Chapter Fourteen
“Hello?” he said. I’d forgotten how gentle his voice was.
“Hey. It’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t call before. And by before, I mean weeks ago. I’ve actually been pretty messed up, and I didn’t want anyone to see me like that,” I said, and then when he didn’t reply right away, “Also I was still freaked out over you getting hurt because of me, and I was having a really hard time talking myself into putting you back in harm’s way on my account.”
“I see,” Chogyi Jake said carefully.
“Anyway, I don’t know if Ex called you yet, but I figured out why I have all these weird powers that are getting stronger when they should be getting weak. I’ve got a rider. It’s called Sonnenrad or the Black Sun. Apparently it’s really powerful, but it’s young. Ex took me to New Mexico to find his old mentor, who’s this kind of intense guy named Father Chapin. Only, when they tried to exorcise it, there was another rider. It was trying to get in while the old one was being forced out? And I … I took off. I mean, Ex thinks I’m being played by the rider I
“Okay,” Chogyi Jake said. I felt a moment’s fear. He was being so distant and withdrawn, and I interpreted his reserve as anger. And then I didn’t. I closed my eyes, chagrined.
“Only Ex called you last night and told you all of this. And you flew out,” I said. “He’s standing, like,
“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Well, that’s awkward.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
We were both silent for a moment. In the kitchen, something fell. The clatter of metal spilling on the floor made me jump a little.
“I’m not coming back in,” I said. “There really is another rider.”
“Okay.”
“Only they’re not going to believe that. At least not coming from me. So … yeah. I’ll check back in later.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Chogyi Jake said. I could hear him smile.
“It’s good to hear you, though,” I said.
“You too,” he said. “We’ll talk again soon.”
The line went dead, and I put the handset down on the desk. I didn’t know if I was disturbed that Chogyi Jake was with Ex and trying to track me down, or glad that he was in the neighborhood even if he wasn’t by my side. Both, maybe. It was interesting that he hadn’t wanted Ex to know it was me on the phone. I tried to imagine what Chogyi Jake would see, looking at Father Chapin’s cabal, and I failed. Warriors against the army of the unclean. Unhealthy religious zealots. Something else. It all seemed equally plausible.
I stepped out of the little office and back into the kitchen. The guy with the cross was scraping a steel spatula over the grill, the muscles of his arm tense with the effort. Voices and the clinking of knives and forks against plates came from the front like it was a different planet. I waited until he looked over his shoulder at me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah. You know when he’s getting back? I don’t want double shifts my whole life.”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Couple of days at least.”
He said something casually obscene and turned back to the grill. I slipped out the back. The cold was vicious and the jeans-and-sweater outfit, while better than a ceremonial shift, still counted as underdressed for the occasion. I ran across to the RV, opened the door, and hopped up. Ozzie the Labrador bumped against me, pushing out through the door I’d come in. I watched for a few seconds while she peed, scratched gleefully at the snow, and trotted back to me. I wondered whether Midian had housebroken her or if she’d come that way. I let her clamber back in beside me.
It took me a few minutes to figure out the stove. There was a switch that turned the whole thing on and off separate from the controls for the individual burners. I assumed it had something to do with safety and not having your apartment catch fire while you were driving it. I scrambled one of the eggs and ate it while sitting on the couchlike thing, petting the dog with my feet to keep my toes warm. After a while, my nose became accustomed to the ashtray smell, and I didn’t even notice it.
I was alone, or as near to it as I’d been in years. I didn’t quite have enough food to make it through to tomorrow afternoon without a few hours of mild hunger. I still had a foreign thing living inside of me, ready to take over at any moment. The guilt and horror of Grace Memorial were at the back of my head like a headache that wouldn’t quite go away. I didn’t have shoes or a coat. I didn’t have chains on me, but I was almost as trapped here as I had been in the basement in San Esteban.
It should have felt like a prison, but it didn’t. It felt like a retreat. The cheesy, decrepit RV was where they couldn’t find me. There was nothing to do but listen to the radio, doze, and watch the late afternoon sunset turn the snow from white to gold, gold to unearthly red, and red fading to gray under an unimaginable spread of stars. I could feel the cold radiating from the windows, but the heater was working just fine. I found a spare fitted sheet stuffed in a cupboard, stripped Midian’s bed, and made it my own. Ozzie went out just after dark and didn’t come back for a couple height='urs.
Hundreds of miles away, my little brother, Curtis, was getting ready for what was going to be his last Christmas at home. Next year, he’d graduate high school and go off to Bible college or a job, if he could find one. My older brother, Jay, was probably still getting ready for his shotgun wedding. I hadn’t spoken to him about it, hadn’t met the girl who was going to be my sister-in-law and the mother of my nephew or my niece. I knew her family was Mexican and that my mother was embarrassed. I wondered if Jay was in love with her or seduced and trapped or something else that I hadn’t even imagined. The wind started to pick up, the RV creaking and rocking under the pressure.
In Chicago, Kim and Aubrey would be getting home from work. I’d set them up with enough money that they could make their own research plans. I’d never thought about the questionable joys of parasitology before I’d met them. Now I was going to be responsible for funding some good basic research about
I couldn’t do anything about any of it. Not now, and not until late tomorrow, and I didn’t feel powerless. I felt relieved. If great power brought great responsibility, then being totally impotent meant I was off the hook, at least for a while. Tomorrow would come, and I’d need to make some decisions. I’d have to find a way to prove that there really was another rider. I’d have to figure out how it had gotten past a circle of exorcists and explicitly rider-proof magic. I’d have to decide what I was doing about having a Prince of Hell sharing my body. All of it tomorrow.
I wondered, nestled in the little metal and plastic shell, whether this was how my rider felt. Just before midnight, I heard claws at the door, stumbled out of bed, and let the dog back in.
“You are a pain in the ass,” I said sternly. “I was comfortable.”
She chuffed happily, jumped on the couchlike thing, and fell instantly to sleep. I went back to my bed—I already thought of it as mine—and curled up under the blanket. I remembered the first time I’d seen Midian, stretched out like a corpse on a bed in the apartment Eric owned. I’d been sure he was dead until his eyes opened. And then a couple of hours later, we’d been attacked, and I’d felt my rider for the first time. I tried to pull back from the memory, but sleep-soaked as I was, I couldn’t help it. I saw Midian walking over the fallen wizards, a Luger in his hand. He’d told me at the time that they weren’t people, just qliphoth. Shells. That the riders in them had displaced anything human. Probably, he’d been lying.
From there it was a short step into nightmare. I was in Grace Memorial, burying the black coffin with an innocent man inside it. I was crying. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I drove the nails into the coffin with the palm of my hand.
And then I was outside myself, watching. That was new. The dream never went like that before. I was in a theater, watching myself twenty feet tall. A beam of dusty light hung in the air above us, connecting the
