As I pulled out to the road, Ozzie trotted into the parking lot. I saw her dark eyes looking up at me, her tail wagging. The little chuffed bark was white in the cold. I stopped and opened the passenger’s door. She looked at me.
“You coming?”
She trotted over, hauled herself up the step, and sat in the passenger’s seat, panting through a canine smile. When I reached across her to close the door, I got a cold earful of damp nose. I took us out to the highway.
Jayné Heller, international demon hunter, and her dog.
Even better.
Chapter Fifteen
“Hey,” I said. “Can you talk?”
“Yeah,” my little brother, Curtis, said. “They’re all out doing stuff. What are you up to?”
“Surprisingly difficult question to answer,” I said. “I just got a dog. What’s going on at home?”
For twenty miles, Curtis filled me in on the gossip at home. Our older brother, Jay, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and now my future sister-in-law and her whole extended family had descended to prepare for the wedding. Mom had given up all hope of keeping the bun-in-the-oven issue quiet, and was now explaining to everyone at church that the new in-laws only
Before he hung up, I got Ozzie to bark hello to him a couple of times.
My new cell phone had a web browser that promised me a hotel with a real shower and hot water if I drove back in toward Taos proper. My other option appeared to be heading north into the Carson National Forest and staying there until spring, so with a little trepidation, I headed south.
The sky was enormous, the horizon seemed to fly out before me snow-white and earth-brown and the gray- green of piñons. Clouds draped the overwhelming blue like lace pulled to breaking, and the air smelled of cold and smoke and pine. For all my moving around the world, I’d spent very little time driving, and almost none by myself. I found myself humming, and then singing. Ozzie didn’t object.
There were a few cars and trucks on the highway, zooming along regardless of the ice on the pavement. I passed the turnoff to San Esteban with a little shudder. I kept waiting for Ex’s little black sports car to zoom up alongside and force me off the road. Once I got in close enough that there was traffic and an almost urban concentration of buildings, I actually started feeling better. I had cover and the anonymity of the crowd.
I made it to a little hotel just after three. It was two stories, with low scrub pine around the perimeter and a gravel parking lot mostly buried under ice and snow. We were a long way from the ski valley, and even so, there was only one vacancy. The guy at the desk balked at Ozzie until I gave him an extra hundred. The room was on the second floor, and it would have been physically impossible to do a hundred dollars’ worth of damage to it. The carpet was damp and stank of mildew. The bed sagged visibly in the center. The windows had scallops of dust running down them. At that moment, the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio wouldn’t have been better. I took a hot shower, washing my hair three times to get the last of the cigarette stink out. When I toweled off, my toes were pale and prune-wrinkled.
The scabs and cuts that cross-hatched the soles of my feet burned, the waer loosening the clots, but I didn’t start bleeding again. When I probed my rib, it still hurt, sure enough. In the mirror, my skin was bright pink from the hot water where it wasn’t white with old scars: my arm, my side. I stretched out, and the vertebrae between my shoulder blades cracked pleasantly.
Ozzie had curled up on the bed and wagged heavily as I got dressed again. I was going to need a place to use as my base of operations. This wasn’t the little condo halfway up to the ski valley. It didn’t have the gas fire heater or the hot tub or the little kitchen. If I wanted food, I’d have to head out to the convenience store or a tiny diner a few blocks down the road. In the next room, two women were shouting at each other over the yammering of their television cranked to eleven.
“Okay,” I said. “I know it’s not the best accommodations in the world, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Just don’t take off running down the road with me like last time, okay?”
My rider didn’t reply, but Ozzie sighed and let her head loll down on the bedspread. So I figured that made two out of three in favor with one abstention. Not great, but until I had better, it’d do. I put my few belongings in the closet and bathroom counter, pulled my hair back into a ponytail, and went out for supplies. The convenience store was called Allsup’s, and it was entirely covered in Christmas decorations—tinsel icicles, printed cardboard reindeer, even blinking colored lights strung around the cash register. A weak version of “Little Drummer Boy” was leaking out of the radio, reminding me that I wanted my own music back. But they had dog food for Ozzie and some snacks for me. I bought enough granola bars, sunflower seeds, and Diet Coke to keep body and soul together for a couple of days. Ozzie stayed in the car. As I walked out, flimsy plastic bag on my wrist, my new phone rang, a chiming tritone.
“Hello?” I said, fumbling to get the SUV’s back door open and talk on the phone at the same time.
“Jayné, dear? I have the information on that license plate you wanted me to look for,” my lawyer said.
“Spiffy. Give me just a second, and I’ll … Okay. Got a pen. Go ahead.”
The car was registered to Eduardo Garcia with an address in Questa, New Mexico. I was reasonably sure that none of the women I’d seen sitting around Chapin’s table had been named Eduardo, but apparently someone knew him well enough to borrow his car. It was a start.
“Also I had a call from our friend Ex,” she said. “He seemed a bit upset.”
I closed the rear door and leaned against the SUV. An ancient-looking station wagon pulled up to the gas pumps, an old man at the wheel and three young children mashed close together in the backseat. A fire truck cruised by, slow and stately as a sailboat.
“Dear?”
“What did he say?”
“He seems to think you’ve had a psychological crisis of some sort. Run off in the night. He wanted me to look into getting you an evaluation. Against your will if necessary.”
“Great.”
I waited for the next comment, certain sheosedsk what was really going on and unsure what I’d say.
“Are you certain you want to keep him on the payroll?” she asked.
I smiled.
“Yeah, for now. He’s overreacting to some disagreements we had. We’ll figure it out.”
“He’s a darling boy, and very intense, but he seems a bit histrionic sometimes.”
“He just hates not being the one in control,” I said.
“Well, that’s true of us all, I suppose. Is there anything else I can do for you right now?”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m good.”
I got in the SUV, started up the engine, and paused. It was Sunday afternoon, with a couple of hours still before sundown. Questa was half an hour away. If it all worked out right, I could find Dolores tonight and get her back to Chapin and Ex in the morning with her story to back up mine. Except …
Except she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten an exorcism recently. Was it her sister? Someone else in her immediate family had been ridden and cured before she had, and I was pretty sure it had been her sister. And if all of Chapin’s exorcisms came with a secret toy surprise like mine, that meant at least one person in Dolores’s household was being ridden right now. Or maybe everyone. Hell, all of Questa could be one big rider colony for all I knew.
And for that matter, I was making an assumption about Chapin too. I was thinking there was only one ringer in the circle. What if that wasn’t true? What if all of them were under the control of something else? I leaned against the steering wheel. I couldn’t go running after this like I was chasing fireflies. I had to think it through. Ozzie yawned massively and lay down on the passenger’s seat.
Being with Aubrey for as long as I had, I’d learned a few things by osmosis. Things like this: parasitic
