Killing Rites

There, trapped in my skin with the rider like we were sewn in the same sack, I lost my balance. The bus didn’t miss me this time. The room spun around me. A part of me that wasn’t my body hurt. The sewage smell was getting worse.

“Beast, in the name of God and all His saints, in the name of Christ and His apostles, I command you! Surrender your name!”

My head lifted, and my body stood. I felt the effort it took, like a giant rising against a mountain of chains. When it spoke, my voice trembled with defiance and fear.

“I am Sonnenrad, the Voice of the Desert,” the rider said. “I am the Black Sun and the Black Sun’s daughter.”

Silence fell on the room. I saw triumph in Father Chapin’s expression.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”

Chapter Eleven

I’d seen exorcisms before, mostly as performed by Ex going it alone in the field. I hadn’t understood how difficult the rites he’d performed were. He was the expert. I made sure he had what he needed, and he did the rest. If afterward he’d seemed a little sapped, he hadn’t complained about it. So I had figured that, taxing as it might be, it couldn’t be that punishing.

Bad call.

I had thought forcing the rider to give us its name had been bad, and it had been. The next part was worse. The combined will of the six men around me was a constant source of pain, even though the burning and nausea and disorientation I felt was just the spillover of what the rider was absorbing.

“… qui ambulavit super aspidem et basiliscum, qui conculcavit leonem et draconem, ut discedas ad hoc hominae …”

After the second hour, time had stopped having any meaning. The candle I’d used at the ceremony’s beginning was gone—kicked over and stomped into the brick under my feet. I didn’t remember doing that. My skin felt hot, like I had a bad sunburn. My vocal cords strained with screaming. At one point, the rider had fallen to the ground, writhing in a pain that felt like bathing in acid secondhand. The fall left my lip bleeding, and the taste of blood hadn’t left my mouth since.

“Ecce Crucem Domini, fugite, partes adversae!” Chapin shouted, waving a crucifix at me. It was enchanted like the medallion that still burned and blistered my arm. The rider couldn’t look at it.

“Stop this,” it cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what this means!”

The Latin kept on beating at it, the syllables a medium for the power behind it. It didn’t feel holy. It didn’t feel like the cleansing power of a glorious God. It felt like violence, but I’d put in for this, and I was going to see it through. Caught in the space behind my eyes, I pressed myself hard as a stone and endured.

For what seemed like weeks, the rider didn’t shift. It just took the abuse like a mountain in a windstorm. But slowly, at first by degrees so small I could barely feel it, they started to pull it away. It felt like someone ripping off a scab. Something I’d always thought was part of me started to ache and then burn and then—painfully—to lift at the edges.

And once it started losing, it kept losing. I felt its frenzy, its frantic search for something in me to hold on to. I kept my will tucked tight, small and safe, and put everything I could spare into pushing it away.

When it came for me, I knew we were close to the end.

The desert had changed. The stones bore long, black scorch marks. The sky, usually vast and blue, was hazy with smoke and a shining curtain like the aurora that hurt to look at. We stood there, the two of us. We were both bleeding from the lip, but mine was red where hers was white. She held her hand out to me, begging me to take it. And despite everything, I wanted to. I put my hands behind me, locking my fingers around the opposite wrist. The wail of despair wrenched itself out of the desert to the room where my physical body shook against the floor like someone in a seizure. For a moment, I could see it all at once, and I knew the rider was losing its grip.

I felt it fall away. There was space between us. The rite was going to work. It was going to be cast out. It was going to die.

The mixture of elation and regret was the last thing I felt before the new attack came.

I smelled sewage again. Something touched my belly, wet and soft, and I wasn’t sure if it was in the desert or on the brick floor. I tried to sit up, but then I wasn’t anywhere. The rider screamed, but it didn’t use my throat. No one else could hear it.

Something foul slid into my mouth. Not my real mouth, but mine all the same. It tasted like salt and rot. The outhouse stench was overpowering. I choked, and the thing pushed deeper into my throat. It wasn’t just the two of us. There was something else.

Something else was in there with us.

Another rider.

“Stop!” I shouted. I did, with my own flesh. Chapin ignored me. The desert spasmed, and the other me was falling away, her hand out toward me. “I said stop! It’s me! Jayné! Something’s wrong!”

“I adjure you, ancient serpent—

em'eight='0em' width='1em'>“I said something’s wrong! You have to stop!”

The thing in my throat thickened, pulsed once. I couldn’t speak. My throat froze open, and I heard myself retching. It was shutting me off, silencing me. With my real eyes, I looked up at Ex. His palms were toward me like he was taking heat from a campfire. Look at me, I thought. See what’s happening. Save me.

He didn’t. A sense of Novocain-like numbness was spreading from my mouth out through my body. For a strange moment, I was in control of my arms and legs, but not my breath or neck. The other thing—the invader— pushed out, trying to fill me. I felt a sense of triumph, deep and powerful and unfamiliar and threatening as a strange man’s cough in my bedroom.

I reached out to the desert, to my other self. I felt my rider grab on to me, and I pulled her in with all my strength. The numbness faded. The foul smell receded. In my real body again, I rolled onto my side and vomited. The cold, hard bricks under me felt as comfortable as a feather bed. It took me a while to realize that no one was shouting in English or Latin. I looked up. They were all around me. The sunlight pushing in around the window shades glowed gold and red. Sunset colors. We’d been going at this hammer and tongs for hours. No wonder I felt like this. I tried to talk, coughed, and tried again.

“Different rider. It was trying to get in me while the other one got pushed out.”

“No, Miss Jayné,” Chapin said. His voice was almost as weary as mine. “There was not. Satan has a thousand tricks. We were making great progress. We might very well have succeeded, had your will not broken.”

I forced myself up to sitting. My muscles ached and trembled. I was cold.

“Didn’t break,” I said. “There was another one.”

“Not actually possible,” Carsey said. “You’re in a circle of exorcists, in a consecrated building, and you’ve got the Mark of St. Francis of the Desert clapped up against your arm. You’re in more danger of being eaten by an alligator than being attacked by a demon you didn’t bring in here yourself.”

I hung my head. My ribs hurt when I breathed too deeply. One of the scabs on my feet had ripped open during the rite; my right leg from knee to ankle was red with blood. What he said made sense. Of course there couldn’t be another rider. Of course the thing inside me would do anything it could to keep its grip on me, to survive. Of course Satan had a thousand tricks.

And yet …

“It’s okay,” Ex said. “We’ll get it next time.”

“Yes,” Chapin said, with a long sigh. “We will take a few minutes to recover ourselves. Then we will begin again.”

“We won’t,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s going on here. Until I’ve got a handle on it, we’re stepping back.”