” Ex said through his smile, “that’s a good minimum, I guess.”
We were silent for a moment, the only sound the muttering of the flames and the quiet ticking of a clock. Ex put his head down on his arms, his face toward me. He looked tired and distant. His hair was unbound, spilling across his face, softening him. Here I was, alone in a secluded mountain cabin with a man wearing a blanket. I watched the firelight flicker on his skin. It should have felt weird. It didn’t.
I knew Ex had a thing about me. Crush, call it. Or attraction or unrequited love. Pick a card. I’d even felt it once when we were doing a ritual that meant blending my mind and his. And my just-barely-ex-boyfriend Aubrey, and his ex-wife and still-significant Kim. We’d been in a lot of trouble at the time, and so all our attention had really been on the battle at hand. Looking back on it from here, it had been intimate in a way that almost nothing else in my life had been. I’d been able to feel Aubrey’s confusion from the inside, like it was mine. Kim’s desperation and hope. I’d been able to feel them become aware of me. But there hadn’t been words. I’d felt Ex’s desire and guilt and determination, roaring like a furnace, but not the facts and details of the life that created them.
He sighed. His eyes closed. He didn’t look like the passions I’d felt were in him. Even his usual almost- disapproving intelligence was gone right now. I wanted to take his hand, but I wasn’t sure what I’d want after that, so I didn’t.
“It didn’t want to come out this time, did it,” Ex said. When I didn’t answer, he opened his eyes again, pinning me with them. “When the wind demon attacked you, the rider didn’t want to come out, did it?”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
Ex nodded, his cheek brushing against the cushion.
“It’s aware, then,” he said. “Intelligent. It knew that manifesting would give the game away. More evidence that it’s not just spells and cants that Eric put on you. They wouldn’t have any reason to keep hidden. Or the intelligence to know when they should.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. Something in my belly felt cold.
“Did you and Chapin talk about that too?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“It’s what we came here for. To talk about it. He agrees that whatever it is, it’s powerful. We’d knocked the edge off the wind demon, but the way you took it out was …” He shook his head without lifting it off his arms. “That wasn’t small stuff.”
“Did he have any idea why we couldn’t find anything before?”
“A few thoughts,” Ex said. “There are some kinds of riders that survive by stealth. They can live in someone for years and never show any sign, even when you know that you’re looking for something. This could be a particularly effective one of those.”
“Or?”
“Or the rider may be digging in deeper. Trying to get far enough inside you that we can’t see it to pull it out. Or it may be young. Or it may be that the thing where you’re hard to see with magic extends to the rider. Or comes from it.”
“And no way to guess which one we’re looking at.”
“Well, there are some other things that point toward it being young.”
“Really?” I said, wanting to know and not wanting to know.
“The fact that we’re here at all,” Ex said. “The rider can take complete control of you. We know that. But it wasn’t able to keep us from coming here. That means your will still trumps it most of the time. With a mature rider, you’ll usually see it running things all the time. That yours is … I don’t know. Intermittent? That makes it seem like it’s not full-grown.”
The warm feelings I’d had before were fading fast, and the hiss of the gas flame started to bother me. Anxiety and impatience nibbled at my skin, and I shifted to sit farther from the fireplace. Ex didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t care.
“Chapin’s working hypothesis is that it can’t take over for a very long time. A few minutes here and there. And usually in extremis. If you’re not threatened somehow, it can’t take the reins. Influence you, maybe. Steer you. But not the all-out control like we saw today.”
“So as it gets older, it gets more powerful and I get … what? Slowly eaten?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s more like a cocoon. The control dynamic stays right about where it is until the rider’s fully formed. Then it breaks out of the chrysalis, and the rules change all at once.”
The cold feeling in my gut got worse. I’d had the sense of rider and magic before, and this wasn’t it. It was old-school, please-Jesus-get-it-off-of-me fear. I had to change the subject, and I had to do it now.
“So,
Ex chuckled. When he sat up, he winced, but he didn’t lie back down.
“Father Ignatius. He was my unofficial mentor when I was a novice. He had this long beard, and when I started my regency with Father Chapin, I tried to grow one too. It didn’t go well. One morning, Carsey said it made me look like a Wookiee. I was clean-shaven by afternoon, but it stuck.”
His smile was gentle—chagrined and embarrassed, but gentle.
“What did Father Ignatius think of it?” I asked.
“Oh, he never saw it. There are a couple of years of study between your novitiate and regency. The last time I saw him was when I took first vows. I’d have been … what? Nineteen years old?”
“What kinds of vows do they make you take at nineteen?”
“The usual ones,” Ex said, his voice exhausted and melancholy. “Poverty, chastity, obedience. At the time I thought it was better that way. Disassociate myself from sin before I’d ever experienced it. It’s hard to miss a place you’ve never been. Worked great in theory.”
“But in practice, not so much,” I said.
“Well, I made it through my first studies and regency,” Ex said.
“You keep saying
“Sorry. It’s a Jesuit thing where we were supposed to really commit to apostolic work. Lasts three years.”
“You went three years with Chapin?”
“And Tamblen and Carsey. Miguel came in my second year. Tomás finished his regency the year before I came in, and then went on mission. He took his final vows in Japan and came back just before I left, so he was sort of before and after. The new kid. Alexander? I didn’t meet him until today.”
“Wonder what Carsey calls him,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t see your attempt, but when it comes to un-dignified facial hair, Alexander pretty much takes it walking.”
